Step Across This Line (29 page)

The Satanic Verses
is a committedly secular text that deals in part with the material of religious faith. For the religious fundamentalist, especially, at present, the Islamic fundamentalist, the adjective “secular” is the dirtiest of dirty words. But here’s a strange paradox: in my country of origin, India, it was the secular ideal of Nehru and Gandhi that protected the nation’s large Muslim minority, and it is the decay of that ideal that leads directly to the bloody sectarian confrontations which the subcontinent is now witnessing, confrontations that were long foretold and could have been avoided had not so many politicians chosen to fan the flames of religious hatred. Indian Muslims have always known the importance of secularism; it is from that experience that my own secularism springs. In the past four years, my commitment to that ideal, and to the ancillary principles of pluralism, skepticism, and tolerance, has been doubled and redoubled.

I have had to understand not just what I am fighting against—in this situation, that’s not very hard—but also what I am fighting for, what is worth fighting for with one’s life. Religious fanaticism’s scorn for secularism and for unbelief led me to my answer. It is that values and morals are independent of religious faith, that good and evil come before religion: that—if I may be permitted to say this in the house of God—it is perfectly possible, and for many of us even necessary, to construct our ideas of the good without taking refuge in faith. That is where our freedom lies, and it is that freedom, among many others, which the fatwa threatens, and which it cannot be allowed to destroy.

[
From an article that was not, in the end, offered for publication, April 1993
]

On Monday, February 22, the prime minister’s office announced that Mr. Major had agreed in principle to a meeting with me, as a demonstration of the government’s determination to stand up for freedom of expression and for the right of its citizens not to be murdered by thugs in the pay of a foreign power. More recently a date was set for that meeting. Immediately a vociferous Tory backbench campaign sought to have the meeting canceled, because of its interference with Britain’s “partnership” with the murderous mullahs of Tehran. The date—which I had been assured was “as firm as can be”—has today been postponed without explanation. By a curious coincidence, a proposed British trade delegation to Iran in early May can now take place without embarrassment. Iran is hailing this visit—the first such mission in the fourteen years since the Khomeini revolution—as a “breakthrough” in relations. Its news agency states that the British have promised that lines of credit will be made available.

It is becoming harder to retain confidence in the Foreign Office’s decision to launch a new “high-profile” international initiative against the notorious fatwa. For not only are we scurrying off to do business with the tyrannical regime that the U.S. administration calls an “international outlaw” and brands as the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, but we also propose to lend that regime the money with which to do business with us. Meanwhile, I gather I am to be offered a new date for my little meeting. But nobody from Number 10 Downing Street has spoken or written to me.

The Tory “anti-Rushdie” pressure group—its very description demonstrates its members’ desire to turn this into an issue of personality rather than principle—includes Sir Edward Heath and Emma Nicholson, as well as that well-known apologist for Iranian interests Peter Temple-Morris.
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Emma Nicholson tells us that she has grown to “respect and like” the Iranian regime (whose record of killing, maiming, and torturing its own people has recently been condemned by the United Nations as being among the worst in the world), while Sir Edward, still protected by Special Branch because, twenty years ago, the British people suffered under his disastrous premiership, criticizes the decision to offer similar protection to a fellow Briton who is presently in greater danger than himself.

All these persons agree on one point: the crisis is my fault. Never mind that over two hundred of the most prominent Iranians in exile have signed a statement of absolute support for me. That writers, thinkers, journalists, and academics throughout the Muslim world—where the attack upon dissenting, progressive, and above all secularist ideas is daily gathering force—have told the British media that “to defend Rushdie is to defend us.” That
The Satanic Verses,
a legitimate work of the free imagination, has many defenders (and where there are at least two views, why should the book-burners have the last word?), or that its opponents have felt no need to understand it.

Iranian officials have admitted that Khomeini never so much as saw a copy of the novel. Islamic jurisprudents have stated that the fatwa contradicts Islamic law, never mind international law. Meanwhile, the Iranian press has awarded a prize of sixteen gold pieces and a pilgrimage to Mecca for a cartoon “proving” that
The Satanic Verses
is not a novel at all but a carefully engineered Western conspiracy against Islam. Does this whole affair not feel, at times, like the blackest of black comedy—a circus sideshow enacted by murderous clowns?

