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 Rushdie vs Hồi
Giáo!
GCC vs Bắc Kít!
Trong Tự Thuật,
Rushdie cho biết, đã từng ngồi nắn nót viết Tự Kiểm, y chang thi sĩ HC
của xứ Mít,
trước Tố Hữu, ấy chết xin lỗi, trước 1 Hội Đồng “juges”, là những chức
sắc số 1
của Hồi Giáo. Họ sẽ can thiệp để gỡ bỏ cái án nặng nề nhất đối 1 nhà
văn: bị
thiến mất lưỡi!
 Rushdie vs Hồi
Giáo! Trong Tự Thuật,
Rushdie cho biết, đã từng ngồi nắn nót viết Tự Kiểm, y chang thi sĩ HC
của xứ Mít,
trước Tố Hữu, ấy chết xin lỗi, trước 1 Hội Đồng “juges”, là những chức
sắc số 1
của Hồi Giáo. Họ sẽ can thiệp để gỡ bỏ cái án nặng nề nhất đối 1 nhà
văn: bị
thiến mất lưỡi!
On February
14, 1989,Valentine's Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC
journalist and
told that he had been "sentenced to death" by the Ayatollah Khomeini,
a voice reaching across the world from Iran to kill him in his own
country. For
the first time he heard the word fatwa. Cái tít cuốn
hồi ký của Salman Rushdie, là từ hai tên tác giả gối đầu giường của
ông: Joseph
Conrad và Anton Chekhov. Thoạt đầu Gấu nghĩ không
ra, cứ chê ông này vô ơn!
Writers,
broadcasters, friends and publishing insiders recall what it was like
to be
caught up in the most controversial story in recent literary history,
The
Satanic Verses and the ensuing fatwa against its author, as Salman
Rushdie
prepares to bring out his eagerly awaited memoir  Hồi Ký Rushdie: Nghe nói, ông “được” "renew" Lệnh Xé Xác, nhân cuốn phim bôi bác Đấng Tiên Tri ?  Kẻ biến mất Note: TV tính đi bài này, chưa kịp, thì me-xừ đại sứ Mẽo ở Libya đã bị làm thịt! Gấu đọc câu mở bài viết, thấy thú quá, vì nó làm Gấu nhớ đến cái tay TNXP chuyên khám đồ thăm nuôi của tù tại nông trường cải tạo Đỗ Hòa, đã mất công ra tận hiện trường lao động, dẫn Gấu về gặp Gấu Cái [đếch phải phận sự của anh, mà đúng ra, của 1 tên bảo vệ nông trường], chỉ để nói cho Gấu biết, có mấy trăm bạc ở trong cái bị gạo, lấy ra liền, dím đi, rồi cố mà ăn được miếng nào đỡ đói miếng đó, vì về Tổ Trừng Giới là chúng làm sạch! Rushdie, kể lại là, lần đó, ông quên mất tên cái người đã báo tin cho ông biết, tên của ông đã đi vào sổ đen, và ông biến thành 1 kẻ được đánh dấu! Afterward, when the world was exploding around him, he felt annoyed with himself for having forgotten the name of the BBC reporter who told him that his old life was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin. She 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 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. He wondered how many days he had left, and guessed that the answer was probably a single-digit number. He hung up the telephone and ran down the stairs from his workroom, at the top of the narrow Islington row house where he lived. The living-room windows had wooden shutters and, absurdly, he closed and barred them. Then he locked the front door I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the “Satanic Verses” book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all the Muslims to execute them wherever they find them. Ta thông báo tới những người Muslim tự hào trên thế giới, tác giả cuốn Quỉ Thi, chống lại Islam, Nhà Tiên Tri, Kinh Koran, và tất cả những người liên quan tới việc in ấn, xb, biết nội dung của cuốn sách, đều bị kết án tử. Ta yêu cầu tất cả những người Muslim làm thịt họ, bất cứ khi nào kiếm thấy họ. Looking back at Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses Writers, broadcasters, friends and publishing insiders recall what it was like to be caught up in the most controversial story in recent literary history, The Satanic Verses and the ensuing fatwa against its author, as Salman Rushdie prepares to bring out his eagerly awaited memoir  How the
fatwa changed a writer’s life.by Salman Rushdie September
17, 2012 . Afterward,
when the world was exploding around him, he felt annoyed with himself
for
having forgotten the name of the BBC reporter who told him that his old
life
was over and a new, darker existence was about to begin. She 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
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. He
wondered
how many days he had left, and guessed that the answer was probably a
single-digit number. He hung up the telephone and ran down the stairs
from his
workroom, at the top of the narrow Islington row house where he lived.
The
living-room windows had wooden shutters and, absurdly, he closed and
barred
them. Then he locked the front door. It was
Valentine’s Day, but he hadn’t been getting along with his wife, the
American
novelist Marianne Wiggins. Five days earlier, she had told him that she
was
unhappy in the marriage, that she “didn’t feel good around him
anymore.”
Although they had been married for only a year, he, too, already knew
that it
had been a mistake. Now she was staring at him as he moved nervously
around the
house, drawing curtains, checking window bolts, his body galvanized by
the
news, as if an electric current were passing through it, and he had to
explain
to her what was happening. She reacted well and began to discuss what
they
should do. She used the word “we.” That was courageous. A car
arrived at the house, sent by CBS Television. He had an appointment at
the
American network’s studios, in Bowater House, Knightsbridge, to appear
live, by
satellite link, on its morning show. “I should go,” he said. “It’s live
television. I can’t just not show up.” Later that morning,
a memorial service for his friend Bruce Chatwin, who had died of AIDS,
was to
be held at the Greek Orthodox church on Moscow Road, in Bayswater.
“What about
the memorial?” his wife asked. He didn’t have an answer for her. He
unlocked
the front door, went outside, got into the car, and was driven away.
Although
he did not know it then—so the moment of leaving his home did not feel
unusually freighted with meaning—he would not return to that house, at
41 St.
Peter’s Street, which had been his home for half a decade, until three
years
later, by which time it would no longer be his. At the CBS
offices, he was the big story of the day. People in the newsroom and on
various
monitors were already using the word that would soon be hung around his
neck
like a millstone. “Fatwa.” from the
issuecartoon banke-mail this. I inform the
proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the “Satanic
Verses” book,
which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those
involved in
its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death.
I ask
all the Muslims to execute them wherever they find them. Somebody
gave him a printout of the text as he was escorted to the studio for
his
interview. His old self wanted to argue with the word “sentenced.” This
was not
a sentence handed down by any court that he recognized, or that had any
jurisdiction over him. But he also knew that his old self’s habits were
of no
use anymore. He was a new self now. He was the person in the eye of the
storm,
no longer the Salman his friends knew but the Rushdie who was the
author of
“Satanic Verses,” a title that had been subtly distorted by the
omission of the
initial “The.” “The Satanic Verses” was a novel. “Satanic Verses” were
verses
that were satanic, and he was their satanic author. How easy it was to
erase a
man’s past and to construct a new version of him, an overwhelming
version,
against which it seemed impossible to fight. He looked at the journalists looking at him and he wondered if this was how people looked at men being taken to the gallows or the electric chair. One foreign correspondent came over to him to be friendly. He asked this man what he should make of Khomeini’s pronouncement. Was it just a rhetorical flourish, or something genuinely dangerous? “Oh, don’t worry too much,” the journalist said. “Khomeini sentences the President of the United States to death every Friday afternoon.” On air, when
he was asked for a response to the threat, he said, “I wish I’d written
a more
critical book.” He was proud, then and always, that he had said this.
It was
the truth. He did not feel that his book was especially critical of
Islam, but,
as he said on American television that morning, a religion whose
leaders
behaved in this way could probably use a little criticism. When the
interview was over, he was told that his wife had called. He phoned the
house.
