Nor was Gad el-Haq Ali Gad el-Haq the only Egyptian sheikh to be offended by these books and their authors. The so-called “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, afterward jailed for his involvement in the first attack on the World Trade Center in New York, announced that if Mahfouz had been properly punished for Children of Gebelawi, then Rushdie would not have dared to publish The Satanic Verses. In 1994 one of his followers, understanding this statement to be a fatwa, stabbed Naguib Mahfouz in the neck. The elderly novelist survived, fortunately. After the Khomeini fatwa Mahfouz had initially come to the defense of The Satanic Verses, denouncing Khomeini’s act as “intellectual terrorism,” but subsequently he slid toward the opposite camp, declaring that “Rushdie did not have the right to insult anything, especially a prophet or anything considered holy.”
Quasi-mythological names were coming after him now, grand sheikhs and blind ones, the seminarians of Darul Uloom in India, the Wahhabi mullahs of Saudi Arabia (where the book had also been banned), and, in the near future, the turbaned Iranian theologians of Qom. He had never given much thought to these august personages, but they were certainly thinking about him. Rapidly, ruthlessly, the world of religion was setting the terms of the debate. The secular world, less organized, less united, and, essentially, less concerned, lagged far behind; and much vital ground was given up without a struggle.
As the demonstrations of the faithful grew in number, size and clamor, the South African writer Paul Trewhela, in a bold essay that defended him and his novel from a position on the left, and in uncompromisingly secularist terms, described the Islamic campaign as a “bursting forth of mass popular irrationalism,” a formulation that implied an interesting question, a tough one for the left to deal with: How should one react when the masses were being irrational? Could “the people” ever be, quite simply, wrong? Trewhela argued that it was “the novel’s secularizing tendency that was at issue … its intention (says Rushdie) to ‘discuss Muhammad as if he were human,’ ” and he compared this project to that of the Young Hegelians in Germany in the 1830s and ’40s, and their critique of Christianity, their belief that—in Marx’s words—“man makes religion, religion does not make man.” Trewhela defended The Satanic Verses as belonging to the antireligious literary tradition of Boccaccio, Chaucer, Rabelais, Aretino and Balzac, and argued for a robust secularist response to the religious attack. “The book will not be silenced,” he wrote. “We are at the birth, painful, bloody and difficult, of a new period of revolutionary enlightenment.”
There were many on the left—Germaine Greer, John Berger, John le Carré—for whom the idea that the masses could be wrong was unpalatable. And while liberal opinion dithered and equivocated, the movement of mass popular irrationalism grew daily in its irrationality, and in its popularity, too.
He was a signatory to Charter 88, whose name (which some conservative commentators found “vainglorious”) was a homage to the great charter of liberties, Charter 77, published by Czech dissident intellectuals eleven years earlier. Charter 88 was a call for British constitutional reform, and was launched at a House of Commons press conference at the end of November. The only frontline British politician who showed up at the meeting was the future Labour foreign secretary Robin Cook. This was the period of high Thatcherism, and the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, had privately dismissed Charter 88 as a bunch of “wankers, whingers and whiners.” There were no votes in constitutional reform in those days, before the great devolution debates changed British politics so dramatically. Cook was there because of his commitment to Scottish devolution.
Eleven years later, the friendly acquaintanceship forged that day would indirectly lead to the resolution of the international crisis surrounding The Satanic Verses. It would be Robin Cook who, as foreign secretary in the Blair government, committed himself to solving the problem; who, with his deputy Derek Fatchett, MP, fought for, and gained, the breakthrough.
The year ended badly. There was a demonstration against The Satanic Verses in Bradford, the Yorkshire city with Britain’s largest Muslim population, on December 2. On December 3, Clarissa received her first threatening phone call. On December 4, her fortieth birthday, there was another one. A voice said, “We’ll get you tonight, Salman Rushdie, at 60 Burma Road.” That was her home address. She called the police and they stayed at her house overnight.
Nothing happened. The tension ratcheted up another notch.
