Who Wants Salman Rushdie Killed?
Thirty-three years after the fatwa, the author of the Satanic Verses was grievously injured in an assassination attempt at a literary event in New York. The attack, by a 24-year-old man inspired by the forces unleashed by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, reminds the world how alive is the murderous fury of radical Islam against the freedom of ideas and imagination
S Prasannarajan
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19 Aug, 2022
Salman Rushdie (Photo: AFP)
It all began from the dreams of Gibreel Farishta in The Satanic Verses, a novel which has gained more critics, among them politicians and priests, than readers. Farishta, a movie star with a conflicted soul, spiritually torn between belief and doubt, owes his first name to the Archangel. Dreams are his flight from the torments of a man who is losing his faith—and eventually his life. In the dreams that would come to offend those who claim absolute rights over divine revelations, the formation and evolution of a religion resembling Islam are put on trial. They would, off-page, prove to be more dangerous than Jesus’s dreams on the cross in Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation. In a self-referential irony, it’s a character called Salman the Persian who subverts the prophet’s project in Jahilia, the sandy land of ignorance, and at one point, he justifies his singular freedom to dissent: “It’s his Word against mine.”
Rushdie has risked his life for the sake of what he considers non-negotiable: freedom of expression, the argument about which he cannot—and will not—lose. Unfortunately, those dreadful moments in the amphitheatre of the Chautauqua institution are unlikely to shake up the liberals in denial
The Satanic Verses is one of those novels in which the real would come to mime the imagined. But what was imagined was not what the clergy and their selectively liberal apologists had made it out to be. It is not a monochromatic portrait of the counter-scriptural, intended to insult. It is a novel by a non-believer, with an academic background in Islamic history, about the painful process of shedding the last vestiges of faith in a world where transmigrations and hallucinatory revelations are what make existence an astonishment— and a question to struggle with. Still, like Salman the Persian, Salman Rushdie the novelist himself was marked as the corruptor of the Word. It was as if the Imam of the novel would leap out of the pages to punish his creator. “We will make a revolution,” the Imam proclaims, and his real revolt is against History, which is the “blood-wine that must no longer be drunk. History the intoxicant, the creation and possession of the Devil, of the great Shaitan, the greatest of the lies…”
“I admit to a dilemma. Ignore the politics (which I’d love to do), and my silence must look enforced or fearful. Speak, and I risk deafening the world to those other utterances, my books, written in my true language, the language of literature. I risk helping to conceal the real Salman behind the smoky, sulfurous Rushdie of the Affair. I have led two lives: one blighted by hatred and caught up in this dire business, which I’m trying to leave behind, and the life of a free man, freely doing his work. Two lives, but none I can afford to lose, for one loss would end both.” —‘Ten Years of the Fatwa’ (column published in February 1999; collected in Step Across This Line, 2002)
Those words could have been spoken by the highest revolutionary of Islam in the 20th century. The revolution, on its 10th anniversary, was dying, and it badly needed an enemy, even a book that would mobilise the faithful in defence of the Book. Then, Ayatollah Khomeini was not aware of The Satanic Verses; the book-burner was elsewhere, in Rushdie’s homeland. India was the first country, in October 1988, to decide that The Satanic Verses was a dangerous book to read, and one man who was ready with the bonfire was the late Syed Shahabuddin, an MP who had subsisted on Muslim resentment, and who could reportedly smell a ‘filthy’ book without reading it. The book came in handy when he desperately needed to feed the ghettos—and as a hardbound bargaining item to dangle before the shaky Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi. The fire lit in Delhi by the politics of appeasement spread far and wide, from Bradford to Karachi, and in the replay of the old fascist fury against ideas and imagination, what the flames that enveloped Rushdie’s book brought in sharp relief was an altered reality that answered to the Book alone. It was then that the Ayatollah woke up to the Satanic opportunity.
On a loveless Valentine’s Day, in 1989, Rushdie was condemned to death by Khomeini. The blasphemous storyteller was what the famished Islamic Revolution needed. With the price tag of more than a million-dollar on his head, Rushdie, a writer enriched by the confluence and conflicts of cultures, by the fables and histories of East and West, found himself, all of a sudden, with no ground beneath his feet. When, elsewhere, the writer, after a campaign of “living in truth”, was winning freedom from the lies of ideology, making 1989 Eastern Europe’s annus mirabilis, here was one—a secular mind whose crime was metaphorising the clash between faith and doubt, death and love, and a migrant’s struggle to belong—vanishing into exile. In another time, when Mandelstam and later Solzhenitsyn were banished by Stalinist Russia, it was the jackboot of ideology that hovered over metaphors; and now, as the world was laying to rest the spectre that haunted dissenters, a revolution made the sword of Islam more than a rhetorical threat.
