Step Across This Line (32 page)

Yet it is not art that is weak but artists who are vulnerable. The poetry of Ovid survives; the life of Ovid was made wretched by the powerful. The poetry of Mandelstam lives on; the poet was murdered by the tyrant he dared to name. Today, around the world, literature continues to confront tyranny—not polemically but by denying its authority, by going its own way, by declaring its independence. The best of that literature will survive, but we cannot wait for the future to release it from the censor’s chains. Many persecuted authors will also, somehow, survive; but we cannot wait silently for their persecutions to end. Our Parliament of Writers exists to fight for oppressed writers and against all those who persecute them and their work, and to renew continually the declaration of independence without which writing is impossible; and not only writing but dreaming; and not only dreaming but thought; and not only thought but liberty itself.

[
An open letter to Taslima Nasrin, July 1994
]

Dear Taslima Nasrin, I am sure you have become tired of being called the female Salman Rushdie—what a bizarre and comical creature that would be!—when all along you thought you were the female Taslima Nasrin. I am sorry my name has been hung around your neck, but please know that there are many people in many countries working to make sure that such sloganizing does not obscure your own identity, the unique features of your situation, and the importance of fighting to defend you and your rights against those who would cheerfully see you dead.

In reality it is our adversaries who seem to have things in common, who seem to believe in divine sanction for lynching and terrorism. So instead of turning you into a female me, the headline writers should be describing your opponents as “the Bangladeshi Iranians.” How sad it must be to believe in a god of blood! What an Islam they have made, these apostles of death, and how important it is to have the courage to dissent from it!

Taslima, I have been asked to inaugurate a series of open letters in your support, letters that will be published in about twenty European countries. Great writers have agreed to lend their weight to the campaign on your behalf: Czeslaw Milosz, Mario Vargas Llosa, Milan Kundera, and many more. When such letter-writing campaigns were run on my behalf, I found them immensely strength-giving and cheering, and I know that they helped shape public opinion and government attitudes in many countries. I hope that our letters will bring you similar comfort and cheer, and that the pressure they will exert will be of use.

You have spoken out about the oppression of women under Islam, and what you said needed saying. Here in the West there are too many eloquent apologists working to convince people of the fiction that women are not discriminated against in Muslim countries; or that, if they are, it has nothing to do with the religion. The sexual mutilation of women, according to this argument, has no basis in Islam; which may be true in theory, but in practice, in many countries where this goes on, the mullahs wholeheartedly support it. And then there are the countless (and uncounted) crimes of violence within the home, the inequalities of legal systems that value women’s evidence less than men’s, the driving of women out of the workplace in all countries where Islamists have come to, or even near to, power, and so on.

You have spoken out, too, about the attacks on Hindus in Bangladesh after the destruction of the Ayodhya mosque in India by Hindu extremists. For this your novel
Lajja
has been attacked by zealots, for this your life was first placed in danger. Yet any fair-minded person would agree that a religious attack by Muslims on innocent Hindus is as bad as an attack by Hindus on innocent Muslims. Such simple fairness is the target of the bigots’ rage and, in defending you, we also defend that fairness.

You are accused of having said that the Qur’an should be revised (though you have said that you were referring only to the Sharia). You may have seen that only last week the Turkish authorities have announced a project to revise the Sharia, so in that regard at least you are not alone. And here is another simple point: even if you did say that the Qur’an should be revised to remove its ambiguities about the rights of women, and even if every Muslim man in the world were to disagree with you, it would remain a perfectly legitimate opinion, and no society that wishes to jail or hang you for expressing it can call itself free.

Simplicity is what fundamentalists always say they are after, but in fact they are obscurantists in all things. What is
simple
is to agree that if one may say, “God exists,” then another may also say, “God does not exist”; that if one may say, “I loathe this book,” then another may also say, “But I like it very much.” What is not at all simple is to be asked to believe that there is only one truth, one way of expressing that truth, and one punishment (death) for those who say this isn’t so.

