A Cassandra of his own Time- A Essay on S. Rushdie-P Mishra

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A Cassandra of his own Time- A Essay on S. Rushdie-P Mishra

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Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie - review

The humiliations, the parties, the failures of analysis – Pankaj Mishra on Salman Rushdie's memoir



Pankaj Mishra


The Guardian, Tuesday 18 September 2012 08.00 BST



"Politics and literature," Salman Rushdie wrote in 1984, in what now seems an innocent time, "do mix, are inextricably mixed, and that … mixture has consequences." Criticising George Orwell for having advocated political quietism to writers, Rushdie asserted that "we are all irradiated by history, we are radioactive with history and politics" and that, "in this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss."


Five years later, his novel The Satanic Verses would be abruptly inserted into a series of ongoing domestic and international confrontations in the west and Muslim countries. Sentenced to death by an Iranian theocrat, Rushdie himself would embody the perils of mixing politics and literature in an interconnected and volatile world, where, as Paul Valéry once warned, "nothing can ever happen again without the whole world's taking a hand" and where "no one will ever be able to predict or circumscribe the almost immediate consequences of any undertaking whatever."

In his new memoir Joseph Anton, which describes his life in hiding for more than a decade, Rushdie claims that The Satanic Verses was his "least political book". It was "an artistic engagement with the phenomenon of revelation", albeit from the perspective of an "unbeliever", but "a proper one nonetheless. How could that be thought offensive?" But then authorial intentions barely seemed to matter to readers bringing to the book their own particular backgrounds, worldviews and prejudices.

No one among Rushdie's early readers in Europe and America seems to have suspected that parts of the novel constituted, as Eliot Weinberger wrote in 1989, an "all-out parodic assault on the basic tenets of Islam". A pre-publication review in the Indian newsweekly India Today revealed that Rushdie had irreverently rewritten the life of the Prophet, the paradigmatic figure of virtue for all Muslims, naming him Mahound, the term used to identify him as a devil in medieval Christian caricature, and placing his 12 wives in a brothel. Rushdie claimed in the accompanying interview that the image out of which his book grew was of the Prophet "going to the mountain and not being able to tell the difference between the angel and the devil."

Responding to the coverage in India Today, some self-proclaimed leaders of Indian Muslims demanded a ban on The Satanic Verses. The Indian government rashly obliged, prohibiting the novel's importation (though copies were already in circulation). "You own the present," Rushdie appealed unsuccessfully to the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, "but the centuries belong to art." The following month South Africa proscribed the book. Nearly 70 per cent of Bolton's Muslim population turned up for Britain's first major demonstration against the book. Most of the Muslims protesting against the book had not read it; but many of those who had were no less "transfixed with fear, anger and hatred", as the writer Ziauddin Sardar, himself a critic of Islamic fundamentalism, confessed.

Rushdie's exemplary record of anti-racism amounted to little as demonstrators in Bradford ceremoniously burnt a copy of The Satanic Verses. As with the film Innocence of Muslims last week, news of the novel's alleged insult to Islam travelled speedily to politically combustible regions. Some Kashmiris in Srinagar, fighting a corrupt and brutal Indian rule, found in the book another pretext to ventilate their rage, and a differently motivated crowd of Pakistani protesters attacked the American Center in Islamabad, claiming the first of many lives consumed by a fast-spreading global wildfire. No one, however, weaponised the novel with more devastating effect than Iran's chief cleric, then bloodily consolidating his young theocracy and Iran's claims to global Muslim leadership after a catastrophic eight-year war with Iraq.

Khomeini's unconscionable fatwa, though immediately condemned by most critics of The Satanic Verses, widened the already great chasm of perception and historical memory between white westerners and the Muslim inhabitants of former western empires. In Britain, it became another pretext for rants about Muslim barbarism, and fresh assaults on the straw man of "multiculturalism". "We fell for the idea," Michael Ignatieff admitted last week, speaking for many liberal intellectuals, not to mention quasi-racist right-wingers, "that the ayatollah was speaking for the whole faith." In this atmosphere of "anti-Muslim feeling", as Bhikhu Parekh described it, most Muslims were seen as fundamentalists or "illiterate peasants preferring the sleep of superstition to liberal light, and placed outside civilised discourse".

