The pressure of security around the apartment became almost farcically insupportable as the time came for Salman to be taken by armored vehicle to the White House. (“Is your secret guest your prime minister?” inquired my Filipina housekeeper in a reverent whisper. It turned out that the man she had identified as this key figure was Salman’s intrepid agent Andrew Wylie, who had joined us late one night.) As Salman eventually left for the appointment, there was still no word on whether the president would consent to meet him. But Stephanopoulos was on the phone in a half an hour or so, to say “The Eagle Has Landed” and the presidential hand had been outstretched. Later we celebrated this triumph at a press conference and later—after Clinton had basely and typically insisted that the meeting had been unofficial and accidental and off-the-record, with no photograph—we slightly uncelebrated. But it was still no defeat. At dinner I made a point of inviting Kemal Kurspahić, the editor of the Bosnian resistance’s daily paper Oslobojenje (Freedom): Muslim Bosnia was a site of daily slaughter by Christians and we had also been trying to get Clinton to take some kind of intelligibly vertebrate position on that. It may have been after that dinner that Salman began to evolve and improvise a new word game, this time of book titles that had almost but not quite made it to acceptance by publishers: The Big Gatsby, A Farewell to Weapons, For Whom the Bell Rings, Good Expectations, Mr. Zhivago, Two Days in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch…
Talking of “vitches” I noticed again not long ago that the patronymic middle name of Nicholas Rubashov in Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is “Salmanovitch.” Interesting to think of him being a son of a Salman: I don’t think it completely fanciful to imagine Rushdie as being the lineal descendant of all those who have had to confront the totalitarian idea physically as well as morally.* He would, I am sure, make light of this and pooh-pooh any comparison between himself and a Gulag victim. But it’s still quite something to be told, by the armed, hoarse enforcers of a murder-based regime, that you are yourself “a dead man on leave.” And the claustrophobic world in which he had to live for some years was a prefiguration of the world in which we all, to a greater or lesser extent, live now. I mean to say a world in which a fanatical religion, which makes absolutist claims for itself and promises to supply—even to be—a total solution to all problems, furthermore regards itself as so pure as to be above criticism. I had a small foretaste of how this world feels when, after Salman’s departure from Washington, I received a summons from the head of the Department of Narcotics and Counterterrorism (“Drugs and Thugs” as it is known at Foggy Bottom) at the State Department.
Having overseen Salman’s visit, this man now told me, he and his people had been in receipt of “believable chatter” from Iranian sources, indicating an intended revenge on myself and my family for helping to host the trip. I took this in and asked what I was supposed to do. “We suggest changing your address.” But would not any Iranian state-directed agent who knew where I lived also be able to find out where I had moved? “Very well, might you at least consider changing your phone number?” Suddenly I “got it.” The State Department, like the British Foreign Office, had done its “due diligence.” It had called me in, warned me, and could now file the thing away. Already well-covered behinds had been given further protective clothing. But in truth I didn’t think my own rear end was any more exposed than anyone else’s.* And the time was soon to come when the mentality of the fatwah, allied to the ideology of jihad, would arrive in Washington by unscheduled civilian air transport and almost demolish a building far better armored than the Department of State.
I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the importance of the Rushdie case. Along with the reference to Koestler that I have already ventured, I did at one time propose another comparison that you may choose to think is almost as portentous. The Ayatollah’s fatwah had included in its condemnation all those “responsible for the publication” of The Satanic Verses. The night before I was due to speak at Susan Sontag’s solidarity meeting in New York, in the first week of the drama, I was striving to think of something that might go beyond the usual petition-signing and letter-writing routine, something that would mark this assault on our liberties and our principles as something out of the common, to be met with no ordinary response. I thought: What if we all declare ourselves “co-responsible for its publication”? This was the principle of solidarity introduced by the followers of Spartacus and taken to a still higher level by those Danes in 1941 who (not, alas, including their king: that story is a beautiful myth) voluntarily donned the yellow star as a gesture to those who were compelled to wear it. On the following morning I made the proposal in my speech and was agreeably surprised by how well it went over: the petition was drawn up there and then in that form, and signed by a pretty solid collection of authors from Norman Mailer* to Diana Trilling to Don DeLillo. It was then put out for general circulation and garnered widespread endorsement, though I moaned with disgust when it was eventually printed in the Times Literary Supplement, because meanwhile some quavering, cretinous hand had inserted the weasel words “while we regret any offense caused” into the preamble. I know I am not the only one who did not mind in the least if religious delusions were ridiculed, but if I had been the only one, I still wouldn’t have given a damn.
