Salman Rushdie on Life Under a Fatwa 'I Insist on the Right to Freedom of
Expression'
For over a decade, author Salman Rushdie had to live in hiding from Muslim
extremists intent on assassinating him in accordance with an Iranian fatwa.
SPIEGEL spoke with Rushdie about the trying experience and why he has now
chosen to write about it in his new memoir.
09/25/2012
SPIEGEL: Mr. Rushdie, you named your memoir after the alias you assumed
during the period when you were in hiding.
Rushdie: Yes. The first thing the police officers told me was that I needed
an alias in order to make possible certain practical things: secret houses
had to be rented, and I needed a fake bank account and had to write checks.
Besides, my bodyguards needed a code name to use when they talked about me.
But just try coming up with one. I thought about it for days.
SPIEGEL: And then, of all things, you decided on "Joseph Anton?"
Rushdie: The names of two of my favorite writers: Joseph Conrad and Anton
Chekhov. At first I wanted to use the name of a character I had developed
for a new novel. The character was a little mentally confused, also a
writer, and he was named Ajeeb Mamouli. It seemed fitting. Ajeeb means
"strange," while Mamouli means "normal." So I was Mr. Strange Normal, a
changing contradiction. That's how I felt about myself.
SPIEGEL: And?
Rushdie: Well, my security people didn't like the name. Too hard to
remember, too hard to pronounce, too Asian. Our enemies would eventually be
able to put two and two together, they said. Then I combined the names of
other writers I like: Marcel Beckett, Vladimir Joyce, Franz Sterne. They
were all ridiculous.
SPIEGEL: But your bodyguards liked Joseph Anton?
Rushdie: They loved it. From then on I was Joe, for 10 years. Hey Joe. I
hated it. When I was alone in the house with them, I would always say: Hey
guys, why don't you stop calling me Joe for a bit? No one's here, and we all
know who we are. It was pointless. Then I said to myself: Joe, you must live
until you die.
SPIEGEL: Did Joe die when your personal security was discontinued in 1999?
Rushdie: Yes. I was relieved.
SPIEGEL: And yet now you've resurrected him.
Rushdie: Because I wanted people to understand how strange it is to live in
a world in which you are ordered to give up your name.
SPIEGEL: In a SPIEGEL interview a year-and-a-half ago, you told us that this
period was very damaging to you emotionally and psychologically. Has it
helped you now to write about it?
Rushdie: For a long time, I didn't feel emotionally capable of reliving the
reality of those days. I didn't want to. I thought: I've emerged from this
dark tunnel and have somehow managed to slam the door behind me. Just leave
the door shut! But I always knew that I would eventually write about it. I
kept a journal, almost from day one.
SPIEGEL: Every day?
Rushdie: Almost every day. Sometimes they were just short entries, and
sometimes longer stories. It turned into thousands of pages -- total chaos.
Emory University in Atlanta catalogued them for me. Suddenly I had my life
under the fatwa laid out in front of me, day by day. It was quite a shock.
The entries went from the fall of 1988, when "The Satanic Verses" was
published, to 2003.
SPIEGEL: Did you know that you would eventually write about it? Or was it a
form of self-therapy?
Rushdie: I wrote so that I would be able to remember. The events were so
powerful, and everything happened so quickly, that I knew that I wouldn't be
able to remember what had happened. In those extremely lonely, isolated
days, writing was sometimes the only thing I had left.
SPIEGEL: How were those days?
Rushdie: On the day the fatwa was published, Feb. 14, 1989, I left my house
in London and didn't know that I wouldn't be able to return for years.
Operation Malachite, the name the Special Branch of the London Police gave
to my case, began the next day. They moved me around in the first few
months, to hotels, strange bed and breakfasts run by retired police
officers, apartments of friends and, later, apartments and houses that were
rented at the last minute. I started my days by running into my bodyguards
in the kitchen while I was still in my pajamas.
SPIEGEL: How many bodyguards did you have?
Rushdie: Over all the years, I always had two bodyguards with me around the
clock. There were also two drivers and two armored cars, an old Jaguar and
an even older Land Rover. The second car was always brought along in case
the first one broke down.
SPIEGEL: Is it possible to get used to that?
Rushdie: Yes, of course. But there was a strong voice in my head that
refused to do so. I refused to allow myself to accept it as my life.
Throughout the entire time, I was trying to get it to end.
SPIEGEL: You fought publicly. You defended yourself, and you tried to
convince Iran to remove the fatwa. You wore yourself out and made more and
more enemies as a result of your struggle. Was it the right thing to do?
Rushdie: I refused to allow myself to give up my own picture of the world
and accept the security picture provided by the police instead. When that
happens, you become their creature, and you have to do what they say. I
greatly valued the way I was being protected, I understood how important it
was, and some of the bodyguards became my friends. But my public campaign
and the negotiations with the security personnel were consistently aimed at
regaining a normal life.
SPIEGEL: What could a normal life have looked like, given the circumstances?
