Novels often torment us with if-onlies, and the Rushdie affair constantly invites us to consider alternative narratives. It might seem, at first assessment, one of Rushdie’s extra misfortunes that his five years of internal exile have been spent with a Conservative government in charge. And, in a sense, vice versa: for what could be less appealing to the average Thatcherite MP as a test of your principles than a brown-skinned left-wing novelist who in an essay at the time of the 1983 election had described the beloved leader as “unusually cruel, incompetent, unscrupulous and violent,” and the nation as “nanny-Britain, straight-laced Victoria-reborn Britain, class-ridden know-your-place Britain, thin-lipped, jingoist Britain”? What’s more, didn’t he in the very damn book that was causing such a hoo-ha down among the natives refer to the PM as “Mrs. Torture”? (He didn’t, actually: he had a satirized Thatcherite briefly and affectionately so refer to her; but that, of course, is being literary.) Pity the poor Tory MP faced with such a hard case—though pity Rushdie more for having to plead his cause before Tory torpor.
Yet the hypothesis, the alternative narrative, that suggests he might have done better with the Labour Party in power is unconvincing. Though historically more libertarian and arts-favoring than the Tories, Labour hardly fell over itself to support one of its well-known supporters. The Party’s former leader Michael Foot (one of the Booker Prize judges who had short-listed The Satanic Verses) was a staunch public advocate, but his two successors, Neil Kinnock and John Smith, have been more than ultracautious. Kinnock was hindered by the fact that his chief home and foreign-affairs spokesmen, Roy Hattersley and Gerald Kaufman, seemed keen to cause the Government the least possible embarrassment on this issue. Hattersley, then Deputy Leader, is a sort of novelist himself (he writes chubby sagas full of characters called Hattersley), and took the twin line that Rushdie had the right to publish his novel but ought to suppress the paperback: some might spot a plump contradiction slopping around in there. Two Labour MPs called for withdrawal of the book, arguing that Labour “ambivalence” on the matter (i.e., pro-Rushdie squeaks) might cost the Party as many as ten seats at the next election. Labour MPs might be sympathetic in private, but publicly the Party didn’t want to know.
Politicians can be very crude and noisy when they sniff votes; the truth in the Rushdie case—or, at least, the truth as most British politicians saw it—was that there was little to gain and much to lose by openly supporting him. The ignoble reasoning presumably was that, while pro-Rushdieites would tend to vote on wider issues, anti-Rushdieites in the Muslim community were likely to be single-issue voters. Between Labour and Conservative there was therefore cross-party support in favor of apathy. Rushdie got more reliable aid from Paddy Ashdown, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, whose seats tend to be in the whiter extremities of the country.
A second alternative narrative is to imagine the affair taking place in another country. When I put this hypothesis to Rushdie, he replied that in another country he might very well be dead by now. Still, it’s revealing to compare British and French attitudes. There is no close parallel to the Rushdie case, but we could remember the time when de Gaulle got Régis Debray out of a South American jail. Despite a profound political antipathy between the two men, the Presidential view was that their shared Frenchness remained the overriding consideration. The French tend on the one hand to refer to basic humanitarian principles, and on the other to be practically effective in obtaining the release of hostages and pseudohostages. (French nationals were the first to be released from Baghdad during the Gulf War, with Paris characteristically claiming that no sort of deal had been done.) The British stiffly view this as hypocrisy; but it came as a bracing relief when an Air France spokesman, asked about the British Airways ban, simply replied, “We respect the French custom regarding the rights of man, which means that we transport passengers without discrimination. If Mr. Rushdie wished to travel with Air France he would not be refused.”