And what of Salman himself? He made, I will always feel, the ideal protagonist for this drama. If literature and the ironic mind are to be defended to the death, then it is as well to have a superbly literate and ironic individual as the case in point. I cannot remember any moment when he said or did anything crass, or when he raised his voice unduly or responded in kind to those who were taunting or baiting him. He was at one time very concerned that he would dry up as a writer because of being moved from one safe house to another, but in practice produced several first-rate fictions and many brilliant essays and reviews,** thus disproving Orwell’s fine but fallacious dictum that “the imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.” I was going to say that he never lost his sense of humor, but this would be to miss the one great exception, which was the awful and unctuous and convoluted prose of his declaration of adherence to Islam. It really read as if written at gunpoint, which of course it had been. It also read as if it were written by someone else. During his stay with us at Thanksgiving, while he was signing a few books for his newly born “un-goddaughter,” he seized the volume of essays in which this literary abortion was preserved like a nasty freak in a bottle, and wrote across the title “Why I Have Embraced Islam” the additional and expressive words: “No! Aargh!” He then carefully crossed out every page of the “offensive” piece, signing each one to confirm his own authorial deletion. It was as near to the defacement of a book—or to an auto-da-fé—as I could imagine him getting.
To proceed with that religious imagery, though, there was perhaps something fine to be salvaged even from this preceding degradation. By trying his best to compose matters with the mullahs, he had sincerely shown that he did not seek a violent collision, and he had gone a long way to ask that the bitter cup—of having to live the rest of his life under threat of death—might be allowed to pass from him. Who can fail to sympathize? But, having been made to understand that there was no path of compromise, Salman has become one of the world’s most reliable defenders of the free expression of others. The sad paradox is that while he and his book both survived and flourished, nobody in the Anglo-American publishing business would now commission or print The Satanic Verses. Indeed, the whole cultural and media industry has become, where reactionary Islam is concerned, one long profile in prudence. The other paradox is that the very multiculturalism and multiethnicity that brought Salman to the West, and that also made us richer by Hanif Kureishi, Nadeem Aslam, Vikram Seth, Monica Ali, and many others, is now one of the disguises for a uniculturalism, based on moral relativism and moral blackmail (in addition to some more obvious blackmail of the less moral sort) whereby the Enlightenment has been redefined as “white” and “oppressive,” mass ille
gal immigration threatens to spoil everything for everybody, and the figure of the free-floating transnational migrant has been deposed by the contorted face of the psychopathically religious international nihilist, praying for the day when his messianic demands will coincide with possession of an apocalyptic weapon. (These people are not called nihilists for nothing.) Of all of this we were warned, and Salman was the messenger. Mutato nomine et de te fabula narratur: Change only the name and this story is about you.
Mesopotamia from Both Sides
Terror, the most abject terror, is in the atmosphere about us—a consuming passion, like that of jealousy—a haunting, exhausting specter, which sits like a blight upon life. Such a settled state of terror is one of the most awful of human phenomena. The air holds ghosts, all joy is dead; the sun is black, the mouth parched, the mind rent and in tatters.
