Wishtank
Sir Salman Rushdie: Literary knight of expression
by: Wythe Marschall
When Great Britain knighted Salman Rushdie on June 15, Mr. Rushdie joined the luminous ranks of the Rolling Stones, Isaac Newton and a lot of war-mongering rich white people as a special person within the British realm, and he broke finally and utterly from Pakistan and its incessant political nightmare — the dream of a “strong but fair” secular and pious leader, from which the large, populous country — like so many around the world — cannot seem to wake.
In 1988, Rushdie wrote a book about the origin and future of Islam, a triptych of allegorical and funny stories interwoven through time and space that span the ground from Mumbai to London and the decades from the early CE 600s to the late eighties. Even the book’s name — The Satanic Verses — refers to multiple “verses” by multiple people (none of them Satan) within the stories of the rise and fall of the famous Indian actor, the wealthy but ridiculed Prophet, and the divinely-commanded peasants, sojourning into the sea. To many readers, this book was a revelation — an amazing act of poetry within prose, a bitter challenge to fanaticism everywhere, and a damn good read.
But to policy makers in Iran and other Islam-centric nations, the book was an evil not to be ignored. Part of the problem is that, by its strictest interpretation, Islam forbids the representation of the Prophet by any mortal in any way. Humans are only supposed to talk about the Prophet within the frame of the Qur’an — whose viewpoints and historical facts are infallible. Given this, and Rushdie’s status as an atheist Pakistani who moved to London and never looked back, many pious Muslims read the book as a big slap in the face of a very big, at times very angry faith.
India immediately banned the book. The Ayatollah, Iran’s Supreme Leader, issued a fatwa (a clarification of a principle within Islam — the word can mean anything from advice on how to keep a shattering marriage together to, in this case, a command) calling for Mr. Rushdie’s immediate death. The Supreme Leader’s fatwa left no room for interpretation: It was the solemn, unavoidable duty of all pious Muslims to see that Rushdie went to Hell as fast as possible.
Mr. Rushdie, many are glad to note, is still alive, and his writings are still a subject of great contention.
The New York Times, in its recent congratulations to Mr. Rushdie’s knighthood, says that it is “possible to argue that our desire to protect free speech — and, in effect, do away with the very notion of literary heresy — is as much an acculturation as the desire to enforce religious orthodoxy. But the problem Mr. Rushdie raises is not about the origins of human belief. It is about the consequences of human belief and, specifically, the consequences of religious tyranny.”
This is a commendation in which is couched an awkward rebuttal of free speech and free readership. The desire to do away with the concept of “literary heresy” — the funny notion that, if someone writes something you strongly dislike, you may kill him, in good conscience or in any sort of conscience — is not an “acculturation” on par with radical Islam, or radical Christianity, or even not-so-radical Quakerism or Sufism.
We should not kill people. That simple fact may astound some in the literary community, but it couldn’t be more plain. We shouldn’t kill people; we shouldn’t kill writers; we shouldn’t kill writers who are different from us; we shouldn’t kill people we disagree with.
A 1989 demonstration against The Satanic Verses
photo by Rob Kenyon
The Times and others should not equate the sort of post-modern, atheistic, “heretical,” or scientific examinations of world literature that could lead one to discover a novel such as The Satanic Verses with anything “bad” in any sense. Have you ever heard a good reason for thinking that it ever hurts you to read anything? If you disagree with the view of an author, you are free (in this country, for the most part) to respond, in various ways, and try to persuade others that yours is the superior position — superior logically, morally, ethically, literarily or what have you.
Christians would be wiser to read the Qur’an and Muslims the New Testament. Certainly everyone should have the freedom to read the Gospel of Thomas from the Nag Hammadi library of the Gnostics (including the works of the Sethites, Borborites and other colorfully-named, long-exterminated philosopher-sects).
In fact, we should consider that, viewed by any other religion, any given faith’s holy books are “heretical.” Thus non-Satanists rail against The Satanic Bible, non-Scientologists against Dianetics, non-Gnostics against The Gospel of Judas, non-Semites against the Pentateuch and Zohar, non-UFO-believers against Chariots of Fire and fans of Daniel Denett’s or Deepak Chopra’s psychology of the mind against The Origin of Consciousness in the Break-Down of the Bicameral Mind, etc — the list of possible heresies and potential “how-could-one-even-think -this-stuff?” grievances is endless.
Or to dramatize the situation somewhat: A non-Satanist could see Anton LaVey’s Satanic Bible on a friend’s coffee table and immediately assume that that friend is either A) a student of world religion and philosophy or B) a nutjob, a “heretic,” an evil-doer. The non-Satanist could assume that his friend is interested in the points of view of others — even if his friend doesn’t “get” some of those points of view, even if his friend doesn’t like them. Or the non-Satanist could assume that his friend is a heretic and burn him at the stake.
A nice Rushdie Collection. photo by Cristina Petrescu
More people should be able to read the writings of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey and see that, for all their hilarious bombast, purposefully confusing and silly-sounding mysticism, and emphasis on almost-Fascist concepts of self-improvement and personal responsibility, they are not “bad” books or filled with any idea more “evil” than that, if you want something, you should try to figure out how to get it, and that not everyone is going to get everything they want. These ideas might seem “evil” in the same way that capitalism or greed in general are evil, or in the way that saying “I guess I care about what’s happening in Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Congo, Darfur, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, but I don’t want to do anything about it, not if it’s going to personally cost me time, money, or energy” is, in its way, evil. But LaVey’s ideas are hardly monstrous, hardly as evil as, say, Hitler’s.
