The Iranian Revolution had been shaky ever since Khomeini was forced, in his own words, to “drink the cup of poison” and accept the unsuccessful end of his Iraq war, which had left a generation of young Iranians dead or maimed. People in the newsroom and on various monitors were already using the word that would soon be hung around his neck like a millstone. “Satanic Verses” were verses that were satanic, and he was their satanic author. It was the truth. The temples of the three goddesses were economically important to the city’s ruling élite, an élite from which Muhammad had been excluded—unfairly, in his opinion. “The car drove by the premises just now,” Stan told him, “and the report, I’m sorry to say, is that the front door is open and all the lights are on.” He was unable to reply. He left a message on Clarissa’s machine and then interrogated his own. If that had been all he learned at Arthur’s feet, it would have been enough. On this day there were crowds marching down the streets of Tehran carrying posters of his face with the eyes poked out, so that he looked like one of the corpses in “The Birds,” with their blackened, bloodied, bird-pecked eye sockets. She was ready to be that person, and he knew that she would make a formidable representative. “People put two and two together sometimes.” So he was to give up his race as well. He didn’t want her to be at risk because of him. They were leaders without followers, mountebanks trying to make careers out of her brother’s misfortune. What would such a falling star be called? He made lists of such combinations, but all of them sounded ridiculous. For Winston Smith, in Orwell’s “1984,” it was rats. Oh, well, he thought, they’re a little late. “Upstairs.”. “You understand,” he said to Stan, “that if they have him and they want a ransom, they want me to exchange myself for him, then I’m going to do that, and you guys can’t stop me doing it.” Stan took a slow, dark pause, like a character in a Pinter play. The terms “P.C.,” “laptop,” “mobile phone,” “Internet,” “WiFi,” “SMS,” and “e-mail” were either uncoined or very new. Maybe somewhere in that picture-postcard region of rolling hills and golden-stone houses. It treated him as he always said he wanted to be treated, not as a divine figure (like the Christians’ “Son of God”) but as a man (“the Messenger”). If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t—you shouldn’t—tell their story. If Sameen became his public spokesperson, the media would camp outside her house and there would be no escape from the glare of publicity; her private life, her daughter’s life, would become a thing of klieg lights and microphones. Every head in the gas station turned to stare at him. The Disappeared. It was almost seven-forty-five on a school night. In a very short time, he grew extremely fond of his protectors. [...] That is to say, it has decayed into something much less than multiculturalism, which is cultural relativism. “Hmm hmm,” he said, inspecting the weapon. Although he did not know it then—so the moment of leaving his home did not feel unusually freighted with meaning—he would not return to that house, at 41 St. Peter’s Street, which had been his home for half a decade, until three years later, by which time it would no longer be his. Salman Rushdie is one of the most widely discussed of contemporary writers; also, one whose work has provoked disagreement and controversy—not least in the far-reaching 'Rushdie affair.' I really looked forward to continuing reading. They could only hope that her face would be less recognizable than his. “We’re worried about you,” Martin said, embracing him. An Iranian ayatollah named Hassan Sanei offered a million dollars in bounty money for the apostate’s head. Salman Rushdie is a novelist. “Then we’ll see how they play,” Stan said. Sign in to Purchase Instantly. January 2013 A few hours later, a document was brought to the offices of Iranian radio and presented as Khomeini’s edict. Today, I’m remembering those earlier incarnations of this unlovely breed. he asked. There was no chance that he’d be able to walk to his car, which was parked a hundred yards down the road, without being followed by cameras and microphones and men who had been to various kinds of school and who had been sent down specially. They were both strikingly handsome, and packing heat. He had his daily routine with Clarissa: At seven o’clock every evening, he would call to say hello to Zafar. Would the Lygon Arms be a possibility? It was Valentine’s Day, but he hadn’t been getting along with his wife, the American novelist Marianne Wiggins. As the service progressed, however, journalists began to enter the church. (Names and some details have been changed for this account.) But Joe grated on him almost from the beginning. He went on dialling Clarissa’s number. Make a contribution Subscribe US edition switch to the UK edition UK edition It’ll get sorted. And nearly lost another.”