Joseph Anton: A Memoir (19 page)

The next morning he called Nadine Gordimer who, as the patron of the Congress of South African Writers (COSAW), was the other sponsor of his invitation to speak. This tiny, indomitable woman was
an old friend, and one of the people he most respected and admired. She was extremely agitated and distressed. South African Muslims, usually vociferous in their opposition to the restrictions of apartheid, were threatening a holy war against the blasphemous author and his book. They would kill him and bomb his meetings and attack those who had invited him. The police seemed unable or unwilling to guarantee the safety of those who were being threatened. There was a danger of a rift in COSAW, with its Muslim members threatening to resign en masse, and the loss of funding that would result from such a rupture would be disastrous for that organization. The staff of the
Weekly Mail
was predominantly Jewish and there was a lot of unpleasant anti-Semitism in the Muslim vitriol. Nadine Gordimer had tried to meet with Muslim leaders to solve the problem, and many highly respected figures in the antiapartheid movement had appealed to the Muslim extremists to back down, but they had not. The prominent Muslim intellectual professor Fatima Meer had stated, “In the final analysis it is the Third World that Rushdie attacks.” In spite of a lifetime of anticolonialism he was being transformed into an oppressor, who had made a “malicious attack on his ethnic past.” Faced with this crisis, the ANC had remarkably said nothing at all. There were many voices raised against the Muslim assault, including those of J. M. Coetzee, Athol Fugard and André Brink, but the Islamists grew more vociferously threatening by the day. Gordimer was plainly shaken and, as a friend, protective. “I can’t bring you into this kind of danger,” she said.

That week, the South African government also banned
The Satanic Verses
. The banning order disparaged the novel as a “work thinly disguised as a piece of literature,” criticized its “foul language,” and said that it was “disgusting not only to Muslims but to any reader who holds clear values of decency and culture.” Interestingly, the same language could be found in the letter to “Brothers in Islam”—evidently “Sisters in Islam” were not worth addressing—issued by the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs just a few days earlier, on October 28. In that document, the description “thinly disguised as a piece of literature” was also to be found, as well as many of the accusations of abusiveness, filth, and so on. The white racists of South Africa were
apparently taking dictation from Mr. Mughram al-Ghamdi, the signatory of the UK Action Committee letter.

After many phone conversations, with Nadine and Anton Harber, the coeditor of the
Weekly Mail
, he was told that COSAW, for all its political radicalism, was recommending to the newspaper that his invitation be withdrawn. He was saddened to hear that this had precipitated a public quarrel between South Africa’s two greatest writers. J. M. Coetzee opposed the withdrawal of the invitation, saying that the decision to come or not come should be Rushdie’s alone. Nadine Gordimer, immensely regretful, said that the issue of safety was paramount. They were both right, but he did not want his fellow writers to be quarreling over him. He accepted the decision to withdraw the invitation. On the same day, Tony Lacey, his editorial director at Viking, called him to tell him in confidence that
The Satanic Verses
had won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel. Its “thin disguise as a piece of literature” had obviously worked.

The first piece of hate mail arrived at his London home. The
Evening Standard
reported on a global Islamic threat to “end Penguin.” The famous lawyer David Napley demanded that he be tried under the Public Order Act. Meanwhile, he and Clarissa took Zafar to watch the Guy Fawkes Night fireworks on Highbury Fields. Marianne turned forty-one, and at lunchtime he went to the Whitbread prize-giving ceremony to receive his award. In the afternoon she quarreled with him. She was hidden in his shadow, she said, and she hated it. That night, still irritable with each other, they went to see Harold Pinter’s play
Mountain Language
at the National Theatre. He came away feeling that like the people in the play he, too, was being forbidden to use his language. His language was improper, even criminal. He should be tried in court, hounded out of society, even killed. This was all legitimate because of his language. It was the language of literature that was the crime.

A year had passed since his father died. He was glad Anis was not around to see what was happening to his son. He called his mother. Negin supported him staunchly,
these terrible people
, but, strangely, she defended their God. “Don’t blame Allah for what these people say.” He argued with her. What sort of god could be excused the actions of
his followers? Didn’t it, in a way, infantilize the deity to say he was powerless against the faithful? She was adamant. “It’s not Allah’s fault.” She said she would pray for him. He was shocked. This was not the kind of family they had been. His father had been dead for just a year and suddenly his mother was praying? “Don’t pray for me,” he said. “Don’t you get it? That’s not our team.” She laughed, humoring him, but didn’t understand what he was saying.

A solution of sorts was found for the South African problem. He agreed to speak to the
Weekly Mail
conference by telephone link from London. His voice went to South Africa, his ideas were heard in a Johannesburg hall he couldn’t see, but he stayed at home. It wasn’t satisfying, but it felt better than nothing.

The grand sheikh of al-Azhar, Gad el-Haq Ali Gad el-Haq: The name sounded almost impossibly antiquated to him, an
Arabian Nights
name belonging to the age of flying carpets and wonderful lamps. This grand sheikh, one of the grand eminences of Islamic theology, a hard-line conservative priest based at the al-Azhar University in Cairo, on November 22, 1988, delivered himself of an utterance against the blasphemous book. He decried the way in which “lies and figments of the imagination” were passed off as facts. He called on British Muslims to bring legal actions against the author. He wanted action from the forty-six-member Organization of the Islamic Conference.
The Satanic Verses
was not the only book he was upset by. He also renewed his objections to the great Egyptian writer and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s novel
Children of Gebelawi
—also accused of blasphemy because its contemporary narrative was an allegory of the lives of prophets from Abraham to Muhammad. “A novel cannot just be permitted into circulation because its author won the Nobel Prize for Literature,” he declared. “That award does not justify the propagation of misguided ideas.”

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.