Joseph Anton: A Memoir (6 page)

So much for the first burden. As for economics, he was rescued by a second welcoming angel, the director of studies, Dr. John Broadbent, an Eng. lit. don so magnificently groovy that he could easily have been (though he was not) one of the models for the supercool and ultra-permissive Dr. Howard Kirk, hero of Malcolm Bradbury’s novel
The History Man
. Dr. Broadbent asked him, when he gloomily said that he was supposed to change subjects because his father insisted on it, “And what do
you
want to do?” Well, he didn’t want to read economics, obviously; he had a history exhibition and he wanted to read history. “Leave it to me,” Dr. Broadbent said, and wrote Anis Rushdie a gentle but fierce letter stating that in the opinion of the college Anis’s son Salman was not qualified to read economics and that if he continued to insist upon doing so it would be better to remove him from the university to make room for someone else. Anis Rushdie never mentioned economics again.

The third burden, too, was soon lifted. The war in the subcontinent ended, and everyone he loved was safe. His university life began.

He did the usual things: made friends, lost his virginity, learned
how to play the mysterious matchstick game featured in
L’année dernière à Marienbad
, played a melancholy game of croquet with E. M. Forster on the day Evelyn Waugh died, slowly understood the meaning of the word “Vietnam,” became less conservative, and was elected to the Footlights, became a minor bulb in that dazzling group of illuminati—Clive James, Rob Buckman, Germaine Greer—and watched Germaine perform her Stripping Nun routine, bumping and grinding her way out of her sisterly habit to reveal a full frogman’s outfit beneath, on the tiny club stage in Petty Cury on the floor below the office of the Chinese Red Guards where Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book was on sale. He also inhaled, saw one friend die of bad acid in the room across the hall, saw another succumb to drug-induced brain damage, was introduced to Captain Beef heart and the Velvet Underground by a third friend who died soon after they graduated; enjoyed miniskirts and see-through blouses; wrote briefly for the student paper
Varsity
until it decided it didn’t need his services; acted in Brecht, Ionesco and Ben Jonson; and crashed Trinity May Ball with the future art critic of the London
Times
to listen to Françoise Hardy sing the anthem of young loveless anguish, “Tous les garçons et les filles.”

In later life he often spoke of the happiness of his Cambridge years, and agreed with himself to forget the hours of howling loneliness when he sat alone in a room and wept, even if King’s Chapel was right outside his window blazing with beauty (this was in his final year, when he was living on the ground floor of S staircase in the college itself, in a room with a view, if ever there was one—chapel, lawn, river, punts—a cliché of gorgeousness). In that final year he had returned from the holidays in low spirits. That was at the end of the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love, when, if you were going to San Francisco, you had to be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. He, unfortunately, had been in London with nobody to love. By chance he had found himself at the very heart of “where,” in the parlance of those days, “it was at,” staying in a rented room above the coolest boutique of all, Granny Takes a Trip, at the World’s End end of the King’s Road. John Lennon’s wife, Cynthia, wore the frocks.

Mick Jagger
was rumored to wear the frocks. Here, too, there was an education to be had. He learned not to say “fab” or “groovy.” At
Granny’s, you said “beautiful” to express mild approval, and, when you wanted to call something beautiful, you said “really nice.” He got used to nodding his head a lot, wisely. In the quest for cool, it helped that he was Indian. “India, man,” people said. “Far out.” “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Yeah.” “The maharishi, man,” people said. “Beautiful.” “Ravi Shankar, man,” he replied. At this point people usually ran out of Indians to talk about and everyone all just went on nodding, beatifically. “Right, right,” everyone said. “Right.”

He learned an even more profound lesson from the girl who ran the shop, an ethereal presence sitting in that fashionably darkened, patchouli-oil-scented space heavy with sitar music, in which, after a time, he became aware of a low purple glow, in which he could make out a few motionless shapes. These were probably clothes, probably for sale. He didn’t like to ask. Granny’s was frightening. But one day he plucked up his courage and went downstairs to introduce himself,
Hi, I’m living upstairs, I’m Salman
. The girl in the shop came close, so that he could see the contempt on her face. Then slowly, fashionably, she shrugged.

“Conversation’s dead, man,” she said.

Up and down the King’s Road walked the most beautiful girls in the world, ridiculously underdressed, laughing, accompanied by peacocking men who were equally ridiculously overdressed, in high-collared frock coats and frilly shirts and flared crushed velvet trousers and fake-snakeskin boots, also laughing. He seemed to be the only one who didn’t know what it was to be happy.

He returned to Cambridge feeling, at the ripe old age of twenty, that life was passing him by. (Others had the final-year blues, too. Even the invariably cheerful Jan Pilkington-Miksa was deeply depressed; though happily he did recover to declare that he had decided to be a film director, and intended to head for the south of France as soon as he was done with Cambridge, “because,” he said airily, “they probably need film directors down there.”) He took refuge in work, just as he had at Rugby.
The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life or of the work
, Yeats said, and since the perfect life was plainly beyond him he had better look to the work instead.

That was the year he found out about the satanic verses. In Part
Two of the History Tripos he was expected to choose three “special subjects” from a wide selection on offer, and concentrate on those. He chose to work on Indian history during the period of the independence struggle against the British, from the 1857 uprising to Independence Day in August 1947; and the extraordinary first century or so of the history of the United States, 1776–1877, from the Declaration of Independence to the end of the post–Civil War period known as Reconstruction; and a third subject, offered, that year, for the first time, titled “Muhammad, the Rise of Islam and the Early Caliphate.” In 1967 few history students at Cambridge were interested in the Prophet of Islam—so few, in fact, that the course’s designated lecturer canceled his proposed lectures and declined to supervise the few students who had chosen the course. This was a way of saying that the subject was no longer available, and another choice should be made. All the other students did indeed abandon the Muhammad paper and go elsewhere. He, however, felt an old stubbornness rise in him. If the subject was offered, it could not be canceled as long as there was a single student who wished to study it; that was the rule. Well, he did want to study it. He was his father’s son, godless, but fascinated by gods and prophets. He was also a product, at least in part, of the deep-rooted Muslim culture of South Asia, the inheritor of the artistic, literary and architectural riches of the Mughals and their predecessors. He was determined to study this subject. All he needed was a historian who was willing to supervise him.

