Joseph Anton: A Memoir

by Salman Rushdie

  Something new was happening here: the growth of a new intolerance. It was spreading across the surface of the earth, but nobody wanted to know. A new word had been created to help the blind remain blind: Islamophobia. To criticize the militant stridency of this religion in its contemporary incarnation was to be a bigot. A phobic person was extreme and irrational in his views, and so the fault lay with such persons and not with the belief system that boasted over one billion followers worldwide. One billion believers could not be wrong, therefore the critics must be the ones foaming at the mouth. When, he wanted to know, did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent. “He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill,” wrote Edmund Burke. “Our antagonist is our helper.” Only the weak and the authoritarian turned away from their opponents and called them names and sometimes wished to do them harm.

  It was Islam that had changed, not people like himself, it was Islam that had become phobic of a very wide range of ideas, behaviors, and things. In those years and in the years that followed Islamic voices in this or that part of the world—Algeria, Pakistan, Afghanistan—anathematized theater, film and music, and musicians and performers were mutilated and killed. Representational art was evil, and so the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan were destroyed by the Taliban. There were Islamist attacks on socialists and unionists, cartoonists and journalists, prostitutes and homosexuals, women in skirts and beardless men, and also, surreally, on such evils as frozen chickens and samosas.

  When the history of the twentieth century was written the decision to place the House of Saud on the Throne That Sits Over the Oil might well look like the greatest foreign policy error of the Western powers, because the Sauds had used their unlimited oil wealth to build schools (madrassas) to propagate the extremist, puritanical ideology of their beloved (and previously marginal) Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, and as a result Wahhabism had grown from its tiny cult origins to overrun the Arab world. Its rise gave confidence and energy to other Islamic extremists. In India the Deobandi cult spread outward from the seminary of Darul Uloom, in Shia Iran there were the militant preachers of Qom, and in Sunni Egypt the powerful conservatives of Al-Azhar. As the extremist ideologies—Wahhabi, Salafi, Khomeiniite, Deobandi—grew in power and the madrassas funded by Saudi oil turned out generations of narrow-eyed men with hairy chins and easily clenched fists, Islam moved a long way away from its origins while claiming to be returning to its roots. The American humorist H. L. Mencken memorably defined puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy,” and very often the true enemy of the new Islam seemed to be happiness itself. And this was the faith whose critics were the bigots? “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty told Alice, in Wonderland, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” The creators of “Newspeak” in Orwell’s 1984 knew exactly what Humpty Dumpty meant, renaming the propaganda ministry the Ministry of Truth and the state’s most repressive organ the Ministry of Love. “Islamophobia” was an addition to the vocabulary of Humpty Dumpty Newspeak. It took the language of analysis, reason and dispute, and stood it on its head.

  He knew, as surely as he knew anything, that the fanatical cancer spreading through Muslim communities would, in the end, explode into the wider world beyond Islam. If the intellectual battle was lost—if this new Islam established its right to be “respected” and to have its opponents excoriated, placed beyond the pale, and, why not, even killed—then political defeat would follow.

  He had entered the world of politics and was trying to make arguments from principle. But behind closed doors, in the rooms in which decisions were made, principles very rarely made policy. It would be an uphill fight, made harder because he also had to struggle to regain a freer private and professional life. The battle would have to be fought simultaneously on both fronts.

  Peter Florence, who ran the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, got in touch to ask if there was any chance that he might take part in that year’s event. The great Israeli novelist David Grossman had been scheduled to take part in a conversation with Martin Amis, but had had to cancel. It would be so great, Peter said, if you could step in. We wouldn’t have to tell anyone in advance. The audience would be so thrilled to see you and welcome you back to the world of books. He wanted to accept; but first he had to discuss Peter’s invitation with the protection team, who had to discuss it with the senior officers at the Yard, and, as the proposed event was outside the Metropolitan Police’s jurisdiction, the chief constable of the Powys police force would have to be informed, and local uniformed officers would have to be involved. He could imagine the senior policemen rolling their eyes, here he goes, making demands again, but he was determined not to succumb to their desire that he lie low and say nothing. In the end it was agreed that he could go and stay at Deborah Rogers and Michael Berkeley’s farm near Hay and make the proposed appearance, as long as news of it didn’t get out before the event. And so it was done. He walked out on stage at Hay to find that he and Martin were wearing identical linen suits and for a happy hour and a half he was a writer among readers again. The paperback of The Satanic Verses, imported from America, was on sale at Hay and everywhere else in the United Kingdom, and after all that difficulty this was what happened: nothing. Things did not improve, but things did not get worse, either. The moment Penguin Books had feared so greatly that they had given up publication rights passed off without a single unpleasant incident. He wondered if Peter Mayer had noticed that.

  Each of his campaigning trips took days—weeks—to prepare for. There were arguments with local security forces, problems with airlines, politicians’ broken agreements, the interminable yes-and-no, up-and-down work of political organization. Frances and Carmel and he talked constantly, and the campaign was becoming his full-time job as well. In later years he would say that he had lost one, maybe two full-length novels to the fatwa; that was why, once the dark years came to an end, he plunged into writing with renewed determination. There were books piled up inside him, demanding to be born.

