When did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent.
I was in my early 20's when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie, declaring that the author should be executed for the blasphemy of The Satanic Verses, and it really didn't affect me. This was 12 years before 9/11, the Soviets were just wrapping up their war in Afghanistan, the CIA either was or wasn't cozy with Bin Laden, and I had no reason to believe that a leader of a different faith, speaking from the other side of the world, could affect me. Every now and then, Rushdie's name would pop up in the news, usually linked with the ongoing fatwa, and I would think, "Huh. Is that still happening?" I got married and had kids, my life went on whether or not Rushdie was in hiding, and I ended up reading Midnight's Children (which I liked a lot) and The Satanic Verses (which I didn't really like, although the sections about the "satanic verses" themselves were very interesting). Then 9/11 came, and even though this was about the same time that Rushdie finally left police protection, it was the first time that I realised that, yes, those greybeards in the faraway deserts might actually be capable of affecting me; the world had changed and in the way that Rushdie had foreseen.
Joseph Anton is Salman Rushdie's memoir, and although the title comes from his codename during his years in hiding (taken from his favourite authors Conrad and Chekov), he begins the book with his childhood. I did find this part to be very interesting as Rushdie described his secular Muslim upbringing (no daily prayers but no pork either) and his father's interest in both storytelling and in the historical figure of Mohammed. This upbringing, coupled with the fact that Rushdie once took a university course on the so-called satanic verses themselves, makes a compelling case for why the author later thought that he could fictionalise the Prophet's experience with impunity. As I learned about the British police force's reaction to the fatwa and Rushdie's initial spiriting away, I thought this was going to be an intriguing glimpse into a life on the run, real cloak and dagger stuff, but it's really not. In the end, Joseph Anton seems intended to settle the score with those people that Rushdie doesn't think fully supported him during his time in hiding, and the tone is self-righteous and superior and bitter -- and I have to wonder if I wouldn't sound the same way after a dozen years in hiding, fighting for a principle and my life, and repeatedly seeing in print that I had called it all down upon myself. While I did empathise with Rushdie's experience, this was neither a particularly enjoyable book or a successful memoir.
Rushdie was forced into hiding by the police, paying out huge sums in rent out of his own pocket to stay one step ahead of the assassins, while the newspapers and some government officials bemoaned the cost of his protection. Even once he was "allowed" to buy and fortify a permanent home, Rushdie's existence was bizarrely bilateral: He would fight to be allowed to have some freedoms and become enraged when the police force mused about ending his protection. Public opinion in Britain seemed to be stacked against him, on the fifth anniversary of the fatwa:
(T)he entire op-ed page was given over to the egregious Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's piece about how the fatwa had led to many good, positive outcomes, allowing the British Muslim community to find an identity and a public voice. "Had it not been for that fateful 14 February 1989," she wrote, "the world would be hurrying, unchallenged, toward the inalienable right to wear blue jeans and eat McDonald's hamburgers."
Don't I have an inalienable right to blue jeans and hamburgers? Justified or not, there's a lot of name-calling in Joseph Anton. Kalim Siddiqui, the British Muslim leader who immediately and loudly supported the fatwa ("We strike back," he said. "Sometimes we strike back first") is referred to as a garden gnome, a silver-bearded garden gnome, a poisonous garden gnome, a malevolent gnome, and a loquacious garden gnome. And doesn't that seem a bit…childish? Of Cat Stevens -- or Yusuf Islam as he had become by then -- Rushdie says he "bubbled up in The Guardian like a fart in a bathtub". Also included was a nasty back and forth feud with John le Carré on the letters page of The Guardian and the following observation about America: "World politics, the great dirty game, inevitably funneled back in the end to this smallish white mansion in which a big pink man in an oval room made yes-no choices in spite of being deafened by the babbling maybes of his aides." When he meets Bill Clinton, Rushdie notes the president "was even bigger and pinker that he had anticipated". Being a gossipy sort of book as well, Rushdie doesn't fail to drop the name at this point of someone who said she had worked very closely with Clinton when he was running for governor of Arkansas (wink, wink -- and by the way, it's Norman Mailer's wife Norris). There is constant name-dropping; for a man in hiding, Rushdie attended quite a few parties with long lists of beautiful and important people, and while steadfast writer friends like Susan Sontag and John Irving are mentioned glowingly, and ad nauseam, writers like Arundhati Roy, who said that Rushdie's "writing was merely exotic while hers was truthful", are sneeringly dismissed. (And as an aside, I chose Ms. Roy as an example because her Booker Prize winner The God of Small Things made me cry where Rushdie never has.) He even has his revenge against the Commander of the special services squad that provided his police protection: Rushdie describes an event where he was forced to blackmail the Commander into allowing him to attend a book reading, with the threat that if Rushdie wasn't allowed to attend he'd write about the incident and make the police look bad. The Commander relents and Rushdie remained silent…until now.