In the last four years I have been slandered by many people. I do not intend to keep turning the other cheek. If it was proper to attack those on the Left who were the fellow-travelers of Communism, and those on the Right who sought to appease the Nazis, then the friends of revolutionary Iran—businessmen, politicians, or British fundamentalists—deserve to be treated with equal contempt.

I believe we have reached a turning point. Either we are serious about defending freedom, or we are not. If we are, then I hope Mr. Major will very soon be willing to stand up and be counted as he has promised. I should very much like to discuss with him how pressure on Iran can be increased—in the European Commission, through the Commonwealth and the UN, at the International Court of Justice. Iran needs us more than we need Iran. Instead of quaking when the mullahs threaten to cut trade links, let us be the ones to turn the economic screws. I have discovered, in my conversations across Europe and North America, widespread all-party interest in the idea of a ban on offering credit to Iran, as a first stage. But everyone is waiting for the British government to take a lead. In today’s London
Times,
however, Bernard Levin suggests that fully two-thirds of all Tory MPs would be delighted if Iranian assassins succeeded in killing me. If these MPs truly represent the nation—if we are so shruggingly unconcerned about our liberties—then so be it: lift the protection, disclose my whereabouts, and let the bullets come. One way or the other. Let’s make up our minds.

[
From
The Observer,
July 1993
]

I met the writer and journalist Mr. Aziz Nesin in 1986, when I took part in an event organized by British writers to protest against the Turkish authorities’ decision to confiscate his passport. I hope that Mr. Nesin remembers my small effort on his behalf, because recently he has done me no favors at all. Mr. Nesin is now editor-in-chief of the Turkish newspaper
Aydinlik,
and a publisher. Recently
Aydinlik
began the publication of extracts from
The Satanic Verses,
“to promote debate and discussion.” These extracts appeared over a period of weeks, under the heading “Salman Rushdie—Thinker or Charlatan?” At no time did Mr. Nesin or
Aydinlik
seek my permission to publish any extracts. Nor did they discuss with me what extracts would be used, or allow me to confirm the accuracy or quality of the translation. I never saw the published texts. Ever since 1989, Iranian mullahs and Islamic zealots around the world have been quoting and reproducing decontextualized segments of
The Satanic Verses
to use as propaganda weapons in the larger war against progressive ideas, secularist thought, and the modern world, a war in which the so-called Rushdie affair is no more than a skirmish. I was appalled to find that these Turkish secularists and anti-fundamentalists were using my work in exactly the same unscrupulous fashion, albeit to serve different political purposes. Once again, I was a pawn in somebody else’s game.

I asked my agents to write to Mr. Nesin and ask: why had his newspaper pirated my work? What were his motives for wishing to publish me in the first place? Was he, for example, interested in my work as a writer? And if, as he claimed, he had fought on behalf of writers’ rights for many years, would he be prepared to protest against
Aydinlik
’s infringement of those rights? After a long silence, Nesin’s reply was to print my agents’ letter in
Aydinlik
together with a riposte that must rank as one of the most malicious, untruthful and, paradoxically, revealing texts I have ever read. He scolded me for daring to ask about his motives and then said that he didn’t care about my situation: “What concern is Salman Rushdie’s cause to me?” He further said that he had asked for permission to publish only as a courtesy. If we refused, he said, “I will be forced to publish the book without your sanction . . . you may take us to court.”

Plainly, Nesin and his associates wished to use me, and my work, as cannon fodder in their struggle against religious zealotry in Turkey. And here is where I find myself in difficulties. For I, too, am a committed secularist. I, too, deplore, and have used every opportunity in the last five years to struggle against, the spread of religious fanaticism across the face of the earth. Only last week I was able to attend a gathering in Paris of the Académie Universelle des Cultures, an organization created by President Mitterrand under the presidency of the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and attended by, among others, Wole Soyinka, Umberto Eco, Cynthia Ozick, the great Arab poet Adonis, and, from Turkey, the novelist Yashar Kemal. As members of this académie we spent a good part of the day protesting against attacks on secularists by fundamentalists in Algeria, Egypt, and, yes, Turkey. I have believed from the beginning that the true context of the attack on
The Satanic Verses
was this wider war. But Mr. Nesin did not see me as a combatant. For him, my work was simply a weapon, to use as he saw fit.

