Joseph Anton: A Memoir (20 page)

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.

He had begun to lead two lives: the public life of the controversy, and what remained of his old private life. January 23, 1989, was his and Marianne’s first wedding anniversary. She took him to the opera to see
Madama Butterfly
. She had booked excellent seats in the front row of the grand tier and as the lights went down Princess Diana came in and sat down next to him. He wondered what she thought of the opera’s story, about a woman promised love by a man who left her and eventually returned, having married another woman, to break her heart.

At the Whitbread Book of the Year awards the next day, his novel, winner of the Best Novel category, was up against four other category winners, including A. N. Wilson’s biography of Tolstoy and a first novel by a former staff nurse in a psychiatric hospital, Paul Sayer’s
The Comforts of Madness
. He ran into Sayer in the men’s toilets. The young man was feeling physically ill with nerves and he tried to comfort him. An hour later Sayer won the award. When news of the jury’s deliberations leaked out it was plain that two of the judges, the Tory cabinet minister Douglas Hurd, the home secretary, and the conservative journalist Max Hastings, had scuppered
The Satanic Verses
for reasons that were not wholly literary. The noise of the demonstrations had, so to speak, reached the jury chamber, and made its point.

He had his first quarrel with Peter Mayer and Peter Carson at Viking Penguin, because they were unwilling to contest the Indian ban on his novel in the courts.

He was invited to lunch by Graham Greene, who was interested to meet London-based writers of non-British origin. He went to the Reform Club for lunch along with Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri, Hanan al-Shaykh, Wally Mongane Serote and a few others, including Marianne. When he arrived, Greene’s long form was folded into a deep armchair, but the great man sprang to his feet and cried, “Rushdie! Come and sit here and tell me how you managed to make so much trouble! I never made nearly as much trouble as that!” This was oddly comforting. He understood how heavy his heart had grown and how much he needed such a moment of lightness and support. He sat beside the great man and told him as much as he could and Greene listened with great attention, and then, without offering any judgment at all, clapped his hands and cried, “Right. Lunch.” At lunch he ate almost nothing but drank liberal quantities of wine. “I only eat,” he said, “because it allows me to drink a little more.” After lunch a photograph was taken on the steps of the club, Greene beaming in the center of the picture in a short brown coat, looking like Gulliver in Lilliput.

Several weeks later he showed this photograph to one of the Special Branch officers on his protection team. “This is Graham Greene,” he said, “the great British novelist.” “Oh, yeah,” said the policeman reflectively. “He used to be one of ours.”

The book was getting excellent reviews in the United States but on February 8 he received a mixed one from his wife, who told him she was leaving him; however, she still wanted him to come to the publication dinner for her novel
John Dollar
. Four days later the strange interregnum between publication and calamity came to an end.

Two thousand protesters was a small crowd in Pakistan. Even the most modestly potent politico could put many more thousands on the streets just by clapping his hands. That only two thousand “fundamentalists” could be found to storm the U.S. Information Center in the
heart of Islamabad was, in a way, a good sign. It meant the protests hadn’t really caught fire. Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was out of the country at the time, on a state visit to China, and it was speculated that destabilizing her administration had been the demonstrators’ real aim. Religious extremists had long suspected her of being guilty of the crime of secularism, and they wanted to put her on the spot. Not for the last time,
The Satanic Verses
was being used as a football in a political game that had little or nothing to do with it.