Letters from London (42 page)

Torpor, active indifference; but there has also been worse. “Quite
often,” Rushdie told me, “the place where there has been the most hostility has been in my own country” Of course, since freedom of expression is the central issue in the Rushdie case, it might seem artless to complain about people saying and writing what they believe. Even so, you might think there would, or should, be a level of decorum when sounding off about someone who is incarcerated under threat of death. You might think so for the very good reason that in a parallel case there was. Terry Waite, routinely described as “the Archbishop of Canterbury’s special envoy,” though later evidence suggests that the Archbishop may have had doubts about letting this loose cannon roll around the eastern Mediterranean, was held captive in Beirut for five years. While he was away, awkward questions about what exactly he was doing there, about how closely he was involved with Oliver North, whose patsy he might be, about whether vanity, self-delusion, and a love of headlines were part of his makeup, and whether all these factors made him partly complicit in his own fate, were, quite rightly, avoided. When he came out, they were, cautiously, addressed.

No such decorum has applied with Rushdie, whose motives were questioned and whose supposed character was imaginatively trashed even before the
fatwa
had been analyzed. Here are some of the ranker items: Roald Dahl called his fellow writer a “dangerous opportunist.” Former Tory Party Chairman Norman Tebbit dubbed him “an outstanding villain” before musing on the inadequacy of that description: “Is villain a strong enough word for one who has insulted the country that protects him and betrayed and reviled those to whom he owes his wealth, his culture, his religion and now his very life? Happily, villains such as Rushdie are rare. What a pity it is our country in which he chose to live.” Germaine Greer oddly denounced him as “a megalomaniac, an Englishman with dark skin” (are these two conditions related, or did she mean melanomic?) before observing, “Jail is a good place for writers; they write.” (But what about execution? They don’t write much after that.) The plain-man tendency was exemplified by the tabloid thinker Richard Littlejohn: “I couldn’t care less if the Iranians top Salmoon Rushdie tomorrow…. But I’d rather
they didn’t do it here.” The posh, windy, high-table version of this same line came from the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who asserted, after giving the matter four months’ academic reflection, that Rushdie’s “offence is one of manners, not a crime, and the law cannot notice it. That being so, I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit and literature would not suffer. If caught, his correctors might, of course, be found guilty of assault; but they could then plead gross provocation and might merely, if juvenile, be bound over. Our prisons are, after all, overcrowded.”

Still, the most distasteful item in this local
trahison des clercs
came from Marianne Wiggins, Rushdie’s second wife, who had initially gone into hiding with him. She talked expansively to the
Sunday Times
about his character flaws, and explained how wrong we would be to consider him any sort of hero. Even allowing for the bitterness of a soon-to-be-ex-spouse, this seemed especially repugnant. It also had its ironic side for those who had come across Ms. Wiggins in
pre-fatwa
days. I remember, for instance, how she once winsomely declared to me that she wanted, as a writer, to be no more than a mere foothill beside the mighty mountain that was Salman. Alas, when Muhammad came to the mountain the foothill hightailed it over the horizon.

Two years ago, faced with “the absence of any real political enthusiasm here,” Rushdie and his Defence Committee decided to go on the road. Despite the aloofness of British Airways, he traveled to Europe and North America, usually finding access to government ministers easier than in his own country. “Basically, in those two years we did rather better than I’d hoped,” he told me. Germany, being not just the most powerful country in Europe but also the largest trader with Iran, was a key target, and in December 1992 the Bundestag passed an all-party resolution holding the Iranian government legally responsible for Rushdie’s safety. (Whether such a motion would get through the House of Commons as currently constituted is doubtful.) The Nordic countries, traditionally strong on
human rights, offered active support; and in January 1993 the Irish President, Mary Robinson, became the first head of state to meet Rushdie and his committee.