Of the three great historians who were Fellows of King’s at that time, Christopher Morris was the most published, with the most established reputation, historian of Tudor political thought, ecclesiastical history, and the Enlightenment, while John Saltmarsh was one of the grand eccentrics of the university with his wild white hair, mutton-chop side-whiskers, long-john underwear poking out at his trouser cuffs above his sockless, sandaled feet, the unrivaled expert in the history of the college and chapel, and, more broadly, in the local history of the region, often seen tramping the country lanes around Cambridge with a rucksack on his back. Both Morris and Saltmarsh were disciples of Sir John Clapham, the scholar who established economic history as a serious field of study, and both conceded that the third
member of the King’s history trinity, Arthur Hibbert, a medievalist, was the most brilliant of them all, a genius who, according to college legend, had answered the questions he knew least about in his own history finals exams, so that he could complete the answers in the time allotted. Hibbert, it was decided, was the most appropriate person to deal with the matter in hand; and he agreed to do so without a moment’s fuss. “I’m not a specialist in this field,” he said, modestly, “but I know a little about it, so if you will accept me as your supervisor, I am willing to supervise you.”

This offer was gratefully accepted by the stubborn young undergraduate standing in his study sipping a glass of sherry. So came about a strange state of affairs. The special subject about Muhammad, the rise of Islam and the early caliphate had not been offered before; and in that academic year, 1967–68, only this one, obdurate student took it; and the following year, owing to lack of interest, it was not offered again. For that single student, the course was his father’s vision made real. It studied the life of the Prophet and the birth of the religion as events inside history, analytically, judiciously,
properly
. It might have been designed especially for him.

At the beginning of their work together Arthur Hibbert gave him a piece of advice he never forgot. “You must never write history,” Hibbert said, “until you can hear the people speak.” He thought about that for years, and in the end it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t—you
shouldn’t
—tell their story. The way people spoke, in short, clipped phrases, or long, flowing rambles, revealed so much about them: their place of origin, their social class, their temperament, whether calm or angry, warmhearted or cold-blooded, foulmouthed or clean-spoken, polite or rude; and beneath their temperament, their true nature, intellectual or earthy, plainspoken or devious, and, yes, good or bad. If that had been all he learned at Arthur’s feet, it would have been enough. But he gained much more than that. He learned a world. And in that world one of the world’s great religions was being born.

They were nomads who had just begun to settle down. Their cities were new. Mecca was only a few generations old. Yathrib, later renamed Medina, was a group of encampments around an oasis without so much as a serious city wall. They were still uneasy in their new urbanized lives, and the changes made many of them unhappy.

A nomadic society was conservative, full of rules, valuing the well-being of the group more highly than individual liberty, but it was also inclusive. The nomadic world had been a matriarchy. Under the umbrella of its extended families even orphaned children could find protection, and a sense of identity and belonging. All that was changing now. The city was a patriarchy and its preferred family unit was nuclear. The crowd of the disenfranchised grew larger and more restive every day. But Mecca was prosperous, and its ruling elders liked it that way. Inheritance now followed the male line. This, too, the governing families preferred.

At the gates to the city stood temples to three goddesses, Al-Lat, Al-Manat, and Al-Uzza. Winged goddesses, like exalted birds. Or angels. Each time the trading caravans from which the city gained its wealth left the city gates, or came back through them, they paused at one of the temples and made an offering. Or, to use modern language: paid a tax. The wealthiest families in Mecca controlled the temples and much of their wealth came from these “offerings.” The winged goddesses were at the heart of the economy of the new city, of the urban civilization that was coming into being.

In the building known as the Cube or Kaaba in the center of town there were idols of hundreds of gods. One of these statues, by no means the most popular, represented a deity called al-Lah, meaning
the god
, just as al-Lat was
the goddess
. Al-Lah was unusual in that he didn’t specialize, he wasn’t a rain god or a wealth god or a war god or a love god, he was just, vaguely, an everything god. It may be that this failure to specialize explained his relative unpopularity. People making offerings to gods usually did so for specific reasons, the health of a child, the future of a business enterprise, a drought, a quarrel, a romance. They preferred gods who were experts in their field to this nonspecific all-rounder of a deity. However, al-Lah was about to become more popular than any pagan deity had ever been.

The man who would pluck al-Lah from near obscurity and become his Prophet, transforming him into the equal, or at least equivalent, of the Old Testament God
I Am
and the New Testament’s Three-in-One, was Muhammad ibn Abdullah of the Banu Hashim family (which had fallen, in his childhood, upon hard times), an orphan living in his uncle’s house. As a teenager he began to journey with that uncle, Abu Talib, on his trading journeys to Syria. On those journeys he almost certainly encountered his first Christians, adherents of the Nestorian sect, and heard their stories, many of which adapted Old and New Testament stories to fit in with local conditions. According to the Nestorians, for example, Jesus Christ was born in an oasis, under a palm tree. Later, in the Qur’an, the Archangel Gabriel revealed to Muhammad the
sura
known as “Maryam,” Mary, in which Jesus is born under a palm tree, in an oasis.