Champion of Free Speech
In 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against “the author of the Satanic Verses book,” arguing that the book “is against Islam, the Prophet, and the Qur’an.” The Ayatollah continued, “all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I ask all the Muslims to execute them wherever they find them.”
As a result, the Italian translator of Satanic Verses, Ettore Capriolo, was knifed in his house and survived only by good luck. The Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi was murdered in an elevator on the way to his office. Cody’s bookstore in Berkeley was bombed— no casualties, and the store preserved the damaged area as a shrine to free speech. The British Council’s library in Karachi was bombed — also no casualties. The Norwegian publisher of the book, William Nygaard, took a number of bullets in the back, but survived. Employees at Viking Penguin, the book’s publisher, were threatened, along with their families. Penguin put dogs in its mailroom to sniff out explosives. A New York newspaper was totally destroyed by a fire-bomb after publishing a review defending Rushdie’s freedom of speech. A half-dozen stores in the U.K. were bombed.
And Salman Rushdie, the author, spent eleven years (1989 – 2000), voluntarily, in a mild but necessarily invasive governmental incarceration. Khomeini’s successor, Khamenei, never lifted the fatwa, arguing that only Khomeini could do that. However, in 1998, under pressure from the west, Iran’s moderate president Mohammed Khatami, indicated that Iran would not enforce the fatwa. As a result, the U.K., with Rushdie’s eager agreement, eased off on protecting him. In 2000, he moved to the U.S.
But Iran’s backing off on the fatwa didn’t mean that Muslims in general would back off. In 2016, media organizations in Iran raised $600,000 and offered it as a bounty on Rushdie’s head. Individual Muslims took it upon themselves to expand the fatwa beyond Khomeini’s prescription. In 2015, the South African writer Zainub Priya Dala, who said at a writer’s festival in Durban that she admired Rushdie’s writing style, was beaten with a brick and was called “Rushdie’s bitch.” These and other similar occurrences might have been a warning to Rushdie, but he’d grown tired of looking over his shoulder. In 2022, in New York, he barely survived a knife attack by a Muslim fanatic, Hadi Hatar, which cost Rushdie his right eye.
Joseph Anton is a third-person autobiographical account of Rushdie’s life under protection. Its title is the name of Rushdie’s fictional “cover,” used by members of the special branch of the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard, and other branches of government in their official references to him. Rushdie provided the name, linking the first names of his two most favorite writers, Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. The book focuses on Rushdie’s struggle to keep the UK government, security services, airlines, publishers, booksellers, family members, editors, critics, fellow writers, and (mainly) himself focused on the reality of the situation.
The reality was, first, that a leader of one nation can’t be allowed to kill a citizen of a second nation, even if that citizen has committed something that leader considers a crime. In their everyday lives, all citizens of all nations regularly violate the laws of other nations. By not covering their heads, western women violate the laws of Iran. By supporting the Sikh separatist cause, some North American Sikhs have been convicted of treason in India. One of them, Singh Nijjar, a Canadian, was executed by a hit squad sent out by Narinda Modi. The killers escaped back to India, and Canada now wants them extradited for trial.
More reality: in a democracy that upholds rule of law, like the UK, protecting citizens and at the same time ensuring their rights and the rights of those they come in contact with, is a delicate balancing act. When Rushdie agreed to go into protection he became, in effect, a ward of the state. He gave up many of his rights, or subjected them to negotiation and possible denial. He could’ve made it easy for the government by agreeing to incarceration on a military base, but chose not to. It should be noted about this that he had a choice only because he was rich — his books sold well, and Satanic Verses, thanks to Khomeini, made him over $2,000,000 US in royalties in the first year of publication. The government paid and fed his guards, and provided weapons and armoured cars, but Rushdie had to buy or rent the residences — ones approved by the Special Branch.
