ONE THOUSAND DAYS IN A BALLOON
A hot-air balloon drifts slowly over a bottomless chasm, carrying several passengers. A leak develops; the balloon starts losing height. The pit, a dark yawn, comes closer. Good grief! The wounded balloon can bear just one passenger to safety; the many must be sacrificed to save the one! But who should live, who should die? And who could make such a choice?
In point of fact, debating societies everywhere regularly make such choices without qualms, for of course what I’ve described is the given situation of that evergreen favourite, the Balloon Debate, in which, as the speakers argue over the relative merits and demerits of the well-known figures they have placed in disaster’s mouth, the assembled company blithely accepts the faintly unpleasant idea that a human being’s right to life is increased or diminished by his or her virtues or vices—that we may be born equal but thereafter our lives weigh differently in the scales.
It’s only make-believe, after all. And while it may not be very nice, it does reflect how people actually think.
I have now spent over a thousand days in just such a balloon; but, alas, this isn’t a game. For most of these thousand days, my fellow-travellers included the Western hostages in the Lebanon, and the British businessmen imprisoned in Iran and Iraq, Roger Cooper and Ian Richter. And I had to accept, and did accept, that for most of my countrymen and countrywomen, my plight counted for less than the others’. In any choice between us, I’d have been the first to be pitched out of the basket and into the abyss. ‘Our lives teach us who we are,’ I wrote at the end of my essay ‘In Good Faith’. Some of the lessons have been harsh, and difficult to learn.
Trapped inside a metaphor, I’ve often felt the need to redescribe it, to change the terms. This isn’t so much a balloon, I’ve wanted to say, as a bubble, within which I’m simultaneously exposed and sealed off. The bubble floats above and through the world, depriving me of reality, reducing me to an abstraction. For many people, I’ve ceased to be a human being. I’ve become an issue, a bother, an ‘affair’. Bullet-proof bubbles, like this one, are reality-proof, too. Those who travel in them, like those who wear Tolkien’s rings of invisibility, become wraith-like if they’re not careful. They get lost. In this phantom space a man may become the bubble that encases him, and then one day—pop!—he’s gone forever.
It’s ridiculous—isn’t it?—to have to say, But I am a human being, unjustly accused, unjustly embubbled. Or is it I who am being ridiculous, as I call out from my bubble, I’m still trapped in here, folks; somebody, please, get me out?
Out there where you are, in the rich and powerful and lucky West, has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can’t recognize religious persecution when you see it?… The original metaphor has reasserted itself. I’m back in the balloon, asking for the right to live.
What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: ‘Not a lot.’ But I refuse to give in to despair.
I refuse to give in to despair because I’ve been shown love as well as hatred. I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the crazy, upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a single novelist can be accused of having savaged or ‘mugged’ a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its tarred and feathered victim) and the scapegoat for all its discontents. Many people do ask, for example: When a white pop-star-turned-Islamic-fanatic speaks approvingly about killing an Indian immigrant, how does the Indian immigrant end up being called the racist?
Or, again: What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?
I refuse to give in to despair even though, for a thousand days and more, I’ve been put through a degree course in worthlessness, my own personal and specific worthlessness. My first teachers were the mobs marching down distant boulevards, baying for my blood, and finding, soon enough, their echoes on English streets. I could not understand the force that makes parents hang murderous slogans around their children’s necks. I have learned to understand it. It burns books and effigies and thinks itself holy. But at first, as I watched the marchers, I felt them trampling on my heart.
Once again, however, I have been saved by instances of fair-mindedness, of goodness. Every time I learn that a reader somewhere has been touched by The Satanic Verses, moved and entertained and stimulated by it, it arouses deep feelings in me. And there are more and more such readers nowadays, my post-bag tells me, readers (including Muslims) who are willing to give my burned, spurned child a fair hearing at long last. Milan Kundera writes to say that he finds great tenderness towards Muslim culture in the book, and I’m stupidly grateful. A Muslim writes to say that in spite of the book’s ‘shock tactics’ its ideas about the birth of Islam are very positive; at once, I find myself wishing upon a star that her co-religionists may somehow, impossibly, come to agree with her.
Sometimes I think that, one day, Muslims will be ashamed of what Muslims did in these times, will find the ‘Rushdie affair’ as improbable as the West now finds martyr-burning. One day they may agree that—as the European Enlightenment demonstrated—freedom of thought is precisely freedom from religious control, freedom from accusations of blasphemy. Maybe they’ll agree, too, that the row over The Satanic Verses was at bottom an argument about who should have power over the grand narrative, the Story of Islam, and that that power must belong equally to everyone. That even if my novel were incompetent, its attempt to retell the Story would still be important. That if I’ve failed, others must succeed, because those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.
One day. Maybe. But not today.
