As Sir Salman Rushdie embarks on a long painful road to recovery, after the near-fatal assassination attempt last week, we should pay homage to the voice that was nearly silenced. While his fiction needs to be read whole, what Rushdie has said about the basic values of an open society and its enemies is accessible in bite-sized pieces.
Investigations are still ongoing but it seems that the attack is related to Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, published in 1988. At the time, one of its chapters was declared to blaspheme against Islam and the then spiritual leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, put a bounty on Rushdie’s head.
After Khomeini’s death, the death sentence was never unambiguously reversed. Outside Iran, the most virulent anti-Rushdie venom was spewed by Iran’s client, Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shiite political party with an armed militia. Nasrallah has openly wished for Rushdie to be killed.
Both Iran and Hizbollah are denying any role in the assassination attempt, even while it’s being celebrated. But the would-be assassin, Hadi Matar, has a link to Hizbollah.
He was born in the US of two Muslim parents of Lebanese origin. After his parents divorced, Matar’s father returned to his home town in south Lebanon, a stronghold of Hizbollah. In the last few years, Matar has visited his father and, according to his mother, became increasingly alienated from normal social life (he hardly went out during the day) and more radicalised.
For some of Rushdie’s supporters, someone like Matar represents the essence of Islam. But Rushdie himself, although an atheist with little time for religion, has taught us to think otherwise:
“When I was writing The Satanic Verses, if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn’t have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn’t seem to be a big deal.”
Rushdie has a deeply historical sense of culture. His surname, Rushdie, was chosen by his father (a secularised Muslim from Kashmir) in honour of the medieval Arab philosopher, Ibn Rushd, who wanted Islamic theology to be based on Aristotelian reason.
Rushdie’s grandfather was deeply religious; Sir Salman considers him the wisest person he’s ever met.
It’s impossible for Rushdie to oversimplify Islam without betraying what he knows as a son and grandson and through his novelist’s sensibility and imagination.
With this background, it’s evident that it would be glib to explain the threats against his life as down to an entire world religion. In fact, Rushdie has described radical Islam – or any kind of religious totalitarianism – as a “deadly mutation in the heart of Islam”, a form of unreason combined with modern weaponry.
We could add that, in many cases, it’s combined with the power of modern states, pursuing not theological aims but regime self-preservation. The analysis of Middle East scholars like Gilles Kepel shows how the timing of the campaigns against Rushdie and, say, the Danish newspaper that published the Mohammed cartoons in 2005, had much to do with realpolitik and manipulating public opinion.
Freedom of expression is not just the right to be argumentative- Ranier Fsadni
The “deadly mutation” takes over individuals in a personal drama worthy of a novel. Matar’s mother has attested his mutation into someone she can barely recognise and who she disowns.
Silvana Fardos is not alone. There are many such life stories on record. We have, say, the autobiography of Khaled al-Berry, an Egyptian medical student in the 1990s, who joined the violent Egyptian group, Gama’a al-Islamiyya. A brilliant high school student, but timid, he was attracted to the strong personalities of the youth group, at first, not the theology.
Al-Berry’s memoir, Earth is More Beautiful Than Paradise, captures the horror with which his parents shrank from his gradual transformation – beard, dress, distant manner – into a son they could not recognise. He describes his enjoyment in bullying fellow students into obeying his arbitrary orders.
Ordinary Muslim families and friends are often the first victims of terrorists calling themselves Muslim. More Muslims than non-Muslims have been killed by these terrorists.
To say all this is to excuse nothing. It is to understand and explain, not to forgive.
“We are the storytelling animal,” Rushdie reminds us. To be storytellers is to remember that characters are complex. Characters that are purely bad or purely good are the telltale sign of feeble storytelling.
Recognising the complexity of the issues is separate from fighting terrorism implacably. Rushdie again:
“But there’s one thing we must all be clear about: terrorism is not about the pursuit of legitimate goals by some sort of illegitimate means. Whatever the murderers may be trying to achieve, creating a better world certainly isn’t one of their goals. Instead they are out to murder innocent people.”
In other words, if you think that murdering innocent people is permissible, that says everything we need to know about your goals, not just about the means you’re prepared to countenance. A world in which murder is permissible is a world in a perpetual state of terror.
Recognising the salience of complexity doesn’t mean backing off from affirming that freedom of expression would not exist without the freedom to offend and that freedom of expression is the bedrock of an open society.
However, freedom of expression is not just the right to be argumentative. Rushdie reminds us it is also the ability to tell stories:
“An attack upon our ability to tell stories is not just censorship – it is a crime against our nature as human beings.”
Censorship of stories is a war on noticing what’s going on around us and trying to make sense of it. It’s the mark of fundamentalism – religious or secular – to oversimplify the world. It’s the mark of a master storyteller like Rushdie to get us to resist oversimplification and banal polarisation.
If you want to show solidarity with Rushdie, buy and read his books. Let your heart go out to him and his family. And let your mind embrace his version of humanity, not the caricatures of his enemies.