Every radical needs a spiritual guide, and as matar’s chosen identity reveals, Khomeini’s ghost perpetuates the revolution in the mind of the new Jihadist, who is not necessarily a man in a balaclava wielding the knife, hovering over his kneeling victim. He could be a man next to you in an amphitheatre, or in a café. He is god’s everyman terrorist
For a decade, Rushdie lived in darkness, shifting from safehouse to safehouse, under the name of Joseph Anton (a nod to two writers he admired, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov, and it would become the title of his memoir). Exile is a place where time stagnates, and for a banished storyteller, it is where the very act of writing becomes the eternity of homecoming. And it’s the “sea of stories” that kept Rushdie alive; he wrote two of his finest novels, The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, while in hiding. The fatwa itself faded away, but not before taking the life of his Japanese translator. Rushdie would emerge from the shadows, reclaim the public space, smell the streets again, and take his freedom for granted. A reformist president in Iran added to the sense of normalcy by saying that the fatwa would not be active. Khomeini’s successor, though, would reaffirm the sanctity of the death sentence. Rushdie refused to give in; a life reclaimed for him was not a life meant to be lived in fear.
“Afterwards, when the world was exploding around him and the lethal blackbirds were massing on the climbing frame in the school playground, he felt annoyed with himself for forgetting the name of the BBC reporter, a woman, who had told him that his old life was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin. She had called him at home on his private line without explaining how she got the number. ‘How does it feel,’ she asked him, ‘to know that you have just been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini?’ It was a sunny Tuesday in London but the question shut out the light. This is what he said, without
really knowing what he was saying: ‘It doesn’t feel good.’ This is what he thought: I’m a dead man.” —Joseph Anton: A Memoir (2012)
The assassin, contrary to what we had come to believe, did not go away; he was lurking in the crowd, knife unsheathed, waiting. His moment came on Friday, August 12, more than three decades after the fatwa, at the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York, where Rushdie was on the stage, which has a tradition of celebrating writers and arguments. Rushdie was there as, apart from being a novelist enchanted by the magic of the cultural past and the political delirium of the present, a relentless fighter for the freedom of expression. Before the writer could utter a word, Hadi Matar, age 24, wanted to silence him forever. Rushdie barely survived after suffering multiple knife wounds. The assassin, restrained by some from the audience, did not praise any god after the lightning attack. Still, it would soon become clear what powered his vengeance. The attack shattered the idyll, which was, in retrospect, a false calm that only allowed the killer to wait amidst us.
“To put it as simply as possible: I am not a Muslim. It feels bizarre, and wholly inappropriate, to be described as some sort of heretic after having lived my life as a secular, pluralist, eclectic man. I am being enveloped in, and described by, a language that does not fit me. I do not accept the charge of blasphemy, because, as somebody says in The Satanic Verses, “where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy”. I do not accept the charge of apostasy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one cannot be said to have apostasised [sic] from. The Islam I know states clearly that “there can be no coercion in matters of religion”. The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that any person so born who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death.” — ‘ In Good Faith’ (essay, published
in February 1990)
The killer’s story, the very banality of his lonely suburban life and his religious inspirations, explains the trajectory of the evil that dreads stories. The name on his fake driver’s licence has revealed his admiration for Iran and Hezbollah. His contribution to the endangered faith has been celebrated by the Iranian media owing allegiance to the legacy of Khomeini with jubilations such as “a thousand bravos” and “Satan on the path to hell”. The clergy has blamed the writer for the attack, in the hoary tradition of totalitarianism, no matter religious or ideological, in which punishment must seek crime. Matar, who according to his mother has changed after a visit to the Middle East, is, in the end, not a lonely man, but a member of a fraternity that finds little justice in this world, and the ultimate epitaph he yearns for is perhaps “Martyr on the path to paradise”. For Matar, his failure to kill is his punishment.