. To do so would be to endanger his neighbors and place an intolerable burden on police resources, because an entire street, or more than one street, would need to be sealed off and protected. Such a notion, Rushdie suggests, is disproved by the most cursory survey of a literary scene that includes such budding … The building known as the Kaaba, or Cube, in the center of town, was dedicated to a deity named Allah, meaning “the god,” just as al-Lat was “the goddess.” Allah was unusual in that he didn’t specialize. It was not possible for him to estimate how long it would take. He looked like a beaten man. But, on his second day at the Lygon Arms, he was told that he had twenty-four hours to find somewhere else to stay. “I’m sorry,” he replied. He phoned the house. They knew that it was difficult for “principals” to have policemen in the kitchen, leaving their footprints in the butter. Good story, he thought, when he read about it at Cambridge. Are you there?”, “Yes,” he said, “I’m here. When I had read the first three paragraph I found myself really impressed of how detailed and describing Rushdie had written the short story. He wanted to believe in their optimism. Stanley was one of the best tennis players on the police force. That was the subject today: his unfunny Valentine from those bearded men, those shrouded women, and that lethal old man, dying in his room, making his last bid for some sort of murderous glory. Howley did not have an answer. The historical record is incomplete, but most of the major collections of hadith, or stories about the life of the Prophet—those compiled by Ibn Ishaq, Waqidi, Ibn Sa’d, and Tabari—recount an incident that later became known as the incident of the “Satanic Verses.” The Prophet came down from the mountain one day and recited verses from what would become Surah—or chapter—No. I’ll make some inquiries.” A few minutes later, he came back to say that he had spoken to Metpol—the London Metropolitan Police—and a car would be sent to the address to do a “drive-by.” After that, the minutes moved as slowly and coldly as glacial ice, and when the report came it froze his heart. She didn’t say much. He called twice more in the next ten minutes. Not being the reason your team loses is everything.”, “It’s mine-and I’d appreciate your not looking out of it.”, “I’ve heard mitigating things about you!”, “I’ve never forgiven him for that thing I made up in my head.”. As he lay close to death, the nation held its breath; when he rose again, the effect was almost Christlike. Nothing happened. Marianne sat facing him, unable to provide comfort. He thought before replying. When you do get back, sir, don’t go out again tonight, if that’s all right. And supposing he chose not to make a statement at all at this time? “O.K.,” Stan said, “leave it with me. And when the Meccans heard that he had acknowledged the three goddesses “they were delighted and greatly pleased.” Why, then, did the Prophet recant? “The term is O.F.D.s,” Dennis said. to resume his normal life in the foreseeable future. This was when another harsh truth was explained: it was up to him to find places to stay. He remembered hearing an Indian politician on TV talking about the British Prime Minister and being unable to pronounce her name properly. Nobody ever saw the formal document, if one existed. I ask all the Muslims to execute them wherever they find them. The toll of injuries and deaths had continued to rise. “Just to inform you on what we’re doing,” Stan said. stand for? They tried very hard, and without any rancor, to give him as much space as they could. “What kind of idea are you?” the novel asked the new religion, and suggested that an idea that refused to bend or compromise would, in all likelihood, be destroyed, but conceded that, in very rare instances, such ideas became the ones that changed the world. Would she be safe there? One of the unforeseen consequences of this decision was that as the “affair” blazed on, and he was obliged to be mostly invisible—because the police urged him not to further inflame the situation, advice he accepted for a time—there was nobody who loved him speaking for him, not his wife, not his sister, not his closest friends, the ones he wanted to continue to see. They stood up, they sat down, they knelt, they stood, and then sat again. Many of them said to him, always using the same words, “We’ve never lost anyone. It’s impossible to say for sure. But he knew that, if the statement was to be effective, it had to be read as a straightforward apology. Voltaire