“Don’t come back here,” she said. “There are two hundred journalists on
the
sidewalk waiting for you.” “I’ll go to
the agency,” he said. “Pack a bag and meet me there.” His literary
agency, Wylie, Aitken & Stone, had its offices in a white-stuccoed
house on
Fernshaw Road, in Chelsea. There were no journalists camped
outside—evidently
the press hadn’t thought he was likely to visit his agent on such a
day—but
when he walked in every phone in the building was ringing and every
call was
about him. Gillon Aitken, his British agent, gave him an astonished
look. He found that he couldn’t think ahead, that he had no idea what the shape of his life would now be. He could focus only on the immediate, and the immediate was the memorial service for Bruce Chatwin. “My dear,” Gillon said, “do you think you ought to go?” Bruce had been his close friend. “Fuck it,” he said, “let’s go.” Marianne
arrived, a faintly deranged look on her face, upset about having been
mobbed by
photographers when she left the house. She didn’t say much. Neither of
them
did. They got into their car, a black Saab, and he drove it across the
park to
Bayswater, with Gillon, his worried expression and long, languid body
folded
into the back seat. His mother and his youngest sister lived in Karachi, in Pakistan. What would happen to them? His middle sister, long estranged from the family, lived in Berkeley, California. Would she be safe there? His oldest sister, Sameen, his “Irish twin,” was in Wembley, with her family, not far from the stadium. What should be done to protect them? His son, Zafar, just nine years and eight months old, was with his mother, Clarissa, in their house near Clissold Park. At that moment, Zafar’s tenth birthday felt far, far away. The service
at the Cathedral of St. Sophia of the Archdiocese of Thyateira and
Great
Britain, built and lavishly decorated a hundred and ten years earlier
to
resemble one of the grand cathedrals of old Byzantium, was all
sonorous,
mysterious Greek. Blah-blah-blah Bruce Chatwin, the priests intoned,
blah-blah
Chatwin blah-blah. They stood up, they sat down, they knelt, they
stood, and
then sat again. The air was full of the stink of holy smoke. He and
Marianne were seated next to Martin Amis and his wife, Antonia
Phillips. “We’re
worried about you,” Martin said, embracing him. “I’m worried about me,”
he
replied. Blah Chatwin blah Bruce blah. Paul Theroux was sitting in the
pew
behind him. “I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman,” he
said. There had
been a couple of photographers on the sidewalk outside when he arrived.
Writers
didn’t usually draw a crowd of paparazzi. As the service progressed,
however,
journalists began to enter the church. When it was over, they pushed
their way
toward him. Gillon, Marianne, and Martin tried to run interference. One
persistent gray fellow (gray suit, gray hair, gray face, gray voice)
got
through the crowd, shoved a tape recorder toward him, and asked the
obvious
questions. “I’m sorry,” he replied. “I’m here for my friend’s memorial
service.
It’s not appropriate to do interviews.” “You don’t
understand,” the gray fellow said, sounding puzzled. “I’m from the
Daily
Telegraph. They’ve sent me down specially.” “Gillon, I
need your help,” he said. Gillon
leaned down toward the reporter from his immense height and said,
firmly, and
in his grandest accent, “Fuck off.” “You can’t
talk to me like that,” the man from the Telegraph said. “I’ve been to
public
school.” After that, there was no more comedy. When he got out onto Moscow Road, journalists were swarming like drones in pursuit of their queen, photographers climbing on one another’s backs to form tottering hillocks bursting with flashlight. He stood there blinking and directionless, momentarily at a loss. There was no chance that he’d be able to walk to his car, which was parked a hundred yards down the road, without being followed by cameras and microphones and men who had been to various kinds of school and who had been sent down specially. He was rescued by his friend Alan Yentob, a filmmaker and a senior executive at the BBC. Alan’s BBC car pulled up in front of the church. “Get in,” he said, and then they were driving away from the shouting journalists. They circled around Notting Hill for a while until the crowd outside the church dispersed and then went back to where the Saab was parked. He and Marianne got into the car, and suddenly they were alone. “Where shall we go?” he asked, even though they both knew the answer. Marianne had recently rented a small basement apartment in the southwest corner of Lonsdale Square, in Islington, not far from the house on St. Peter’s Street, ostensibly to use as a work space but actually because of the growing strain between them. Very few people knew that she had this apartment. It would give them space and time to take stock and make decisions. They drove to Islington in silence. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. It was
midafternoon, and on this day their marital difficulties felt
irrelevant. On
this day there were crowds marching down the streets of Tehran carrying
posters
of his face with the eyes poked out, so that he looked like one of the
corpses
in “The Birds,” with their blackened, bloodied, bird-pecked eye
sockets. That
was the subject today: his unfunny Valentine from those bearded men,
those
shrouded women, and that lethal old man, dying in his room, making his
last bid
for some sort of murderous glory. Now that the school day was over, he had to see Zafar. He called his friend Pauline Melville and asked her to keep Marianne company while he was gone. Pauline, a bright-eyed, flamboyantly gesticulating, warmhearted, mixed-race actress full of stories about Guyana, had been his neighbor in Highbury Hill in the early nineteen-eighties. She came over at once, without any discussion, even though it was her birthday. When he got
to Clarissa and Zafar’s house, the police were already there. “There
you are,”
an officer said. “We’ve been wondering where you’d gone.” “What’s
going on, Dad?” His son had a look on his face that should never visit
the face
of a nine-year-old boy. “I’ve been telling him,” Clarissa said brightly, “that you’ll be properly looked after until this blows over, and it’s going to be just fine.” Then she hugged her ex-husband as she had not hugged him since they separated five years before. “We need to
know,” the officer was saying, “what your immediate plans might be.” He thought before replying. “I’ll probably go home,” he said, finally, and the stiffening postures of the men in uniform confirmed his suspicions. “No, sir, I wouldn’t recommend that.” Then he told them, as he had known all along he would, about the Lonsdale Square basement, where Marianne was waiting. “It’s not generally known as a place you frequent, sir?” “No,
Officer, it is not.” “That’s
good. When you do get back, sir, don’t go out again tonight, if that’s
all
right. There are meetings taking place, and you will be advised of
their
outcome tomorrow, as early as possible. Until then, you should stay
indoors.” He talked to
his son, holding him close, deciding at that moment that he would tell
the boy
as much as possible, giving what was happening the most positive
coloring he
could; that the way to help Zafar deal with the event was to make him
feel on
the inside of it, to give him a parental version that he could hold on
to while
he was being bombarded with other versions in the school playground or
on
television. “Will I see
you tomorrow, Dad?” He shook his
head. “But I’ll call you,” he said. “I’ll call you every evening at
seven. If
you’re not going to be here,” he told Clarissa, “please leave me a
message on
the answering machine at home and say when I should call.” This was
early 1989.
The terms “P.C.,” “laptop,” “mobile phone,” “Internet,” “WiFi,” “SMS,”
and
“e-mail” were either uncoined or very new. He did not own a computer or
a
mobile phone. But he did own a house, and in the house there was an
answering
machine, and he could call in and interrogate it, a new use of an old
word, and
get, no, retrieve, his messages. “Seven o’clock,” he repeated. “Every
night,
O.K.?” Zafar nodded
gravely. “O.K., Dad.” He drove
home alone and the news on the radio was all bad. Khomeini was not just
a
powerful cleric. He was a head of state, ordering the murder of a
citizen of
another state, over whom he had no jurisdiction; and he had assassins
at his
service, who had been used before against “enemies” of the Iranian
Revolution,
including those who lived outside Iran. Voltaire once said that it was
a good
idea for a writer to live near an international frontier, so that, if
he
angered powerful men, he could skip across the border and be safe.
Voltaire
himself left France for England, after he gave offense to an
aristocrat, the
Chevalier de Rohan, and remained in exile for almost three years. But
to live
in a different country from one’s persecutors was no longer a guarantee
of
safety. Now there was “extraterritorial action.” In other words, they
came
after you. The night in
Lonsdale Square was cold, dark, and clear. There were two policemen in
the
square. When he got out of his car, they pretended not to notice him.
They were
on short patrol, watching the street near the flat for a hundred yards
in each
direction, and he could hear their footsteps even when he was indoors.
