Twenty-five years since it was first published, Salman Rushdie says withdrawing 'The Satanic Verses' in the face of the fatwa put on him would have been ‘cowardly, craven, disgusting and shameful’. Kate Evans and Michael Cathcart take a look at the lessons of the controversy a quarter of a century later.

It has been 25 years since the religious leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for his novel The Satanic Verses, and it’s impossible to count the number of people who have died as a result. Rushdie himself can list the places that were bombed, the bookshops threatened, the publishers phoned and intimidated; he knows the names of those—like his Japanese translator—who were murdered. It’s harder to count, he admits, those who died as a result of protests and reprisals in India and Pakistan, most of whom had never read the book.

Yet he says to withdraw or deny the book would have been ‘cowardly, craven, disgusting and shameful’.

Look, I’m a novelist, you know? Don’t ask me to solve the problems of the world, it’s hard enough to express the problems of the world. Salman Rushdie

The events of 1989 and their aftermath still loom large. Extremism and terrorism appears to be on the rise in some parts of the world. A British man is suspected of having murdered journalist James Foley in Syria.

What does Rushdie make of that?

‘Look, I’m a novelist, you know? Don’t ask me to solve the problems of the world, it’s hard enough to express the problems of the world,’ he says.

Rushdie says that while Britain has changed and the racism and tensions of a quarter of a century ago have lessened, ‘what’s now clearly happened, certainly amongst sections of the British Muslim community, is that there is this frighteningly radical jihadist ideology that’s beginning to attract a lot of support.’

It’s a difficult environment for literature, as Rushdie well knows. He’d like to see The Satanic Verses finally judged as a piece of fiction, a work of literature. He wants it to have ‘the ordinary life of a novel’, in which it can be liked, or not liked, in its own right. Rushdie wanted the book to be judged and fought for on the basis that it was, in fact, a good novel.

‘One of the things you weren’t allowed to do at that point was to use the defence that’s been used historically on behalf of books that have been under attack—the quality defence,’ he says.

‘The quality defence was used for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in which many people said they perjured themselves, said it was a great novel, but they did so to win the case. The quality defence was used for Lolita and for Ulysses and for any number of books that have been attacked in different ways.’

‘What I’d like now that we’re so many years down the line—this is a very long time ago, it’s a quarter of a century ago—is that people are finally able to read that novel as a novel and not just as some kind of political hot potato.’

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Rushdie is arguing for more than just a recognition of his book. In the broadest possible sense, he argues for the principles of freedom of speech.

Even so, it was certainly personal. Early on, while Rushdie was living in London, a British terrorist scored a terrible own goal by blowing himself up with explosives that were meant for Rushdie.

‘The history of literature is one in which writers have defended their work, and I wasn’t going to be the one who didn’t,’ he says.

‘[But when] somebody’s trying to kill you because of something you’ve said or written ... you have to ask yourself if it’s worth dying for.’

While the declaration of the fatwa itself was surprising, there had been ominous precedents. The book was banned in a number of countries soon after its release, and there had been a book burning in Bradford, an English city with a significant immigrant community which mirrored that portrayed in the book.

‘Anybody involved in the world of books is well aware of the history of burning books and well aware of where it leads,’ says Rushdie.

There’s a certain irony in the fact that the quotation that’s always used about this subject, Heinrich Heine’s famous line, ‘where they burn books they will afterwards burn people’, comes from the play Almansor, in which the book being burned is the Koran.

‘This famous text about not burning books is actually a defence of the Koran against being burnt, and [it is] very strange that it should then be people on behalf of the Koran burning other books,’ says Rushdie. ‘It was very upsetting to see book burning being revived.’

For a lifelong atheist who grew up in a nominally Muslim household in India, and who also studied the history of Islam at Cambridge University, Rushdie’s relationship to the Koran as a text is, to say the least, complicated.

Born not long before the partition of India in 1947, Rushdie says forces other than religion were at work in the world of his youth.

‘I think my generation growing up, both in India and England, it would never have occurred to us that there would be a time when religion would move back into the centre of the stage and begin to define what went on in the world. The idea that it would become the dominant force in public life again; nobody would have given that serious consideration.’

‘The generation of the ‘60s, how wrong we were. While we were busy doing all that ‘60s nonsense, this force that we had discounted gradually crept back into the reckoning and as we now see, is a very large force to be reckoned with.’

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Rushdie was not born at the stroke of midnight, as India and Pakistan were. He left that to his narrator in Midnight’s Children, his Booker Prize winning novel of history, life and pickles. That book was published in 1980, and it took him years, he says, to find his voice in it. He first wrote it in the third person, and it seemed ‘oddly inert’ before he found his character, the unreliable and vainglorious Saleem Sinai. It was the book that first made Rushdie’s name and, he points out, it was read differently in the east and west.

‘Western readers tended to like it for it’s more fantastic, fabulated elements, and that’s the stuff that people noticed and wrote about. In India people did basically treat it like a history book. I remember going there shortly after the book came out and I did a little tour in various cities, and in Bombay this young guy came up to me and said, “You know, I could have written your book, I know all that stuff.”’

‘I just thought that’s a sort of compliment. What he’s saying is that the book expresses an experience that he feels that he shared. I think many people, when the book came out, reacted to it like that, they saw it as a version of their own generation’s story. It is a book about the generation of independence.’

Rushdie left India at the age of 13 for England and the Rugby School in Warwickshire, where he suddenly became ‘foreign’. He was remade there as an ‘other’. Not only that, he suffered what he called the ultimate triple whammy: clever, foreign, not any good at sports. He was miserable, but he got through. ‘I was a very good kid; I’ve made up for it later.’

One thing his schooling gave him was a grounding and interest in history, which has always been reflected in his fiction.

‘I think what history encourages you to ask all the time is [ask what] the relationship between our individual ordinary lives and the big sphere of public events and how those two interact and whether it’s possible for us, as individuals, or as groups of individuals, to make a difference, to have an impact on the world in which we live, or whether we’re simply the victims of power and it’s movements.’

He left Rugby and went to Cambridge, which was a relief: ‘It was open and tolerant and diverse and ... this was 1965, this was the historical epicentre of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.’

Sir Salman Rushdie at MWF Wednesday 3 September 2014 Listen to the full interview with Sir Salman Rushdie at Books and Arts Daily. More This [series episode segment] has image,

For various reasons—which he spells out in his reflective memoir, Joseph Anton—Rushdie ended up being the only student in a history of Islam course that was only taught once. In it, he learned that pagan deities were briefly integrated into the teachings of the prophet Mohammed, and then rejected. It’s a long and complicated story, involving the ‘temptation’ of the prophet and sections of the Koran that were later expunged. These verses were deemed to be not from God but from the devil: satanic verses.

‘If you look up the Koran and the chapter called ‘The Star’, ‘Al-Najm’, you will find those verses there now,’ says Rushdie. 'So the Satanic verses were expelled and then there follows the persecution of Islam and eventually the flight to Medina.’

‘It seemed to me interesting that there was this moment of temptation with compromise, and then a rejection of it. It seemed to me very interesting that one of the reasons given for the non-divinity of these pagan deities was their femaleness. Shall God have daughters while you have sons, and I thought at the very least, that’s interesting in a culture which has grown up enormously disadvantaging women.'

‘It seemed to me when I studied this at Cambridge in 1967, ‘68, I was 20, 21 years old, I thought, “good story”, and filed it away and 20 years later found out how good a story it was.’

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