Today, my education in worthlessness continues, and what Saul Bellow would call my ‘reality instructors’ include: the media pundit who suggests that a manly death would be better for me than hiding like a rat; the letter-writer who points out that of course the trouble is that I look like the Devil, and wonders if I have hairy shanks and cloven hooves; the ‘moderate’ Muslim who writes to say that Muslims find it ‘revolting’ when I speak about the Iranian death threats (it’s not the fatwa that’s revolting, you understand, but my mention of it); the rather more immoderate Muslim who tells me to ‘shut up’, explaining that if a fly is caught in a spider’s web, it should not attract the attention of the spider. I ask the reader to imagine how it might feel to be intellectually and emotionally bludgeoned, from a thousand different directions, every day for a thousand days and more.
Back in the balloon, something longed-for and heartening has happened. On this occasion, mirabile dictu, the many have not been sacrificed, but saved. That is to say, my companions, the Western hostages and the jailed businessmen, have by good fortune and the efforts of others managed to descend safely to earth, and have been reunited with their families and friends, with their own, free lives. I rejoice for them, and admire their courage, their resilience. And now I’m alone in the balloon.
Surely I’ll be safe now? Surely, now, the balloon will drop safely towards some nearby haven, and I, too, will be reunited with my life? Surely it’s my turn now?
But the balloon is over the chasm again; and it’s still sinking. I realize that it’s carrying a great deal of valuable freight. Trading relations, armaments deals, the balance of power in the Gulf—these and other matters of great moment are weighing down the balloon. I hear voices suggesting that if I stay aboard, this precious cargo will be endangered. The national interest is being redefined; am I being redefined out of it? Am I to be jettisoned, after all?
When Britain renewed relations with Iran at the United Nations in 1990, the senior British official in charge of the negotiations assured me in unambiguous language that something very substantial had been achieved on my behalf. The Iranians, laughing merrily, had secretly agreed to forget the fatwa. (The diplomat telling me the story put grea
t stress on this cheery Iranian laughter.) They would ‘neither encourage nor allow’ their citizens, surrogates, or proxies to act against me. Oh, how I wanted to believe that! But in the year-and-a-bit that followed, we saw the fatwa restated in Iran, the bounty money doubled, the book’s Italian translator severely wounded, its Japanese translator stabbed to death; there was news of an attempt to find and kill me by contract killers working directly for the Iranian government through its European embassies. Another such contract was successfully carried out in Paris, the victim being the harmless and aged ex-Prime Minister of Iran, Shapour Bakhtiar.
It seems reasonable to deduce that the secret deal made at the United Nations hasn’t worked. Dismayingly, however, the talk as I write is all of improving relations with Iran still further, while the ‘Rushdie case’ is described as a side-issue.
Is this a balloon I’m in, or the dustbin of history?
Let me be clear: there is nothing I can do to break this impasse. The fatwa was politically motivated to begin with, it remains a breach of international law, and it can only be solved at the political level. To effect the release of the Western hostages in the Lebanon, great levers were moved; great forces were brought into play; for Mr Richter, seventy million pounds in frozen Iraqi assets were ‘thawed’. What, then, is a novelist under terrorist attack worth?
Despair murmurs, once again: ‘Not a plugged nickel.’
But I refuse to give in to despair.
You may ask why I’m so sure there’s nothing I can do to help myself out of this jam.
At the end of 1990, dispirited and demoralized, feeling abandoned, even then, in consequence of the British Government’s decision to patch things up with Iran, and with my marriage at an end, I faced my deepest grief, my unquenchable sorrow at having been torn away from, cast out of, the cultures and societies from which I’d always drawn my strength and inspiration—that is, the broad community of British Asians, and the broader community of Indian Muslims. I determined to make my peace with Islam, even at the cost of my pride. Those who were surprised and displeased by what I did perhaps failed to see that I was not some deracinated Uncle Tom Wog. To these people it was apparently incomprehensible that I should seek to make peace between the warring halves of the world, which were also the warring halves of my soul—and that I should seek to do so in a spirit of humility, instead of the arrogance so often attributed to me.
In ‘In Good Faith’ I wrote: ‘Perhaps a way forward might be found through the mutual recognition of [our] mutual pain,’ but even moderate Muslims had trouble with this notion: what pain, they asked, could I possibly have suffered? What was I talking about? As a result, the really important conversations I had in this period were with myself.
I said: Salman, you must send a message loud enough to be heard all over the world. You must make ordinary Muslims see that you aren’t their enemy, and make the West understand a little more of the complexity of Muslim culture. It was my hope that Westerners might say, well, if he’s the one in danger, and yet he’s willing to acknowledge the importance of his Muslim roots, then perhaps we ought to start thinking a little less stereotypically ourselves. (No such luck, though. The message you send isn’t always the one that’s received.)
And I said to myself: Admit it, Salman, the Story of Islam has a deeper meaning for you than any of the other grand narratives. Of course you’re no mystic, mister, and when you wrote I am not a Muslim that’s what you meant. No supernaturalism, no literalist orthodoxies, no formal rules for you. But Islam doesn’t have to mean blind faith. It can mean what it always meant in your family, a culture, a civilization, as open-minded as your grandfather was, as delightedly disputatious as your father was, as intellectual and philosophical as you like. Don’t let the zealots make Muslim a terrifying word, I urged myself; remember when it meant family and light.
