I haven’t laid my hands on Salman Rushdie’s new book, but it is an anticipated pleasure. Joseph Anton: A Memoir tells his own story of being forced underground with armed surveillance after Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against him over The Satanic Verses. Anton was the incognito name Rushdie used when most in danger. The danger has lessened but the fatwa remains current, as the only person who could have lifted it – Khomeini – inconveniently died a few months after the pronouncement. Rushdie is rebuilding his life 24 years after the publication of that fateful book.
The best explanation for the fatwa and how it directly inspired London’s 7/7 are in English writer Kenan Malik’s From Fatwa to Jihad. In February 1989 Malik witnessed a profound event: the first public burning of The Satanic Verses. A thousand Muslims gathered in Bradford, Yorkshire with copies of Rushdie’s book and burned it in front of a police station. It wasn’t quite Kristallnacht but it was calculated to shock and offend.
Like Rushdie, Malik was born of an Indian Muslim family. He grew up in Britain in an Islamic culture which was deeply embedded but not “all consuming”. He became a radical leftist in the 1980s, and did not think of himself as Muslim but “black”. Malik quotes secular writer Fay Weldon who said the Qu’ran offered no food for thought. “It forbids change, interpretation, self-knowledge, even art for fear of treading on Allah’s creative toes,” Weldon said.
Malik didn’t mind treading on Allah’s toes. He was self-consciously secular and militant. Black for Malik was a political badge which meant refusing to put up with the discrimination dished out to previous generation. Whites called them Asians but they were no more Asian than the Brits were Europeans. Malik said it was much later they became “Muslims” for political reasons. Rushdie came from a similar background to Malik and his early writings did more than most to humanise the experience of immigrant Muslims.
Rushdie was used to having his books burned and rubbing powerful people up the wrong way. His first novel Midnight’s Children was banned in India and Indira Gandhi successfully sued for libel in a forum-shopping British court after he portrayed her as the witch-like Widow with “centre-parted, schizoid-colored hair who imprisons, castrates, and destroys the Children of Midnight”. In his second novel Shame, Rushdie’s description of Benazir Bhutto as the Virgin Ironpants caused outrage in Pakistan and another ban. Rushdie laughed it off as he won prize after prize for his writing. The third book took mockery to the next level, a fable about the origins of Islam.
Written 12 years before 9/11, Verses opens with an exploding aeroplane. The magical events that happen to the two crash survivors are used to discuss how God’s revelation to the prophet Mahound brings a new religion called Submission (the English translation of “Islam”) to a city in the sand called Jahilia (“Ignorance” – where Arabs lived prior to Islam). A second tale in the book is a caricature of Ayatollah Khomeini and the third is based the true story of an Indian pied piper who led her Indian townspeople on the Haj and then into the sea to drown.
In this one incendiary book, Rushdie attacked Islam’s history, one of its major political leaders, and one of its five pillars of behaviour. He expected resistance, yet the immediate reaction wasn’t huge. Rushdie’s book was so obtuse and so difficult to follow in non-narrative form it was almost impossible to understand in a single reading and threatened to go under the radar.
Then Sher Azam stepped in. Azam was the president of Bradford’s Council of Mosques. Azam wasn’t the first British Muslim critic of the book. Philosopher Shabbir Akhtar had called it an inferior piece of literature. But Azam used as a rallying cry for Muslim identity. He had not read the book but read reviews of it. Religious scholars declared it blasphemous and Azam wrote to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher comparing it to the Spycatcher affair and asking for it to be banned. He got no reply.
Azam told Malik that Christians don’t mind about what people say about their God because they no longer believe in “Him”. But, he told Malik, “it means a country where the values have gone. People drink, take drugs, have sex like dogs.” Azam said those problems would disappear if people believed in God. Azam tapped into a new consciousness among young radicals. These people were moving away from Malik’s radical secularism to a radical religiosity rooted in Muslim beliefs.
The Bradford Muslims who burned Verses were applauded across the umma. Tuned in to a philosophy bigger than themselves, they found a giddy sense of power they never had before. Then on February 14, 1989, Khomeini called on “all zealous Muslims” to execute anyone involved in the publication of the book and Iran offered $3m for Rushdie’s death. The bounty was discounted to $1m if the assassin was non-Muslim.
Khomeini was less interested in Rushdie than in establishing a marker in his battle with the Saudis for Muslim supremacy but his intervention made it an event of global consequence. That day Rushdie attended a memorial service for writer Bruce Chatwin who had just died. Paul Theroux came up and said “we’ll be back here next week for you.” An understated Rushdie said it wasn’t the funniest joke he’d ever heard. The following morning Scotland Yard gave him grade one protection and took him to a safe house. Joseph Anton was born.
But so was jihadism in Britain, according to Malik. He said Britain and other western governments formed pacts with religious movements because they thought they would be easier to control than the left. This was a miscalculation. After the London Bombings of 2005, British Muslim leaders lashed Prime Minister Tony Blair for ignoring the warning signs. Blair hit back criticising moderate Muslims for not doing enough. “Governments cannot go and root out the extremism in these communities,” he said.
Under the guise of multiculturalism, Britain divested all its decisions on Muslim issues to the Muslim Council of Mosques. Radicalism fermented in their organisations. Six 7/7 plotters were trainee doctors. Verses was a catalyst for a more confident Islamic identity which educated young professionals could endorse. But it was not an identity recognised by most Muslims. Islamism is not an expression of ancient faith but a modernist reaction against the loss of belonging in complex societies, comforted by literal belief in the Qu’ran. Rushdie, one of the most nuanced of Muslim culture writers and one of the most successful to thumb his nose at unfettered authority, had no chance against the power of this certainty.