On December 28 there was another bomb scare at the offices of Viking Penguin. Andrew Wylie called him to tell him. “Fear is beginning to be a factor,” Andrew said.
Then it was 1989, the year the world changed.
On the day they burned his book he took his American wife to see Stonehenge. He had heard about the proposed stunt in Bradford and something in him rebelled violently. He didn’t want to wait around all day to see what happened and then field the inevitable press inquiries, as if he had nothing better to do than be the servant of the day’s ugliness. Under a leaden sky they headed for the ancient stones. Geoffrey of Monmouth said it was Merlin who built Stonehenge. Geoffrey was an unreliable source, of course, but this was a more appealing Stonehenge than the ancient burial ground the archaeologists said it was, or the altar of a Druid cult. Driving fast, he was not in the mood for Druids. Religious cults, large and small, belonged in history’s dustbin and he wished somebody would put them there along with the rest of the juvenilia of mankind, the flat earth, for example, or the moon made of cheese.
Marianne was at her brightest. There were days when an almost frightening brightness blazed from her face, her habitual intensity turned up too high. She was from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but there was nothing Amish about her. She had a flamboyant personal style. They had been invited to a royal garden party at Buckingham Palace and she had worn a shiny black slip instead of a dress, accompanied by a smart bolero jacket and a little pillbox hat. In spite of strong encouragement from her daughter she refused to wear a bra. He walked round the gardens of the palace with his braless wife in her undergarment. The royals, dressed in primary colors, stood surrounded by hordes of guests, like racehorses, each in his or her personal paddock. The crowds around the queen and the Charles-Diana combo were by far the largest. Princess Margaret’s fan club was almost embarrassingly small. “I wonder,” Marianne said, “what the queen has in her handbag.” That was a funny question and they spent a few happy moments inventing the contents. Mace, perhaps. Or tampons. Obviously not money. Nothing with her face on it.
When Marianne got going she was fun to be with. There was no denying her smartness, her wit. She took notes wherever she went and her handwriting was as flamboyant as she. He was sometimes alarmed by the speed at which she transformed experience into fiction. There was almost no pause for reflection. Stories poured from her, yesterday’s incidents becoming today’s sentences. And when the brightness blazed from her face she could look fabulously attractive, or nuts, or both. She told him that all the women in her fiction who had names beginning with the letter M were versions of herself. In the novel she published before John Dollar, a novel he had liked called Separate Checks, the main character bore the last name of McQueen: Ellery McQueen, after the thriller writer. The writer Ellery Queen had actually been two Brooklyn writers, cousins, named Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, except that those were aliases, too, and their real names were Daniel Nathan and Emanuel Lepofsky. Marianne’s character was an alias whose name was a play on the pen name of a divided-self pair of writers who used that alias to disguise names that were themselves aliases for other names. Ellery McQueen in Separate Checks was an inmate in a private psychiatric hospital. The balance of her mind was disturbed.
In Bradford a crowd was gathering outside the police station in the Tyrls, a square also overlooked by the Italianate city hall and the courthouse. There was a pool with a fountain and an area designated as a “speaker’s corner” for people to sound off about whatever they liked. The Muslim demonstrators were uninterested in soapbox oratory, however.
The Tyrls was a more modest location than Berlin’s Opera Square had been on May 10, 1933, and in Bradford only one book was at issue, not twenty-five thousand or more; very few of the people gathered there would have known much about the events presided over more than fifty-five years earlier by Joseph Goebbels, who cried, “No to decadence and moral corruption! Yes to decency and morality in family and state! I consign to the flames the writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Gläser, Erich Kästner.” The work of Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Thomas Mann and even Ernest Hemingway were also burned that day. No, the demonstrators knew nothing about that bonfire, or the Nazis’ desire to “purge” and “purify” German culture of “degenerate” ideas. Perhaps they were also unfamiliar with the term “auto-da-fé,” or with the activities of the Catholic Inquisition, but even if they lacked a sense of history they were still part of it. They too had come to destroy a heretical text with fire.