  The campaign began in Scandinavia. In the years that followed he would fall in love with the Nordic peoples because of their adherence to the highest principles of freedom. Even their airlines had morals and carried him without argument. The world was a strange place: In the hour of his greatest adversity, a boy from the tropics found some of his closest allies in the frozen north, even if the Danes were worried about cheese. Denmark exported a very large quantity of its feta cheese to Iran and if it was seen to be cozying up to the blasphemer, apostate and heretic, the cheese trade might suffer. The Danish government was obliged to choose between cheese and human rights, and at first it chose cheese. (There were rumors that the British government had urged the Danes not to meet with him. Ian McEwan’s Dutch publisher, Jaco Groot, had heard that the Brits were telling their European colleagues that they didn’t want to be “embarrassed” by “too public a show of support.”)

  He went anyway, as the guest of Danish PEN. Elizabeth traveled a day earlier with Carmel, and then he was taken to Heathrow through a security entrance and driven onto the tarmac and was the last passenger onto the plane. He had been very worried that the other passengers might panic when they saw him, but these passengers were almost all Danes, and he was greeted by smiles and handshakes and genuine, fearless pleasure. As the plane lifted off from the runway he thought, Maybe I can begin to fly again. Maybe it will be all right.

  At Copenhagen airport, the reception committee somehow missed him. He was evidently less recognizable than he thought. He went through the airport and walked out beyond the security barrier and spent almost half an hour in the arr
ivals hall looking for someone who knew what was happening. For thirty minutes he had slipped through the safety net. He was tempted to get in a taxi and make a run for it. But then the police came sprinting toward him and with them was his host Niels Barfoed of Danish PEN, huffing and puffing and apologizing for the confusion. They went to the waiting cars and the net closed around him again.

  His presence—this became “normal” for a while—had not been announced in advance. The PEN members gathered at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art that evening were expecting the guest of honor to be Günter Grass, and Grass was indeed there, one of the sequence of great literary figures who agreed to act, in those years, as his “beard.” “If Salman Rushdie is a hostage then we are hostages too,” Grass said, introducing him, and then it was his turn. A few weeks earlier, he said, fifty Iranian intellectuals had published a declaration in his defense. “To defend Rushdie is to defend ourselves,” they said. To fail against the fatwa would embolden authoritarian regimes. This was where the line had to be drawn and there could be no retreat from it. He was fighting his fellow writers’ fight as well as his own. The sixty-five Danish intellectuals gathered at Louisiana pledged to join him in that fight, and to lobby their own government to do the right thing. “If the British Government feels unable to confront Iran’s unacceptable threat to the democratic process,” said Frances D’Souza, “the defense committee must seek the commitment and support that has been offered in Europe.”

  At one point he saw a battleship cruising by outside the windows of the museum. “Is that for me?” he asked, meaning it as a joke; but it was indeed for him: his personal battleship, to guard him against a naval attack, and to keep a lookout for Islamic frogmen swimming up toward the museum with cutlasses between their teeth. Yes, everything had been thought of. They were a thorough people, the Danes.

  His Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard of H. Aschehoug & Co., insisted that he follow up on his Danish trip by visiting Norway. “Here I think we can do even better,” he said. Government ministers were ready to meet him. Every summer Aschehoug threw a big garden party at the beautiful old villa at Drammensveien 99, which at the turn of the last century had been the Nygaard family home. This party was one of the highlights of the Oslo season, attended by many of the best-known Norwegian writers as well as business and political leaders. “You must come to the party,” William said. “In the garden! With more than one thousand people! It will be fantastic. A gesture of freedom.” William was a charismatic figure in Norway: a dashing skier, strikingly handsome, scion of one of the oldest families, and head of the leading publishing house. He was also as good as his word; the visit to Norway was a success. At the Drammensveien garden party he was guided through the throng by William Nygaard and met, well, le tout Oslo. The response to his visit, William told him later, was immense.

  This trip made William his most “visible” European publisher. They did not know it then, but his work on his author’s behalf had placed his life in great danger. Fourteen months later the terror would come knocking at William’s door.

  In London the Labour spokesman for the arts, Mark Fisher, MP, arranged a press conference at the House of Commons, attended by Labour and Tory MPs, and he was given a sympathetic hearing inside the Palace of Westminster for the first time. There was one sour note. The ultrarightist Conservative Rupert Allason stood up and said, “Please don’t misinterpret my presence here as support. To conceal what you were up to, your publishers say, you misled them about your book. It is quite wrong for public money to be used to protect you.” This nasty little attack upset him less than it once would have. He no longer hoped to be universally loved; he knew that wherever he went he would find adversaries as well as friends. Nor were all the adversaries on the right. Gerald Kaufman, the Labour MP who had been vocal about his dislike of Mr. Rushdie’s writing, publicly rebuked his fellow Labourite Mark Fisher for inviting the author to the House of Commons. (The Iranian Majlis agreed with Kaufman that the invitation had been “disgraceful.”) There would be more Kaufmans and Allasons along the road. What was important was to press the case.