himself left France for England, after he gave offense to an aristocrat, the Chevalier de Rohan, and remained in exile for almost three years. The level of threat against an individual might be high—and it was for the intelligence services to determine this—but the level of risk attached to a particular action by that individual might be much lower, for example, if nobody knew what he was planning to do, or when. It is a known fact that in most metropolitan readings of the global periphery, the text is made to stand in for an entire culture. None of this fully explained the police’s response, which was to open fire, using rifles, semiautomatic weapons, and pump-action shotguns. “He longed for a way to attract them,” Ibn Ishaq wrote. “There are two hundred journalists on the sidewalk waiting for you.”, “I’ll go to the agency,” he said. Hamid Dabashi is … The Salman Rushdie affair: Thirty years and a novelist later. He didn’t have an answer for her. Or was it, as Claire Tomalin wrote in the Independent, a “wheel that would not turn,” or, in Hermione Lee’s even harsher opinion, in the Observer, a novel that went “plunging down, on melting wings toward unreadability”? The faces looked friendly—one man waved, another gave the thumbs-up sign—but it was alarming to be so intensely visible at exactly the moment that he was being asked to lie low. Somebody needed to answer these people who were driving a sectarian wedge through the community, she said, to name them as the hypocrites and opportunists that they were. “We’ll look into it.”. Search with google. Bricks and stones were thrown at security forces, and there were screams of “American dogs!” and “Hang Salman Rushdie!”—the usual stuff. He did not know. Defended Salman Rushdie in the blasphemy case brought against The Satanic Verses On Valentine's Day 1989, the dying Ayatollah Khomeini launched the mother of all prosecutions against Salman Rushdie . “I should go,” he said. “How does it feel,” she asked him, “to know that you have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?” It was a sunny Tuesday in London, but the question shut out the light. 2, quipped that, if that was what it took to get to the top spot, he was content to be runner-up. Acclaimed novelist Salman Rushdie has come to the aid of guests who check into a trendy Manhattan hotel with nothing to read, choosing 13 celebrated American books for their rooms. And in this way the recitation was purified of the Devil’s work. He stood there blinking and directionless, momentarily at a loss. They drove to Islington in silence. “We’ve been wondering where you’d gone.”. Risk assessment was the job of the police-protection team. Photograph by Richard Avedon / “Salman Rushdie, London, England, September 26, 1994” / © 1994 The Richard Avedon Foundation, “You will always be a hero, but you will never be a superhero.”, “Winning isn’t everything, Josh. “Never have We sent a single prophet or apostle before you with whose wishes Satan did not tamper,” Surah No. April 2013 In my life, I have seen several dictators rise and fall. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. It wasn’t normal for them to be out so late. Their cities were new. Sontag, Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer, Claire Bloom, and Larry McMurtry were among the readers. Using the first three novels of Salman Rushdie, this essay articulates a different conceptual framework for reading the postcolonial texts. They agreed to “set it up.” Once it was dark, he was driven to Burma Road in an armored Jaguar. He learned a world. The house felt bleak, as did the days. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. It now looked as though he would be at risk for a considerable time, and that was not what the Special Branch had foreseen, Howley told him. People usually made offerings to gods for specific reasons: the health of a child, the future of a business enterprise, a drought, a quarrel, a romance. Conrad, the translingual creator of wanderers, of voyagers into the heart of darkness, of secret agents in a world of killers and bombs, and of at least one immortal coward, hiding from his shame; and Chekhov, the master of loneliness and of melancholy, of the beauty of an old world destroyed, like the trees in a cherry orchard, by the brutality of the new, Chekhov, whose “Three Sisters” believed that real life was elsewhere and yearned eternally for a Moscow to which they could not return: these were his godfathers now. She came over at once, without any discussion, even though it was her birthday. It would give them space and time to take stock and make decisions. Life was over. He looked at the journalists looking at him and he wondered if this was how people looked at men being taken to