Also, Rushdie’s right to services that must be offered equally to citizens in good standing could be denied. Seats on airplanes, tables in a café, and services in any retail establishment or by any professional, unless freely offered, had to be negotiated by police or Rushdie himself. For example, airlines refused, some for a time, and some permanently, to sell Rushdie tickets; at first, he traveled (when other countries would have him) on British military aircraft when they happened to be going in his direction. Renters could reject him on the grounds that his presence could cause property damage that would not be covered by insurance. Retailers could refuse him service. Britain’s biggest bookstore chain, W. H. Smith, removed The Satanic Verses from its shelves and sponsored no launches or signings. Book-prize and literary-award committees, and literary conference organizers were free to avoid him, though most didn’t.
Rushdie was hurt when politicians, government officials and ordinary citizens didn’t stand up for him. But he understood that they were afraid, of getting killed, of losing votes, of losing deals for Iranian oil, of endangering citizens who were overseas, or of failing to achieve middle-east peace. Rushdie understood politicians and officials, too, when they wanted him to help ease relations between Iran and the U.K. by writing apologies to the Ayatollah and to Muslims. He wasn’t inclined to do this, of course, as the implications were that the Ayatollah was correct in regarding the book as an insult to Islam.
Rushdie got angry only when people covered for their fears by coming up with irrelevant reasons for not standing up for him — such as the fact that they didn’t like his book, that the book insulted Islam, or that he had deliberately (in order to get attention and sell books) provoked the Ayatollah. This sort of thing started at the ceremonial top. Prince Charles told Martin Amis that Rushdie deserved everything he got, and needed to do something to undo the great harm that he had done. The Prince added in another context that the book was no good. At the real top of government, Margaret Thatcher went on TV, saying she understood the insult to Islam and sympathized with the insulted — though it was not her but her officials that suggested an apology. Also demanding an apology from Rushdie, in the interests of ecumenical fellowship, were the Archbishop of Canterbury and Britain’s chief rabbi.
Finally, UK citizens could even, in their protests and complaints, threaten Rushdie’s life. They were protected by their own right to free speech. There are laws about advocating the murder of a fellow citizen, but enforcing them is tricky. As it usually works out in the courts, you can get away with a death threat so long as you don’t specify that you yourself are planning the murder. Mullahs all over England openly supported the fatwa, and led marches against Rushdie, and advocated that he be killed. Thousands, including some politicians, marched with them. But no one promised, openly, to do the deed.
One famous marcher and advocate for Rushdie’s execution, the born-again Muslim, Cat Stevens, came close to that line. He went on television stating that he was prepared to call in and pay a hit squad if he learned the blasphemer’s whereabouts. That “if” was likely what saved him from police. Stevens also, in the U.S., repeated his call for Rushdie’s murder. Since neither he nor Rushdie were U.S. citizens, no legal action could be taken, but there were protests against Stevens, even burnings of his albums. Later he denied he’d ever advocated the killing of Rushdie. Rushdie ultimately placed him at the head of “the Cat-Stevens-Stupid Party,” which included all those, like Prince Charles, who argued that Rushdie had done wrong and should issue apologies.
In the U.S., and other countries where Rushdie’s books sold in English or in translations, most of these countries being constitutional democracies committed to the right of free speech as essential to good government and public order, officials were free to deny Rushdie visas on the grounds that he was a threat to public safety. They were naturally reluctant to do this to the citizen of a democratic country, and one-by-one they came around, starting with the US and the western European democracies. Not long into the fatwa, they started giving Rushdie visas to come and do book-signings, receive prizes, give lectures, visit friends and, ultimately, take vacations. He was allowed to board most Scandinavian, Canadian, US, French, German and British flights.
But foreign countries were under no obligation to protect him. Rushdie’s handlers hired security companies. Sometimes Rushdie paid, or contributed to, these security expenses. Promoting one book, The Ground beneath her Feet (1999), in the US, cost Rushdie $80,000 for a two-week tour. It was, evidently, well worth it.
