August 22, (THEWILL) – “When a book leaves its author’s desk,” Sir Salman Rushdie once said, “it changes.” It would turn out to be exactly so following publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988. Never in the history of modern world literature has any one book generated so much scorn and admiration for an author all at once.
Venerable British spy fiction writer, John le Carre thought Rushdie had taken too much liberties with another religion. “Nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion,” he wrote in The Guardian, “and be published with impunity.” Rushdie’s fellow Indian immigrant but from T&T V. S. Naipaul put down the support by other writers as hypocrisy: “Certain causes are good, and then other causes become good. Now the good people are saying something else. I wish the good people were a little more consistent.”
Children’s book author, Roald Dahl was more acerbic. Speaking of Rushdie writing and publishing The Satanic Verses, he observed that the author “has profound knowledge of the Muslim religion and its people and he must have been totally aware of the deep and violent feelings his book would stir up among devout Muslims. In other words, he knew exactly what he was doing and he cannot plead otherwise.”
Revered British historian, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper insisted he wouldn’t “shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring [Rushdie’s] manners, were to waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.”
On the other divide were Rushdie’s supporters, the professional body of writers all over the world, PEN, then headed by Susan Sontag. There were others like Ian McEwan, Norman Mailer, Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens late, Bill Buford, Andrew Wylie Rushdie’s literary agent and many more. Though an immigrant from the Indian subcontinent, Rushdie is as gifted a writer as any one of the Anglo-American writers, easily earning their respect and comradeship.
Seven years before, Rushdie had published Midnight’s Children to rave reviews and wide reception. It got a Booker Prize soon after and the Booker of Bookers in 2007. Rushdie who was in Chicago during the award ceremony was represented by two of his sons, Zafar and Milan, while the author himself accepted the award through video.
“I have to say this is just a marvellous moment for me and for Midnight’s Children,” Rushdie said at the time. “I’m slightly lost for words which usually I’m not. I think there’s something rather wonderful about my real children accepting a prize for my imaginary children.”
It is true that Midnight’s Children rankled former Indian Prime minister, Indira Gandhi, who complained that her family was badly portrayed in the book. Rushdie settled out of court with the Gandhis and the offensive portrayal was excised from subsequent editions. But with the publication of The Satanic Verses, it was not just one family that complained. It was the entire Muslim world. The Satanic Verses, they fumed, was a desecration of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam. But to others, especially the publishing world, it was a literary masterpiece.
Literary agents in Europe and America battled themselves for marketing rights. Publishers bowled over by the book jostled to have publishing rights to it. But millions of Muslims around the world thought little of the novel’s literary merit. It was, many of them concluded without ever reading the novel, a blasphemous publication. Like the author presciently predicted, his book had changed after leaving his desk. Rushdie’s life would change as well, but not in the way he ever imagined.
In February 1989 on a day most people around the world shower gifts, love messages or some such niceties on one another (spouses, boyfriends or girlfriends) a day people recognize for love and nothing else, a day people startup new relationships or renew pledges to old ones, Rushdie got an unusual message from the Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhuolla Khomeini. It was a fatwa commanding Muslims anywhere in the world to kill the author for his blasphemous publication.
The ransom was a hefty $1.5m. At about the same time, thousands of Muslims everywhere staged public demonstrations from the UK to India and Pakistan, Indonesia, South Africa and Iran, denouncing both book and author, going as far as burning the author in effigy and the book on the streets of London and Islamabad. In one instance, the 542-page hardcover defied the protesters spirited effort to incinerate it. A supervising Imam somewhere in Bradford later said the novel had to be doused with petrol to make it burn faster.
Following Khomeini’s death sentence on Rushdie, thousands more took to the streets in support of the spiritual leader of Iran’s decree. One or two Muslim foundations added half a million dollars to the ransom money. As of the time the lone attacker surprised Rushdie on Friday August 12 at Chautauqua Centre in New York, the bounty placed on him had reached $3.5m.
Rushdie himself was bemused that his book had caused so much outrage worldwide. The Satanic Verses is basically about double-ness, of being an alien in other cultures of which Rushdie is a living example. He was born a Muslim in India where Muslims are considered outsiders. He immigrated to the UK at 13 with his father. There, he was also seen as an outsider, a wog as people from the Indian subcontinent are derogatorily referred to in the UK. So, when Muslims from that part of the world demonstrated against man and novel, Rushdie was somewhat disappointed.
“This is, for me, the saddest irony of all,” Rushdie rued about the attack on his novel, “that after working for five years to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it’s about, people who might find some pleasure and much recognition in its pages.”
To be sure, major political upheavals took place around the world in 1989, from the man and tank confrontation in Tiananmen Square in Beijing to the fall of Berlin Wall and much else. But it was The Satanic Verses and its author who mostly dominated the front pages, made the headlines on paper and on screen. As Martin Amis, one of Rushdie’s colleague and close friend later put it, the author had “vanished into the front pages.”
True, Rushdie was the most talked about subject at the time but he was also rarely seen in public because of the fatwa. Of course, the man had to go under, adopting a nickname at the time. Asked what name to call him by British undercover security agents assigned to him, he chose the first names of his two favourite authors – Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov thus Joseph Anton.
He had pretty much lived underground for decades since then, toured the literary circuit in Europe and America, giving lectures, readings – either from his books or publications by others. On that day, Rushdie, also an American, was to give a lecture. Thus was he occupied on August 12 at Chaupauqua Centre when Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old American but born to Lebanese parents stormed the venue.
Anatomy of a Plan
By his own admission, that was what Rushdie’s attacker did prior to the infamous stabbing. Living in nearby New Jersey, Matar had watched his victim for years, watched him on Youtube, followed his itinerancy closely. He slept in an open field near the venue, probably praying to Allah for a successful job with his knife handy.
Describing Rushdie as an enemy of Islam, Matar told an interviewer that he doesn’t like him. “I don’t like the person. I don’t think he’s a very good person, I don’t like him. I don’t like him very much. He’s someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, their belief systems.”
Though unborn at the time of the fatwa, it has taken three decades plus to finally track Rushdie down to a venue where the author always felt very much at home, a public reading in New York where he was with Henry Rees on stage. Just then, a lone male figure at the reading approached the stage, surprised a defenseless Rushdie, slashed his head, neck, arms and stomach and would have done more harm but for the prompt intervention of security and guests who wrestled him down rugby style.
He succeeded in wounding Rushdie but not killing him. “I am surprised he survived,” Matar later said. His intention was to kill. A newspaper in Iran with close ties to the supreme leader Ali Khamenei, The Kayhan, reacted to the Rushdie attack thusly: “A thousand bravos should be bestowed on upon the brave and dutiful person who attacked the apostate and evil Salman Rushdie in New York.”
But words of condemnation have been more, and from imams themselves. Former Prime minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, described the attack as “unjustifiable, sad and terrible.”
For now, Rushdie is alive and recuperating and certain to write about this latest experience in his memoir like he did with his years underground in Joseph Anton. As for Matar, spending the rest of his days in prison is as certain as his determination to kill in the name of religion.
About the Author
Michael Jimoh is a Nigerian journalist with many years experience in print media. He is currently a Special Correspondent with THEWILL.
