Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

by Salman Rushdie

  In spite of the Bush people’s best efforts, I did manage to meet a group of U.S. senators—led by New York’s Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Vermont’s Patrick Leahy—who invited me to lunch at the Capitol and, to my amazement, brought along copies of my books for me to sign. After lunch, at a press conference, Moynihan and others spoke passionately on my behalf. This was a crucial moment. It now became possible to approach parliamentarians and governments all over Europe and the Americas. I was even invited to the British House of Commons to address an all-party group, after which Iran’s Majlis (parliament) instantly demanded that the fatwa be carried out.

  In the summer of 1992 it was made possible for me to go to Denmark as the guest of Danish PEN. Once again, the security was very heavy. There was even a small gunboat in Copenhagen harbor that I was told was “ours.” This resulted in many jokes about the need to guard against an attack by the Iranian fleet in the Baltic, or perhaps by fundamentalist frogmen.

  During the time in Denmark the government kept away from me (though by enabling my visit and providing protection, they had clearly shown a certain level of support). The risk to Denmark’s feta cheese exports to Iran was cited as one reason for the government’s reticence. However, I was given enthusiastic support by politicians of all other parties, notably Anker Jorgensen, the Labor once-and-probably-future prime minister, with whom I gave a joint press conference aboard a boat in the harbor. Jorgensen promised to hold discussions with the ruling party to develop a policy of all-party support for my case. It was less than I’d hoped for, but it was a step on the road.

  I made a brief visit to Spain. (I am glossing over the immense difficulties of organization, but believe me, none of these trips was easy.) There I was made an offer of mediation by Gustavo Villapalos, the rector of Madrid’s Complutense University, a man very close to the Spanish government and also extremely well connected in Iran. Soon he reported to me that he had received encouraging signals from persons high in the Iranian regime: it was an excellent time to resolve this matter, he had been told. Iran knew that this case was the biggest single obstacle to its economic strategies. All sorts of distinguished people were letting it be known that they wanted a solution: the names of Khomeini’s widow and surviving elder brother were mentioned. A few weeks later, however, European newspapers quoted Villapalos as having said that I had agreed to rewrite parts of The Satanic Verses. I had said no such thing. Villapalos told me he had been misquoted and asked for a meeting in London. I agreed. Since then I have not heard from him.

  A breakthrough came in late summer, in Norway. Once again my hosts were the international writers’ organization, PEN, and my courageous publishers, Aschehoug. Once again, the media and people of the country showed me fantastic warmth and support. And this time I had meetings with the ministers for culture and education, received a message of friendship from the prime minister, Gro Harlem Brundtland, and elicited firm promises of government support at the United Nations and in other international forums as well as in bilateral contacts between Norway and Iran.

  The Nordic countries, with their traditionally strong concern for human-rights issues, were beginning to come aboard. In October I was invited to address a Nordic Council conference in Helsinki: an opportunity to push for a joint Nordic initiative. And indeed the Nordic Council did make a strong resolution of support, and many delegates to the conference undertook to bring the matter back to their own parliaments and governments.

  There was one snag, however. The British ambassador, invited by the Nordic Council to the session I was to address, refused to come. I was told by the organizers that they had been shocked by the rudeness of his refusal.

  Back home, I was abruptly informed by a chief superintendent who was clearly very embarrassed by what she was saying that my protection would shortly end, even though there was no reason to believe that things were any safer. “Many people live in danger of their lives in Britain,” I was told, “and some of them die, you know.” However, soon after Article 19 took the matter up with Number 10, this policy was reversed, and the defense campaign received a letter from the prime minister’s office assuring us unequivocally that the protection would continue as long as the threat did.

  I am—to say it once again—very grateful for the protection. But I also know that it will take a bigger push to force Iran to change its policy, and the purpose of my visits abroad was to try and create the force for that push.

