Posts Tagged ‘Salman Rushdie’

It was the worst Valentine’s Day present ever: on 14 February 1989, the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini called for the novelist Salman Rushdie‘s death. The author’s crime? A brilliant book written with his characteristic wit, erudition, and playfulness called The Satanic Verses. Blasphemy, said the grim and fanatical ayatollah. Rushdie went into hiding, but as the years went by, he inevitably relaxed his guard and began to live more openly, appearing at speaking engagements, parties, P.E.N. meetings, and universities. It seemed he would beat the rap, until last August 11, when an rootless nobody named Hadi Matar attacked him at a speaking engagement in Chautauqua, NY. This month, a fascinating article in the New Yorker, “The Defiance of Salman Rushdie” by David Remnick, discusses his life under a fatwa, his injuries in last year’s attack (he’s lost an eye and the use of a hand), his books, and his indefatigable courage.

Excerpts:

Did he think it had been a mistake to let his guard down since moving to New York? “Well, I’m asking myself that question, and I don’t know the answer to it,” he said. “I did have more than twenty years of life. So, is that a mistake? Also, I wrote a lot of books. The Satanic Verses was my fifth published book—my fourth published novel—and this is my twenty-first. So, three-quarters of my life as a writer has happened since the fatwa. In a way, you can’t regret your life.”

***

Whom does he blame for the attack?

“I blame him,” he said.

***

At this meeting and in subsequent conversations, I sensed conflicting instincts in Rushdie when he replied to questions about his health: there was the instinct to move on—to talk about literary matters, his book, anything but the decades-long fatwa and now the attack—and the instinct to be absolutely frank. “There is such a thing as P.T.S.D., you know,” he said after a while. “I’ve found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I’m not out of that forest yet, really.”

He added, “I’ve simply never allowed myself to use the phrase ‘writer’s block.’ Everybody has a moment when there’s nothing in your head. And you think, Oh, well, there’s never going to be anything. One of the things about being seventy-five and having written twenty-one books is that you know that, if you keep at it, something will come.”

Had that happened in the past months?

Rushdie frowned. “Not really. I mean, I’ve tried, but not really.” He was only lately “just beginning to feel the return of the juices.”

How to go on living after thinking you had emerged from years of threat, denunciation, and mortal danger? And now how to recover from an attack that came within millimetres of killing you, and try to live, somehow, as if it could never recur?

He seemed grateful for a therapist he had seen since before the attack, a therapist “who has a lot of work to do. He knows me and he’s very helpful, and I just talk things through.”

The talk was plainly in the service of a long-standing resolution. “I’ve always tried very hard not to adopt the role of a victim,” he said. “Then you’re just sitting there saying, Somebody stuck a knife in me! Poor me. . . . Which I do sometimes think.” He laughed. “It hurts. But what I don’t think is: That’s what I want people reading the book to think. I want them to be captured by the tale, to be carried away.”

Many years ago, he recalled, there were people who seemed to grow tired of his persistent existence. “People didn’t like it. Because I should have died. Now that I’ve almost died, everybody loves me. . . . That was my mistake, back then. Not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get fifteen stab wounds, much better.”

Read the whole thing here.

Last night’s Twitter feed was dispiriting. A surprising number of tweeters from the Middle East came out of the woodwork to pray for the death of Salman Rushdie, who was attacked yesterday. Even many Americans didn’t seem to understand that “free speech” protects speech that you don’t like or find offensive. That’s the point. Other speech doesn’t need protection.

Douglas Murray posted “The Best Response to Salman Rushdie’s Stabbing” over at The Spectator. You can read the whole thing here. An excerpt:

In his 2012 memoir – Joseph Anton – Rushdie wrote about the fatwa years. The book is a detailed chronicle of all the people who let him down: the MPs who promised support and then whipped up mobs; the political figures of left and right who said that while the Ayatollah may have caused an offence so had the novelist; the authorities who allowed Muslims in Bradford and others on television to call for a British subject´s murder with impunity.