He walked among the stones of what he wanted to think of as Merlin’s henge and for an hour the present slipped away. He may even have taken his wife by the hand. On the way home there was Runnymede, the water meadow by the Thames in which King John’s nobles obliged him to sign the Magna Carta. This was the place in which the British had begun to gain their liberty from tyrant rulers 774 years ago. The British memorial to John F. Kennedy stood here also and the fallen president’s words, etched in stone, had much to say to him that day. Let every Nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend or oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and success of liberty.
He turned on the car radio and the Bradford burning was at the top of the news. Then they were home, and the present engulfed him. He saw on television what he had spent the day trying to avoid. There were perhaps a thousand people in the demonstration, and all of them were male. Their faces were angry, or, to be precise, their faces were performing anger for the cameras. He could see in their eyes the excitement they felt at the presence of the world’s press. It was the excitement of celebrity, of what Saul Bellow had called “event glamour.” To be bathed in flashlight was glorious, almost erotic. This was their moment on the red carpet of history. They were carrying placards reading RUSHDIE STINKS and RUSHDIE EAT YOUR WORDS. They were ready for their close-up.
A copy of the novel had been nailed to a piece of wood and then set on fire: crucified and then immolated. It was an image he couldn’t forget: the happily angry faces, rejoicing in their anger, believing their identity was born of their rage. And in the foreground a smug man in a trilby with a little Poirot mustache. This was a Bradford councilor, Mohammad Ajeeb—the word “ajeeb,” oddly, was Urdu for “odd”—who had told the crowd, “Islam is peace.”
He looked at his book burning and thought of course of Heine. (But to the smug and angry men and boys in Bradford, Heinrich Heine meant nothing. Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.) Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too. The line from Almansor, prophetically written over a century before the Nazi bonfires, and later engraved in the ground at the Berlin Opernplatz, the site of that old Nazi book burning: Would it one day also be inscribed on the sidewalk of the Tyrls to commemorate this much smaller, but still shameful deed? No, he thought. Probably not. Even though the book burned in Almansor was the Qur’an, and the book burners were members of the Inquisition.
Heine was a Jew who converted to Lutheranism. An apostate, you could say, if that was the sort of language you cared to use. He too was being accused of apostasy, among many other offenses: blasphemy, insult, offense. The Jews made him do it, they said. His publisher was a Jew and paid him to do it. His wife, a Jew, put him up to it. This was bleakly comic. Marianne was not a Jew; and the way things were between them most of the time she couldn’t have persuaded him to wait for the signal before crossing a busy road. But on this day, January 14, 1989, they had sunk their differences and held hands.
He had been sent a T-shirt as a gift from an unknown admirer. BLASPHEMY IS A VICTIMLESS CRIME. But now the victory of the Enlightenment was looking temporary, reversible. Old language had been renewed, defeated ideas were on the march. In Yorkshire they had burned his book.
Now he was angry, too.
“How fragile civilization is,” he wrote in the Observer, “how easily, how merrily a book burns! Inside my novel, its characters seek to become fully human by facing up to the great facts of love, death and (with or without God) the life of the soul. Outside it, the forces of inhumanity are on the march. ‘Battle lines are being drawn up in India today,’ one of my characters remarks. ‘Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark. Better you choose which side you are on.’ Now that the battle has spread to Britain, I can only hope it will not be lost by default. It is time for us to choose.”
Not everyone saw it that way. There were many equivocations, particularly from members of Parliament with significant numbers of Muslim constituents. One of Bradford’s MPs, Max Madden, along with Jack Straw, both of them parliamentarians with a strong history of defending freedom of speech, placed themselves meekly on the Muslim side of the fence along with other pugnacious Labour Party eminences, such as Roy Hattersley and Brian Sedgemore. Defending the play Perdition, Straw had written in September 1988, “Its idea is … offensive to me … but democracy is about according rights of free expression to those with whom one profoundly disagrees.” On this occasion, though, Straw decided to support those calling for an extension of the blasphemy law to cover all religions (the United Kingdom’s law of blasphemous libel protected only the established Church of England), and to outlaw material that “outraged religious feeling.” (The blasphemy law was abolished altogether in 2008, in spite of Mr. Straw.) Max Madden was “sad” that “Rushdie has heightened protests about The Satanic Verses by refusing to give Muslims any right of reply (I suggested a brief insert [in the novel] allowing Muslims to explain why they find his book offensive.)” His fellow Bradford MP, Bob Cryer, robustly opposed the Muslim demonstrators, and did not lose his seat.