Similarly, in early 1989, when British and French Muslims were demonstrating on the streets of London and Paris, the French Prime Minister, Michel Rocard, put a straightforward limit on the nature of protest: “Any further calls for violence or murder will lead to immediate criminal prosecution.” In Britain, the police, the Director of Public Prosecutions, and the Cabinet apparently didn’t notice that there was open incitement to murder in several major cities. This meant ignoring tape of Muslim leaders, footage and stills of street demonstrators. Here, for instance, are two British Muslims in Derby holding a banner saying “Rushdie Must Die;” here is a protester in Slough with an unconvincing effigy garnished with the words “Dog Must Lose Life;” here is a cheerful fellow in collar and tie, beneath Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, with a “Death to Rushdie” placard. (An extra tinkle of irony here lies in the fact that Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize—for literature.) Imagine if one of these slogans had said “Death to Thatcher” and had been waved by an Irishman: some slight action might have been taken. So what was going on? Torpid pragmatism laced with a little upside-down racism: let Britons of subcontinental origin have a burn of street democracy, let “them” run around in “their” excitable way and get it off their chests. Anyway, we shouldn’t provoke them at home—we’ve seen how touchy they can get abroad.
White Britons’ attitudes to nonwhite Britons are, at best, fluid (fine if you’re an Olympic champion, less good if you’re stopped by police and aren’t carrying your gold medal). This inconstancy has certainly applied to Rushdie in some quarters. When an issue is complicated and seemingly insoluble, the urge to simplify is alluring. What could be more simplifying, therefore, than to return Rushdie to “his people”? The story beneath the story can be made to run like this: clever Indian boy, English public school (hated it, but so do we all; character-building anyway), Cambridge, advertising, scribbling, Booker Prize, fame, money: one of us. Then, public figure with opinions (hostile, God damn it) about the Government, ungrateful for the privileges we gave him, stirrer not just with us but with his own people, went too far this time, should have known better, can’t understand the book anyway: one of them. Got to protect him from hotheads, murderers, and fuzzy-wuzzies generally, but Islam, after all, that’s not really our bag, is it? Anyway, didn’t he prove our point for us, first by converting to Islam and then by calling the whole affair “a family quarrel”? In this line of “thinking,” Rushdie, already condemned in the East as a racist colonialist CIA provocateur corrupted by Western values, is flung back by the West in a game of pass-the-parcel. He has been, in two senses, blackened.
One way of making this point in a slimily indirect manner has been to complain about the cost of protecting the writer. Sir Philip Goodhart, MP, of the Tory right, had the dishonorable distinction of raising this matter less than a month after the fatwa, though right-wing commentators, such as Auberon Waugh had anticipated him. Not: a million a year (or whatever), that’s a pretty cheap price to pay for showing the country’s proud belief in individual liberty and freedom of expression. But: this chappie must have a few quid squirreled away, why not make him stump up—after all, he started the rumpus, didn’t he? In fact, Rushdie does help foot the bill, having paid out an estimated £500,000 so far. The same question—how much money is his life worth?—is not, it must be said, asked about minor royals and dud ex-Northern Ireland ministers, let alone more illustrious protectees. Last October, for instance, Lady Thatcher did a signing session in Chester to promote her memoirs. There was the usual protection from the Cheshire police, backed up by officers from North Wales and Manchester, plus a helicopter overhead. A tenacious Labour MP winkled out the information that this hour or so of promo, which hardly constituted state business, cost the taxpayers £26,398, not a pfennig of which was being paid by author or publisher. If such expenditure was typical, then the price to the nation of her twelve-day book tour was around £300,000. Right-wing columnists have not made much noise about this so far.
Torpor, active indifference; but there
has also been worse. “Quite often,” Rushdie told me, “the place where there has been the most hostility has been in my own country” Of course, since freedom of expression is the central issue in the Rushdie case, it might seem artless to complain about people saying and writing what they believe. Even so, you might think there would, or should, be a level of decorum when sounding off about someone who is incarcerated under threat of death. You might think so for the very good reason that in a parallel case there was. Terry Waite, routinely described as “the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy,” though later evidence suggests that the Archbishop may have had doubts about letting this loose cannon roll around the eastern Mediterranean, was held captive in Beirut for five years. While he was away, awkward questions about what exactly he was doing there, about how closely he was involved with Oliver North, whose patsy he might be, about whether vanity, self-delusion, and a love of headlines were part of his makeup, and whether all these factors made him partly complicit in his own fate, were, quite rightly, avoided. When he came out, they were, cautiously, addressed.