Christopher Hitchens's gloss on Islam was not untypical: "the very word is like the echo of a forehead knocking repeatedly on the floor, while the buttocks are proffered to the empty, unfeeling sky." Not surprisingly, as Malise Ruthven wrote, "Muslims in Britain and abroad" who already felt the sharp edge of the "power of the west", responded "to The Satanic Verses as an assault on their collective cultural identity".

Simple assertions of the principle of free speech did not persuade those Muslims who were aware of laws that protected Christians from blasphemy. Edward Said, while correctly defending Rushdie's right to untrammelled expression, tried to ventriloquise the Muslim sense of hurt and bafflement: "Why must a Muslim, who could be defending and sympathetically interpreting us, now present us so roughly, so expertly and so disrespectfully to an audience already primed to excoriate our traditions, reality, history, religion, language, and origins?" But the question suffered from many misunderstandings about Rushdie's position and role as an expatriate novelist from a former imperial possession.

Like many writers of non-western backgrounds in the west, Rushdie had suffered the ambiguous fate of being hastily appointed as a representative and spokesperson of India, South Asia, the "third world", multiculturalism, the immigrant condition – whatever seemed alien and incomprehensible to the white majority. In reality, there was little in common between Rushdie, an atheistic, Cambridge-educated upper-class intellectual from Bombay, and the devout guest-worker from Anatolia (representative of the mostly working-class Muslims of rural origins who had been imported to service Europe's post-war economies), or the Pakistani trade unionist chased out by the torturers of Zia ul-Haq, the CIA-backed radical Islamist who had spent most of the 1980s facilitating an anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. The Satanic Verses itself is less about the immigrant condition than a helplessly Anglophilic Indian's profound ambivalence about a British ruling class that regards him as a wog.

Attacked for having defamed the Prophet, Rushdie withdrew from the terrain of history and politics he had previously staked, insisting that his novel was a "work of art", and not reducible to an anti-Islam polemic. Upholding an exalted post-Christian notion of literature, he argued that the novel was the privileged realm of polyphony, doubt and argument. As such, it was naturally opposed and superior to the "unarguable absolutes of religion" and incomprehensible to the Muslims protesting against his book – people prone to "mass popular irrationalism".

The world of unreformed Islam in this view presented a clear and present danger to the cherished beliefs, institutions and art forms of the secular and rational west. In his memoir, where Rushdie bizarrely decides to write about himself, or "Joseph Anton", his Conrad-and-Chekhov-inspired alias, in the third person, he repeatedly points to his early intuitions and warnings about the atrocity suffered by the west on 9/11. "He knew, as surely as he knew anything, that the fanatical cancer spreading through Muslim communities would in the end explode into the wider world beyond Islam." Indeed, Rushdie's writings from this period anticipate many declarations of war on "Islamofascism" after 9/11. As he wrote in 1990, defending The Satanic Verses: "'Battle lines are being drawn in India today,' one of my characters remarks. 'Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark. Better you choose which side you are on.' Now that the battle has spread to Britain, I only hope it will not be lost by default. It is time for us to choose."

The ayatollah's cruelty and malice made many of Rushdie's choices for him. Joseph Anton conveys a clear and shaming picture of his ordeal – the soul-numbing humiliations of a subterranean existence, the scurrying from one safehouse to another, and the endless negotiations with security staff for a few slivers of ordinary life. The reader is fully on Rushdie's side, and outraged when, in one of the book's few superbly rendered scenes, fear and confusion force him to re-embrace Islam before some Muslim scholars/busybodies.

There are fascinating details about Rushdie's parents in the memoir's early pages, which also appealingly evoke his years as a struggling writer with his first wife, Clarissa; few readers would fail, later in the book, to be moved by the account of her death and Rushdie's grief-tinged recall of his superseded self. Rushdie engagingly reveals the autobiographical energies that went into the making of such novels as The Satanic Verses and Fury. Anton's Herzog-style letters, addressed variously and randomly to famous people, critics, and even God, effectively evoke the mind of an isolated and hunted man.

Yet the memoir, at 650 pages, often feels too long, over-dependent on Rushdie's journals, and unquickened by hindsight, or its prose. Ostensibly deployed as a distancing device, the third-person narration frequently makes for awkward self-regard ("The clouds thickened over his head. But he found that his sentences could still form … his imagination still spark"). A peevish righteousness comes to pervade the memoir as Rushdie routinely and often repetitively censures those who criticised or disagreed with him. The long list of betrayers, carpers and timorous publishers includes Robert Gottlieb, Peter Mayer, John le Carré, Sonny Mehta, the Independent (evidently the "house journal for British Islam"), Germaine Greer, John Berger and assorted policemen "who believed he had done nothing of value in his life". Small darts are also flung at James Wood, "the malevolent Procrustes of literary criticism", Arundhati Roy, Joseph Brodsky, Louis de Bernières and many others.

