Web Master Trying to unmask the “real” Salman Rushdie inevitably leads one to the discovery of two, sometimes conflicting, personas. Rushdie himself blames this apparent dichotomy on what he calls the “curse of the profile.” “I feel that out there, in the tabloids and newspapers, there exists this mysterious ‘Rushdie’ character who bears little resemblance to the much more boring Salman, interested mainly in writing books.” While a highly visible public figure in the last fifteen years due to the dangerous life he led dodging extremist assassins through much of the 1990s, and more recently because of his beautiful model girlfriend, it’s easy to forget that Rushdie is the author of nine critically acclaimed novels (including the Booker prize-winning Midnight’s Children), three non-fiction works, and one screenplay, and indeed is one of English literature’s most gifted contemporary authors.
But despite his remarkable literary achievements, Rushdie is probably still best known for the infamous fatwa that was declared against him by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Responding to the alleged “anti-Islamic” message in Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, Khomeini condemned Rushdie and the book’s publishers to death. For nearly a decade afterward, until the fatwa was lifted in 1998, there were intermittent attempts by Iranian-backed agents to assassinate Rushdie, and the author was forced to go into hiding during much of the 1990s. Since then, Rushdie’s life has calmed down significantly, but his new lease on life has only generated more demand for visits and lectures.
Last Thursday, Rushdie spoke with Washington University English professor Priya Joshi before a packed audience at Graham Chapel. On Friday, Rushdie sat down with William H. Gass, himself a renowned author and Washington University Professor Emeritus, in the more intimate setting of Hurst Lounge to discuss Rushdie’s work. Before this discussion, Rushdie spoke briefly with Cadenza.
Salman, if such is the persona that came to Wash U last week, remains largely unaffected by the high profile of his notorious alter ego. Behind the man’s aging face, complete with balding head, graying hair, and protruding belly, there lies a remarkably youthful intellectual enthusiasm. Rushdie engages himself whole-heartedly in discussion topics ranging from ancient literary classics to current political events. His answers are always focused and detailed, exhibiting an exceptional mental stamina. Despite being carted around from event to event, including a talk with graduate students and interviews with several members of the press, Rushdie’s supply of energy seemed to remain limitless.
Rushdie, now fifty-five, was born in Bombay, India, on June 19, 1947, eight weeks before India’s independence. He grew up during India’s infancy, a period marked by the bloody partition of Pakistan, communal violence, and religious conflict between the majority Hindu and minority Muslim populations. This period was to have a huge impact on Rushdie’s writings, especially in his early masterpiece, Midnight’s Children.
At age fourteen, Rushdie was shipped across the Atlantic to England to receive a first-rate secondary education, and stayed on to study at King’s College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with an M.A. in history. After completing his education, Rushdie returned briefly to the Indian subcontinent, working in Karachi for Pakistan TV., but disgusted by the severe censorship in Pakistan and India, Rushdie returned to London, where he felt a greater sense of academic freedom.
Rushdie then settled down to begin his literary career with the publication of his first novel, Grimus, in 1975. A critical and commercial failure, Grimus was an inauspicious start for Rushdie and made him doubt the viability of his career. But his follow up, 1981’s Midnight’s Children, was undeniable proof of Rushdie’s prodigious talents. Released in February, the rich and detailed novel was awarded the prestigious Booker Prize in October, and marked the beginning of Rushdie’s ascent into the high ranks of contemporary English writers.
Midnight’s Children focuses primarily on migration, and draws heavily from Rushdie’s personal experiences. For Rushdie, the immigrant’s struggle (especially that of the Indian immigrant) is about the clash between old (Indian) values and new (British) education. By having to abandon many of his old values, the immigrant experiences a spiritual void-a topic that Rushdie explored controversially in The Satanic Verses. Rushdie explained: “the act of migration forces immigrants to question everything about their lives, [and] I find that questioning very interesting.”
Despite the similarities between Midnight’s Children and his life experiences, Rushdie hesitates to call his work autobiographical. “That’s always the right answer,” Rushdie remarks sarcastically, “when people ask me if my work is autobiographical, they always want to hear ‘yes, completely’.” A more accurate description, Rushdie feels, is that he simply takes on the subject that life has given him. He happens to be an immigrant, and this offers him a unique vantage point from which to comment on the immigrant’s situation. In this sense, we can treat Rushdie not as a writer trying to tell his life story, but instead as an expert on the Indian immigration to Britain and America. To Rushdie, this first-hand experience is fundamentally to writing about the topic.
He reported his dismay at how “outside” British writers have historically portrayed Indian immigrants and India herself. According to Rushdie, such writers mistakenly use the same formalized, proper language of British writing to paint a picture of India. Rushdie contends this simply does not work. “India is not nice and neat,” he explains, “India is hot and humid, dirty, crowded.India is sticky, it’s violent, it’s chaotic.all in all, a wonderful place. In India, there is no universal experience, but instead, an inexhaustibility of personal stories.” Rushdie asserts that the inspiration for his own free form, sometimes confusing writing style is India herself. It is as though Rushdie needed a style equally as jumbled and messy as his subject matter.
In The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, Rushdie revisits the themes that he developed in Midnight’s Children, calling into doubt, among other things, religious faith. It was, of course, Rushdie’s views on religion that provoked an international uproar against him. Along with the fatwa it produced,
The Satanic Verses was also outright banned in five countries, including Rushdie’s native India. This extraordinary reaction shocked Rushdie: “I expected a debate, a very legitimate debate that I felt needed to happen. But I did not expect such radical opposition.” From Rushdie’s perspective, it is easy to see why the Ayatollah’s response was so surprising. In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie saw himself as making a perfectly valid academic assessment of the Archangel Gabriel’s revelation to the prophet Mohammed. (continued on page 5)
this [revelation] was a profound internal spiritual experience.” Rushdie views Islam as less a product of divine revelation, and more as a synthesis of the social, economic, and political conditions from which it initially emerged.
Since his comments on Islam were the cause of so much controversy, I asked Rushdie what it was about Islam that made it especially enticing as a subject for examination in The Satanic Verses. As a religion that is thoroughly steeped in fundamentalist rhetoric, it would seem to be a great target for anyone seeking to stir up trouble. Rushdie, however, offered a much more banal, and less sinister, explanation for his choice. “Islam, of all the religions, is the one about which we have the most historical information. So it is the only religion which you can actually watch the birth and the development of as an historical event and not as a series of legends. The Gospels, even the first Gospel, is written at least a hundred years after the death of Christ. Whereas the material we have of Islam is absolutely contemporary. And what is sad, it seems to me, is that the insistence on the literal truth of the Koran as the word of God, makes it impossible to read it as a text inside history. Because actually it is possible to argue very convincingly that the reason the Koran takes the shape it takes has to do with the social conditions of Arabia at the time in which Mohammed was living in it.”