All this high-profile activity shifted the pack ice at home a little. The Foreign Office, being reactive, reacted. Their change of heart after four years wasn’t so much a belated recognition of principle as a pragmatic admission that being supine and smarmy wasn’t getting anywhere with the Iranians. Statements became stronger: Douglas Hogg, No. 2 in the Foreign Office, addressing the United Nations Commission for Human Rights in February 1993, called the
fatwa
“infamous and outrageous,” a visible upping of the adjectives. The Foreign Secretary himself, Douglas Hurd, told the Council of Europe, in Strasbourg, that he remained “greatly concerned at the continuing failure of the Iranian authorities to repudiate the incitement to murder.” This may not sound especially severe, but it made a change from Hurd’s ritual pronouncements of “deep respect” for Islam; and it should not be forgotten that earlier in the affair Hurd, when asked by a journalist what his most unpleasant experience in politics had been, jauntily replied, “Reading
The Satanic Verses?
When Hogg met Rushdie on February 4, 1993, it was the first time since the affair began that the writer had been publicly received at the Foreign Office. In a Commons explanation, Hogg stated, “It was right to demonstrate our support,” while A. Spokesman, that reliable anonymity, pronounced as follows: “You have a policy and you pursue it until you reach a solution. Salman Rushdie is now being more visible and if you ask, ‘Are you angry about that?’ the answer is no. He enjoys the same rights to free speech and travel as everyone else.” This may seem a tortuous, almost Carrollian piece of bureaucratese, but it’s good to have it on record. The Foreign Office is not angry that Mr. Rushdie is more visible. And he has the same travel rights as everyone else. As long as he doesn’t try booking on the nation’s flagship airline.

And then, at last, in May 1993, Rushdie was allowed to meet John Major, who promised him twenty minutes and gave him forty-five. The
Daily Mail
, which tends to articulate the middle area of the
Conservative brain, thought the encounter “astoundingly ill-advised.” Former Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath objected on the ground that Britain was losing “masses of trade” because of “that wretched book;” while Peter Temple-Morris, Tory chairman of the all-party Britain-Iran Parliamentary Group, said, “I think whoever is advising the Prime Minister needs their heads reading.” (Strange that he said “reading” rather than the normal “examining,” but a pertinent lapsus in the present case.) None of these objectors thought it odd, or scandalous, or humiliating, that a law-abiding British citizen, in order to meet a peacetime Prime Minister at the desire of both parties, should have to be smuggled into the House of Commons.

There is no photographic record of Rushdie meeting Major (or meeting Hogg, Hurd, or Clinton). The Defence Committee, aware that the encounter was more symbolic than productive, pushed for one, but without success. This rare shrinkingness of British politicians before the camera is a minor yet interesting aspect of the Rushdie affair. The novelist has in his two years of shuttle diplomacy been photographed with Václav Havel, Klaus Kinkel, Mário Soares, Jack Lang, Jean Chrétien, and most leading Scandinavian politicians. In Britain, only the Labour leader John Smith has so far agreed not to treat Rushdie as an infectious case.

Still, the statements from Hogg and Hurd, plus the meeting with Major—whom Rushdie found “well briefed, sympathetic, and engaged with the issues”—have left Britain in a comparatively less inactive position; indeed, we have practically hauled ourselves into line with the rest of Europe. Whether, as Rushdie suggested after meeting the Prime Minister, the British government is now “leading from the front” remains very much to be seen; one rather imagines the British government preferring to lead from somewhere in the middle on this issue. One other side benefit of John Major’s public gesture of support might be the tacit reinclusion of Rushdie, a handing back of his symbolic passport: one of us, not one of them.