I reminded myself that I had always argued that it was necessary to develop the nascent concept of the ‘secular Muslim’, who, like the secular Jews, affirmed his membership of the culture while being separate from the theology. I had recently read the contemporary Muslim philosopher Fouad Zakariya’s Laïcité ou Islamisme, and been encouraged by Zakariya’s attempt to modernize Islamic thought. But, Salman, I told myself, you can’t argue from outside the debating chamber. You’ve got to cross the threshold, go inside the room, and then fight for your humanized, historicized, secularized way of being a Muslim. I recalled my near-namesake, the twelfth-century philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroës), who argued that (to quote the great Arab historian Albert Hourani), ‘not all the words of the Qu’ran should be taken literally. When the literal meaning of Qu’ranic verses appeared to contradict the truths to which philosophers arrived by the exercise of reason, those verses needed to be interpreted metaphorically.’ But Ibn Rushd was a snob. Having propounded an idea far in advance of its time he qualified it by saying that such sophistication was only suitable for the élite; literalism would do for the masses. Salman, I asked myself, is it time to pick up Ibn Rushd’s banner and carry it forward; to say, nowadays such ideas are fit for everybody, for the beggar as well as the prince?
It was with such things in mind—and with my thoughts in a state of some confusion and torment—that I spoke the Muslim creed before witnesses. But my fantasy of joining the fight for the modernization of Muslim thought, for freedom from the shackles of the Thought Police, was stillborn. It never really had a chance. Too many people had spent too long demonizing or totemizing me to listen seriously to what I had to say. In the West, some ‘friends’ turned against me, calling me by yet another set of insulting names. Now I was spineless, pathetic, debased; I had betrayed myself, my Cause; above all, I had betrayed them.
I also found myself up against the granite, heartless certainties of Actually Existing Islam, by which I mean the political and priestly power structure that presently dominates and stifles Muslim societies. Actually Existing Islam has failed to create a free society anywhere on Earth, and it wasn’t about to let me, of all people, argue in favour of one. Suddenly I was (metaphorically) among people whose social attitudes I’d fought all my life—for example, their attitudes about women (one Islamicist boasted to me that his wife would cut his toe-nails while he made telephone calls, and suggested I found such a spouse) or about gays (one of the Imams I met in December 1990 was on TV soon afterwards, denouncing Muslim gays as sick creatures who brought shame on their families and who ought to seek medical and psychiatric help). Had I truly fallen in among such people? That was not what I meant at all.
Facing the utter intransigence, the philistine scorn of so much of Actually Existing Islam, I reluctantly concluded that there was no way for me to help bring into being the Muslim culture I’d dreamed of, the progressive, irreverent, sceptical, argumentative, playful and unafraid culture which is what I’ve always understood as freedom. Not me, not in this lifetime, no chance. Actually Existing Islam, which has all but deified its Prophet, a man who always fought passionately against such deification; which has supplanted a priest-free religion by a priest-ridden one; which makes literalism a weapon and redescriptions a crime, will never let the likes of me in.
Ibn Rushd’s ideas were silenced in their time. And throughout the Muslim world today, progressive ideas are in retreat. Actually Existing Islam reigns supreme, and just as the recently destroyed ‘Actually Existing Socialism’ of the Soviet terror-state was horrifically unlike the utopia of peace and equality of which democratic socialists have dreamed, so also is Actually Existing Islam a force to which I have never given in, to which I cannot submit.
There is a point beyond which conciliation looks like capitulation. I do not believe I passed that point, but others have thought otherwise.
I have never disowned my book, nor regretted writing it. I said I was sorry to have offended people, because I had not set out to do so, and so I am. I explained that writers do not agree with every word spoken by every character they create—a truism in the world of books, but a continuing mystery
to The Satanic Verses’ opponents. I have always said that this novel has been traduced. Indeed, the chief benefit of my meeting with the six Islamic scholars on Christmas Eve 1990 was that they agreed that the novel had no insulting motives. ‘In Islam, it is a man’s intention that counts,’ I was told. ‘Now we will launch a world-wide campaign on your behalf to explain that there has been a great mistake.’ All this with much smiling and friendliness and handshaking. It was in this context that I agreed to suspend—not cancel—a paperback edition, to create what I called a space for reconciliation.
Alas, I overestimated these men. Within days, all but one of them had broken their promises, and recommenced to vilify me and my work as if we had not shaken hands. I felt (most probably I had been) a great fool. The suspension of the paperback began at once to look like a surrender. In the aftermath of the attacks on my translators, it looks even more craven. It has now been more than three years since The Satanic Verses was published; that’s a long, long ‘space for reconciliation’. Long enough. I accept that I was wrong to have given way on this point. The Satanic Verses must be freely available and easily affordable, if only because if it is not read and studied, then these years will have no meaning. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.
‘Our lives teach us who we are.’ I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else’s description of reality to supplant your own—and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs—then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world-view is the easiest to keep hold of; whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I’ve always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to that chameleon, that chimera, that shape-shifter, my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I’ve lived in that messy ocean all my life. I’ve fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.