As you know, Taslima, Bengali culture—and I mean the culture of Bangladesh as well as Indian Bengal—has always prided itself on its openness, its freedom to think and argue, its intellectual disputatiousness, its lack of bigotry. It is a disgrace that your government has chosen to side with the religious extremists against their own history, their own civilization, their own values. Bengalis have always understood that free expression is not only a Western value; it is one of their own great treasures, too. It is that treasure-house, the treasure-house of the intelligence, the imagination, and the word, that your opponents are trying to loot.

I have seen and heard reports that you are all sorts of dreadful things—a difficult woman, an advocate (horror of horrors) of free love. Let me assure you that those of us who are working on your behalf are well aware that character assassination is normal in such situations, and must be discounted. And simplicity again has something valuable to say on this issue: even difficult advocates of free love must be allowed to stay alive, otherwise we would be left only with those who believe that love is something for which there must be a price—perhaps a terrible price—to pay.

Taslima, I know that there must be a storm inside you now. One minute you will feel weak and helpless, another strong and defiant. Now you will feel betrayed and alone, and now you will have the sense of standing for many who are standing silently with you. Perhaps in your darkest moments you will feel you did something wrong—that the processions demanding your death may have a point. This of all your goblins you must exorcise first. You have done nothing wrong. The wrong is committed by others against you. You have done nothing wrong, and I am sure that, one day soon, you will be free.

[
A statement for the French press regarding the cancellation of the visit of Taslima Nasrin, October 1994
]

The Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin has been obliged to cancel her visit to France because of the French government’s decision to limit her visa to twenty-four hours, on the bizarre grounds that France could not guarantee her safety.

This is disturbing news.
France
could not guarantee her safety? France, of all countries? How is it that she can stay safely in Lisbon, in Stockholm, in Stavanger, but not in Paris? France’s minister of the interior, Charles Pasqua, likes to present himself as a strong man; why, then, does he make France itself look so weak? In my experience of these matters the “safety” argument is always a disguise for the real, cynical motives for such decisions. To those of us who admire French culture, who have found inspiration in France’s contributions to the language of human freedom, it seems essential that the French government should think again. France should not shun those who are persecuted by freedom’s enemies but rather embrace them; it should not be a no-go area for such people but a valued refuge. I urge M. Pasqua and the French government urgently to reconsider their decision in this case.

[
An introduction to
The Price of Free Speech
by William Nygaard, October 1995
]

The day William Nygaard was shot was one of the worst days of my life. (A worse day for him, of course.) I called Oslo constantly for news of his condition, and in between calls tried to reassure myself: he was a fit man, of athletic habits, he would be fine. But when I heard that he was going to survive I realized that until that moment I had not really believed he would. Then we learned that he was expected to make a full recovery, and I wondered if I should give up my lifelong skepticism about miracles. I went on to Norwegian television feeling relieved enough to make a joke. He had always had a back problem, I said, and now he would have an even bigger one.

In the days that followed there wasn’t much to joke about. I couldn’t help feeling that my friend and publisher had been struck by bullets that had been meant for me. I felt, at different times, or all at once, filled with rage, helplessness, determination, and, yes, guilt. Meanwhile William’s colleagues at Aschehoug responded to the atrocity with great courage and principle. They did not waver in their resolve to keep my work in print; indeed, they printed extra copies. And when, finally, William was strong enough to take phone calls, I heard his strangely weakened voice saying an extraordinary thing: “I just want you to know,” were his first words to me, “that I am very proud to be the publisher of
The Satanic Verses.
” William doesn’t like being called heroic, but that day I understood how deep his convictions were, how tough-minded his principles.

Since his recovery, William has been standing up for those principles, defending the freedoms he cares about, and expressing his anger that those who menace such freedoms continue to be treated with deference, in a series of remarkable essays and speeches. Reading his words, I sometimes come across statements that surprise me, such as the revelation that publishers felt
The Satanic Verses
to be a more “difficult” book than my earlier novels (all I can say is, they didn’t tell me!); and sometimes there are things I don’t quite agree with, such as his description of literary agents as the “killer whales” of modern literature—because I know that had it not been for my agents’ passionate work on my behalf,
The Satanic Verses
would probably not have been published in, for example, France and Spain. But with the central thrust of his arguments, I am in complete accord.