Joseph Anton is the story of how Rushdie came to understand, accept, and deal with his real situation — with what his tangible right to free speech actually meant. He proves himself to be a common-sensical, sensitive, and morally upright person with a good sense of humour, but equally obvious is that he was a very stressed one — worried about the safety of his wives (he acquired a second one during the fatwa), children (also a second one acquired), relatives (in Britain, India and Pakistan), publishers and their editors and other employees all around the world, bookstores and their employees, translators, and various British hostages in Iran. He talks about trying to fight off the sense that, as the Cat-Stevens-stupid party argued, he had done something wrong, that he was the cause of all this trouble, that it was incumbent upon him to do something about it.
This — what he calls “the desire to be loved” (but also of course the more admirable desire to help in the saving of lives) — was the biggest threat to his intellectual stamina and, really, to his case nationally and internationally. The desire to be loved inclined him to get depressed and disoriented when he didn’t feel love. In these circumstances, he usually blew up at the wrong people, like the police protecting him, a wife, a landlord, a politician, an editorialist, or his son Zafar.
It also inclined him to “court approval” by explaining his book to show that it had been “seriously undertaken.” He summarizes or quotes from these explanations in Joseph Anton, and they are as painful to read as they must have been to write. It is the job of critics, not authors, to argue for the “importance” of a book, and such arguments are usually unconvincing since they tend to make “importance,” rather than “entertainment value” the primary consideration. T.S. Eliot, said that we must enjoy a literary work before we can understand it; a valid interpretation must be an interpretation of the reader’s feelings while reading. Rushdie, like an English teacher deriving themes from literary works so students can write about those themes, tried to extract “redeeming social merit” from his book.
John le Carré called him out of this: “Are we to believe that those who write literature have a greater right to free speech than those who write pulp? Such elitism does little to help Rushdie’s cause, whatever that cause has now become.”
Rushdie was also inclined, because of his need for love (or support), to argue theoretically — philosophically, politically, and historically — for free speech as a human right. During the time of the fatwa, he was called upon to write articles on this topic for popular magazines. He admits that he is not good at managing “opinions” — as in opinions that generate journalistic articles, but some of those articles are incorporated or summarized in the book.
They do make his point, but not so much through logic as rhetoric. First, his comic analogies are often brilliant. For example, he says about the methodology of post colonialist critics that they, believe that literary modes (realism, satire, fantasy etc) are like arrases behind which writers hide their real meaning. They deduce from this that it is the critic’s job to run the deconstructive sword through these arrases and pierce the racist, sexist, classist, fatist Poloniuses that are hiding behind.
Second, he finds inspirational quotes from the great and good. For example, Nehru said, “It is a dangerous power in the hands of government: the right to determine what shall be read and what shall not.” He cites key documents, like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression and opinion. This right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
And he tells great stories with great efficiency. One of these is about him and Rowan Atkinson (“Mr. Bean”) going to the Home Office to try to stop a Labour government motion that would make it illegal to criticize religion. Atkinson tells the officials that he has just done a TV sketch showing Muslims in prayer, with a voiceover that says, “And the search goes on for the Ayatollah’s contact lens.” How would I know, Atkinson asks the officials, if this would pass muster under the new law. They tell him he would just submit it to the relevant government department, and they’d tell him.
“Why,” Atkinson says to Rushdie, “am I not reassured by that.”
Basically, Rushdie is a satirist, in the tradition of Swift and Voltaire. Satire is real life exaggerated into fantasy, realism turned magic, but still perceptible as realism. He loves American cartoons and everything Monty Python and Mr. Bean. His favourite movie is The Life of Brian. It is quite clear, from his satire, what Rushdie’s opinions are.