He
realized, in that footstep-haunted space, that he no longer understood
his
life, or what it might become, and he thought, for the second time that
day,
that there might not be very much more of life to understand. Marianne
went to bed early. He got into bed beside his wife and she turned
toward him
and they embraced, rigidly, like the unhappily married couple they
were. Then,
separately, lying with their own thoughts, they failed to sleep. 1966 He was in
his second year of reading history at Cambridge when he learned about
the
“Satanic Verses.” In Part Two of the History Tripos, he was expected to
choose
three “special subjects,” from a wide selection on offer. He decided to
work on
Indian history during the period of the struggle against the British,
from the
1857 uprising to Independence Day, in August, 1947; the extraordinary
first
century or so of the history of the United States, from the Declaration
of
Independence to the end of Reconstruction; and a third subject, offered
that
year for the first time, titled “Muhammad, the Rise of Islam and the
Early
Caliphate.” He was supervised by Arthur Hibbert, a medievalist, a
genius, who,
according to college legend, had answered the questions he knew least
about in
his own history finals so that he could complete the answers in the
time
allotted. At the
beginning of their work together, Hibbert gave him a piece of advice he
never
forgot. “You must never write history,” he said, “until you can hear
the people
speak.” He thought about that for years, and it came to feel like a
valuable
guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of
how people
spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t—you
shouldn’t—tell
their story. The way people spoke, in short, clipped phrases or long,
flowing
rambles, revealed so much about them: their place of origin, their
social
class, their temperament, whether calm or angry, warmhearted or
cold-blooded,
foulmouthed or polite; and, beneath their temperament, their true
nature,
intellectual or earthy, plainspoken or devious, and, yes, good or bad.
If that
had been all he learned at Arthur’s feet, it would have been enough.
But he
learned much more than that. He learned a world. And in that world one
of the
world’s great religions was being born. They were
nomads who had just begun to settle down. Their cities were new. Mecca
was only
a few generations old. Yathrib, later renamed Medina, was a group of
encampments around an oasis, without so much as a city wall. They were
still
uneasy in their urbanized lives. A nomadic society was conservative,
full of
rules, valuing the well-being of the group more highly than individual
liberty,
but it was also inclusive. The nomadic world had been a matriarchy.
Under the
umbrella of its extended families, even orphaned children had been able
to find
protection and a sense of identity and belonging. All that was
changing. The
city was a patriarchy, and its preferred family unit was nuclear. The
crowd of
the disenfranchised grew larger and more restive every day. But Mecca
was
prosperous, and its ruling elders liked it that way. Inheritance now
followed
the male line. This, too, the governing families preferred. Outside the
gates of the city stood temples to three goddesses, al-Lat, al-Manat,
and
al-Uzza. Each time the trading caravans that brought the city its
wealth left
the city gates or came back through them, they paused at one of the
temples and
made an offering. Or, to use modern language, paid a tax. The richest
families
in Mecca controlled the temples, and much of their wealth came from
these
offerings. The goddesses were at the heart of the economy of the new
city, of
the urban civilization that was coming into being. The building
known as the Kaaba, or Cube, in the center of town, was dedicated to a
deity
named Allah, meaning “the god,” just as al-Lat was “the goddess.” Allah
was
unusual in that he didn’t specialize. He wasn’t a rain god or a wealth
god or a
war god or a love god; he was just an everything god. This failure to
specialize may explain his relative unpopularity. People usually made
offerings
to gods for specific reasons: the health of a child, the future of a
business
enterprise, a drought, a quarrel, a romance. They preferred gods who
were
experts in their field to this nonspecific all-rounder of a deity. The man who
would pluck Allah from near-obscurity and become his
Prophet—transforming him
into the equal, or at least the equivalent, of the Old Testament God “I
Am” and
the New Testament’s Three-in-One—was Muhammad ibn Abdullah of the Banu
Hashim
clan. His family had, in his childhood, fallen upon hard times; he was
orphaned
and lived in his uncle’s house. Muhammad ibn Abdullah earned a
reputation as a
skilled merchant and an honest man, and at the age of twenty-five he
received a
marriage proposal from an older, wealthier woman, Khadijah. For the
next
fifteen years, he was successful in business and happy in his marriage.
However, he was also a man with a need for solitude, and for many years
he
spent weeks at a time living like a hermit in a cave on Mt. Hira. When
he was
forty, the Angel Gabriel disturbed his solitude there and ordered him
to recite
the verses that would eventually form a new holy book, the Koran.
Naturally,
Muhammad believed that he had lost his mind and fled. He returned to
hear what
the Angel had to say only after his wife and close friends convinced
him that
it might be worth a return trip up the mountain, just to check if God
was
really trying to get in touch. It was easy to admire much of what followed, as the merchant transformed himself into the Messenger of God, easy to sympathize with his persecution, and to respect his rapid evolution into a respected lawgiver, an able ruler, and a skilled military leader. The ethos of the Koran, the value system it endorses, was, in essence, the vanishing code of nomadic Arabs, the matriarchal, more caring society that did not leave orphans out in the cold, orphans like Muhammad, whose success as a merchant, he believed, should have earned him a place in the city’s ruling body, and who was denied such preferment because he didn’t have a powerful family to fight for him. Here was a
fascinating paradox: an essentially conservative theology, looking
backward
with affection toward a vanishing culture, became a revolutionary idea,
because
the people it attracted most strongly were those who had been
marginalized by
urbanization—the disaffected poor, the street mob. This, perhaps, was
why
Islam, the new idea, felt so threatening to the Meccan élite; why it
was
persecuted so viciously; and why its founder may—just may—have been
offered an
attractive deal, designed to buy him off. The
historical record is incomplete, but most of the major collections of
hadith,
or stories about the life of the Prophet—those compiled by Ibn Ishaq,
Waqidi,
Ibn Sa’d, and Tabari—recount an incident that later became known as the
incident of the “Satanic Verses.” The Prophet came down from the
mountain one
day and recited verses from what would become Surah—or chapter—No. 53.
It
contained these words: “Have you thought on al-Lat and al-Uzza, and,
thirdly,
on Manat, the other? They are the Exalted Birds, and their intercession
is
desired indeed.” At a later point—was it days or weeks, or
months?—Muhammad
returned to the mountain and came down, abashed, to state that he had
been
deceived on his previous visit: the Devil had appeared to him in the
guise of
the Archangel, and the verses he had been given were therefore not
divine but
satanic and should be expunged from the Koran at once. The Archangel
had, on
this occasion, brought new verses from God, which were to replace the
“Satanic
Verses” in the great book: “Have you thought on al-Lat and al-Uzza,
and,
thirdly, on Manat, the other? Are you to have the sons, and He the
daughters?
This is indeed an unfair distinction! They are but names which you and
your
fathers have invented: God has vested no authority in them.” And in this
way the recitation was purified of the Devil’s work. But the questions
remained: Why did Muhammad initially accept the first, “false”
revelation as
true? And what happened in Mecca during the period between the two
revelations,
satanic and angelic? This much was known: Muhammad wanted to be
accepted by the
people of Mecca. “He longed for a way to attract them,” Ibn Ishaq
wrote. And
when the Meccans heard that he had acknowledged the three goddesses
“they were
delighted and greatly pleased.” Why, then, did the Prophet recant?
Western
historians (the Scottish scholar of Islam W. Montgomery Watt, the
French
Marxist Maxime Rodinson) proposed a politically motivated reading of
the
episode. The temples of the three goddesses were economically important
to the
city’s ruling élite, an élite from which Muhammad had been
excluded—unfairly,
in his opinion. So perhaps the deal that was offered ran something like
this:
If Muhammad, or the Archangel Gabriel, or Allah, agreed that the
goddesses could
be worshipped by followers of Islam—not as the equals of Allah,
obviously, but
as secondary, lesser beings, like, for example, angels, and there
already were
angels in Islam, so what harm could there be in adding three more, who
just
happened to be popular and lucrative figures in Mecca?—then the
persecution of
Muslims would cease, and Muhammad himself would be granted a seat on
the city’s
ruling council. And it was perhaps to this temptation that the Prophet
briefly
succumbed. Then what
happened? Did the city’s grandees renege on the deal, reckoning that by
flirting with polytheism Muhammad had undone himself in the eyes of his
followers? Did his followers refuse to accept the revelation about the
goddesses? Did Muhammad himself regret having compromised his ideas by
yielding
to the siren call of acceptability? It’s
impossible to say for sure. But the Koran speaks of how all the
prophets were
tested by temptation. “Never have We sent a single prophet or apostle
before
you with whose wishes Satan did not tamper,” Surah No. 22 says. And if
the
incident of the “Satanic Verses” was the Temptation of Muhammad it has
to be
said that he came out of it pretty well. He both confessed to having
been
tempted and repudiated that temptation. Tabari quotes him thus: “I have
fabricated things against God and have imputed to Him words which He
has not
spoken.” After that, the monotheism of Islam remained unwavering and
strong,
through persecution, exile, and war, and before long the Prophet had
achieved
victory over his enemies and the new faith spread like a conquering
fire across
the world. Good story,
he thought, when he read about it at Cambridge. Even then he was
dreaming of
being a writer, and he filed the story away in the back of his mind for
future
consideration. Twenty-three years later, he would find out exactly how
good a
story it was. 1984 There was a
novel growing in him, but its exact nature eluded him. It would be a
big book,
he knew that, ranging widely over space and time. A book of journeys.
