The Rushdie 'Affair'
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The publication of The Satanic Verses
(1989) aroused the wrath of some Muslims. A passage in the
book describing the birth of a religion resembling
Islam
was seen as blasphemous by some Muslims. On Febuary 19th
1989 Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa - a
huge reward was offered for Rushdie's assassination and he
was forced to go into hiding. The book has been banned in
most Islamic countries.
Rushdie denied any intentional blasphemy, and despite
his public decision in 1990 "to
enter into the body of Islam
after a lifetime spent outside it," his death sentence remains
in force.
For the Granta Paperback edition of his book of essays and
criticism Imaginary Homelands
an additional essay was
included entitled One Thousand Days in a Balloon to mark
the third anniversary of the fatwa. In this essay
Rushdie uses the metaphor of a balloon or a bubble
drifting "slowly over a bottomless chasm" to descibe
his state in exile:
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...For many people, I've ceased to be a human being. I've become an issue, a bother, an 'affair'. Bullet-proof bubbles, like this one, are reality-proof, too. Those who travel in them, like those who wear Tolkien's rings of invisibility, become wraith-like if they're not careful... (p. 431) |
Rushdie on the fatwa:
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...Let me be clear: there is nothing I can do to break this impasse. The fatwa was politically motivated to begin with, it remains a breach of international law, and it can only be solved at the political level. To effect the release of Western hostages in the Lebanon, great levers were moved; great forces were brought into play; for Mr Richter, seventy million pounds in frozen Iraqi assets were 'thawed'. What, then, is a novelist under terrorist attack worth? (p. 434) |
Rushdie on Free Speech and Reality:
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'Our lives teach us who we are.' I have
learned the hard way that when you allow anyone else's
description of reality to supplant your own - and such
descriptions have been raining down on me, from security
advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends,
enemies, mullahs - then you might as well be dead. Obviously,
a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to
keep hold of; whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture
I've always carried about is more vulnerable. Yet I must cling
with all my might to that chameleon, that
chimera, that shape-shifter, my own soul; must hold on to its
mischevious, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown instincts, no matter
how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction
and paradox, so be it; I've lived in a messy ocean all my life.
I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea
outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which
I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.
'Free speech is a non-starter,' says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself. (p. 438-9) |
| The fatwa has still not been lifted although in April 1998, an Iranian spokesman said unnoficially that the Iranian government does not support the fatwa. Nothing has been put in writing and there is no guarantee of Rushdie's safety. |