No one, least of all Rushdie, expected Iranian politicians to read any defences of free speech. And politicians and bureaucrats who suckered Rushdie into producing apologies must have known that apologies would have no effect. The Iranian government had pragmatic reasons to keep the fatwa alive. It was a means of getting concessions from the U.K., and it distracted Iranians from the Ayatollah’s many failures, starting with his handling of the disastrous Iran-Iraq war (1980 – 1988).
If the politicians and officials cynically tried to take advantage of Rushdie, and some citizens weaseled their way out of supporting him, Rushdie got great support from most people, starting with his family, especially his son, Zafar. Zafar, who grew to maturity under the fatwa and had to put up with jibes (and special attention) at his school, was rock-solid, and understanding of his father’s fears. He was too young to understand Satanic Verses itself, but he knew that its message, if there was one, was not the issue. He asked his father to write a book that he would understand, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) resulted. Zafar helped Rushdie write the book with incisive criticism, and it too became a best-seller. Zafar seems to have been disappointed that his book, like his dad’s, didn’t result in a second fatwa directed at him.
Rushdie’s sister Sameen, living in England, was also adamant in her support. She cursed him for the apology he issued after meeting with British Islamic leaders: “’Have you taken leave of your senses,’ she shouted at him. ‘What do you think you are doing?’” Rushdie’s wife at the time the fatwa was issued, Marianne Wiggens, bailed during its first year, but Rushdie admits that the marriage had been a troubled one from the start. Rushdie’s next wife, Elizabeth West, knew Rushdie’s circumstances and chose to marry him anyway. While Rushdie chafed under police protection, constantly demanding to venture out, West found it comforting, especially after she gave birth to a daughter. Overall, she was supportive.
Outside the UK, there was some political support on the part of governments and some writer’s organizations like PEN International, but of course, politicians are necessarily guided more by expedience than ideals, organizations by the opinions of their majorities. In the first year of the fatwa, the Congress of South African Writers, propelled by Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, invited Rushdie to its yearly meeting, asking him to speak about censorship. South African Muslims objected and the South African government refused to admit Rushdie on the grounds that there would certainly be violence. Gordimer accepted the decision, arguing that sacrificing even one life for free speech was unacceptable. Coatzee disagreed, arguing that dis-inviting Rushdie was “cowardly, provincial, and anti-secular.” The Congress was split down the middle.
Vaclav Havel, just made president of Czechoslovakia in 1990, and on a state visit to Margaret Thatcher, wanted to meet Rushdie and voice his support in Thatcher’s presence. A writer who had just helped to liberate his country from the Soviet Union, Havel knew what freedom of speech meant — how essential it was, how hard it was to fight for it. Thatcher refused, with the weak excuse that the British could not find a safe place for such a meeting. Later, in a meeting of all those under protection by Scotland Yard, Thatcher was asked directly by Elizabeth what was being done to end the fatwa. The prime minister said, “I’m afraid nothing will really change until there’s a change of regime in Tehran.” Elizabeth responded in anger, but Rushdie was polite, admitting that he appreciated Thatcher’s honesty. It was unlikely the fatwa would be lifted, and Thatcher was, after all, protecting him, and negotiating for the fatwa’s end.
John Major, Thatcher’s successor (1990 – 1997), when asked by Rushdie if the U.K. would take his case to the International Court of Justice, said he wouldn’t do it because he didn’t want “to paint Iran into a corner.” Major promised a high-profile campaign to negotiate the end of the fatwa, though, but no such campaign materialized. Tony Blair’s government did initiate such a campaign, in 1997, and got the assurance from Khatami that he would neither support nor hinder the assassination of Rushdie.
Foreign politicians who helped Rushdie include U.S. president Bill Clinton. In 1993, he met Rushdie against the advice of his advisors, saying publicly that he meant no insult to Islam, but wanted to support the struggle for free speech. In 1995, Rushdie, buoyed up by a meeting of French Islamic leaders who disagreed with the fatwa, met with prominent French politicians including president-in-waiting Jacques Chirac, and got from them a promise to push the EU foreign ministers to ask Iran for a guarantee that the fatwa would not be acted upon. The foreign ministers complied, and the initiative received great publicity (Zafar especially got his hopes up). Nothing came of it directly, but it added to the pressure on Iran to do something.