And Rushdie’s ideas, of course, don’t even make it down to the “LaVey” mark on the Evilometer. Rushdie, in The Satanic Verses, posits that perhaps Muhammad (blessed be the Prophet) was (gasp!) just a man, a sometimes-good man, thinking up metaphors, perhaps deluding himself into thinking up metaphors, into hallucinating Gibreel’s words, so that he could improve his place and time, so that he could stop what he saw as Arab-on-Arab haterism, rampant greed and spiritually destructive materialism. Rushdie doesn’t posit this idea in an academic paper, even; he tells a story. He tells a story about a man named Muhammad, with a cousin named Ali and an ex-slave named Bilal, who all hang out and wish that life wasn’t so full of suffering, or that they could somehow diminish that suffering even a little bit.
Shouldn’t we salute anyone — Rushdie, LaVey, the Stones, or (many would say) the Prophet — who can make life a little less full of suffering?
To go back to the Times’ op-ed page, it should be pointed out to Rushdie fans that “the problem Mr. Rushdie raises” is exactly “about the origins of human belief.”
It is also “about the consequences of human belief and, specifically, the consequences of religious tyranny,” but it is primarily, most interestingly about the origins and purpose of belief, or rather Belief. Did Muhammad really wrestle with, and listen to, and learn from a flaming-sword-carrying Gibreel? Did Muhammad want to believe so bad that he started making up the words of God . . . that he convinced himself? When he utters the titular “Satanic verses” that call for a compromise with the pagan materialist greedy bad-Arabs and their primary idol, Al-Lat, and when he almost immediately recants these verses, recants God’s words — in these moments, is Muhammad the sincere prophet or the cagey businessman, hedging his bets and trying to hold his fragile flock together? Or is he mad?
Salman Rushdie. photo by Ben Rutkowski
Yes, The Satanic Verses is about the consequences of religion, of extremity in religion, but only marginally. The book is properly more about psychosis, about the will to believe, the will to individually make a difference in a large world. We are tempted by the title to think that the book portrays a binary, Good/Evil sort of world. But the book is much subtler and thus more powerful than that: Rushdie says that we must be able to consider certain possibilities. We must be able to consider that Muhammad was a man; that men are fallible; that men hear voices and lie and do good and end up not doing as much good as they’d intended. We must, must let ourselves read, be able to read. To read anything.
The day we stop questioning (or being able to question) anything at all, we start sliding into Newspeak and self-oppression. This is easy to see in North Korea, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and sometimes in America, such as when the principal of Wilton High School in a small town in Connecticut doesn’t let students discuss the Iraq War in a class about current affairs, or when the students aren’t allowed to perform a play about Iraq War soldiers and veterans, because it might upset people (i.e., it might make some people think new thoughts, thoughts they don’t even want to think, don’t even want to consider as possibilities).
Read the Deconstructionists and George Lakoff and Julian Jaynes and others who write about language, and the importance of free speech (free thought) becomes more and more obvious: The brain only has a few ideas, a few sounds to work with. It is up to us to be able to combine them in new, increasingly useful, increasingly expansive ways. It is up to us to never diminish the pool of possible thought (or, to step out on a shaky poetic bough for a second, “to never diminish the size or constrict the shape of God") by saying that such-and-such a book is not only “bad” or “generally not worth reading” (as are many books), but is actually evil. There is enough real evil in the world already.
Fans of free thought should congratulate Mr. Rushdie and those in Britain who advocated for his knighthood, for they decided to use an archaic system of rewarding the rich with extra titles and honors in a constructive way, bringing world media attention again to the problems of censorship, fanaticism and intellectual laziness.
As a friend recently said, Rushdie’s book and the arguments that have ensued and continue to ensue add to “the human race’s responsibility to develop their own values as readers.” We read for many reasons; is one of those reasons to challenge what we know (or think we know), and to question why we believe what we believe?
Salman Rushdie at Jaipur, India.
photo by Shailendra Pandey (aka Tehelka)
During the Renaissance and Enlightenment, many European traditions changed as more and more people obtained access to printed material — some of it seditious, alarming, or downright “evil,” according to the Catholic church and other powers-that-were. This engine of change, wherein new thoughts enabled moribund old traditions to morph into better versions of themselves (alchemy into chemistry) or to gradually expire in favor of new ideas (mercantilism into Marxism and capitalism), occurred before the printed word, of course. But technology’s continued ability to increase the information available to the average human — from Gutenberg’s Bible and its impact on the rise of Protestantism to Google’s attempted cataloging of every book ever — has shaped the West’s ability to respond to popular change from within.
Reading one new idea gives you one new option.
Right now, there are many in Iran and the Middle East who would desperately like to open up a conversation on where Islam is headed and why. There are hundreds of gifted poets, playwrights, novelists and journalists who do not view the printed word as subject to approval by a board of civic propriety. Yet grandees in Tehran and at the principle fatwa-issuing authority, Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, continue to debate what is right to think or not be able to think, and our own President recommends we avoid questioning his administration and its spies and mercenaries and generally inept apparatuses of surveillance and control.
The faithful must challenge their faith, or they are merely the hopeful. Likewise, to be a truly free society, we must acknowledge that — whether a book is good or bad, or stupid, or long, or funny, or (as are the better of Mr. Rushdie’s) gripping and controversial, strange and new — that book has a right to be written and moreover a right to be read. •
Wythe Marschall
Wythe Marschall lives, writes and raps in Bushwick, Brooklyn. His writing has appeared in 5_Trope, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Euphony, Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, Locus Novus, Bennington College’s Silo (which he edited at one point), Pomp & Circumstance (of which he is the copy editor) and his own A Lush In Rio (http://www.alushinrio.com). You can reach him at .
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