When I asked Rushdie what hopes he has for Year Six, he replied, “That the promises made in Year Five will be fulfilled.” He himself is giving up his traveling campaign—“It can’t go on with me being this
endless ambassador for myself”—and applying himself to fiction. The Defence Committee (and its half-dozen associate bodies in Europe and the States) will keep up the pressure on national governments. The problem, of course, is turning the fine words into effective deeds. As Rushdie observes, strong verbal stances are a good beginning, but “in terms of economic muscle nobody wants to take any action, and unless they do Iran isn’t going to mind The United States talks most emphatically about economic pressure, but they are the country which has most increased their trade with Iran over the last twelve months, despite the embargo.” A nation spouting high principle looks over its shoulder to see its neighbor taking low economic gain. Can the Western alliance afford to apply serious economic pressure? On the other hand, can it afford not to? The Belgian Foreign Minister, Willy Claes, told Rushdie that any continuing desire among Western governments to placate Iran would be “a great historical mistake.”

Over the last five years, we have learned new things about the speed and communicability of international outrage. When the House of Chanel recently apologized to Muslims for the Koran-embroidered bustier worn by Claudia Schiffer in its latest summer collection, the protest had come not from some street march in the Rue de Rivoli but from the Muslim community in Jakarta. The affair of the Satanic Breasts, as it became known in France, could be seen as a comic analogue of the Rushdie case were it not for the chilling presence of fire, as promised by Chanel’s chief executive: “The three dresses and the texts will be destroyed by incineration.” We have also learned that
The Satanic Verses
is not a one-off blasphemy but, rather, one among various categories of thought which fundamentalists seek to eradicate. The English newspapers may not have got a shot of the Rushdie-Major encounter, but there were pictures enough of the five thousand or so Muslim fundamentalists who met in Dacca last December to demand the death of the thirty-one-year-old poet and feminist Taslima Nasreen. Two months previously, a group of clerics had pronounced a
fatwa
on her and offered the paltry fee of £850. Nasreen had, inter alia, denounced Bangladeshi men for keeping women “veiled, illiterate, and in the kitchen;” and the women certainly don’t
seem to have enough status to take part in this heavily bearded protest. Then there is the recent misfortune of the Muslim actress from Bombay, Shabana Azmi: she was threatened with a campaign of “severe action” for the “un-Islamic and un-Indian act” of kissing Nelson Mandela on the cheek while presenting him with the Newsmaker of the Year award in South Africa.

Rushdie argues strongly that his own case, while the most publicized, is not egregious; it exists in a specific intellectual and political context. In the West, we tend to be picky about individual cases, and unwilling to countenance the idea of a general punitive movement. According to Rushdie, most journalists were not interested in the deaths of seventeen writers and journalists in Algeria between March and December of last year: “It happened in Arabic.” He points out that when the Western nations pooled their intelligence about Iran a couple of years ago, every expert agreed that Iran now has an extensive terrorist network in place across Europe. And the assassins-in-waiting are not, we can be sure, all there in case Rushdie does a signing session in the nearest town. This generality of threat is, apart from anything else, one answer to the sneery little charge against Rushdie that he “knew what he was doing.” Did the others—the Algerian writers, for example? What is it that suddenly, worldwide, makes Iranian dissidents, antifundamentalists, novelists, and journalists of various ideological stripes decide that they simply must throw themselves upon the enemy’s sword? Or could it be the sword that is moving?

Toward the end of the Oxford fund-raiser, Rushdie read the scene from
Midnight’s Children
in which the ten-year-old Saleem, pursued by school bullies, loses the top third of his middle finger by having it shut in a door. Then the evening closed with a Brahms violin sonata, and we all trooped back to the greenroom. The litterateurs offered congratulations to the musicians, but they weren’t having any. “The Brahms was
not
good,” said the pianist self-reproachingly. “I’ve
never
before failed to play two whole notes of the opening chord.” The violinist admitted that she had also had problems. They did not like to imply blame, but one minute they were listening to Rushdie
read a line about “the top third of my middle finger lying there like a lump of well-chewed bubble-gum,” and the next they were applying digits to ivory and gut while trying to ignore the whistling afterlife of the novelist’s image. It seemed a local but appropriate reminder of the basic truth: words count.

February 1994