Now, tragically, Mr. Nesin has been involved in a violent confrontation with the fundamentalists in Sivas, Turkey. The news reports say he is alive.
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But many, many people are dead. And the newspaper reports call this a “Rushdie riot.” It is hard to express how I feel today.

However, we must not fail to lay the blame for these horrible killings where it truly belongs. Murder is murder, and the guilt for the crime must be laid at the feet of the criminals. And the criminals are, of course, the religious zealots who hounded a meeting of secularist writers, who set fire to their hotel and then prevented the rescue services from reaching the scene. I am utterly appalled by these God-driven mobs and by their wild lust for the blood of unbelievers, and I send my grief, my sympathy, and my outraged support to the families of the dead; to all those who fight against religious bigots; yes, also to Mr. Aziz Nesin.

Will any good come out of this tragedy? Will the world’s leaders, now assembling for the G7 meeting in Japan, assume the moral responsibility of saying, enough is enough, terrorism cannot be supported, and countries that promote it, that train and arm and finance the killers, that point fingers across the world and demand the heads of innocent men, will suffer for their misdeeds? Will the much-spoken-of New World Order be a triumph of cynicism, of business-as-usualism, of naked greed and raw power? Or might we, at last, start to draw the lines of a more humane society and inform terrorist states that their immoral acts will have political and economic consequences? I hope that every journalist arriving in Tokyo will ask the G7 politicians to condemn the fanatical murderers of Sivas, and their “spiritual” leaders and paymasters too. These are not only the enemies of secularists and Westerners; they are also the real enemies of Islam.

[
This article appeared in
The New York Times
in July 1993 under the title “The Struggle for the Soul of Islam”
]

The following news stories are all taken from the first half of 1993.

In Pakistan, an elderly poet, Akhtar Hameed Khan, seventy-eight, is quoted as saying that while he admires Muhammad, his real inspiration has been Buddha. He denies saying this but is nevertheless accused by mullahs of blasphemy. In 1992, he had been arrested for insulting the Prophet’s descendants by writing a poem about animals that the fundamentalists alleged had hidden, allegorical meanings. He managed to beat that charge, but now, once again, his life is in danger.

In Sharjah, one of the United Arab Emirates, an Indian theater group who in 1992 performed a play entitled
Corpse-Eating Ants,
which was held to be blasphemous, and who had been sentenced to six-year jail sentences for blasphemy, appeal against the sentence. Some members of the group are freed, but one has his sentence increased to ten years, and another has his six-year term upheld by the appeals court.

In Istanbul, one of the country’s most respected secularist journalists, Ugur Mumçu, is gunned down in the street. Turkish fundamentalists take credit for the attack, and the Turkish government says it has evidence linking the murderers to Iran. The interior minister, Ismet Sezgin, says that at least three killings have been carried out by a group called Islamic Movement, whose members have been trained in assassination techniques “at an official Iranian facility between Tehran and Qom.”

In Egypt, the assassins who in 1992 murdered the distinguished secular thinker Farag Fouda are currently being tried; however, extremist bombings and killings continue.

In Algeria, the writer Tahar Djaout is one of six secularists murdered in a killing spree by what the security forces call “Muslim terrorists.”

In Saudi Arabia, a number of distinguished intellectuals forms the country’s first human-rights group. Within days, many of them are fired from their posts, including university professorships; many of them are arrested and jailed. Trials are pending.

In Egypt, Professor Nasr Abu-Zeid, who teaches literature at Cairo University, is charged with apostasy because of his criticisms of the Islamists. Fundamentalists ask the courts to dissolve his marriage, since it is illegal for a Muslim to be married to an apostate. The alternative would be for his wife to be stoned to death as an adulteress.