Not just individuals, entire countries, even races are judged, and frequently found wanting. The Danes lay on a battleship to protect Anton, who falls "in love with the Nordic peoples because of their adherence to the highest principles of freedom". "America," we are told, "had made it impossible for Britain to walk away from his defence." Also, outside Britain, Anton "was seen as likeable, funny, brave, talented and worthy of respect".

There are some exceptions to British mean-mindedness. After one "lovely evening" at Chequers, where the singer Mick Hucknall's "hot girlfriend" is distractingly present, Anton confesses to a "soft spot" for Tony Blair. "You set out sincerely to change my life for the better," he writes, and though this "may not quite cancel out the invasion of Iraq", it does weigh in his "personal scales". Oddly, Anton seems to require no such moral balancing for the Sri Lankan strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is commended for resisting Iranian pressure and green-lighting the filming of Midnight's Children; the responsibility of this authoritarian president and his brother in the massacre of tens of thousands of Tamil Hindus is passed over in silence. Nor does Anton record the piquant fact that the Hindu nationalists who noisily protested against the Indian decision to ban The Satanic Verses and, once in power, allowed him to visit India are implicated in the killings of thousands of Muslims in the previous two decades.

All this was also on the front pages into which, as Martin Amis famously remarked, Rushdie "vanished" soon after the fatwa. However, Joseph Anton describes more accurately, if inadvertently, how Rushdie re-emerged, after the strangest ever writerly journey, in the gossip pages, aureoled by the wealth, power and glamour of the western world.

Understandably, proximity to doting US senators in the "heart of American power" would prove exhilarating for someone miserably on the run from a murderous regime; and it is one of the grotesque ironies of Rushdie's situation that freedom for him should become synonymous with a private plane with a "Ralph Lauren interior", and a nine-car motorcade with motorcycle outriders. But the moral autonomy of literature, or the dignity of the individual artist, is not affirmed when a celebrated writer exults over being in the same "mighty room" as Bernard-Henri Lévy and Nicolas Sarkozy.

A naive beguilement rather than sly irony frames Rushdie's accounts of hanging out with such very famous people as Jerry Seinfeld and Calista Flockhart. Madonna, narrowly missed at Tina Brown's immortal launch party for Talk magazine, is finally encountered at Vanity Fair's Oscars bash in the company of Zadie Smith. At lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Warren Beatty confesses that Padma Lakshmi, Rushdie's fourth wife, is so beautiful that it makes him "want to faint". And William Styron's genitalia are unexpectedly on display one convivial evening at Martha's Vineyard.

In this remembrance of parties and celebrities past, as in much of Rushdie's later fiction, eclecticism amounts to a disconcerting absence of discrimination – and tact. We learn uneasily of, among other infidelities, his wine-induced adultery with Jack Lang's "beautiful and brilliant daughter". His wives themselves are described much less flatteringly as gold-diggers or nags, squeezing Anton for more alimony or progeny. Cuttingly titled "His Millenarian Illusion", the chapter about his marriage to Padma Lakshmi tries to show that his fourth wife's "grand ambition and secret plans" for wealth and fame had "nothing to do with the fulfilment of his deepest needs".

A similar longing for self-affirmation fuels Rushdie's geopolitical analysis, where an obsession with the "poison" of "actually existing Islam" suppresses all nuance suggested by political and historical facts. He accuses Khomeini of taking "his country into a useless war with its neighbours" and sees more evidence of Muslim irrationalism in the frenzied mourning provoked in Iran by the old fanatic's death. In fact, it was Saddam Hussein who invaded Iran, and then assaulted it with chemical weapons, with the consent, even support, of western countries. This not only stoked a long-simmering anti-westernism in Iran, which had been occupied by Russia and Britain during both world wars, and then suffered for decades the brutal dictatorship of the pro-American shah. The second longest intra-nation war of the 20th century, which killed nearly one million Iranians, also entrenched the Basij militia and Revolutionary Guards, made life harder for the moderates who cancelled Khomeini's fatwa, and eventually helped bring Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.