  On October 25, 1992, I went to the German capital, Bonn. Germany is Iran’s number-one trading partner. I had been led to believe I would get nowhere. What happened in Germany felt, therefore, like a small miracle.

  My visit was arranged by a small miracle of a woman, an SPD member of the Bundestag called Thea Bock. Her English was as rotten as my German, and even though we often had to speak in sign language we got along famously. By a mixture of cajoling, strong-arm tactics, and sheer trickery, and with the help of other members, notably Norbert Gansel, she managed to arrange meetings for me with most of the people at the heart of the German state—the very powerful and popular speaker of the Bundestag, Rita Süssmuth; high-ranking officials in the Foreign Ministry; the leading members of the foreign affairs committee; and the leader of the SPD himself, Bjorn Engholm, who astonished me by standing next to me on TV and calling me his “brother in spirit.” He committed the SPD to total support for my cause and since then has worked hard on my behalf. In short, I was promised support from Germany by people at the very highest levels of the State. Since then that support has been made concrete. “We will protect Mr. Rushdie,” the German government has announced. The Bundestag has passed an all-party resolution stating that Germany will hold Iran legally responsible for my safety and that, should any injury befall me, Iran will face economic and political consequences. (The Swedish and Canadian parliaments are presently considering similar resolutions.) Also, the enormous German-Iranian cultural agreement has been put on hold, and Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel has stated that it will not be taken off the shelf until the cancellation of the fatwa.

  Germany’s willingness to use economic and cultural leverage on my behalf rattled Iran into its latest restatement of the fatwa and renewal of bounty offers. This was foolish; it only strengthened the resolve of a growing number of sympathetic governments to take up the case. After Germany came Sweden, where the government and Swedish PEN jointly awarded me the Kurt Tucholsky Prize, traditionally given to writers suffering human-rights abuses. Sweden’s deputy prime minister Bengt Westerberg made a passionate speech to the press promising the government’s complete and vigorous support. The leader of Sweden’s Social Democratic Party, Ingvar Carlsson, promised to work with other European socialist parties on my behalf. I know that he has now taken up this case with the British Labour Party, urging it to do more. At the moment of writing, neither I nor Article 19 has been contacted by the Labour Party leadership to tell us of their position and intentions. I invite John Smith or Jack Cunningham to rectify this as soon as possible.

  A diplomat more experienced in the ways of the Middle East than most *19 said to me: “The secret of diplomacy is to be standing in the station when the train arrives. If you aren’t in the station, don’t complain if you miss the train. The trouble, of course, is that the train can arrive at many stations, so make sure you’re standing at all of them.”

  In November, Iran’s prosecutor general, Morteza Moqtadaei, said that all Muslims were obliged to kill me, thus revealing the falsehood of Iran’s claim that the fatwa had nothing to do with the Iranian government. Ayatollah Sanei, the man behind the bounty, said that volunteer hit-squads were to be dispatched. Then, at the beginning of December, I made it across the Atlantic again: to Canada, as the guest of Canadian PEN. (Was any writer ever given more help by his colleagues? If I ever get out of this, it will be my life’s work to try and give back just a little of the aid, and passion, and affection I’ve been given.) At a PEN benefit night in Toronto, so many writers spoke on my behalf that somebody whispered
to me, “This is one hell of a bar mitzvah you’re getting”; and it was. The premier of Ontario, Bob Rae, bounded onstage and embraced me. He thus became the first head of any government to stand with me in public. (Backstage, before the event, he actually kissed me for a photographer. Naturally, I kissed him back.)

  The next day in Ottawa I met, among others, Canada’s secretary of state for external affairs, Barbara MacDougall, and the leader of the opposition, Jean Chrétien. I also gave testimony to the parliamentary sub-committee on human rights. The effect of all this was electrifying. Within forty-eight hours, resolutions demanding that the Canadian government take this issue to the United Nations and pursue it in many other places such as the International Court of Justice had been rushed through the Canadian parliament with all-party support and the government had agreed to act upon them.