—H.F.B. Lynch: Armenia: Travels and Studies [1901]
IN JULY OF 2007 my old magazine the New Statesman made an attempt to embarrass me by reprinting an article I had written from Iraq in early 1976. In those days, ran the snide prologue to the reproduction, “Young Hitchens saw Saddam as an up-and-coming secular socialist who would transform Iraq into a progressive model for the rest of the Middle East.” The implied accusation—of a U-turn or even of a turned coat—bothered me not at all. I had long since learned to ask John Maynard Keynes’s question: “When the facts change then my opinion changes: and you, sir?” But I was nonetheless conscious of two conflicting desires. The first was to point out that my original essay hadn’t got it all that wrong. The second was to give an account of how I had, in fact, almost completely reversed my opinion—and of how long such a process can take, and how painful it can be.
Iraq in March of 1976 was eight years into the rule of the Ba’ath Party. The nominal president Ahmad Hassan Abu Bakr, whose ugly face was on all the posters and banners, was understood to be terminally ailing from diabetes. Now and then, and always phrased in careful and oblique tones, one heard talk of his vice president Saddam Hussein, seemingly the head of the party’s security apparatus. “Make a note of the name,” I wrote in my dispatch, adding that “as the situation grows more complicated Saddam Hussein will rise more clearly to the top.” I am not so embarrassed to have written that—unless it be embarrassment for my rather leaden prose. But leaden prose always tends to be a symptom of other problems and if I am honest I think I can reconstruct the cause of my own langue de bois.
It was my second visit to Iraq and I knew approximately four things about the country. The first was that it had been a British colonial invention, carved out between the other arbitrary frontiers of the post-Ottoman Middle East, between Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. This meant that, as a British socialist, I had an instinctive sympathy with its nationalists. The second thing I knew was that it had a large Kurdish minority, and that the rights of this minority had long been a major cause of the Left. The third thing I knew was that the Ba’ath Party, which called itself socialist, was at least ostensibly secular and not religious. The fourth thing I knew was that the casinos and brothels and nightclubs of London, just then awash in Gulf Arab clientele after the free-for-all of the post-1973 oil embargo, did not tend to feature droves of greedy Iraqis throwing their country’s wealth away on drink and harlots. On the visible evidence, partly confirmed to me by guarded British diplomats at the Alwiyah Club near the River Tigris, Iraq was using its immense national income to create a serious infrastructure—of building and development, but also of health and welfare.*
My friend Gavin Young, the great travel writer and gay ex-Guardsman, had told me of the Marsh Arabs of the southern wetlands, pursuing an antique manner of life that still had strong biblical trace elements to it, but when I mentioned my wish for a visit down there, the relevant Iraqi officials steadfastly stonewalled me and tried to put me off. “Why do you want to see backwardness? We are a modern country now.” This dimly jogged my memory of visitors to the USSR being taken to see tractor factories while collectivization was ravaging the countryside, but in truth I slightly prefer the city to the countryside and meanwhile I had found myself an extraordinary companion of the urban sort.
My first meeting with Mazen al-Zahawi was, I would say, unpropitious. In return for a visa, the Ba’athists insisted on providing me with a “guide.” Many regimes do this as a means of keeping visiting scribes under control: you may sometimes escape a “minder” but there’s an art and a science to it and it can take time. As I stood in line at Baghdad Airport for my passport to be stamped, I could see a group of people waiting on the other side of the barrier and instantly made up my mind which one I hoped would not be for me. He was sallow, morose-looking, and wearing dark glasses indoors: a thoroughly bad sign. A secret-police or Mukhabarat type, bored and resentful and hard to shake. As I passed through the barrier he stepped softly forward and gave me a soggy, insipid handshake.
I can’t remember how we passed the time in the car—there was a chauffeur, in front of whom he was icily silent—but we got to the hotel and he said he’d let me check in and then meet me in the bar. I took my time. When I eventually pulled myself onto the neighboring stool, it was in order to feign exhaustion and to see if perhaps I might take an uninvigilated walk in the city while he thought I was napping. But he took off his shades, leaned toward me, placed his hand firmly on my knee and said: “I believe we are going to be such friends. My own little circle tells me that I am an exact blend of Adolf Hitler and Oscar Wilde.” If I say that I suddenly noticed how faultless his English was, I say the least of it. “Are you a member of the drinking classes?” he went on, gesturing effectively to the attendant. “I thought so. Later on we shall repair to my home. I shall play you my personal tape of The Importance of Being Earnest. I am of course Gwendolyn. The part of Lady Bracknell is taken by Gavin Young.” I think I can claim this as one of the more original introductions of an outsider to Ba’ath Party internal affairs.
