Fatwa Wrap
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I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve read very little Salman Rushdie. That’s largely because I did read Midnight’s Children, often accounted his best book, and while I enjoyed it, I didn’t love it. It didn’t grab me by my soul, its language didn’t colonize my mind, and neither its story nor its characters have become my companions through life. Those are high bars, but Rushdie was aiming to clear them, and with me he didn’t. I bought The Satanic Verses when it came out and tried to get into it, but never finished. I read Haroun and the Sea of Stories when it came out, and found it slight—and not because it was children’s literature. And after that I kind of stopped paying attention.
To his writing, that is. Rushdie still mattered and continues to matter as a cultural and political figure regardless of whether what I think or anyone thinks of him as a writer, and I never stopped being aware of him at least peripherally in his capacity as a celebrity and as a potential martyr to free speech, even if I declined to read his books. That says something, though: that his importance has very little to do with the power or influence of his writing. I don’t just mean that it has very little to do with whether his novels are works of genius, whether they are triumphs of style or storytelling. If The Satanic Verses had inspired spirited debate within the Islamic world because of its premise, pitting modernizers against conservatives, then it would have been a culturally important book in its own right, even if it were not a monumental achievement in purely literary terms, and Rushdie would matter for that reason. So far as I know, though, The Satanic Verses has had limited if any actual impact on the Islamic world outside of elite literary circles. Qua book, then, it’s hard for me to say that The Satanic Verses matters. What makes Rushdie significant is not what he wrote, but the fatwa, the death sentence that Iran’s spiritual and political leader pronounced against him for writing it.
I think that’s kind of a tragic fate for a writer, honestly, to matter for reasons other than one’s writing. Not that every writer has to aspire to cultural significance in his home country or in his lifetime. Silence, exile and cunning worked well enough for James Joyce, and perhaps The Satanic Verses just needs more time to make its influence felt in the Islamic world, as it took time for Ireland to embrace the author of Ulysses. Even if that does happen, though, I think the fatwa changed the arc of that possible future in a fundamental. It usurped the place of the writer at the heart of his own story. In that sense, the Ayatollah achieved his goal long ago.
Meanwhile, Rushdie’s country of birth—India—has spent the past several years becoming simultaneously an increasingly hostile place for its large Islamic minority and an increasingly hostile place for freedom of speech. If someone pulled a Rushdie on the Ramayana, I doubt the Modi government would issue a death sentence. But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it denounced the book in terms calculated to promote violence in response. In that sense, too, the Ayatollah’s spirit has been a conquering one of late.
In the wake of the recent assassination attempt, there will undoubtedly be calls for stronger security to protect controversial writers from threats to their lives. I hope the relevant institutions are careful in how they respond to those calls, so as not to give that spirit yet another victory. Less than his writing, and much less than his political pronouncements on various topics (atheism, gun control, the Iraq War, etc.), what made Rushdie an inspiring figure over the course of decades has been his determination to live his life as unencumbered as possible by fear of imminent death, even though death was quite literally hunting him. In that way, he’s been an example to us all of how to live, which is ultimately more important than being an example of how to write or of what to think. I hope Chautauqua and its ilk recognize that fact, and that whatever steps they take to reduce the likelihood of future violent attacks, they don’t retrospectively crimp that spirit of expansiveness and engagement. We need more of it in response to such an atrocity, not less.
The latest reports are that Rushdie’s condition is stable and that he is on the long and difficult road to recovery. I wish him a speedy and complete one, and to his return to writing. If it’ll encourage him to do so, even in a minuscule way, I promise to read his next book, whatever it is. Who knows; maybe I’ll like it—maybe I’ll even think it matters.
On Here
I haven’t wrapped in weeks, partly because I keep traveling, partly because I haven’t had any new pieces elsewhere, and partly because I’ve been working on stuff related to my film. I hope that work begins to bear fruit, and that I have even less time to devote here in months to come. In the meantime, though, here’s the fruit of the past three weeks’ posting on Substack:
“Pass Good Laws, Repeal Bad Ones” — praise for the decision to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, and for future efforts by congress and the state legislatures to repeal laws that are still on the books that nobody really supports, rather than waiting for the courts to take action for them.
“Empathy for the NIMBY Devil” — not so much a defense of NIMBY positions as an appreciation for the emotional basis of opposition to development as classically conservative.
“If You Drive Fast, You Have To Corner Harder” — my thoughts on fighting recession and inflation, since we actually have to do both if we care about promoting the general welfare.
“Mankind Cannot Bear Too Little Reality” — a movie post, about Five Easy Pieces, Nope and what happens when we can no longer represent reality but only the images of it that we have absorbed from earlier representations.
“Turn Off, Tune Out, Drop In” — on not missing the news cycle while on a writing retreat in New Mexico, with passing thoughts on the particular odiousness of that cycle with respect to the raid on Mar-a-Lago.