What I most disliked, however, was Rushdie's description of his four (!) failed marriages during this period. His first wife, Clarissa, is treated pretty well until, many years after their divorce, after collecting alimony and child support for those many years, her lawyers advise her to finally ask for a cash settlement from him and he sighs over the £150 000. He describes his second wife, Marianne, thus: "when the brightness blazed from her face she could look fabulously attractive, or nuts, or both." Rushdie resented that this wife didn't approve of a long-term love affair he had with an Australian writer and bemoaned the fact that Marianne took his photo albums when she finally left him. Of his third wife he wrote:
A few days later Elizabeth did what people always did and read his journal when he wasn't there and found out about his day in Paris with Caroline Lang and then they had the painful conversation people always had and Elizabeth was the one feeling wretched and unsafe and it was his fault.
And then when Rushdie left Elizabeth, mother of his second child, for the beauty Padma Lakshmi, he wrote:
Then there were lawyers and after that both people were angry and the one who was ending it stopped feeling guilty, you came into my life riding a bicycle and working as a junior editor and living in someone's attic as their lodger and you want to leave it as a multimillionairess.
Of course she did! Elizabeth gave Rushdie her youth and joined him in hiding and neglected her own career and was forced to have only the one child her husband reluctantly agreed to and then was left by this man who was chasing after a dream woman, Padma, a woman he describes as "capable of saying things of such majestic narcissism that he didn't know whether to bury his head in his hands or applaud". Eventually Padma would leave:
...not in a green puff of smoke like the Wicked Witch of the West but in some ancient Scrooge McDuck's private jet, into his private world at Dismal Downs and other places filled with wretchedness and cash. After eight years during which she had told him once a week on average that he was too old for her she ended up with a duck who was two hundred years older, because Scrooge McDuck would open the enchanted door that allowed her into her own secret dreamworld of infinite entitlement, of life lived with no limits on the Big Rock Candy Mountain with the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees...
Just as he uses the third person perspective in his memoir as an apparent distancing device, Rushdie seems to distance himself from all of the events of his life, unwilling to accept any portion of blame for what happens. Even when he's involved in a terrible car accident, "coming as close as they ever came to being killed, the most nearly lethal moment in all those menacing years", Rushdie deflects blame: "he would always say that the driver's cab crossed the white line, though Elizabeth remembered that he himself had veered slightly to his right".
And there were some curiosities in the writing (beyond the Scrooge McDuck rant) that a skilled editor should have excised, like an exchange where Rushdie tells Elizabeth a joke and she doesn't smile because she was having trouble getting pregnant (there was no logical cause and effect here), or a story about the time "the police almost killed someone" : in actuality, a gun was fired in the house accidentally, and the bullet went through a door and into an empty corridor. Almost killed someone? Actually, the whole book should have been edited and excised and chopped right down -- it works as neither a complete record of Rushdie's years in hiding or as an author's memoir; too much from here and there and nothing focussed; too much arrogance and self-righteousness and bitterness and name-calling and deflection…
And I think that Salman Rushdie has every right to write and publish his memoirs any way he see fits, just like I support his right to have written The Satanic Verses. Throughout his years in hiding, critics said that Rushdie had brought the fatwa upon himself, that he should have known what he was doing by insulting the Prophet, but I'm not sure that that's true -- and even if it is, he had a right to say it anyway. It is incredible to me that more than twenty years later, after everything Salman Rushdie or Ayaan Hirsi Ali or the publishers of the Danish Cartoons have been through, it's actually less likely today that The Satanic Verses could find a publisher. So perhaps the greybeards in the faraway deserts have won after all.
Ultimately, I thought this was going to be an important book, and it didn't work for me.
