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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

Date: Thu Apr 10, 2003 10:53 pm
Subject: A Beacon of Sanity: Salman Rushdie

http://www.sulekha.com/chpost.asp...ilosophy&show=0&cid=53935

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14220

A Beacon of Sanity: Salman Rushdie

Given the world's current conflagrations, anyone who has written
about the dangers of Muslim fundamentalism now seems prescient.
Still, there's something eerily prophetic in some of the newspaper
columns reprinted in Salman Rushdie's new collection of
nonfiction, "Step Across This Line."

As a man with terrifyingly acute firsthand experience of what
Christopher Hitchens, to whom this book is dedicated, calls "Islamo-
fascism," Rushdie has spent years fighting through the issues
currently being hashed out on a thousand Op-Ed pages. Though this
scattershot book ranges, with varying degrees of success, over
subjects including "The Wizard of Oz," Gandhi and Elián González, the
most penetrating pieces here deal with Rushdie's refreshingly
ecumenical abhorrence of religious fundamentalism.

Religious and nationalist obsession have always informed Rushdie's
most brilliant novels – "Midnight's Children," a sweeping, careening
story of India's birth; "Shame," an allegory of Pakistan's corrupt
elite; "The Moor's Last Sigh," with its indictment of Hindu
chauvinism; and, of course, "The Satanic Verses," a hallucinatory
riff on the birth of Islam. It's in this frightening ferment that he
does his best work.

During what he calls his "plague years," after the Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini issued his 1989 fatwa, Rushdie could no longer go to India
(nor freely travel anywhere else); cut off from the wellspring of his
imagination, the incandescence of his art began to dim. Though he has
professed annoyance at the colonial idea that writers from the Third
World can't tackle the whole world, Rushdie just doesn't have the
same visceral feel for America, his recent subject, as he does for
the subcontinent – especially for the multifarious megalopolis of
Bombay.

Take the January 2000 piece in which he declares that "the defining
struggle of the new age would be between Terrorism and Security" and
warns, "It is also alarming to think that the real battles of the new
century may be fought in secret, between adversaries accountable to
few of us, the one claiming to act on our behalf, the other hoping to
scare us into submission."

Then there's the 1993 New Yorker essay in which he writes, "[T]here
is a great struggling in progress for the soul of the Muslim world
and, as the fundamentalists grow in power and ruthlessness, those
courageous men and women who are willing to engage them in a battle
of ideas and of moral values are rapidly becoming as important for us
to know about, to understand, and to support as once the dissident
voices of the old Soviet Union used to be." This was written before
the Taliban rose with American help. Imagine if people had paid
attention to it.

This is crucial at a time when the left – whatever that is – is mired
in tired reflexive reactions and defensiveness. On one side there are
people like Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali and Susan Sontag, who have spent
so long admirably championing the powerless against the depredations
of the powerful that they seem intellectually unable to adapt to a
situation in which imperial forces might be in the right. Set against
them are the new liberal patriots like Todd Gitlin, Christopher
Hitchens and Michael Walzer who, bracing and brilliant as they were
after Sept. 11, tend to write as if anyone who feels alienated from
contemporary America is morally suspect.

Rushdie the cosmopolitan is a defender of an idea even less
fashionable, at the moment, than moral relativism – secular humanism.
It's a cause some of our best thinkers, such as Hitchens and Martin
Amis, are increasingly taking up. Though hardly politically
expedient, the fight against religion's tyranny makes intellectual
and emotional sense right now. It could even replace the struggle
against first-world imperialism as the organizing principle of
radical thought, encompassing as it does the fight against the
lunatics of al-Qaida, the butchers in Gujarat, the hard-line settlers
in the West Bank, the rapists in the Catholic Church, the bombers of
abortion clinics and, of course, our own attorney general.

Amis said it best in a June essay for the Guardian: "Since it is no
longer permissible to disparage any single faith or creed, let us
start disparaging all of them. To be clear: an ideology is a belief
system with an inadequate basis in reality; a religion is a belief
system with no basis in reality whatever. Religious belief is without
reason and without dignity, and its record is near-universally
dreadful." Rushdie echoes this sentiment – as he writes in an enraged
reaction to the killings in Gujarat, "[I]n India, as elsewhere in our
darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood ... What
happened in India, happened in God's name. The problem's name is
God."