That felt
right. He had dealt, as well as he knew how, with the worlds from which
he had
come. Now he needed to connect those worlds to the very different world
in
which he had made his life. He was beginning to see that this, rather
than
India or Pakistan or politics or magic realism, would be his real
subject, the
one he would worry away at for the rest of his career: the great
question of
how the world joins up—not only how the East flows into the West and
the West
into the East but how the past shapes the present even as the present
changes
our understanding of the past, and how the imagined world, the location
of
dreams, art, invention, and, yes, faith, sometimes leaks across the
frontier
separating it from the “real” place in which human beings mistakenly
believe
they live. This was
what he had: a bunch of migrants, or, to use the British term,
“immigrants,”
from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, through whose personal journeys
he could
explore the joinings-up and also the disjointednesses of here and
there, then
and now, reality and dreams. He had the beginnings of a character named
Salahuddin Chamchawala, Anglicized to Saladin Chamcha, who had a
difficult
relationship with his father and had retreated into Englishness.
Chamcha would
be a portrait of a deracinated man, fleeing from his father and his
country,
from Indianness itself, toward an Englishness that wasn’t really
letting him
in, an actor with many voices who did well as long as he remained
unseen,
performing on radio or doing TV voice-overs, a man whose face was,
despite his
Anglophilia, “the wrong color for their color TVs.” And opposite
Chamcha . . . well, a fallen angel, perhaps. In 1982, the actor Amitabh
Bachchan, the biggest star of the Bombay cinema, had suffered a
near-fatal
injury to his spleen while doing his own movie stunts in Bangalore. In
the
months that followed, his hospitalization was daily front-page news. As
he lay
close to death, the nation held its breath; when he rose again, the
effect was
almost Christlike. There were actors in southern India who had attained
almost
godlike status by portraying the gods in movies called mythologicals.
Bachchan
had become semi-divine even without such a career. But what if a
god-actor,
afflicted with a terrible injury, had called out to his god in his hour
of need
and heard no reply? What if, as a result of that appalling divine
silence, such
a man were to begin to question, or even to lose, the faith that had
sustained
him? Might he, in such a crisis of the soul, begin to lose his mind as
well?
And might he in his dementia flee halfway around the world, forgetting
that
when you run away you can’t leave yourself behind? What would such a
falling
star be called? The name came to him at once, as if it had been waiting
for him
to capture it. Gibreel. The Angel Gabriel, Gibreel Farishta. Gibreel
and
Chamcha: two lost souls in the roofless continuum of the unhoused. They
would
be his protagonists. The journeys
multiplied. Here was a fragment from somewhere else entirely. In
February,
1983, thirty-eight Shia Muslims, followers of a young woman named
Naseem
Fatima, were convinced by her that God would part the waters of the
Arabian Sea
at her request, so that they could make a pilgrimage across the ocean
floor
from Karachi to the holy city of Karbala, in Iraq. They followed her
into the
waters and many of them drowned. The most extraordinary part of the
incident
was that some of those who survived claimed, despite all the evidence
to the
contrary, to have witnessed the miracle. He had been
thinking about this story for more than a year now. He didn’t want to
write
about Pakistan, or Shias, so in his imagination the believers became
Sunni, and
Indian. As Sunnis, they wanted to go to Mecca, not Karbala, but the
idea of the
parting of the sea was still at the heart of the tale. Other
fragments crowded in, many of them about the “city visible but unseen,”
immigrant London in the Age of Thatcher. The London neighborhoods of
Southall,
in West London, and Brick Lane, to the east, where Asian immigrants
lived,
merged with Brixton, south of the river, to form the imaginary central
London
borough of Brickhall, in which a Muslim family of orthodox parents and
rebellious teen-age daughters ran the Shaandaar Café, its name a thinly
disguised Urdu-ing of the real Brilliant Restaurant, in Southall. In
this
borough, interracial trouble was brewing, and soon, perhaps, the
streets would
burn. He
remembered hearing an Indian politician on TV talking about the British
Prime
Minister and being unable to pronounce her name properly. “Mrs.
Torture,” he
kept saying. “Mrs. Margaret Torture.” This was unaccountably funny,
even
though, or perhaps because, Margaret Thatcher was not a torturer. If
this was
to be a novel about Mrs. T.’s London, maybe there was room—comic
room—for this
variant of her name. In his notebook, he wrote, “How does newness enter the world?” “The act of
migration,” he wrote, “puts into crisis everything about the migrating
individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture
and
belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of
putting in
question. It must perform the crisis it describes.” And he
wrote, “The Satanic Verses.” The book
took more than four years to write. Afterward, when people tried to
reduce it
to an “insult,” he wanted to reply, “I can insult people a lot faster
than
that.” But it did not strike his opponents as strange that a serious
writer
should spend a tenth of his life creating something as crude as an
insult. This
was because they refused to see him as a serious writer. In order to
attack him
and his work, they had to paint him as a bad person, an apostate
traitor, an
unscrupulous seeker of fame and wealth, an opportunist who “attacked
Islam” for
his own personal gain. This was what was meant by the much repeated
phrase “He
did it on purpose.” Well, of course he had done it on purpose. How
could one
write a quarter of a million words by accident? The problem, as Bill
Clinton
might have said, was what one meant by “it.” The ironic
truth was that, after two novels that engaged directly with the public
history
of the Indian subcontinent, he saw this new book as a more personal
exploration, a first attempt to create a work out of his own experience
of
migration and metamorphosis. To him, it was the least political of the
three
books. And the material derived from the origin story of Islam was, he
thought,
essentially respectful toward the Prophet of Islam, even admiring of
him. It
treated him as he always said he wanted to be treated, not as a divine
figure
(like the Christians’ “Son of God”) but as a man (“the Messenger”). It
showed
him as a man of his time, shaped by that time, and, as a leader, both
subject
to temptation and capable of overcoming it. “What kind of idea are
you?” the
novel asked the new religion, and suggested that an idea that refused
to bend
or compromise would, in all likelihood, be destroyed, but conceded
that, in
very rare instances, such ideas became the ones that changed the world.