  He spoke to David Gore-Booth at the Foreign Office and asked him directly about the rumors that the British government was opposed to his new, higher-profile campaigning and had been working behind the scenes to sabotage it. Gore-Booth had an excellent poker face and no emotion flickered across it. He denied the rumors. “HMG supports your meetings with other governments,” he said. He offered to help with police liaison so that the security forces of countries he visited didn’t “overdo” it. It was hard to know what to think. Perhaps he had begun to drag the government along with him.

  He was invited to Spain by the Complutense University of Madrid to converse with Mario Vargas Llosa at the Escorial Palace. He took Elizabeth and Zafar with him and they spent three quiet days in Segovia before the conference. The Spanish police maintained a very discreet presence and he was able to walk in the streets and eat in the restaurants of that beautiful little town and feel almost like a free man. He lunched in Ávila with Mario and his wife, Patricia. These were precious hours. Then at the Escorial the rector of the Complutense University, Gustavo Villapalos, said he had excellent connections in Iran and offered to mediate. Khomeini, he said, had once called him a “very holy man.” This latest offer of mediation proved as futile as the others. He was horrified to read Villapalos’s announcement in the Spanish press that he had agreed to alter and cut “offending” passages from The Satanic Verses to make a settlement possible. He denied this vehemently and after that Villapalos became unavailable and all contact with him ceased.

  You must be at all the platforms, Giandomenico Picco had said, so that you are standing there when the train arrives. But some of the platforms didn’t have any tracks running past them. They were just places to stand.

  From the moment they landed in Denver they could see things were going badly wrong. The local police were treating the event as a trailer for World War III, and as he and Elizabeth made their way through the airport there were men brandishing enormous assault weaponry running in several directions, and police officers manhandling members of the public out of his way, and there was shouting, and pointing, and an air of imminent calamity. It scared him, terrified the bystanders, and alienated the airline, which refused to allow him on board any of its planes ever again, because of his behavior. The antics of the security forces became “his.”

  They were driven to Boulder, where he spoke at a pan-American literary conference along with Oscar Arias, Robert Coover, William Styron, Peter Matthiessen and William Gass. “Latin American writers have known for a long time that literature is a life and death matter,” he said in his speech. “Now I share that knowledge with them.” He lived in an age in which literature’s importance seemed to be fading. He wanted to make it a part of his mission to insist on the vital importance of books and of protecting the freedoms necessary to create them. In his great novel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino said (speaking through his character Arkadian Porphyrich): “Nobody these days holds the written word in such high esteem as police states do. What statistic allows one to identify the nations where literature enjoys true consideration better than the sums appropriated for controlling it and suppressing it?” Which was certainly true of, for example, Cuba. Philip Roth once said, speaking about Soviet-era repression, “When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters.” What was true of police states and Soviet tyranny was also true of Latin American dictatorships, and of the new theocratic fascism that was confronting him and many other writers, but in the United States—in the liberal, if thin, air of Boulder, Colorado—it was not easy for people to feel the lived truth of repression. He had made it his task, he said, to explain the world in which “nothing goes and everything matters” to the world of “everything goes and nothing mat
ters.”

  It took the personal intervention of the president of the University of Colorado, Boulder, to persuade another airline to fly him home. After he finished his speech he and Elizabeth were taken immediately back to the Denver airport and almost pushed onto a flight to London. The police operation was not as out of control as it had been when they arrived, but it was still big enough to spook anyone who was watching. He left America feeling that the campaign had just taken a step backward.

  Terror was knocking on many doors. In Egypt the leading secularist Farag Fouda had been murdered. In India, Professor Mushirul Hasan, vice chancellor of Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University and a distinguished historian, was menaced by “angry Muslims” for daring to oppose the banning of The Satanic Verses. He was forced to climb down and condemn the book but the mob demanded that he also approve of the fatwa. He refused to do so. As a result he would be unable to return to the university for five long years. In Berlin, four Kurdish-Iranian opposition politicians attending the Socialist International were murdered at the Mykonos restaurant, and the Iranian regime was suspected of being behind the killings. And in London, Elizabeth and he were asleep in their bedroom when there was a very loud explosion and the whole house shook. Policemen rushed into the room with their weapons and dragged the sleepers onto the floor. They remained prone among armed men for what felt like hours until it was confirmed that the explosion had been some distance away at the Staples Corner roundabout, under the overpass for the North Circular Road. It was the Provisional IRA at work; nothing to do with them. It was a non-Islamic bomb. They were left alone to go back to sleep.

  Islamic terror wasn’t far away. Ayatollah Sanei of the 15 Khordad Foundation increased the bounty money to include “expenses.” (Keep your receipts, assassins, you can reclaim that business lunch.) Three Iranians were expelled from the United Kingdom because they had been conspiring to kill him: two embassy employees, Mehdi Sayed Sadeghi and Mahmoud Mehdi Soltani, and a “student,” Gassem Vakhshiteh. Back in Iran, the Majlis—the supposedly “moderate” Majlis elected by voters in the recent Iranian elections!—“petitioned” President Rafsanjani to uphold the fatwa, and the pro-Rafsanjani Ayatollah Jannati responded that the “time was right to kill the filthy Rushdie.”