  Another train in another station. Since then I’ve had a series of very friendly meetings in Dublin, with the new foreign minister, Dick Spring, and two other cabinet members, and, at her invitation, with President Mary Robinson at Phoenix Park. Next stop, perhaps, President Clinton?

  I always knew this would be a long struggle; but at least, now, there’s movement. In Norway, a projected oil deal with Iran is being blocked by politicians sympathetic to the campaign against the fatwa; in Canada, a $1 billion line of credit that Iran had been promised has also been blocked.

  I say wherever I go that the struggle isn’t just about me. It isn’t even primarily about me. The great issues here are freedom of expression, and national sovereignty too. Also, the case of The Satanic Verses is just the best-known of all the cases of writers, intellectuals, progressives, and dissidents being jailed, banned, and murdered throughout the Muslim world. Iran’s artists and intellectuals know this, which is why they have so courageously made statements giving me unqualified support. Leading Muslim intellectuals—the poet Adonis, the novelist Tahar Ben Jalloun, and scores of others—have called for the end of Iran’s threats, not only because they care about me but because they know that this is their fight, too. To win this fight is to win one skirmish in a much greater war. To lose would have unpleasant consequences for me, but it would also be a defeat in that larger conflict.

  As this goes to press there is news that Yasser Arafat has denounced the fatwa as being against Islam; while, here in Britain, even the infamous demagogue Dr. Kalim Siddiqui believes it is time for “both sides to forgive and forget.” After four years of intimidation and violence, there is certainly plenty to forgive. Still, I welcome even this most improbable of olive branches.

  [From an address delivered in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, on the morning of Sunday, February 14, 1993]

  To stand in this house is to be reminded of what is most beautiful about religious faith: its ability to give solace and to inspire, its aspiration to these great and lovely heights, in which strength and delicacy are so perfectly conjoined. In addition, to be asked to speak here on this day, the fourth anniversary of the notorious fatwa of the late Imam Khomeini, is a particular honor. When I was an undergraduate at this college, between 1965 and 1968, the years of flower-power and student power, I would have found the notion of delivering an address in King’s Chapel pretty far-out, as we used to say; and yet, such are the journeys of one’s life that here I stand. I am grateful to the chapel and the college for extending this invitation, which I take as a gesture of solidarity and support, support not merely for one individual but, much more importantly, for the high moral principles of human rights and human freedoms that the Khomeini edict seeks so brutally to attack. For just as King’s Chapel may be taken as a symbol of what is best about religion, so the fatwa has become a symbol of what is worst.

  It feels all the more appropriate to be speaking here because it was while in my final year of reading history at Cambridge that I came across the story of the so-called satanic verses or temptation of the Prophet Muhammad, and of his rejection of that temptation. That year, I had chosen as one of my special subjects a paper on Muhammad, the rise of Islam, and the caliphate. So few students chose this option that the lectures were canceled. The other students switched to different special subjects. However, I was anxious to continue, and Arthur Hibbert, one of the King’s history dons, agreed to supervise me. So as it happened I was, I think, the only student in Cambridge who took the paper. The next year, I’m told, it was not offered again. This is the kind of thing that almost leads one to believe in the workings of a hidden hand.

  The story of the “satanic verses” can be found, among other places, in the canonical writings of the classical writer al-Tabari. He tells us that on one occasion the Prophet was given verses which seemed to accept the divinity of the three most popular pagan goddesses of Mecca, thus compromising Islam’s rigid monotheism. Later he rejected these verses as being a trick of the devil—saying that Satan had appeared to him in the guise of the Archangel Gabriel and spoken “satanic verses.”