His
Prophet flirted with compromise, then rejected it, and his unbending
idea grew
strong enough to bend history to its will. When he was
first accused of being offensive, he was truly perplexed. He thought he
had
made an artistic engagement with the phenomenon of revelation—an
engagement
from the point of view of an unbeliever, certainly, but a genuine one
nonetheless. How could that be thought offensive? The thin-skinned
years of
rage-defined identity politics that followed taught him, and everyone
else, the
answer to that question. 1988 The British
edition of “The Satanic Verses” came out on Monday, September 26, 1988,
and,
for a brief moment that fall, the publication was a literary event,
discussed
in the language of books. Was it any good? Was it, as Victoria
Glendinning
suggested in the London Times, “better than ‘Midnight’s Children,’
because it
is more contained, but only in the sense that the Niagara Falls are
contained,”
or, as Angela Carter said in the Guardian, “an epic into which holes
have been
punched to let in visions . . . [a] populous, loquacious, sometimes
hilarious,
extraordinary contemporary novel”? Or was it, as Claire Tomalin wrote
in the
Independent, a “wheel that would not turn,” or, in Hermione Lee’s even
harsher
opinion, in the Observer, a novel that went “plunging down, on melting
wings
toward unreadability”? How large was the membership of the apocryphal
Page 15
Club of readers who could not get past that point in the book? Soon enough,
the language of literature would be drowned in the cacophony of other
discourses—political, religious, sociological, postcolonial—and the
subject of
quality, of artistic intent, would come to seem almost frivolous. The
book that
he had written would vanish and be replaced by one that scarcely
existed, in
which Rushdie referred to the Prophet and his companions as “scums and
bums”
(he didn’t, though he did allow the characters who persecuted the
followers of
his fictional Prophet to use abusive language), and called the wives of
the
Prophet whores (he hadn’t—although whores in a brothel in his imaginary
city,
Jahilia, take on the names of the Prophet’s wives to arouse their
clients, the
wives themselves are clearly described as living chastely in the
harem). This
nonexistent novel was the one against which the rage of Islam would be
directed, and after that few people wished to talk about the real book,
except,
usually, to concur with Hermione Lee’s negative assessment. When friends
asked what they could do to help, he pleaded, “Defend the text.” The
attack was
very specific, yet the defense was often a general one, resting on the
mighty
principle of freedom of speech. He hoped for, felt that he needed, a
more
particular defense, like those made in the case of other assaulted
books, such
as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Ulysses,” or “Lolita”—because this was a
violent
attack not on the novel in general, or on free speech per se, but on a
particular accumulation of words, and on the intentions and integrity
and
ability of the writer who had put those words together. He did it for
money. He
did it for fame. The Jews made him do it. Nobody would have bought his
unreadable book if he hadn’t vilified Islam. That was the nature of the
attack,
and so for many years “The Satanic Verses” was denied the ordinary life
of a
novel. It became something smaller and uglier: an insult. And he became
the
Insulter, not only in Muslim eyes but in the opinion of the public at
large. But for
those few weeks in the fall of 1988 the book was still “only a novel,”
and he
was still himself. “The Satanic Verses” was short-listed for the Booker
Prize,
along with novels by Peter Carey, Bruce Chatwin, Marina Warner, David
Lodge,
and Penelope Fitzgerald. Then, on Thursday, October 6th, his friend
Salman
Haidar, who was Deputy High Commissioner of India in London, called to
tell him
formally, on behalf of his government, that “The Satanic Verses” had
been
banned in India. The book had not been examined by any properly
authorized
body, nor had there been any semblance of judicial process. The ban
came,
improbably, from the Finance Ministry, under Section 11 of the Customs
Act,
which prevented the book from being imported. Weirdly, the Finance
Ministry
stated that the ban “did not detract from the literary and artistic
merit” of
his work. Thanks a lot, he thought. On October 10th, the first death
threat was
received at the London offices of his publisher, Viking Penguin. The
day after
that, a scheduled reading in Cambridge was cancelled by the venue
because it,
too, had received threats. The year
ended badly. There was a demonstration against “The Satanic Verses” in
Bolton,
in the northwest of England, where the book was burned, on December
2nd. On
December 3rd, Clarissa received her first threatening phone call. On
December
4th, there was another one; a voice said, “We’ll get you tonight,
Salman
Rushdie, at 60 Burma Road.” That was her home address. She called the
police,
and officers stayed at the house overnight. Nothing happened. The
tension
ratcheted up another notch. On December 28th, there was a bomb scare at
Viking
Penguin. Then it was 1989, the year the world changed. 1989 Two thousand
protesters was a small crowd in Pakistan. Even the most modestly potent
politico could put many more thousands on the streets just by clapping
his
hands. That only two thousand “fundamentalists” could be found to storm
the
U.S. Information Center in the heart of Islamabad on February 12th was,
in a
way, a good sign. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was on a state visit to
China
at the time, and it was speculated that destabilizing her
administration had
been the demonstrators’ real aim. Religious extremists had long
suspected her
of secularism, and they wanted to put her on the spot. Not for the last
time,
“The Satanic Verses” was being used as a football in a political game
that had
little or nothing to do with it. Bricks and stones were thrown at
security
forces, and there were screams of “American dogs!” and “Hang Salman
Rushdie!”—the usual stuff. None of this fully explained the police’s
response,
which was to open fire, using rifles, semiautomatic weapons, and
pump-action
shotguns. The confrontation lasted for three hours, and, despite all
that
weaponry, demonstrators reached the roof of the building and the
American flag
was burned, as were effigies of “the United States” and him. On another
day, he
might have asked himself what factory supplied the thousands of
American flags
that were burned around the world each year. But, on this day,
everything else
that happened was dwarfed by a single fact: five people were shot dead.
Blood
will have blood, he thought. Here was a mortally ill old man, lying in a darkened room. Here was his son, telling him about Muslims shot dead in India and Pakistan. It was that book that caused this, the son told the old man, the book that is against Islam. A few hours later, a document was brought to the offices of Iranian radio and presented as Khomeini’s edict. A fatwa, or edict, is usually a formal document, signed and witnessed and given under seal at the end of a legal proceeding, but this was just a piece of paper bearing a typewritten text. Nobody ever saw the formal document, if one existed. The piece of paper was handed to the station newsreader and he began to read. It was
Valentine’s Day. “Threat” was
a technical term, and it was not the same as “risk.” The threat level
was
general, but risk levels were specific. The level of threat against an
individual might be high—and it was for the intelligence services to
determine
this—but the level of risk attached to a particular action by that
individual
might be much lower, for example, if nobody knew what he was planning
to do, or
when. Risk assessment was the job of the police-protection team. These
were
concepts that he would have to master, because threat and risk
assessments
would, from now on, shape his daily life. The Special
Branch officer who came to see him on the morning of February 15th was
Wilson,
and the intelligence officer was Wilton, and they both answered to the
name of
Will. Will Wilson and Will Wilton: it was like a music-hall joke,
except that
there was nothing funny about anything that day. He was told that
because the
threat against him was considered to be extremely serious—it was at
Level 2,
which meant that he was considered to be in more danger than anyone in
the
country, except, perhaps, the Queen—and, because he was being menaced
by a
foreign power, he was entitled to the protection of the British state.
Protection was formally offered and accepted. It was explained that he
would be
allocated two protection officers, two drivers, and two cars. The
second car
was in case the first one broke down. It was explained that, because of
the
unique nature of the assignment and the imponderable risks involved,
all the
officers protecting him would be volunteers. He was introduced to his
first
“prot” team: Stanley Doll and Ben Winters. (Names and some details have
been
changed for this account.) Stanley was one of the best tennis players
on the
police force. Benny was one of the few black officers in the Branch and
wore a
chic tan leather jacket. They were both strikingly handsome, and
packing heat.
The Branch were the stars of the Metropolitan Police, the double-O
élite. He
had never met anyone who was actually licensed to kill, and Stan and
Benny were
presently licensed to do so on his behalf. Regarding
the matter at hand, Benny and Stan were reassuring. “It can’t be
allowed,” Stan
said. “Threatening a British citizen. It’s not on. It’ll get sorted.
You just
need to lie low for a couple of days and let the politicians sort it
out.” “You can’t
go home, obviously,” Benny said. “That wouldn’t be too kosher. Is there
anywhere you’d like to go for a few days?” “Pick
somewhere nice,” Stan said, “and we’ll just whiz you off there for a
stretch
until you’re in the clear.” He wanted to
believe in their optimism. Maybe the Cotswolds, he thought. Maybe
somewhere in
that picture-postcard region of rolling hills and golden-stone houses.
There
was a famous inn in the Cotswold village of Broadway called the Lygon
Arms. He
had long wanted to go there for a weekend but had never made it. Would
the
Lygon Arms be a possibility? Stan and Benny looked at each other, and
something
passed between them. “I don’t see
why not,” Stan said. “We’ll look into it.” He wanted to
see his son again before diving for cover, he said, and his sister
Sameen, too.