Mazen did not at all disappoint. He took me to his family home near the banks of the Tigris, which proved to be the former house of Hitler’s envoy to Iraq at the time of the pro-Nazi coup in favor of Rashid Ali in 1941, a coup that, as I was to learn, had been supported by the political ancestors of the Ba’ath. There was a rather squawking home-made recording of Wilde’s three-act masterpiece, in which Gavin’s booming baritone and Mazen’s lilting response could be discerned. It all rather conformed to Susan Sontag’s speculations about “camp” and “fascinating fascism.” I wondered uneasily what Gavin had told Mazen about me: Young was one of those old queens who believes that deep down all men are queer as clockwork oranges. But Mazen’s own double life proved to be much more subtle and convoluted than that.
For one thing, he was by ancestry half-Kurdish. This was nothing special on its own; intermarriage between Arabs and Kurds in Iraq, as between Sunni and Shi’a, used to be a commonplace. But Iraq had just emerged from a bitter border war with the Shah of Iran, in which Henry Kissinger had used the Kurdish militias in the north as a proxy against Baghdad and then famously abandoned them, to be massacred on the hillsides, in order to seal a deal with the Shah. This had opened Iraqi Kurds to the charge of disloyalty, bad enough at any time, and also of being tools of Iran and its ally Israel, which was even worse. But it wasn’t enough for Mazen to be half-Kurdish and (by night) all gay. During the rest of the working day he was on call to be one of the interpreters for Saddam Hussein. I had frequently met homosexuals who liked to live dangerously or on thin ice but this was the most daring feat of sociopolitical cross-dressing I had encountered to date.
Together we went to visit factories and dams and ministries—and mosques and museums and ziggurats—by day, and Baghdad’s demimonde at night. My friend Marina Warner, back in London, was thinking of writing an opera about the Gilgamesh legend, and Mazen arranged for me to meet a keeper of antiquities at Gertrude Bell’s National Museum to see if he might have anything useful to impart. (“Don’t be too tarty,” he warned me, I thought
and hoped superfluously.) He repeated the same injunction when he asked me casually if I would care to meet Iraq’s nominee for the leadership of the Palestinian struggle.
I was increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinians by then, and was hoping that if any Arab state would outgrow the humiliation of the 1973 defeat by Israel, it would be a secular one and not a Saudi-type or otherwise theocratic manifestation, so I said “yes” without any particular reflection. Accordingly, I was taken to a villa to meet Sabri al-Banna, known as “Abu Nidal” (“father of struggle”), who was at the time emerging as one of Yasser Arafat’s main enemies. The meeting began inauspiciously when Abu Nidal asked me if I would like to be trained in one of his camps. No thanks, I explained. From this awkward beginning there was a further decline. I was then asked if I knew Said Hammami, the envoy of the PLO in London. I did in fact know him. He was a brave and decent man, who in a series of articles in the London Times had floated the first-ever trial balloon for a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. “Well tell him he is a traitor,” barked my host. “And tell him we have only one way with those who betray us.” The rest of the interview passed as so many Middle Eastern interviews do: too many small cups of coffee served with too much fuss; too many unemployed heavies standing about with nothing to do and nobody to do it with; too much ugly furniture, too many too-bright electric lights; and much too much faux bonhomie. The only political fact I could winnow, from Abu Nidal’s vainglorious claims to control X number of “fighters” in Y number of countries, was that he admired the People’s Republic of China for not recognizing the State of Israel. I forget how I got out of his office.