  Historians have long speculated about this incident, wondering if perhaps the nascent religion had been offered a sort of deal by the pagan authorities of the city, which was flirted with and then refused. I felt the story humanized the Prophet, and therefore made him more accessible, more easily comprehensible to a modern reader, for whom the presence of doubt in a human mind, and human imperfections in a great man’s personality, can only make that mind, that personality, more attractive. Indeed, according to the traditions of the Prophet, even the Archangel Gabriel was understanding about the incident, assuring him that such things had befallen all the prophets, and that he need not worry about what had happened. It seems that the Archangel Gabriel, and the God in whose name he spoke, was rather more tolerant than some of those who presently affect to speak in the name of God.

  Khomeini’s fatwa itself may be seen as a set of modern satanic verses. In the fatwa, once again, evil takes on the guise of virtue; and the faithful are deceived.

  It’s important to remember what the fatwa is. One cannot properly call it a sentence, since it far exceeds its author’s jurisdiction; since it contravenes fundamental principles of Islamic law; and since it was issued without the faintest pretense of any legal process. (Even Stalin thought it necessary to hold show trials!) It is, in fact, a straightforward terrorist threat, and in the West it has already had very harmful effects. There is much evidence that writers and publishers have become nervous of publishing any material about Islam except of the most reverential and anodyne sort. There are instances of contracts for books being canceled, of texts being rewritten. Even so independent an artist as the filmmaker Spike Lee felt the need to submit to Islamic authorities the script of his film about Malcolm X, who was for a time a member of the Nation of Islam and performed the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca. And to this day, almost one year after the paperback of The Satanic Verses was published (by a specially constituted consortium) in the United States, and imported into Britain, no British publisher has had the nerve to take on distribution of the softcover edition, even though it has been in the bookstores for months without causing the tiniest frisson.

  In the East, however, the fatwa’s implications are far more sinister. “You must defend Rushdie,” an Iranian writer told a British scholar recently. “In defending Rushdie you are defending us.” In January, in Turkey, an Iranian-trained hit-squad assassinated the secular journalist Ugur Mumçu. Last year, in Egypt, fundamentalist assassins killed Farag Fouda, one of the country’s leading secular thinkers. Today, in Iran, many of the brave writers and intellectuals who defended me are being threatened with death-squads.

  Last summer, I was able to participate in a literary seminar staged in a Cambridge college and attended by scholars and writers from all over the world, including many Muslims. I was touched by the friendship and enthusiasm with which the Muslim delegates greeted me. A distinguished Saudi journalist took my arm and said, “I want to embrace you because you, Mr. Rushdie, are a free man.” He was fully aware of the ironies of what he was saying. He meant that freedom of spe
ech, freedom of the imagination, is that freedom which gives meaning to all the others. He could walk the streets, get his work published, lead an ordinary life, and did not feel free, because there was so much he could not say, so much he hardly dared to think. I was protected by the Special Branch; he had to watch out for the Thought Police.

  Today, as Professor Fred Halliday says in this week’s New Statesman & Society, “the battle for freedom of expression, and for political and gender rights, is being fought out not in the senior common rooms and dinner tables of Europe, but in the Islamic world.” In his essay, he gives some instances of the way in which the case of The Satanic Verses is being used as a symbol by the oppressed voices of the Muslim world. One of the many Iranian exile radio stations, he tells us, has even named itself Voice of the Satanic Verses.

  The Satanic Verses is a committedly secular text that deals in part with the material of religious faith. For the religious fundamentalist, especially, at present, the Islamic fundamentalist, the adjective “secular” is the dirtiest of dirty words. But here’s a strange paradox: in my country of origin, India, it was the secular ideal of Nehru and Gandhi that protected the nation’s large Muslim minority, and it is the decay of that ideal that leads directly to the bloody sectarian confrontations which the subcontinent is now witnessing, confrontations that were long foretold and could have been avoided had not so many politicians chosen to fan the flames of religious hatred. Indian Muslims have always known the importance of secularism; it is from that experience that my own secularism springs. In the past four years, my commitment to that ideal, and to the ancillary principles of pluralism, skepticism, and tolerance, has been doubled and redoubled.