They agreed to “set it up.” Once it was dark, he was driven to Burma
Road in an
armored Jaguar. The armor plating was so thick that there was much less
headroom
than in a standard car. The doors were so heavy that if they swung shut
accidentally and hit you they could injure you quite seriously. The
fuel
consumption of an armored Jaguar was around six miles to the gallon. It
weighed
as much as a small tank. He was given this information by his first
Special
Branch driver, Dennis (the Horse) Chevalier, a big, cheerful, jowly,
thick-lipped man—“one of the older fellows,” he said. “Do you know the
technical term for us Special Branch drivers?” Dennis the Horse asked
him. He
did not know. “The term is O.F.D.s,” Dennis said. “That’s us.” And what
did
O.F.D. stand for? Dennis gave a throaty, slightly wheezing laugh. “Only
Fucking
Drivers,” he said. He would
grow accustomed to police humor. One of his other drivers was known
throughout
the Branch as the King of Spain, because he once left his Jag unlocked
while he
went to the tobacconist’s and returned to find that it had been stolen.
Hence
the nickname, because the King of Spain’s name was—you had to say it
slowly—Juan
Car-los. He told
Zafar and Clarissa what the prot team had said: “It will be over in a
few
days.” Zafar looked immensely relieved. On Clarissa’s face were all the
doubts
he was trying to pretend he didn’t feel. He hugged his son tightly and
left. Sameen, a
lawyer (though no longer a practicing one—she worked in adult
education), had
always had a sharp political mind and had a lot to say about what was
going on.
The Iranian Revolution had been shaky ever since Khomeini was forced,
in his
own words, to “drink the cup of poison” and accept the unsuccessful end
of his
Iraq war, which had left a generation of young Iranians dead or maimed.
The
fatwa was his way of regaining political momentum, of reënergizing the
faithful. It was her brother’s bad luck to be the dying man’s last
stand. As
for the British Muslim “leaders,” whom, exactly, did they lead? They
were
leaders without followers, mountebanks trying to make careers out of
her
brother’s misfortune. For a generation, the politics of ethnic
minorities in
Britain had been secular and socialist. This was the mosques’ way of
getting
religion into the driver’s seat. British Asians had never splintered
into
Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh factions before. Somebody needed to answer
these people
who were driving a sectarian wedge through the community, she said, to
name
them as the hypocrites and opportunists that they were. She was
ready to be that person, and he knew that she would make a formidable
representative. But he asked her not to do it. Her daughter, Maya, was
less
than a year old. If Sameen became his public spokesperson, the media
would camp
outside her house and there would be no escape from the glare of
publicity; her
private life, her daughter’s life, would become a thing of klieg lights
and
microphones. Also, it was impossible to know what danger it might draw
toward
her. He didn’t want her to be at risk because of him. Reluctantly, she
agreed. One of the
unforeseen consequences of this decision was that as the “affair”
blazed on,
and he was obliged to be mostly invisible—because the police urged him
not to
further inflame the situation, advice he accepted for a time—there was
nobody
who loved him speaking for him, not his wife, not his sister, not his
closest
friends, the ones he wanted to continue to see. He became, in the
media, a man
whom nobody loved but many people hated. “Death, perhaps, is a bit too
easy for
him,” Iqbal Sacranie, of the U.K. Action Committee on Islamic Affairs,
said.
“His mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks for
forgiveness from Almighty Allah.” (In 2005, this same Sacranie was
knighted at
the recommendation of the Blair government for his services to
community
relations.) On the way
to the Cotswolds, the car stopped for gas. He needed to go to the
toilet, so he
opened the door and got out. Every head in the gas station turned to
stare at
him. He was on the front page of every newspaper—Martin Amis said,
memorably,
that he had “vanished into the front page”—and had, overnight, become
one of
the most recognizable men in the country. The faces looked friendly—one
man
waved, another gave the thumbs-up sign—but it was alarming to be so
intensely
visible at exactly the moment that he was being asked to lie low. At
the Lygon
Arms, the highly trained staff could not prevent themselves from
gawping. He
had become a freak show, and he and Marianne were both relieved when
they
reached the privacy of their beautiful old-world room. He was given a
“panic
button” to press if he was worried about anything. He tested the panic
button.
It didn’t work. On his
second day at the hotel, Stan and Benny came to see him with a piece of
paper
in their hands. Iran’s President, Ali Khamenei, had hinted that if he
apologized “this wretched man might yet be spared.” “It’s felt,” Stan
said,
“that you should do something to lower the temperature.” “Yeah,”
Benny assented. “That’s the thinking. The right statement from you
could be of
assistance.” Felt by
whom, he wanted to know; whose thinking was this? “It’s the
general opinion,” Stan said opaquely. “Upstairs.” Was it a
police opinion or a government opinion? “They’ve
taken the liberty of preparing a text,” Stan said. “By all means, read
it
through.” “By all
means, make alterations if the style isn’t pleasing,” Benny said.
“You’re the
writer.” “I should
say, in fairness,” Stan said, “that the text has been approved.” The text he
was handed was craven, self-abasing. To sign it would have been to
admit
defeat. Could this really be the deal he was being offered—that he
would
receive government support and police protection only if, abandoning
his
principles and the defense of his book, he fell to his knees and
grovelled? Stan and
Benny looked extremely uncomfortable. “As I say,” Benny said, “you’re
free to
make alterations.” “Then we’ll
see how they play,” Stan said. And
supposing he chose not to make a statement at all at this time? “It’s
thought to be a good idea,” Stan said. “There are high-level
negotiations
taking place on your behalf. And then there are the Lebanon hostages to
consider, and Mr. Roger Cooper in jail in Tehran. Their situation is
worse than
yours. You’re asked to do your bit.” (In the nineteen-eighties, the
Lebanese
Hezbollah group, funded by Tehran, had captured ninety-six foreign
nationals
from twenty-one countries, including several Americans and Britons.
Cooper, a
British businessman, had been seized in Iran.) It was an
impossible task: to write something that could be received as an olive
branch
without giving way on what was important. The statement he came up with
was one
he mostly loathed: As author of
“The Satanic Verses” I recognize that Muslims in many parts of the
world are
genuinely distressed by the publication of my novel. I profoundly
regret the
distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam.
Living
as we do in a world of many faiths this experience has served to remind
us that
we must all be conscious of the sensibilities of others. His private, self-justifying voice argued that he was apologizing for the distress—and, after all, he had never wanted to cause distress—but not for the book itself. And, yes, we should be conscious of the sensibilities of others, but that did not mean we should surrender to them. That was his combative, unstated subtext. But he knew that, if the statement was to be effective, it had to be read as a straightforward apology. That thought made him feel physically ill. It was a
useless gesture, rejected, then half accepted, then rejected again,
both by
British Muslims and by the Iranian leadership. The strong position
would have
been to refuse to negotiate with intolerance. He had taken the weak
position
and was therefore treated as a weakling. The Observer defended
him—“neither
Britain nor the author has anything to apologize for”—but his feeling
of having
made a serious misstep was soon confirmed. “Even if Salman Rushdie
repents and
becomes the most pious man of all time, it is incumbent on every Muslim
to
employ everything he has got, his life and his wealth, to send him to
hell,”
the dying imam said. The
protection officers said that he should not spend more than two nights
at the
Lygon Arms. He was lucky the media hadn’t found him yet, and in a day
or so
they surely would. This was when another harsh truth was explained: it
was up
to him to find places to stay. The police’s advice was that he could
not return
to his home, because it would be impossible (which was to say, very
expensive)
to protect him there. But “safe houses” would not be provided. If such
places
existed, he never saw them. Most people, trained by spy fiction, firmly
believed in the existence of safe houses, and assumed that he was being
protected in one such fortress at the public’s expense. Criticisms of
the money
spent on his protection would grow more vociferous with the passing
weeks: an
indication of a shift in public opinion. But, on his second day at the
Lygon
Arms, he was told that he had twenty-four hours to find somewhere else
to stay.
A colleague of Clarissa’s offered a night or two at her country
cottage, in the
village of Thame, in Oxfordshire. From there, he made phone calls to
everyone
he could think of, without success. Then he checked his voice mail and
found a
message from Deborah Rogers, his former literary agent. “Call me,” she
said. “I
think we may be able to help.” Deb and her
husband, the composer Michael Berkeley, invited him to their farm in
Wales. “If
you need it,” she said simply, “it’s yours.” He was deeply moved.
“Look,” she
said, “it’s perfect, actually, because everyone thinks we’ve fallen
out, and so
nobody would ever imagine you’d be here.” The next day, his strange
little
circus descended on Middle Pitts, a homely farmhouse in the hilly Welsh
border
country. “Stay as long as you need to,” Deb said, but he knew he needed
to find
a place of his own. Marianne agreed to contact local estate agents and
start
looking at rental properties. They could only hope that her face would
be less
recognizable than his. As for him,
he could not be seen at the farm or its safety would be “compromised.”