But it is also a chronicle of the people who supported him, the friends who stood by him and the public figures who stood up for him. One of them was the American writer Susan Sontag, who helped organise a public reading of Rushdie´s work in New York. As Sontag said, the moment called for some basic ‘civic courage’. It is striking how much of that civic courage has evaporated in recent years. Today no one would be able to write – much less get published – a novel like The Satanic Verses. Perhaps nobody has tried. From novels to cartoons a de facto Islamic blasphemy law settled across the West in the wake of the Rushdie affair. The attack today will doubtless exacerbate that.

So apart from willing, wishing or praying for Rushdie´s recovery, the only other thing that can be done now is to display that civic courage that Sontag called for three decades ago.  The Satanic Verses is a complex but brilliant novel. It includes an hilarious and devastating reimagining of the origins of the Quran. I hope that people will read it, and read from it, more than ever. Because what happened in New York today cannot be allowed to win. The illiterate cannot be allowed to dictate the rules of literature. The enemies of free expression cannot be allowed to quash it. The attacker should get exactly the opposite of the response he will have hoped for. Not just hopefully a failure to silence Rushdie, but a failure to limit what the rest of us are allowed to think, read, hear and say.

Read the whole thing here.

Update on August 13, from Google: “The Satanic Verses reached No. 1 in contemporary fiction on Amazon’s best-sellers list on Saturday, in the wake of the stabbing attack on the author the day before.“

For most of us, Salman Rushdie is only a name in the news, a man famous for his books and his marriages. To some of my friends, including Abbas Raza, founder of 3QuarksDaily (we’ve written about it here), he is more than that. Rushdie is a personal friend, and a friend of his extended Pakistani family.

Hence, Karachi-born Abbas Raza wrote on Facebook today about the attempted murder of the renowned Indian writer: “He is in critical condition with much blood loss. Apparently an artery in his neck was severed. I hope he comes back from this roaring. Let us all, in this dangerous moment, renew our commitment to always supporting free speech, especially speech we hate. Otherwise there’s no hope at all.”

On 3QD, he remembered Valentine’s Day 1989, when the fatwa was issued. In a 3QD post, he wrote: “… I knew in my gut that this was the opening salvo in what would become a massive internationalization of an Islamic war on freedom of speech and expression. After all, the government of Iran was threatening and planning to murder a British citizen, and even encouraging other Britons to murder him by putting a bounty on his head, with the enthusiastic approval of a large proportion of Muslims everywhere.

“And although, thank goodness, Rushdie remains safe, the Islamists have largely been winning this war since. They have successfully intimidated a very large number of writers and artists and journalists and film-makers all over the world into silence (and many live in exile because of threats to their safety), and within Muslim countries they have in addition used blasphemy laws to persecute their enemies and basically make any discussion of religion impossible.

“All this while religious apologists continue to proclaim to CNN and the BBC that their religion stands only for peace. Tell that to the tens of thousands of victims of religious violence in Pakistan alone. “Oh, the number of extremists is very small; most Muslims are peace-loving people.” The number of actual terrorists is always small. The problem is that too great a proportion of Muslims sympathize with these people, which is why it is impossible to eliminate them. Let us stop fooling ourselves with this nonsense. People need to stand up for free speech unequivocally, and against this barbarity, and especially Muslims need to. The battle must be joined now, in every way possible.”

Postscript from Abbas Raza: “I have written something about Salman Rushdie every year on Valentine’s Day since 1989, so for 33 years now. Here is what I wrote most recently: ‘Oddly enough, Valentine’s Day has become inextricably conflated in my mind with Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I can clearly remember where I was on this day in 1989: at my desk in the U.S. Department of Labor just off the mall in Washington, D.C., where I was working as a young engineer. I was shocked and dismayed to hear the news and revolted by the murderous threat issued by Khomeini. Of course, things have only gotten worse with religious bigots responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people in the quarter century since that day. One can be thankful for Salman’s continued safety but, at least in my estimation, the damage done to free expression in the arts has been immense. I know for a fact (because they have told me) that writers practice a kind of self-censorship in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair because they do not wish to be killed. Sad. But happy Valentine’s day!’ I hope he will make it through this fine. But the world will still remain a darker, scarier place than it was yesterday. And free speech is under attack everywhere now.”