He was accused by Max Madden of being “coy” about confronting his opponents. He took the train to Birmingham to appear on the BBC TV lunchtime program Daytime Live to debate with one of the Muslim leaders, Hesham el-Essawy, an oleaginous Harley Street dentist who positioned himself as a moderate seeking only to soothe the inflamed situation. While they were on the air a demonstration gathered outside the BBC offices and could be seen through the plate glass windows behind him, shouting menacingly. The inflamed situation was neither mollified nor soothed.
The day after the Bradford book burning, Britain’s biggest chain of booksellers, W. H. Smith, took the book off its shelves in all 430 of its stores. Its managing director, Malcolm Field, said, “In no way do we wish to be regarded as censors. It is our wish to provide the public with what they want.”
The gulf between the private “Salman” he believed himself to be and the public “Rushdie” he barely recognized was growing by the day. One of them, Salman or Rushdie, he himself was unsure which, was dismayed by the numbers of Labour parliamentarians who were jumping on the Muslim bandwagon—after all, he had been a Labour supporter all his life—and noted gloomily that “the true conservatives of Britain are now in the Labour Party, while the radicals are all in blue.”
It was difficult not to admire the efficiency of his adversaries. Faxes and telexes flew from country to country, single-page documents with bullet points were circulated through mosques and other religious organizations, and pretty soon everyone was singing from the same song sheet. Modern information technology was being used in the service of retrograde ideas: The modern was being turned against itself by the medieval, in the service of a worldview that disliked modernity itself—rational, reasonable, innovative, secular, skeptical, challenging, creative modernity, the antithesis of mystical, static, intolerant, stultifying faith. The rising tide of Islamic radicalism was described by its own ideologues as a “revolt against history.
” History, the forward progress of peoples through time, was itself the enemy, more than any mere infidels or blasphemers. But the new, which was history’s supposedly despised creation, could be employed to revive the power of the old.
Allies came forward as well as opponents. He had lunch with Aziz al-Azmeh, the Syrian professor of Islamic studies at Exeter University, who would write, in the following years, some of the most trenchant criticisms of the attack on The Satanic Verses, as well as some of the most scholarly defenses of the novel from within the Islamic tradition. He met Gita Sahgal, a writer and activist for women’s rights and human rights whose mother was the distinguished Indian novelist Nayantara Sahgal, and whose great-uncle was Jawaharlal Nehru himself. Gita was one of the founders of Women Against Fundamentalism, a group that tried, with some courage, to argue against the Muslim demonstrators. On January 28, 1989, perhaps eight thousand Muslims marched through the streets of London to gather in Hyde Park. Gita and her colleagues set up a counterdemonstration to challenge the marchers, and they were physically assaulted and even knocked to the ground. This did not diminish their resolve.
On January 18, Bruce Chatwin died in Nice at the home of his friend Shirley Conran.
The novel was about to be published in the United States—the finished U.S. edition arrived at his home, looking beautiful—and there were threats of “murder and mayhem” from American Muslims. There were rumors that there was a $50,000 contract out on his life. Arguments raged on in the press but for the moment most of the editorial commentary was on his side. “I am fighting the battle of my life,” he wrote in his journal, “and in the last week I have begun to feel I’m winning. But the fear of violence remains.” When he read this entry later he marveled at its optimism. Even at this close proximity to the hammer blow from Iran he had not been able to foresee the future. He would not have made much of a prophet.