A local
farmer looked after the sheep for Michael and Deb, and at one point he
came
down off the hill to talk to Michael about something. “You’d better get
out of
sight,” Michael told him, and he had to duck behind a kitchen counter.
As he
crouched there, listening to Michael try to get rid of the man as
quickly as
possible, he felt a deep sense of shame. To hide in this way was to be
stripped
of all self-respect. Maybe, he thought, to live like this would be
worse than
death. In his novel “Shame,” he had written about the workings of
Muslim “honor
culture,” at the poles of whose moral axis were honor and shame, very
different
from the Christian narrative of guilt and redemption. He came from that
culture, even though he was not religious. To skulk and hide was to
lead a
dishonorable life. He felt, very often in those years, profoundly
ashamed. Both
shamed and ashamed. The news
roared in his ears. Members of the Pakistani parliament had recommended
the
immediate dispatch of assassins to the United Kingdom. In Iran, the
most
powerful clerics fell into line behind the imam. “The long black arrow
has been
slung, and is now travelling toward its target,” Khamenei said, during
a visit
to Yugoslavia. An Iranian ayatollah named Hassan Sanei offered a
million
dollars in bounty money for the apostate’s head. It was not clear
whether this
ayatollah possessed a million dollars, or how easy it would be to claim
the
reward, but these were not logical days. The British Council’s library
in
Karachi—a drowsy, pleasant place he’d often visited—was bombed. On February 22nd, the day the novel was published in America, there was a full-page advertisement in the Times, paid for by the Association of American Publishers, the American Booksellers Association, and the American Library Association. “Free People Write Books,” it said. “Free People Publish Books, Free People Sell Books, Free People Buy Books, Free People Read Books. In the spirit of America’s commitment to free expression we inform the public that this book will be available to readers at bookshops and libraries throughout the country.” The PEN American Center, passionately led by his beloved friend Susan Sontag, held readings from the novel. Sontag, Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Claire Bloom, and Larry McMurtry were among the readers. He was sent a tape of the event. It brought a lump to his throat. Long afterward, he was told that some senior American writers had initially ducked for cover. Even Arthur Miller had made an excuse—that his Jewishness might be a counterproductive factor. But within days, whipped into line by Susan, almost all of them had found their better selves and stood up to be counted. When the
book was in its third consecutive week as No. 1 on the New York Times
best-seller list, John Irving, who found himself stuck at No. 2,
quipped that,
if that was what it took to get to the top spot, he was content to be
runner-up. He himself well knew, as did Irving, that scandal, not
literary
merit, was driving the sales. He also knew, and much appreciated, the
fact that
many people bought copies of “The Satanic Verses” to demonstrate their
solidarity. While all
this and much more was happening, the author of “The Satanic Verses”
was
crouching in shame behind a kitchen counter to avoid being seen by a
sheep
farmer. Marianne
found a house to rent, a modest white-walled cottage with a pitched
slate roof
called Tyn-y-Coed, “the house in the woods,” a common name for a house
in those
parts. It was near the village of Pentrefelin, in Brecon, not far from
the
Black Mountains and the Brecon Beacons. There was a great deal of rain.
When
they arrived, it was cold. The police officers tried to light the stove
and,
after a good deal of clanking and swearing, succeeded. He found a small
upstairs room where he could shut the door and pretend to work. The
house felt
bleak, as did the days. Thatcher was on television, understanding the
insult to
Islam and sympathizing with the insulted. Commander
John Howley, of the Special Branch, came to see him in Wales. It now
looked as
though he would be at risk for a considerable time, and that was not
what the
Special Branch had foreseen, Howley told him. It was no longer a matter
of
lying low for a few days to let the politicians sort things out. There
was no
prospect of his being allowed (allowed?) to resume his normal life in
the foreseeable
future. He could not just decide to go home and take his chances. To do
so
would be to endanger his neighbors and place an intolerable burden on
police
resources, because an entire street, or more than one street, would
need to be
sealed off and protected. He had to wait until there was a “major
political
shift.” What did that mean? he asked. Until Khomeini died? Or never?
Howley did
not have an answer. It was not possible for him to estimate how long it
would
take. He had been
living with the threat of death for a month. There had been further
rallies
against “The Satanic Verses” in Paris, New York, Oslo, Kashmir,
Bangladesh,
Turkey, Germany, Thailand, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, and West
Yorkshire. The toll of injuries and deaths had continued to rise. The
novel had
by now also been banned in Syria, Lebanon, Kenya, Brunei, Thailand,
Tanzania,
Indonesia, and elsewhere in the Arab world. In Tyn-y-Coed, on the Ides
of
March, he was flung without warning into the lowest circle of Orwellian
hell.
“You asked me once,” O’Brien said, “what was in Room 101. I told you
that you
knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room
101 is
the worst thing in the world.” The worst thing in the world is
different for
every individual. For Winston Smith, in Orwell’s “1984,” it was rats.
For him,
in a cold Welsh cottage, it was an unanswered phone call. He had his
daily routine with Clarissa: At seven o’clock every evening, he would
call to
say hello to Zafar. If Clarissa couldn’t be at home with Zafar at
seven, she
would leave a message on the St. Peter’s Street answering machine
telling him
when they would be back. He called the Burma Road house. There was no
reply. He
left a message on Clarissa’s machine and then interrogated his own. She
had not
left a message. Oh, well, he thought, they’re a little late. Fifteen
minutes
later, he called again. Nobody picked up. He called his own machine
again:
nothing there. Ten minutes later, he made a third call. Still nothing.
It was
almost seven-forty-five on a school night. It wasn’t normal for them to
be out
so late. He called twice more in the next ten minutes. No response. Now
he
began to panic. He called Burma Road repeatedly, dialling and
redialling like a
madman, and his hands began to shake. He was sitting on the floor,
wedged up
against a wall, with the phone in his lap, dialling, redialling. Stan
and Benny
noticed their “principal” ’s agitated phone activity and came to ask if
everything was all right. He said no,
it didn’t seem to be. Clarissa and Zafar were now an hour and a quarter
late
for their phone appointment with him and had left no word of
explanation.
Stan’s face was serious. “Is this a break in routine?” he asked. Yes,
it was a
break in routine. “O.K.,” Stan said, “leave it with me. I’ll make some
inquiries.” A few minutes later, he came back to say that he had spoken
to
Metpol—the London Metropolitan Police—and a car would be sent to the
address to
do a “drive-by.” After that, the minutes moved as slowly and coldly as
glacial
ice, and when the report came it froze his heart. “The car drove by the
premises just now,” Stan told him, “and the report, I’m sorry to say,
is that
the front door is open and all the lights are on.” He was unable to
reply.
“Obviously the officers did not attempt to go up to the house or
enter,” Stan
said. “In the situation as it is, they wouldn’t know what they might
encounter.” He saw
bodies sprawled on the stairs in the front hall. He saw the brightly
lit
rag-doll corpses of his son and his first wife drenched in blood. Life
was
over. He had run away and hidden like a terrified rabbit, and his loved
ones
had paid the price. “Just to inform you on what we’re doing,” Stan
said. “We
will be going in there, but you’ll have to give us approximately forty
minutes.
They need to assemble an army.” Maybe they
were not both dead. Maybe his son was alive and had been taken hostage.
“You
understand,” he said to Stan, “that if they have him and they want a
ransom,
they want me to exchange myself for him, then I’m going to do that, and
you
guys can’t stop me doing it.” Stan took a slow, dark pause, like a
character in
a Pinter play. Then he said, “That thing about exchanging hostages,
that only
happens in the movies. In real life, I’m sorry to tell you, if this is
a
hostile intervention they are both probably dead already. The question
you have
to ask yourself is, Do you want to die as well?” Marianne sat
facing him, unable to provide comfort. He had no more to say. There was
only
the crazy dialling, every thirty seconds, the dialling and then the
ring tone
and then Clarissa’s voice asking him to leave a message. There was no
message worth
leaving. “I’m sorry” didn’t begin to cover it. He hung up and
redialled, and
there was her voice again. And again. After a very long time, Stan came and said quietly, “Won’t be long now. They’re just about ready.” He nodded and waited for reality to deal him what would be a fatal blow. He was not aware of weeping but his face was wet. He went on dialling Clarissa’s number. As if the telephone possessed occult powers, as if it were a Ouija board that could put him in touch with the dead. Then,
unexpectedly, there was a click. Somebody had picked up the receiver at
the
other end. “Hello?” he said, his voice unsteady. “Dad?”