But elsewhere Rushdie goes beyond mere denunciation, turning atheism
into a celebration rather than a rejection. In a delightful 1997
letter to the newly born 6 billionth person in the world, he
encourages us to join Voltaire's battle, "the revolution in which
each of us could play our small, six-billionth part: once and for all
we could refuse to allow priests, and the fictions on whose behalf
they claim to speak, to be the policemen of our liberties and
behavior." He ends hopefully, "Imagine there's no heaven, my dear Six
Billionth, and at once the sky's the limit."

http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/burning/sr-death.html

http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/burning/africa-bombings.html

http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/burning/mailer-rushdie.html

Dear Salman Rushdie,

I have thought of you often over the last few years. Many of us begin
writing with the inner temerity that if we keep searching for the
most dangerous of our voices, why then, sooner or later we will
outrage something fundamental in the world. and our lives will be in
danger. That is what I thought when I started out, and so have many
others, but you, however, are the only one of us who gave proof that
this intimation was not ungrounded. Now you live what must me a
living prison of contained paranoia, and the toughening of the will
is imperative, no matter the cost to the poetry in yourself. It is no
happy position for a serious and talented writer to become a living
martyr. One does not need that. It is hard enough to write at one's
best without wearing a hundred pounds on one's back each day, but
such is your condition, and if I were a man who believed that prayer
was productive of results, I might wish to send some sort of vigor
and encouragement to you, for if you can transcend this situation,
more difficult than any of us have known, if you can come up with a
major piece of literary work, then you will rejuvenate all of us, and
literature, to that degree, will flower.

So, my best to you, old man, wherever you are ensconced, and may the
muses embrace you.

Cheers,

Norman Mailer

http://www.januarymagazine.com/profiles/rushdie2002.html

Rushdie's most recent book, Step Across This Line -- the author's
collected non-fiction from 1992 to 2002 -- is, in part, his attempt
to stop people from asking about his years in hiding and living under
the fatwa and to just let him -- please -- get on with his life. He
says that "one of the reasons for trying to put into this book that
material which deals with those years is that I thought it would sort
of draw a line under it. Because, really, the answers to most of the
stuff that people have asked me about those years are here, you know?
So, in a way, people don't have to ask me anymore. They just have to
read the book."
The author maintains that, these days, he's living a normal
life. "Because the thing that I most keenly felt was the loss of
ordinary life. And so it's very good to have it back. Go stand in
line in the supermarket. It's just back to normal."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, back to normal looks slightly different for
Salman Rushdie than it does for many people. His highly publicized
move to New York -- from London, where he'd made his home for 30
years -- in 2000 was eclipsed only by his relationship with Padma
Lakshmi, a 20-something international model, originally from southern
India.

But don't write her off because she's beautiful: Lakshmi speaks four
languages, is the author of a bestselling cookbook and the host of a
FoodTV network cooking show, Padma's Passport. "To Indian people,"
Lakshmi has been quoted as saying of Rushdie, "he's as large as
Faulkner or Hemingway, and when I think about that, I wonder when
he's going to figure out that I'm just a silly girl."
The move -- and the relationship -- earned Rushdie fire of an
entirely new sort: many critics spared no vitriol in calling the
author's 2001 novel Fury largely autobiographical, a charge the
author finds irritating. "Because what nobody wants to hear is the
actual truth. And the truth is: Well, yeah, sorta, it's a bit. I've
used some things from my life and then I've made some other stuff up
and I've changed things round and joined them together in odd ways
and that becomes fiction. But nobody wants to know that."

Rushdie's most recent book, Step Across This Line

Roughly one-fourth of these essays deals with the response of the
media, various governments and Rushdie himself to what he calls
the "unfunny Valentine" he received on February 14, 1989, from the
Ayatollah Khomeini: the fatwa calling for his death. Everyone, it
seems, had a script for Rushdie to follow, though none of these
fantasies resembled the rather simple one the author fancied (and
which seems to have been realized), which is that his problems
gradually disappear and he be allowed to resume a more or less normal
writerly life. To paraphrase an idea that appears in several of these
essays, the problem is that frontiers cross us rather than the other
way around: we are going about our business when our country is
divided (as happened to Rushdie's native India in 1947) or we
encounter a shocking work of art or our enemies declare they will
kill us. Many respond to unnerving changes by embracing religion,
but, says Rushdie, "ancient wisdoms are modern nonsenses"; in place
of sectarian fervor, he recommends intellectual freedom, a simple
concept yet a rigorous practice, as this book proves. These essays
range over literature, politics and religion, as well as Rushdie's
two private passions, rock music and soccer. They are united by a
play of sparkling intelligence seasoned with sly wit, qualities that
would serve the world at any time in its long, flawed history. After
all, says Rushdie, the story he loved first and still loves best,
perhaps the story of all humanity, is The Wizard of Oz, a fable that
tells us the grown-up world doesn't really work, that adults can be
good people and still be bad wizards.