No such decorum has applied with Rushdie, whose motives were questioned and whose supposed character was imaginatively trashed even before the fatwa had been analyzed. Here are some of the ranker items: Roald Dahl called his fellow writer a “dangerous opportunist.” Former Tory Party Chairman Norman Tebbit dubbed him “an outstanding villain” before musing on the inadequacy of that description: “Is villain a strong enough word for one who has insulted the country that protects him and betrayed and reviled those to whom he owes his wealth, his culture, his religion and now his very life? Happily, villains such as Rushdie are rare. What a pity it is our country in which he chose to live.” Germaine Greer oddly denounced him as “a megalomaniac, an Englishman with dark skin” (are these two conditions related, or did she mean melanomic?) before observing, “Jail is a good place for writers; they write.” (But what about execution? They don’t write much after that.) The plain-man tendency was exemplified by the tabloid thinker Richard Littlejohn: “I couldn’t care less if the Iranians top Salmoon Rushdie tomorrow…. But I’d rather they didn’t do it here.” The posh, windy, high-table version of this same line came from the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who asserted, after giving the matter four months’ academic reflection, that Rushdie’s “offence is one of manners, not a crime, and the law cannot notice it. That being so, I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit and literature would not suffer. If caught, his correctors might, of course, be found guilty of assault; but they could then plead gross provocation and might merely, if juvenile, be bound over. Our prisons are, after all, overcrowded.”
Still, the most distasteful item in this local trahison des clercs came from Marianne Wiggins, Rushdie’s second wife, who had initially gone into hiding with him. She talked expansively to the Sunday Times about his character flaws, and explained how wrong we would be to consider him any sort of hero. Even allowing for the bitterness of a soon-to-be-ex-spouse, this seemed especially repugnant. It also had its ironic side for those who had come across Ms. Wiggins in pre-fatwa days. I remember, for instance, how she once winsomely declared to me that she wanted, as a writer, to be no more than a mere foothill beside the mighty mountain that was Salman. Alas, when Muhammad came to the mountain the foothill hightailed it over the horizon.
Two years ago, faced with “the absence of any real political enthusiasm here,” Rushdie and his Defence Committee decided to go on the road. Despite the aloofness of British Airways, he traveled to Europe and North America, usually finding access to government ministers easier than in his own country. “Basically, in those two years we did rather better than I’d hoped,” he told me. Germany, being not just the most powerful country in Europe but also the largest trader with Iran, was a key target, and in December 1992 the Bundestag passed an all-party resolution holding the Iranian government legally responsible for Rushdie’s safety. (Whether such a motion would get through the House of Commons as currently constituted is doubtful.) The Nordic countries, traditionally strong on human rights, offered active support; and in January 1993 the Irish President, Mary Robinson, became the first head of state to meet Rushdie and his committee.
