Salman Rushdie: Not in a rush to die…

WE may begin this treatise with ambiguity: “You can fish.” You may, with your (im)pure mind, read this sentence on a page as an affirmation of (fishing) capability, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But your grandpa who typically abhors any fish not fresh from the lagoon may see the same words as rebuke: that is, as criticism of unnaturalness. Thus, he would be against people who can fish (typically put fish in cans after adding some preservatives). This is pretty much how literary interpretation works with different interpretive communities, and it’s extremely difficult to predict what each community will see when it processes the words on the written page. When Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born British literary giant, published his astoundingly irreverent novel The Satanic Verses (TSV), he aimed to engage issues of India-Britain migration and its dislocations, disruptions and pains, a project that Samuel Selvon, a writer with a milder temperament, had touched on in The Lonely Londoners years earlier. But a novel assumes a life of its own once it gets into the hands of readers, and radical Muslims who read or merely glanced at the title of Rushdie’s novel saw nothing but the denigration of Islam and Prophet Muhammad, and instantly decreed death as the writer’s reward.

The offending novel is actually a piece of magical realism. Magical realism—if you are familiar at least with the works of the Yoruba writer D.O Fagunwa—is literature of enchantment, of spirits and ghosts, of the world beyond logic, of the intensely supra-natural. In magical realism (literature and literary theory admit of multiple realities; reality is subjective, democratically determined, and fickle) a man may turn into a bird or a bug, as we find in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis where the character Gregor Samsa wakes up on a normal morning when, before heading to work, “his immediate reaction was to get up quietly without being disturbed, to put on his clothes, and above all, eat his breakfast”. However, although Gregor still thinks like a human, he has actually transformed into a bug. Magical realism is metafiction, marked by a realistic setting, sense of mystery, suspense and shock, like we find in Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard where a character who enjoys hundreds of kegs of palm wine per day, journeys into the land of the dead in search of his late tapster or supplier.

If the term ‘magical realism’ is still unclear, then consider the recent movie King of Thieves by the Nigerian actor and filmmaker Femi Adebayo, a movie which explores Yoruba magic, ritual, witches and whatnot. That’s magical realism. Magical realist texts deal with events that transcend the normal world of logic, which is why in Rushdie’s TSV, two characters (Farishta and Chamcha) trapped in a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain are miraculously saved even when the plane explodes over the English Channel. Farishta then takes on the personality of Archangel Gabriel while Chamcha takes on the form of the devil, then is arrested as a suspected illegal immigrant. A critic, Timothy Brennan, called the work “the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain.”

Sadly, freedom after speech may not be guaranteed in the real world. If Rushdie wrote himself into controversy, it is because literature is not scripture. Scripture is reverent but literature, at least as history has shown, is typically irreverent and unholy, which is not to say that overlaps do not exist. Rushdie was all about the migrant experience, but the Ayatollah of Iran saw in his novel an assault on his own lived-in reality: the novel then became, in the Ayatollah’s warped view, not a harmless work of art but a treasonable treatise punishable by death. When external reality clashes with fictional reality in this way, it is an affirmation of the fact that a work of art only really begins after it has been published. No one asks for a novel or any other work of art: it is the author that determines that we need one. It is like journalism, where editors thrust reports upon society without being asked to do so.

And so we come to our source story: the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. On August 12, Hadi Matar, 24, a California-born New Jersey resident, stormed the stage of the Chautauqua Institution where Rushdie was about to give a talk dwelling on the United States as a safe haven for exiled writers. Seeking the writer’s eternal silence, Matar stabbed him ten times, but was promptly picked up by a New York state trooper and a sheriff’s deputy while Rushdie was flown by helicopter to UPMC Hamot, a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania. Rushdie is still recuperating but his injuries (liver damage, wounds in the abdomen, neck, the right eye, chest and thigh) are grievous, and he will lose an eye. According to his son Zafar: “Though his life-changing injuries are severe, his usual feisty and defiant sense of humour remains intact”. Sounding just like his father, Zafar philosophized: “Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”

The attacker’s roots are in Yaroun, south of Lebanon, a village noted for its strong support for Hezbollah and the Iranian government. Rolled into the stabbing incident, therefore, is the story of several continents. According to Matar’s mum Silvana, he had become radicalised following his trip to the Middle East. She told the DailyMail: “I was expecting him to come back motivated, to complete school, to get his degree and a job. But instead he locked himself in the basement. He had changed a lot, he didn’t say anything to me or his sisters for months.” And because America is a country where terrorists can expect punishment instead of rehabilitation, she has moved on, knowing that her son’s night (mare) behind cold bars will be long.

Since the publication of his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses (TSV), a work deemed insulting to Islam and Prophet Muhammad, Rushdie has known no rest. Although he had, in January 1989, serenaded the prophet as “one of the great geniuses of world history,” saying that TSV was not “an anti-religious novel” but “an attempt to write about migration, its stresses and transformations,” a fatwa (death sentence) was imposed on him by Ruhollah Khomeini, the Ayatollah (Supreme Leader) of Iran on Valentine Day 1989 for blasphemy against Islam. The Ayatollah had not read the book and neither had Rushdie actually invented the title—Satanic Verses is a long theocratic debate dating back to at least 1858—but the writer had dared to publish his irreverent novel of magical realism. The bounty placed on his head has increased over the years—a foundation in Iran upped it to $3.3 million—and the writer has survived multiple assassination attempts, including the one by Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh, who was priming a book bomb loaded with RDX explosive in a hotel in Paddington, Central London, when the weapon exploded in his face. Even those who interpreted TSV into other languages have been killed.

As the controversy over Rushdie’s novel raged globally in 1989, some radical Muslims actually threatened to kill the Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, following his support for Rushdie and denunciation of the Ayatollah as a ‘’sick and dangerous man who had long forgotten the fundamental tenets of Islam.” Soyinka had written that: ‘’If Salman Rushdie dies, then his work must be unleashed upon an expanding leadership by every available means, and the Ayatollah must be punished for his arrogance, for his hubris and the implicit blasphemy in his arrogation of a supreme will.’’ Hundreds of Muslims marched through Kaduna and delivered a protest letter against Mr. Rushdie to the British consul.

Of liberal Muslim origin but now an atheist, Rushdie has defended freedom of speech throughout his career. He is the converse of Soyinka who had a Christian background but is now an atheist, and who portrays Christianity negatively in his works. Rushdie is one of those who believe that all faiths can and should be challenged. He defended the French magazine Charlie Hebdo which in 2015 lost 12 members of staff to gunfire rage by radical Muslims scandalized by its portrayal of Prophet Muhammad in cartoons. He told L’Express, a French magazine, in an interview at the time: “Why can’t we debate Islam? It is possible to respect individuals, to protect them from intolerance, while being skeptical about their ideas, even criticizing them ferociously.”

Indeed Charlie Hebdo has now come out to condemn Rushdie’s stabbing in vehement terms, slamming the “little and mediocre spiritual heads who are intellectually nil and culturally ignorant.” Naturally, Rushdie was one of the famous writers and intellectuals who, on the eve of the Sochi Olympic Games February 6, 2014, called on the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin to repeal the country’s Gay Propaganda, Blasphemy and Criminal Defamation Laws. Seen by critics in Britain as “an astounding villain” because of his attitude to Britain, Rushdie remains a global voice of liberalism.