the gallows or the electric chair. October 2012 You just need to lie low for a couple of days and let the politicians sort it out.”, “You can’t go home, obviously,” Benny said. Maybe the Cotswolds, he thought. The fuel consumption of an armored Jaguar was around six miles to the gallon. He was on the front page of every newspaper—Martin Amis said, memorably, that he had “vanished into the front page”—and had, overnight, become one of the most recognizable men in the country. “We could take the Queen in an unmarked Ford Cortina down Oxford Street in the rush hour and nobody would know she was there,” they said. Franz Sterne. But he did own a house, and in the house there was an answering machine, and he could call in and interrogate it, a new use of an old word, and get, no, retrieve, his messages. To hide in this way was to be stripped of all self-respect. Salman Rushdie’s 2012 memoir about the death sentence that forced him into hiding, in 1989. “What’s going on, Dad? So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. Sameen, a lawyer (though no longer a practicing one—she worked in adult education), had always had a sharp political mind and had a lot to say about what was going on. The Jews made him do it. He could sit still and think in a room for hours and be content. However, he was also a man with a need for solitude, and for many years he spent weeks at a time living like a hermit in a cave on Mt. His middle sister, long estranged from the family, lived in Berkeley, California. Protection was formally offered and accepted. Paperback (2007) $ 27.99. Later that morning, a memorial service for his friend Bruce Chatwin, who had died of AIDS, was to be held at the Greek Orthodox church on Moscow Road, in Bayswater. He needed a name, the police told him in Wales. A colleague of Clarissa’s offered a night or two at her country cottage, in the village of Thame, in Oxfordshire. Is there anywhere you’d like to go for a few days?”, “Pick somewhere nice,” Stan said, “and we’ll just whiz you off there for a stretch until you’re in the clear.”. This is what he said, without really knowing what he was saying: “It doesn’t feel good.” This is what he thought: I’m a dead man. “You’d better get out of sight,” Michael told him, and he had to duck behind a kitchen counter. In the months and years that followed, they sometimes broke the rules to help him. She called him at home, on his private line, without explaining how she got the number. To him, it was the least political of the three books. They need to assemble an army.”, Maybe they were not both dead. The journeys multiplied. “His mind must be tormented for the rest of his life unless he asks for forgiveness from Almighty Allah.” (In 2005, this same Sacranie was knighted at the recommendation of the Blair government for his services to community relations.). For a generation, the politics of ethnic minorities in Britain had been secular and socialist. “I’m worried about me,” he replied. Then, unexpectedly, there was a click. When friends asked what they could do to help, he pleaded, “Defend the text.” The attack was very specific, yet the defense was often a general one, resting on the mighty principle of freedom of speech. For him, in a cold Welsh cottage, it was an unanswered phone call. Donate this book to the Internet Archive library. At that moment, Zafar’s tenth birthday felt far, far away. “I don’t see why not,” Stan said. They got into their car, a black Saab, and he drove it across the park to Bayswater, with Gillon, his worried expression and long, languid body folded into the back seat. There was a novel growing in him, but its exact nature eluded him. “I’m sorry” didn’t begin to cover it. Mecca was only a few generations old. He had an appointment at the American network’s studios, in Bowater House, Knightsbridge, to appear live, by satellite link, on its morning show. But he asked her not to do it. In Belgium, the mullah who was said to be the “spiritual leader” of the country’s Muslims, the Saudi national Abdullah al-Ahdal, and his Tunisian deputy, Salem el-Behir, were killed for saying that, whatever Khomeini had said for Iranian consumption, in Europe there was freedom of expression. Writers didn’t usually draw a crowd of paparazzi. “There you are,” an officer said. Weirdly, the Finance Ministry stated that the ban “did not detract from the literary and artistic merit” of his work. On air, when he was asked for a response to the threat, he said, “I wish I’d written a more critical book.” He was proud, then and always, that he had said this. You know the technical term for us Special Branch drivers? ”, ’! Sort things out even though he was worried about you, if this a. 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