All this high-profile activity shifted the pack ice at home a little. The Foreign Office, being reactive, reacted. Their change of heart after four years wasn’t so much a belated recognition of principle as a pragmatic admission that being supine and smarmy wasn’t getting anywhere with the Iranians. Statements became stronger: Douglas Hogg, No. 2 in the Foreign Office, addressing the United Nations Commission for Human Rights in February 1993, called the fatwa “infamous and outrageous,” a visible upping of the adjectives. The Foreign Secretary himself, Douglas Hurd, told the Council of Europe, in Strasbourg, that he remained “greatly concerned at the continuing failure of the Iranian authorities to repudiate the incitement to murder.” This may not sound especially severe, but it made a change from Hurd’s ritual pronouncements of “deep respect” for Islam; and it should not be forgotten that earlier in the affair Hurd, when asked by a journalist what his most unpleasant experience in politics had been, jauntily replied, “Reading The Satanic Verses? When Hogg met Rushdie on February 4, 1993, it was the first time since the affair began that the writer had been publicly received at the Foreign Office. In a Commons explanation, Hogg stated, “It was right to demonstrate our support,” while A. Spokesman, that reliable anonymity, pronounced as follows: “You have a policy and you pursue it until you reach a solution. Salman Rushdie is now being more visible and if you ask, ‘Are you angry about that?’ the answer is no. He enjoys the same rights to free speech and travel as everyone else.” This may seem a tortuous, almost Carrollian piece of bureaucratese, but it’s good to have it on record. The Foreign Office is not angry that Mr. Rushdie is more visible. And he has the same travel rights as everyone else. As long as he doesn’t try booking on the nation’s flagship airline.
And then, at last, in May 1993, Rushdie was allowed to meet John Major, who promised him twenty minutes and gave him forty-five. The Daily Mail, which tends to articulate the middle area of the Conservative brain, thought the encounter “astoundingly ill-advised.” Former Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath objected on the ground that Britain was losing “masses of trade” because of “that wretched book;” while Peter Temple-Morris, Tory chairman of the all-party Britain-Iran Parliamentary Group, said, “I think whoever is advising the Prime Minister needs their heads reading.” (Strange that he said “reading” rather than the normal “examining,” but a pertinent lapsus in the present case.) None of these objectors thought it odd, or scandalous, or humiliating, that a law-abiding British citizen, in order to meet a peacetime Prime Minister at the desire of both parties, should have to be smuggled into the House of Commons.
There is no photographic record of Rushdie meeting Major (or meeting Hogg, Hurd, or Clinton). The Defence Committee, aware that the encounter was more symbolic than productive, pushed for one, but without success. This rare shrinkingness of British politicians before the camera is a minor yet interesting aspect of the Rushdie affair. The novelist has in his two years of shuttle diplomacy been photographed with Václav Havel, Klaus Kinkel, Mário Soares, Jack Lang, Jean Chrétien, and most leading Scandinavian politicians. In Britain, only the Labour leader John Smith has so far agreed not to treat Rushdie as an infectious case.
Still, the statements from Hogg and Hurd, plus the meeting with Major—whom Rushdie found “well briefed, sympathetic, and engaged with the issues”—have left Britain in a comparatively less inactive position; indeed, we have practically hauled ourselves into line with the rest of Europe. Whether, as Rushdie suggested after meeting the Prime Minister, the British government is now “leading from the front” remains very much to be seen; one rather imagines the British government preferring to lead fro
m somewhere in the middle on this issue. One other side benefit of John Major’s public gesture of support might be the tacit reinclusion of Rushdie, a handing back of his symbolic passport: one of us, not one of them.
When I asked Rushdie what hopes he has for Year Six, he replied, “That the promises made in Year Five will be fulfilled.” He himself is giving up his traveling campaign—“It can’t go on with me being this endless ambassador for myself”—and applying himself to fiction. The Defence Committee (and its half-dozen associate bodies in Europe and the States) will keep up the pressure on national governments. The problem, of course, is turning the fine words into effective deeds. As Rushdie observes, strong verbal stances are a good beginning, but “in terms of economic muscle nobody wants to take any action, and unless they do Iran isn’t going to mind The United States talks most emphatically about economic pressure, but they are the country which has most increased their trade with Iran over the last twelve months, despite the embargo.” A nation spouting high principle looks over its shoulder to see its neighbor taking low economic gain. Can the Western alliance afford to apply serious economic pressure? On the other hand, can it afford not to? The Belgian Foreign Minister, Willy Claes, told Rushdie that any continuing desire among Western governments to placate Iran would be “a great historical mistake.”