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Salman Rushdie: Joseph Anton (book review)

Life in the Fatwa's Shadow

Michael Moynihan

The Wall Street Journal, September 17. 2012

In 1988, a Booker Prize-winning author published a novel called "The Satanic Verses." In the British city of Bradford, 200 miles from his London residence, a wild-eyed rabble of Muslim fundamentalists, most of whom hadn't bothered to read the book, declared it blasphemous and set it alight. The word "fatwa" would enter the English lexicon when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini weighed in, issuing a religious edict demanding that Salman Rushdie, the book's author, be put to death for insulting the Prophet Muhammad. The ayatollah offered those unmoved by promises of otherworldly paradise a bounty of $1 million.

Mr. Rushdie now lives quite openly in New York—but the author's more literate tormentors can take satisfaction from "Joseph Anton," his compelling, affecting, depressing memoir of a life profoundly disfigured by terrorism. The soldiers of Allah didn't "send him to Hell," as Khomeini demanded, but they did make his existence a living one.

The conspiracies against Mr. Rushdie demanded the intervention of Britain's security services, curtailing his movement and making interaction with the outside world—and his young son—onerous. Book reviews he wrote were, in the days before email, given to a protection officer to be mailed from London, a postmark far from his undisclosed location. (When he included a note explaining why his reviews were late, one newspaper reproduced it on the front page.) The Thatcher government, a frequent target of Mr. Rushdie's more polemical writing, provided the security arrangement but offered only qualified diplomatic support, expressing sympathy more for those "offended" by the novel than for the condemned novelist himself.

It was a position shared by many of his literary and journalistic peers. British tabloid hacks mocked Mr. Rushdie's physical appearance, dismissed the literary merit of his novels and regularly complained of the cost to British taxpayers of keeping him alive. To many in the intelligentsia, it wasn't the bearded ghoul in Tehran who was responsible for the violence, nor his British surrogates, but the bearded novelist who surely "knew what he was doing."

The list of putative liberals suddenly concerned with hurt religious "sensibilities" is depressingly long: Joseph Brodsky, John le Carré, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Roald Dahl ("long, unpleasant man with huge strangler's hands"), Germaine Greer, the reliably Islamophilic Prince of Wales, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, who coughed up the most astonishing pronouncement of the whole affair: "We must be more tolerant of Muslim anger."

Enlarge Image

Joseph Anton

By Salman Rushdie
(Random House, 636 pages, $30)

"Joseph Anton" is hardly a conventional memoir. It is written in the third person, a conceit that works well enough as a way of recounting the alienating experience of living under cover while hearing one's real name condemned by Muslim leaders world-wide. The author covers his life before the fatwa, including a moving account of the death of his father, a brilliant secularist and a brutish drunk. He also savagely recapitulates his marriage to the American novelist Marianne Wiggins (to whom "The Satanic Verses" was dedicated) and provides a brief but revealing accounting of married life with model and TV star Padma Lakshmi, whom he took up with after he came out of hiding. But the bulk of the book deals with the death sentence, the point when "The Satanic Verses" left the realm of literature and was "denied the ordinary life of a novel," instead becoming "something smaller and uglier: an insult." "Joseph Anton" demonstrates Mr. Rushdie's ability as a stylist and storyteller. It also serves as an important moral balance sheet.

It is quite stunning to be reminded of the craven "religious leaders" who openly suborned Mr. Rushdie's murder, to no response from the police or courts. Mr. Rushdie hasn't forgotten, though it seems everyone else has. Iqbal Sacranie, one "leader" given substantial airtime and column inches to adjudicate Mr. Rushdie's fate, said that "death, perhaps, is a bit too easy for him." In 2005, Mr. Sacranie was knighted at the behest of Tony Blair. Then there is Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens), who in 1989 publicly supported the death sentence, saying that Mr. Rushdie "must be killed." In 2010, he was a special guest at comedian Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" in Washington, D.C. In a subtle dig at Mr. Stewart, Mr. Rushdie sighs that the musician, who later denied his words, must have understood that "he lived in an age where nobody had a memory."

Mr. Rushdie's analysis of the pusillanimity of Western journalists and intellectuals is bracing, though one greedily wants more of it. He thunders against the "the cancer of cultural relativism" and the newly minted crime of "Islamophobia," which meant that "to criticize the militant stridency of this religion in its contemporary incarnation was to be a bigot." Mr. Rushdie, a strident atheist, is forthright. "Actually existing Islam had become a poison and Muslims were dying of it and that needed to be said," he writes. "He would say it, if nobody else would."

Since the Iranian regime stopped actively pursuing the fatwa in 1998, Mr. Rushdie has "said it" less frequently, focusing mainly on his career as a novelist. He periodically wades back into the free-speech debate—like signing a statement denouncing "religious totalitarianism" during the Muhammad cartoon affair—but has left the polemical activism to others, like his late friend Christopher Hitchens.

Mr. Rushdie is optimistic about the Arab Spring and those young Muslims who took to the streets because they "wanted jobs and liberty, not religion." But the recent violent attacks on American embassies suggest that the revolution in the Middle East might be more religious than libertarian, and the lightning-quick condemnation last week by the American embassy in Cairo of the "abuse" of free speech by a private citizen who produced an anti-Islam YouTube video indicates that the enemies of liberal democracy have learned well from the Rushdie affair. Defenders of Enlightenment values, regardless of what they think of Mr. Rushdie the novelist, must acknowledge the fact that, when threatened, Salman Rushdie—Joseph Anton—reacted with great bravery and even heroism.

Mr. Moynihan is a contributing editor at Reason and a columnist at Tablet.

A version of this article appeared September 18, 2012, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Life in the Fatwa's Shadow.

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