Some of you may remember literary agent Andy Ross (we’ve written about him here and here), formerly owner of Cody’s Books in Berkeley, back when it was bombed by the adherents of the idea of bombing anyone who carried Salman Rushdie‘s books.

Over at his blog, he has has list of Books Not Recommended for Summer Reading. 

Jokes Cracked by Lord Aberdeen. This book  is perhaps the greatest oddity in the history of the printed page. It  was originally published in 1925 and has been long out of print. The author  of the book is either the 4^th or 5^th Earl of Aberdeen. It is not entirely clear. From the appearance of the dour visage on the cover, one questions whether His Lordship made any significant contribution to the world of Tomfoolery of the late Victorian  period. Indeed, one would question whether the concept of “crack a joke” would even enter the same universe of discourse occupied by Lord Aberdeen.

Foundations of a Complete Science of Knowledge (Grundlage der Gesammten Wissenschaftslehre.) Johan Gottlieb Fichte. Once a towering figure in German Idealist philosophy, now happily  forgotten. Unfortunately for me, when I was 25 and a graduate student in German history, I foolishly picked Herr Fichte’s thought as the subject  for my master’s thesis. I was required to read the entire  660 page work in its original German. The number of expressions in German that I knew at the time was  limited. I believe I could give a pretty  good rendition of: “Wanna go back to my place?” and also “Shut up, you Nazi”.

I will never forget the impact of those first words upon my mind.  (Roughly translated): “X  is in the Ego, and posited through the Ego, for it is the Ego which asserts the above proposition, and so asserts it by virtue of X as a law, and must therefore, be given to the Ego;…”

At the time I was doing considerable experimentation with certain (how shall we say) mind altering drugs and attempting at the same time to win my girlfriend back from a free love commune. Fichte’s immortal words restored my hope and gave a new sense of purpose to my life.

Read the rest here.

In this month’s issue of British Vogue, the renowned author Salman Rushdie explains the complicated history of his relationship with Christmas.

While growing up in Bombay, Christmas wasn’t a thing. “Not only were we not Christians, we weren’t a religious household, so December 25 was just that: the 25th of December.” However, he went to a local “Cathedral School,” and that meant hymns year round and carols in December, and all the students had to sing along, whether Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, or Parsi. “This pretty much atheistic boy of Indian Muslim heritage sang along with everyone else, recommending the adoration of a Middle Eastern boy who had been born the king of angels,” he recalled.

“And because we were, after all, schoolboys, we learned the comic version of ‘Hark!’ also.”

“Hark! the herald angels sing
Beecham’s Pills are just the thing.
If you want to go to heaven
Take a dose of six or seven.
If you want to go to hell,
Take the whole damn box as well.”

Years later, in London, he would get together with fellow “Christmas refuseniks” and go out for an Indian meal on the holiday – often at the Gaylord restaurant on Mortimer Street. “No presents, no stuffing, lots of irreverent fun and tandoori chicken.”

“Then came marriage and children.”

Children change Christmas. My sons Zafar and Milan wanted — still want — a proper Christmas. So do my nieces, my sister Sameen’s daughters Maya and Mishka. So does my daughter-in-law, Zafar’s soprano wife Natalie. They are all Christmas fundamentalists. Sameen and I have given in to their demands, and so for many years now there have been tall trees decked with ornaments, and holly, mistletoe, turkey, stuffing, bread sauce, cranberry sauce, brandy snaps, crackers, the whole nine yards, even the brussels sprouts. There is the Queen on TV. There is an annual ocean of wrapping paper. There are stockings. There are Christmas jumpers. My sister and I look at each other from opposite ends of the groaning dining table and ask, silently, how did this happen to us? We allow ourselves only two small rebellions. One: we don’t like Christmas pudding and won’t eat the stuff. And two: I don’t give her a Christmas present and she doesn’t give me one. That is our small acknowledgement of the people we used to be.