Rushdie: Simply the opportunity to meet readers when a book was published,
or to do a book signing. But the bodyguards didn't want that. Their
rationality consisted of pure risk assessments. They were proud of the fact
that they had never lost a "principal," which is what they called the people
they protected. They wanted it to remain that way. They did understand the
basic needs in a person's life, such as being able to meet my wife and my
son, or even going out to eat with friends once in a while. But a wretched
book signing? For my bodyguards, the security effort was out of proportion
with the benefit. Eventually I did manage to convince them to try it. They
had expected thousands of protesters, but none showed up. So it was easier
the next time. There were many such battles. It's what my life consisted of.
SPIEGEL: Do you know now how real and concrete the threat against your life
really was?
Rushdie: When I met my bodyguards the day after the fatwa was announced,
they were still saying that they were going to keep me hidden and protected
at a hotel for a few days, until "the matter had resolved itself." But
nothing resolved. Later on, there were incidents that made the threat
palpable. A man in a cheap hotel in Paddington blew himself up while
attempting to assemble a bomb. It turned out that it was meant for me. Then
there were serious attacks on two of my translators and my Norwegian
publisher. All of these attacks were not coming from amateurs, but
professional killers, presumably hired by the Iranian regime.
SPIEGEL: Were you kept updated on the status of the threat?
Rushdie: The police officers told me when the threat level went up, and once
or twice a year I was taken to the headquarters of British intelligence to
meet with the officers in charge of my case. They were impressive. They were
no-bullshit people who knew what they were talking about.
Part 2: 'I Don't Need Everybody To Love Me Anymore'
SPIEGEL: In the book, however, you also write that some senior police
officials were guarded toward you.
Rushdie: There was that attitude. That I wasn't the sort of person who they
felt deserved to be protected. The minister for Northern Ireland? Okay, we
get that. But I wasn't like the others, those who deserved protection
because they had done something for the country. I was someone who received
protection because he had made trouble. In their view, it was my own fault
that the Muslims were after me. Some members of the police, not all of them,
didn't understand how anyone could be willing to cause such a fuss for such
an far-off issue. At least if my book had been about England ...
SPIEGEL: The criticism wasn't just coming from the police and Muslims, but
increasingly from colleagues and intellectuals. Perhaps your sharpest
critic, John le Carré, accused you of having attacked a known enemy, one
that reacted as was to be expected, to which you cried "foul."
Rushdie: I think he would probably regret having said these things, because
it is a way of saying all intellectuals who have ever stood up against
tyrants deserved what they get. García Lorca knew how brutal Franco was.
Osip Mandelstam knew what to expect from Stalin. Should they just have kept
their mouth shut? Raising their voices against known enemies is precisely
what writers have done honorably throughout the history of literature. For
le Carré to say that's their own stupid fault is naïve at best. It
dishonored the history of literature.
SPIEGEL: But perhaps attacking a religion isn't the same thing as
criticizing a dictatorship.
Rushdie: I insist on the right to freedom of expression, even when it comes
to religions.
SPIEGEL: So for some you became a "free-speech martyr," as John Updike once
put it, while for others you were a troublemaker who had unnecessarily
offended millions of Muslims. This public pressure came on top of the threat
against you. Is it possible to dismiss something like that?
Rushdie: No. But Günter Grass gave me a valuable tip. He has a similar
problem with his very public persona. At some point, he said, he saw himself
as two people. There was Günter, who he knew, and who his friends and his
family knew. And then there was Grass, who went out into the world and made
a noise. He once said to me: Sometimes I have the feeling that I can send
Grass out into the world to make a noise, while Günter can stay quietly and
peacefully at home.
SPIEGEL: So in your case there was Joe, the man your bodyguards were
protecting. Then there was Joseph Anton, who rented houses and signed
checks. And then there was Rushdie, the troublemaker, and Salman was the
writer who sat alone in his hiding place. It's enough to drive a person
crazy.
Rushdie: It was indeed crazy. There was a huge gulf between public
perception and my own private truth. I believe that the more prominent you
are, the bigger the divide becomes. For instance, I'm sure that Madonna
doesn't think of herself as the person that she is in the newspapers. I once
met her and, well, quite honestly, she was pretty conventional. She talked
about property prices. The only time I ever met her -- and the only thing
she discussed was real estate prices in the Marble Arch area of London.
SPIEGEL: When you're attacked and shielded like that, do you create your own
reality? And you do take yourself too seriously?
Rushdie: Yes. There is a danger of becoming solipsistic. That's why I tried
to break out of the security bubble in which I was caught. But I wasn't
allowed to do so in England, which is why America became so important for
me. There I was allowed to make my own decisions about how I wished to live,
unlike in England, where a security net was thrown over me. And gradually I
managed to burst the bubble around me. When I was writing "The Ground
Beneath Her Feet" in 1998, I was able to live in a house on Long Island for
almost three months, without policemen around me. Suddenly I was able to
drive my own car. We could decide and go out for dinner. I was overjoyed.
SPIEGEL: Were there times of real depression before that?