The attack on all those concerned with the publication of
The Satanic Verses
is an outrage. It is a scandal. It is barbaric. It is philistine. It is bigoted. It is criminal. And yet, over the last seven years or so, it has been called a number of other things. It has been called religious. It has been called a cultural problem. It has been called understandable. It has been called theoretical. But if religion is an attempt to codify human ideas of the good, how can murder be a religious act? And if, today, people understand the motives of such would-be assassins, what else might they “understand” tomorrow? Burnings at the stake? If zealotry is to be tolerated because it is allegedly a part of Islamic culture, what is to become of the many, many voices in the Muslim world—intellectuals, artists, workers, and above all women—clamoring for freedom, struggling for it, and even giving up their lives in its name? What is “theoretical” about the bullets that struck William Nygaard, the knives that wounded the Italian translator Ettore Capriolo, the knives that killed the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi?

After nearly seven years, I think that we have the right to say that nobody has been angry enough about this state of affairs. I have been told in Denmark about the importance of cheese exports to Iran. In Ireland it was halal beef exports. In Germany and Italy and Spain other kinds of produce were involved. Can it really be the case that we are so keen to sell our wares that we can tolerate the occasional knifing, the odd shooting, and even a murder or two? How long will we chase after the money dangled before us by people with bloody hands?

William Nygaard’s voice has been asking many such uncompromising questions. I salute him for his courage, for his obstinacy, and for his rage. Will the so-called Free World ever be angry enough to act decisively in this matter? I hope that it may become so, even yet. William Nygaard is a free man who chooses to exercise his rights of speech and action. Our leaders should recognize that their lack of sufficient anger indicates their own lack of interest in freedom. By becoming complaisant with terror, they become, in a very real sense, unfree.

[
Reflections on the fatwa’s eighth anniversary, February 1997
]

Europe begins, as the Italian writer Roberto Calasso reminds us in
The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,
with a bull, and a rape. Europa was an Asian maiden abducted by a god (who changed himself, for the occasion, into a white bull) and was held captive in a new land that came, in time, to bear her name. The prisoner of Zeus’s unending desire for mortal flesh, Europa has been avenged by history. Zeus is just a story now. He is powerless, but Europe is alive. At the very dawn of the idea of Europe, then, is an unequal struggle between human beings and gods, and an encouraging lesson: that while the bull-god may win the first skirmish, it is the maiden-continent that triumphs, in time.

I, too, have been engaged in a skirmish with a latter-day Zeus, though his thunderbolts have thus far missed their mark. Many others—in Algeria and Egypt as well as Iran—have been less fortunate. Those of us engaged in this battle have long understood what it’s about. It’s about the right of human beings, their thoughts, their works of art, their lives, to survive those thunderbolts—to prevail over the whimsical autocracy of whatever Olympus may presently be in vogue. It’s about the right to make moral, intellectual, and artistic judgments, without worrying about Judgment Day.

The Greek myths are Europe’s southern roots. At the continent’s other end, the old Norse creation-legends also bring news of the supplanting of the gods by the human race. The final battle between the Norse gods and their terrible enemies has already taken place. The gods have slain their foes and been slain by them. Now, we are told, it is time for us to take over. There are no more gods to help us. We’re on our own. Or, to put it another way (for gods are tyrants, too): we’re free. The loss of the divine places us at the center of the stage, to build our own morality, our own communities; to make our own choices; to make our own way. Once again, in the earliest ideas of Europe, we find an emphasis on what is human over and above what is, at one moment or another, held to be divine. Gods may come and gods may go, but we, with any luck, go on forever. This humanist emphasis is, to my mind, one of the most attractive aspects of European thought. It’s easy, of course, to argue that Europe has also stood, during its long history, for conquest, pillage, exterminations, and inquisitions. But now that we are being asked to join in the creation of a new Europe, it’s helpful to remind ourselves of the best meanings of that resonant word. Because there is a Europe that many, if not most, of its citizens care about. This is not a Europe of money, or bureaucracy. Since the word “culture” has been debased by over-use, I’d prefer not to use it. The Europe that is worth talking about, worth re-creating, is anyhow something broader than a “culture.” It is a civilization.