One would respect Rushdie's wish to decline close scrutiny of a radioactive history and politics that have caused him so much distress. But he is too invested in his self-image as an unpopular "Cassandra for his own time". Back in 1989, he claims, "nobody wanted to know what he knew" – that a "self-exculpatory, paranoiac Islam is an ideology with widespread appeal" – and we didn't get this even after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, which, among other things, vindicated his critically ill-treated but evidently prophetic novel Fury.

"Of course this is 'about Islam'," Rushdie quickly retorted in a New York Times op-ed to those who argued that 9/11 "isn't about Islam", or like Susan Sontag, a loyal friend and supporter, described the attacks as "a consequence of specific American alliances and actions", such as the support of Saudi Arabia and fundamentalists in Afghanistan. According to him, "the restoration of religion to the sphere of the personal, its depoliticisation, is the nettle that all Muslim societies must grasp in order to become modern."

This French-style secularisation was and remains a tall order – even in the United States and much of Christian Europe. In the meantime, Rushdie seemed content to endorse the Anglo-American assault on Afghanistan, and, claiming that another "war of liberation might just be one worth fighting", hailed the CIA-sponsored conman Ahmad Chalabi as "the most likely first leader of a democratised Iraq".

Joseph Anton, obscuring these stumbles, presents Rushdie as confidently in step with the march of history. "The world of Islam," he reminds us he had written in 2001, "must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based"; in 2011 "the young people of the Arab world" "tried to transform their societies according to exactly these principles".

Since Egyptians and Tunisians have subsequently elected Islamic parties to power, Rushdie has now changed his mind. Things have "gone very wrong", he recently told Foreign Policy. "One has to say that the Arab Spring is over." Maybe, but long before Egypt and Tunisia, large majorities elected Islamic parties in the biggest and economically most successful Muslim countries, Turkey and Indonesia, where they supervised a transition from military despotism to electoral democracy.

In Iran itself a mass movement drawing on Islamic notions of justice and morality has ranged itself against Khomeini's discredited heirs. Fanatics and fundamentalists, non-Muslim as well as Muslim, remain a blight on many South Asian and Middle Eastern societies; sometimes, they violently disrupt public life in the west. But, arguably, it is the institutionalised procedures of torture, rendition, indefinite detention, extrajudicial execution through drones, secret trials and surveillance that have emerged in the west as the more serious threat to civil and human rights. The icon of free speech today is the Wikilieaks source Bradley Manning, fully exposed in his degrading confinement to the malevolence of an omnipotent intelligence and military establishment.

Meanwhile, cut-price white supremacists gunning down Sikhs, bombing mosques and burning the Qur'an, and the Nordic nationalist massacring multiculturalists and left-wingers have taken Rushdie's reform-minded diagnosis of a "fanatical cancer" within Muslim communities to another level. "Islam is a cancer, period," according to the sinister California-based filmmaker whose calumnies about the Prophet provoke riots across the Muslim world. At the same time, western states, after waging calamitously ill-conceived wars that killed and mutilated hundreds of thousands of Muslims, pursue a face-saving deal with people described by Rushdie as "fascist, terrorist gangsters" – the Taliban.

Certainly, Rushdie's neat oppositions between the secular and the religious, the light and the dark, and rational literary elites and irrational masses do not clarify the great disorder of the contemporary world. They belong to an intellectually simpler time, when non-western societies, politically insignificant and little-known, could be judged solely by their success or failure in following the great example of the secular-humanist west; and writing literary fiction could seem enough to make one feel, as Tim Parks wrote in a review of Rushdie's novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet, "engaged on the right side of some global moral and political battle".

Indeed, such complacencies of imperial intellectual cultures were what Rushdie had bravely attacked in his brilliant early phase. "Works of art, even works of entertainment," he had pointed out in 1984, "do not come into being in a social and political vacuum; and … the way they operate in a society cannot be separated from politics, from history. For every text, a context." No text in our time has had contexts more various and illuminating than The Satanic Verses, or mixed politics and literature more inextricably, and with deeper consequences for so many. In Joseph Anton, however, Rushdie continues to reveal an unwillingness or inability to grasp them, or to abandon the conceit, useful in fiction but misleading outside it, that the personal is the geopolitical.

• Pankaj Mishra's From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia is published by Allen Lane.
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