Rushdie more or less expected support from his colleagues and associates — publishers, editors, and all those famous fellow-writers. He was, after all, taking a big —if involuntary — risk on their behalf. His biggest disappointments came when he failed to get their support. Joseph Anton is detailed on how writers reacted to the fatwa. Because of the detail, Rushdie seems like a name-dropper, but one has to remember that he himself was already a member of the writer-elite, because of the massive critical success of Midnight’s Children (1981).
Roughly in order of steadfastness, Rushdie’s supporters in the writer-publisher-editor elite were Christopher Hitchens, Susan Sontag, Martin Amis, Gunter Grass, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, John Irving, Harold Pinter, Antonia Fraser, Margaret Drabble, Edward Said, Ian MacEwen, Fadia Faqir, Toni Morrison, Azis Azmeh, Margaret Atwood, Joseph Heller and Michael Ignatief. Members of the Cat-Stevens-Stupid Party were John Le Carré, Germain Greer, Allan Gottlieb, Rupert Murdoch, Kingsley Amis, John Berger, and Arundhati Roy.
The most unkindly cut of all came from Gottlieb, his editor at Knopf (publisher of Midnight’s Children) and (later) at the New Yorker. It was the most unkindly because Gottlieb didn’t seem aware that he was insulting Rushdie by questioning his motives. At the publication of Midnight’s Children, Gottlieb told Rushdie that he didn’t much like the book; he preferred V. S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers (1981). Naipaul had written “a very great book” that inclined him not to like Muslims (like Rushdie). Naipaul’s book is not a fiction but a work of journalistic investigation,” and it is explicitly critical of Muslims.
After Satanic Verses and the declaration of the fatwa, Gottlieb told Rushdie, “I am always defending you, Salman. I always tell people that if you had known your book was going to kill people, of course you wouldn’t have written it.” Rushdie barely suppressed the impulse to hit Gottlieb. What novelist thinks ahead of time about the reception of a book, other than to think about making the story as good as possible? Obviously, it wasn’t Satanic Verses that was killing people, it was the Ayatollah.
So, what are Rushdie’s “opinions” —about Islam and the defence of free speech? The moral of Joseph Anton can be summed up in his recommendation to “the world of Islam” to “take on board the secularist – humanistic principles on which the modern is based.” Rushdie also wants “liberal opinion” in the west to “stop dithering” and stand up for these principals.
The dithering, he says, is mainly the result of “thin-skinned years of rage-defined identity politics.” Identity politics started in the universities with “the mandarin literary discourse in which all contemporary writing was mere aftermath.” Rushdie says that he has always been identified by the mandarins as post-something — “postcolonial, postmodern, post secular, post intellectual, postliterate.” I take this to mean that he’s postcolonial in that he writes from the perspective of an immigrant, postmodern in that his writing is innovative, and post secular in that he makes fun of religion. With this he acquires two negative designations: post intellectual (stupid) and post literate (incomprehensible). With Satanic Verses he becomes post-fatwa (or po-fa): a pariah for making religious people feel bad.
Rushdie is saddened that identity politics became identified with left-liberalism — his life-long political stance. This, he says, is because, as the South African writer Paul Trewhela argued, the rage behind identity politics was hard for the left to deal with. Rushdie sums it up: “There were many on the left —Germaine Greer, John Berger, John le Carré — for whom the idea that the masses could be wrong was unpalatable.”
But the masses, of Islamics, of post colonialists, and of leftists, were wrong. Satanic Verses is an entirely enjoyable work of fiction, deserving of the many awards it won. It is offensive only to those who like to be offended. And Joseph Anton is a brilliant defence, in story form, of Rushdie’s right to write books.