Of course, we have a grand time.

The whole story is online here. And here is why you absolutely must click on the link: you will see a charming family photo of the author himself as a boy, reading Peter Pan do his dreamily rapt sisters. You will see a modern-day Rushdie, stuffing himself with brussels sprouts and cranberry sauce at a table decorated with candles and ivy and pine cones. He is wearing a sweater with snowflakes and reindeer on it. Doesn’t get better than that. (And no, I won’t reprint it here. The copyright cops will be down on me faster than a duck on a June bug.) As Tiny Tim would say, “God bless us, every one!'”

 

“I did not want to leave my country forever,” said Syrian author Iman Al Ghafari. When she left her homeland in 2012, she had hoped to recharge her batteries and return to fight for gender issues. Now she knows she cannot go back. Most recently, she worked at the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality, as well as a stint as a guest writer in Utrecht.

Now Ghafari is the Sigtuna literary center’s newest sanctuary writer, a guest in Sweden for the next two years. Sigtuna itself is one of nearly sixty International Cities of Refuge (ICORN), an independent organization of cities and regions offering shelter to writers and artists at risk, advancing freedom of expression, defending democratic values, and promoting international solidarity.

Ghafari spoke at a Sigtuna Literary Festival event yesterday about the plight of feminist and lesbian writers who wish to discuss the issues that concern them in the public sphere. She was joined by author Ola Larsmo, president of the Swedish PEN, and Sigtuna Foundation director Alf Linderman in a conversation about the freedoms we so often take for granted in the West.

She has a doctorate in English literature from Cairo University; her dissertation was on the poet Sylvia Plath. “There was a feeling of anxiety in Syria, a feeling of being excluded in my own country,” she said. “I was not able to appear in public or express my opinion.”

“Then the situation became unsafe in general – every day explosions and bombs,” she recalled. She left the Syria and has been an exile ever since.

The authorities gave other reasons for her marginalization – she said that to admit the truth “would have been a confession.” Or rather, they gave no reason at all. She insisted she had not resigned from her faculty post, but her university said it no longer wanted her. “Before I left, I was involved in a personal war in Syria. I was not allowed to get an income or leave.” She felt like she was a hostage in her own country and an exile even while living in it.

PEN’s Larsmo said that writers and journalists have a special position within society. When waves of people are fleeing a dangerous situation, they are heading in the opposite direction: “Journalists, truth-finders, those are the people who are trying to tell us what is happening there. They are heading in that direction as others flee,” he said.

He noted that the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie provided a model for the way these people are denigrated and held in suspicion by the very people who should be protecting them. He cited four commonplace accusations they face: 1) The threatened artist is “artistically bad,” he said. Hence, Rushdie’s novel Satanic Verses is condemned for being a “lousy novel.”  2) The threatened artist was deliberately provocative to get fame and money. 3) The threatened artist is putting other, innocent people in danger – for example, publishers, illustrators, or bookstore personnel. 4) The threatened writer or journalist is fundamentally “a bad person,” or unhinged and unstable. In keeping with the blaming-the-victim mentality, Ghafari recalled fellow Syrians blaming her, asking her, “Why do you put yourself at risk? Stay on safe subjects. Keep quiet. Don’t create problems for yourself.”

Larsmo recalled an incident where asylum was denied to a Bangladeshi blogger for fear he might overstay his welcome in his potential host country. Instead, he was murdered in his own. “I get furious still when I think about this,” said Larsmo. “In spite of the world situation, you have to keep your decency.”

In the absence of free speech, governments exploit divisions among people and persecute writers. “Turkey is now literally a prison for writers and journalists,” said Larsmo. “Erdogan wants to emphasize polarization. Who knows where Turkey will be in five years?”

Linderman asked Ghafari to look in her to make a few near-term predictions. “I’m not optimistic,” she said. “I see more restrictions on freedom of speech moving to the Western world.”