Any criticism of doctrinaire Islam is stigmatised as Islamophobia by the rearmed legion of the grievance school, which is today at its peak of power, claiming intellectual ownership over the fight against inequalities. They have perfected the art of condemnation with clauses, and Rushdie after fatwa is one writer who has endured it the most in our time
Matar has been made possible by a religious system steeped in the memories of hurt and retribution. In its permanent struggle for justice, the blasphemer is a prerequisite for the combat between the sins of modernity and scriptural purity. This struggle is not always about geography, played out in the sandy expanse of the Levant; it’s about subjugating and controlling the mind space as well. Before Matar’s near-successful mission, his predecessors stormed the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris and killed eight of its staff members, and chanted praise to their god on their way out. They have, in other times, barged into the café, the stadium, and the theatre, and killed to seek glory. Matar may have acted alone, but the ancestry of his rage is shaped by the cult of death. He may be the kind of radical the scholar Olivier Roy has portrayed as Islamised nihilist, fascinated by “pure revolt, not the construction of a utopia. Violence is not a means. It is an end in itself. It is violence devoid of a future.” But every radical needs a spiritual guide, and as Matar’s chosen identity reveals, Khomeini’s ghost perpetuates the revolution in the mind of the new jihadist, who is not necessarily a man in a balaclava wielding the knife, hovering over his kneeling victim, ready to behead in slow motion, sending out a video message to all the infidels out there. He could be a man next to you in an amphitheatre, or in a café. He is god’s everyman terrorist.
Any criticism of doctrinaire Islam is stigmatised as Islamophobia by the rearmed legion of the grievance school, which is today at its peak of power, claiming intellectual ownership over the fight against inequalities. They have perfected the art of condemnation with clauses, and Rushdie after fatwa is one writer who has endured it the most in our time
Rushdie has defied him, and risked his life for the sake of what he considers non-negotiable: freedom of expression, the argument about which he cannot—and will not—lose. Unfortunately, those dreadful moments in the amphitheatre of the Chautauqua Institution are unlikely to shake up the liberals in denial, for, despite periodical reminders by those who reject our freedoms, there has never been an honest conversation on radical Islam and its bloodlust. Any criticism of doctrinaire Islam is stigmatised as Islamophobia by the rearmed legion of the grievance school, which is today at its peak of power, claiming intellectual ownership over the fight against inequalities. They have perfected the art of condemnation with clauses, and Rushdie after fatwa is one writer who has endured it the most in our time. They have either remained silent or condemned Khomeini’s death decree without appreciating Rushdie’s right to free expression. The tentativeness in their response to Islamism is aided by the prevailing pieties according to which terror has no religion. It is an evasion that soothes the liberal conscience, and it pervades across the so-called marketplace of ideas. What Rushdie’s friend Christopher Hitchens wrote 12 years ago rings truer today: “The sad paradox is that while he and his book both survived and flourished, nobody in the Anglo-American publishing business would now commission or print The Satanic Verses. Indeed, the whole cultural and media industry has become, where reactionary Islam is concerned, one long profile in prudence. The other paradox is that the very multiculturalism and multiethnicity that brought Salman to the West…is now one of the disguises for a uniculturalism, based on moral relativism and moral blackmail…” There should not be any dispute over who have legitimised cultural taboos.
“We live in the age of an unprecedented attack on truth itself, in which deliberate lies are masked by the accusation that those who would unmask them are the liars. We live in the age of the world turned upside down. The lunatics are running the asylum. This is a time that poses a great test of the notions of free expression for which I have been arguing. But in the end I’ll hold to my position.” —‘The Liberty Instinct’ (adapted from a lecture at Emory University in 2015; collected in Languages of Truth, 2021)
Rushdie was not restrained by taboos as he travelled in the enchanted gardens of stories, and where nothing was forbidden for him. The Satanic Verses, one of the great novels of an age where to question, even in a dream sequence, is to offend, is born in the imagination of a writer for whom “the wonder tales” tell a bigger truth, “about ourselves that are often unpalatable”. In the wonder tale that is The Satanic Verses, the novelist’s namesake has been warned, “Your blasphemy, Salman, won’t be forgiven.” It is unlikely that Hadi Matar, like those who inspire him, has read the novel, or any novel. He is, most likely, fed on a different kind of wonder, one that fills the mind with a million certainties, and promises an escape from the wretchedness of the present to the perfumed hereafter. Salman Rushdie, with the perseverance of a Scheherazade, continues to outlive him, as a storyteller—as he told me in our last conversation, almost three years ago—who finds reality has “become so contested, fragmented and politicised that maybe only the imagined world can be coherent.” The magic of stories frightens those who are building a false future in places as forbidding as the Jahilia of Rushdie’s imagination. Rushdie, to borrow the title of the memoir by García Márquez, a writer whose art of storytelling he is indebted to, is “living to tell the tale”—a necessary blasphemy.
“Writers have often found themselves at odds with power, from Ovid to Mandelstam and Lorca and up to our own moment. Some writers, such as the Enlightenment figures who deliberately took on the power of the Church to limit speech, put themselves in this position deliberately. Others find themselves there because their truth conflicts with ‘official’ truth.” —Interview with Open (January 8, 2018)
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