Zafar’s voice said. “What’s going on, Dad? There’s a policeman at the
door and
he says there are fifteen more on the way.” Relief cascaded over him
and
momentarily tied his tongue. “Dad? Are you there?” “Yes,” he
said, “I’m here. Is your mother all right? Where were you?” They had
been at a school drama performance that had run very late. Clarissa
came on the
phone and apologized. “I’m sorry, I should have left you a message. I
just
forgot. I’m sorry.” “But what
about the door?” he asked. “Why was the front door open and all the
lights left
on?” It was Zafar on the other end again. “It wasn’t, Dad,” he said. “We just got back and opened the door and turned the lights on and then the policeman came.” “It would
seem,” Stan said, “that there has been a regrettable error. The car we
sent to
have a look looked at the wrong house.” Bookstores
were firebombed—Collets and Dillons in London, Abbey’s in Sydney.
Libraries
refused to stock the book, chains refused to carry it, a dozen printers
in
France refused to print the French edition, and more threats were made
against
publishers. Muslims began to be killed by other Muslims if they
expressed
non-bloodthirsty opinions. In Belgium, the mullah who was said to be
the
“spiritual leader” of the country’s Muslims, the Saudi national
Abdullah
al-Ahdal, and his Tunisian deputy, Salem el-Behir, were killed for
saying that,
whatever Khomeini had said for Iranian consumption, in Europe there was
freedom
of expression. “I am gagged
and imprisoned,” he wrote in his journal. “I can’t even speak. I want
to kick a
football in a park with my son. Ordinary, banal life: my impossible
dream.”
Friends who saw him in those days were shocked by his physical
deterioration,
his weight gain, the way he had let his beard grow out into an ugly
bulbous
mass, his sunken stance. He looked like a beaten man. In a very
short time, he grew extremely fond of his protectors. He appreciated
the way
they tried to be upbeat and cheerful in his company to raise his
spirits, and
their efforts at self-effacement. They knew that it was difficult for
“principals” to have policemen in the kitchen, leaving their footprints
in the
butter. They tried very hard, and without any rancor, to give him as
much space
as they could. And most of them, he quickly understood, found the
confinement
of this particular prot more challenging, in some ways, than he did.
These were
men of action, their needs the opposite of those of a sedentary
novelist trying
to hold on to what remained of his inner life, the life of the mind. He
could
sit still and think in a room for hours and be content. They went
stir-crazy if
they had to stay indoors for any length of time. On the other hand,
they were
able to go home after two weeks and have a break. Several of them said
to him,
with worried respect, “We couldn’t do what you’re doing,” and that
knowledge
earned him their sympathy. In the
months and years that followed, they sometimes broke the rules to help
him. At
a time when they were forbidden to take him into any public spaces,
they took
him to the movies, going in after the lights went down and taking him
out
before they went up again. And they did what they could to assist his
work as a
father. They took him and Zafar to police sports grounds and formed
impromptu
rugby teams so that he could run with them and pass the ball. On
holidays, they
sometimes arranged visits to amusement parks. One day, at such a park,
Zafar
saw a soft toy being offered as a prize at a shooting gallery and
decided that
he wanted it. One of the protection officers, known as Fat Jack, heard
him.
“You fancy that, do you?” he said, and pursed his lips. “Hmm hmm.” He
went up
to the booth and put down his money. The carny handed him the usual
pistol with
deformed gun sights and Fat Jack nodded gravely. “Hmm hmm,” he said,
inspecting
the weapon. “All right, then.” He began to shoot. Boom boom boom
boom—the
targets fell one by one while the carny watched with gold-toothed mouth
hanging
wide. “Yes, that should do nicely,” Fat Jack said, putting down the
weapon and
pointing at the soft toy. “We’ll have that, thanks.” They weren’t
perfect. There were mistakes. There was the time that he was taken to
his
friend Hanif Kureishi’s house. At the end of the evening, he was about
to be
driven away when Hanif sprinted out into the street, waving a large
handgun in
its leather holster above his head. “Oy!” he shouted, delightedly.
“Hang on a
minute. You forgot your shooter.” But they took great pride in their
work. Many
of them said to him, always using the same words, “We’ve never lost
anyone. The
Americans can’t say that.” They disliked the American way of doing
things.
“They like to throw bodies at the problem,” they said, meaning that an
American
security detail was usually very large, dozens of people or more. Every
time an
American dignitary visited the United Kingdom, the security forces of
the two
countries had the same arguments about methodology. “We could take the
Queen in
an unmarked Ford Cortina down Oxford Street in the rush hour and nobody
would
know she was there,” they said. “With the Yanks, it’s all bells and
whistles.
But they lost one President, didn’t they? And nearly lost another.” He needed a name, the police told him in Wales. His own name was useless; it was a name that could not be spoken, like Voldemort in the not yet written Harry Potter books. He could not rent a house with it, or register to vote, because to vote you needed to provide a home address and that, of course, was impossible. To protect his democratic right to free expression, he had to surrender his democratic right to choose his government. He needed to choose a new name “pretty pronto,” and then talk to his bank manager and get the bank to agree to accept checks signed with the false name, so that he could pay for things without being identified. The new name was also for the benefit of his protectors. They needed to get used to it, to call him by it at all times, when they were with him and when they weren’t, so that they didn’t accidentally let his real name slip when they were walking or running or going to the gym or the supermarket and blow his cover. The prot had
a name: Operation Malachite. He did not know why the job had been given
the
name of a green stone, and neither did they. They were not writers, and
the
reasons for names were not important to them. But now it was his turn
to rename
himself. “Probably
better not to make it an Asian name,” Stan said. “People put two and
two
together sometimes.” So he was to give up his race as well. He would be
an
invisible man in whiteface. He thought
of writers he loved and tried combinations of their names. Vladimir
Joyce.
Marcel Beckett. Franz Sterne. He made lists of such combinations, but
all of
them sounded ridiculous. Then he found one that did not. He wrote down,
side by
side, the first names of Conrad and Chekhov, and there it was, his name
for the
next eleven years. Joseph Anton. “Jolly
good,” Stan said. “You won’t mind if we call you Joe.” In fact, he did
mind. He
soon discovered that he detested the abbreviation, for reasons he did
not fully
understand—after all, why was Joe so much worse than Joseph? He was
neither
one, and they should have struck him as equally phony or equally
suitable. But
Joe grated on him almost from the beginning. Nevertheless, that
monosyllable
was what the protection officers found easiest to master and remember.
So Joe
it had to be. He had spent
his life naming fictional characters. Now, by naming himself, he had
turned
himself into a sort of fictional character as well. Conrad Chekhov
wouldn’t
have worked. But Joseph Anton was someone who might exist. Who now did
exist.
Conrad, the translingual creator of wanderers, of voyagers into the
heart of
darkness, of secret agents in a world of killers and bombs, and of at
least one
immortal coward, hiding from his shame; and Chekhov, the master of
loneliness
and of melancholy, of the beauty of an old world destroyed, like the
trees in a
cherry orchard, by the brutality of the new, Chekhov, whose “Three
Sisters”
believed that real life was elsewhere and yearned eternally for a
Moscow to
which they could not return: these were his godfathers now. It was
Conrad who
gave him the motto to which he clung, as if to a lifeline, in the long
years
that followed. In the now unacceptably titled “The Nigger of the
Narcissus,”
the hero, a sailor named James Wait, stricken with tuberculosis on a
long sea
voyage, is asked by a fellow-sailor why he came aboard, knowing that he
was
unwell. “I must live till I die—mustn’t I?” Wait replies. In his
present circumstances, the question felt like a command. “Joseph
Anton,” he
told himself, “you must live till you die.” ♦ 
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