Rushdie: Yes. I was in poor shape at times. And I know this even more now
because as I read through those journals for the book, I can see at times
the person who's writing this isn't doing very well at the moment. I was
very unbalanced in the first two to two-and-a-half years. There were also
periodic attacks of depression later on.
SPIEGEL: In the memoir, you write in the third and not the first person.
It's as if you wanted to distance yourself from the character you're
describing.
Rushdie: I don't want to distance myself from myself. I'm not that crazy. At
first I tried to write it in the first person, but I couldn't find the
voice. It sounded narcissistic or whiney. So I stopped working on the book.
I wasn't enjoying it. At some point I hit upon an idea: What if I told the
story as if it hadn't happened to me, but to someone else? If I would lift
my character to the level of the other characters and describe it a little
more objectively and from various perspectives. Suddenly I knew how I had to
write the book.
SPIEGEL: It makes the descriptions less emotional.
Rushdie: But the story has enough force. Here you have a plot that really
doesn't require exaggeration. You don't want to overwrite it. Otherwise it
would have become an opera.
SPIEGEL: Was it also part of your claim to objectivity that you had certain
characters, especially your ex-wives, say pretty ugly things about you?
Rushdie: Well, yes. The only way of writing a book like this is to drop your
guard. It has to be undefended. Of course there are behaviors of mine,
aspects of my personality, that I'm very critical of. But they do occur. The
truth is that we writers are constantly examining ourselves. The profession
entails repeatedly staring at yourself. I think that's the reason why I
never felt the need for psychiatric help throughout the entire time, even
though I wasn't doing well. Writing is an internal investigation of the
soul.
SPIEGEL: In the book you have your third wife, Elizabeth West, say that you
are a selfish person who goes through life destroying the lives of others.
She experienced most of the fatwa period with you, until you left her for
the Indian model Padma Lakshmi. Could there have been some truth to her
assessment?
Rushdie: I didn't see it that way. But I had to allow her view to be
expressed. Otherwise the book would just have been polemical and
self-righteous. But I want things to be three-dimensional, the way they are
in a novel. I want to show the world that I am indeed capable of depicting
myself.
SPIEGEL: You write in your memoir that the life of a writer is like a
Faustian pact in reverse: You want to attain immortality, and so you pay the
price of having a lousy life. Your life was difficult at times, but you have
in fact become the world's most famous living writer.
Rushdie: That wasn't satisfying because it felt like it was for the wrong
reasons. I wasn't famous for the content of my work, but for the scandal
around it. But scandal doesn't guarantee you immortality. So I don't feel
very comfortable with this fame. The only good thing is when I call a
politician today to ask for help for a fellow writer who is being
threatened, I usually get the politician on the line. Other writers probably
wouldn't succeed.
SPIEGEL: Would you write "The Satanic Verses" in exactly the same way today?
Rushdie: Yes. Fortunately I don't have to because I already did it.
SPIEGEL: You wouldn't leave out the controversial dream passages about the
Prophet?
Rushdie: Of course not. I think they are among the best bits of the book
actually. I really like those passages.
SPIEGEL: Would it really have made the novel worse if you hadn't named the
whores in the brothel after the wives of the Prophet Mohammed?
Rushdie: Yes. There is a reason for doing it. It has to do with attitudes
toward women at the time. There were the wives of the Prophet. They were
very famous at the time, but no other men could see them, because they were
locked away in the Prophet's harem. There were in fact brothels in which
women assumed the name or even adopted the persona of a wife of the Prophet.
This made them accessible as an erotic fantasy. In other words, the purpose
of that chapter isn't to insult the Prophet, but to address the phenomenon
of women with power and the nature of male sexuality and how it is turned on
by what men can't have. These passages are serious, and at no point do they
suggest that the wives of the Prophet behaved inappropriately. It's not that
difficult.
SPIEGEL: One of the chapters in your memoir is titled "The Trap of Wanting
to be Loved." Is that your problem?
Rushdie: I got over that now. At the time, I used to think if I only had the
opportunity to properly explain myself and "The Satanic Verses," people
would understand that there was no reason to be pissed off with me, because
I'm a nice guy. But now I've realized that there will always be people who
are not going to like what I do. And you know? Too bad. I don't need
everybody to love me anymore.
SPIEGEL: Is there still a threat to you today?
Rushdie: No.
SPIEGEL: Last week there were renewed attacks on US facilities in Libya,
Egypt and Yemen, triggered by a film that ridicules the Prophet Muhammad.
Does this seem familiar to you?
Rushdie: We don't exactly know what happened in Libya. The US administration
has said that it's unclear whether the Benghazi attack was related to the
video. It may have been a pre-planned jihadist attack related to the
September 11 anniversary.
SPIEGEL: Are you worried that things will heat up for you again?
Rushdie: You know, I don't want to comment when I don't know what I'm
talking about. I will leave that to Mitt Romney. No, we have to stop
thinking this way. It's a fearful way of thinking. And besides, this is the
story of my life, and I'm not going to let anyone stop me from telling it.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Rushdie, we thank you for this interview.
Interview conducted by Philipp Oehmke
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Received on Tue Sep 25 2012 - 18:10:32 EDT