From Library Journal

Thanks to some Iranian ayatollahs, Rushdie is probably the most
famous writer still alive. Although he remains under partial
protection, he has continued to write since 1989, producing several
novels and many articles. This first collection of short nonfiction
includes material about his life under the fatwa ("Messages from the
Plague Years") but ranges from discussions of The Wizard of Oz and
rock music to his February 2002 lectures on human values at Yale. The
title is well chosen; Rushdie...

http://www.salon.com/06/features/interview2.html

So Salman, what are you reading now?

Rushdie replies:

I've been reading a book by a friend of mine, the novelist Graham
Swift ("Waterland"). He has a new novel coming out called "Lost
Orders" -- it's just come out in England and will be out here in a
couple of months. It's a beautiful little book, about a man who dies
and his four best friends take his ashes to sprinkle into the ocean.
It's just about this outing, these four drinking partners out for a
day in this borrowed or rented car. That's all that happens, but it's
very touching and funny and tells you a lot about what these people
have been to each other, and it also tells you something about the
ritual of death, this last rite of passage. The way in which these
people are ordinary folk who in a strange way rise to the occasion,
and it becomes a real ceremony and they become conscious of the
importance of what they're doing.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3673

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/salmanrushdie/salman.html

===================================================

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/741359.stm

Haidar - A New Rushdie

Islamic students in Cairo say the book blasphemes against Islam

The book that triggered the protests in Cairo, A Banquet of Seaweed,
by the Syrian novelist Haidar Haidar, was first published in Beirut
in 1983. But it was released in Egypt only in November by an
institution affiliated with the Culture Ministry.

Ministry officials say it's one of the best Arabic novels of the 20th
century.

They said the ministry reprinted it as part of a project to publish
celebrated Arabic novels.

'Arab hope'

The novel's plot centers on two leftist Iraqi intellectuals who fled
the injustice of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s.

The Syrian writer treats the Koran as rubbish

Al Shaab newspaper

The characters blame political oppression in the Arab world on
dictatorships and conservative movements.

Haidar himself said that the book tried "to explore the atmosphere of
Arab hope and the subsequent retreat of this hope".

But the Islamists in Egypt have accused the book of blasphemy.

'New Rushdie'

Al Shaab newspaper has led a virulent campaign against it, publishing
selected extracts.

Riot police acted to defend the Culture Ministry's judgment

These include one in which God is described as a failed artist.

One article accused Haidar of "insulting God and the Prophet ... The
Syrian writer treats the Koran as rubbish and the Prophet Mohammed as
a polygamist who married 20 times".

The Islamists have denounced Haidar as a new "Salman Rushdie", the
British writer who was forced into hiding in the 1990s after Iran's
religious leaders adopted a fatwa, or decree, calling for his death.

Monopoly

Fighting back, Haidar has accused his critics of taking the extracts
out of context, and said the real message of his novel was totally
different.

He quoted a paragraph in which one of his characters states: "Islam
was the fortress of the old Arab world. We need Mohammed today in the
20th century."

An attempt to halt the establishment of a civil society

Book's author

Haidar accused the protesters of "trying to impose their monopoly of
interpreting Islam the way they like".

"By doing this," he said, "they want to impose a totalitarian
cultural system after they lost their political battle".

Committee

He declared that the protest against him and the Egyptian Ministry of
Culture was "an attempt to halt the establishment of a civil society
that will confront backwardness, reactionism and obscurantism".

On Friday, as the protest gathered steam, the ministry appointed a
committee to assess the complaints against the book and promised to
publish the results, but that did not satisfy the protesters.

The Egyptian authorities have banned many books and films in recent
years because Islamists complained that they contained anti-Islamic
material.

http://www.umich.edu/pres/rsc/plays/midnightschildren/aboutrushdie.htm
l

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14220

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