Playboy Classic: Salman Rushdie

When militant Muslims

forced the writer into

hiding, playboy found

him and learned the

truth about living

underafatwa

II was like a scene out of an Ian Fleming novel. In Ix>ndon a telephone rang. A special agent from Scotland Yard was calling. "Please be at this address at two p.m. tomorrow," he said. "We presume you will be alone."

The following day our interviewer arrived at the designated place, where he was searched for weapons and then escorted into the safe house where writer Salman Rushdie was in hiding. And our historic interview began.

In 1989 Iran's ruler, Ayatollah Khomeini, had issued a fatwa—a decree-—that Rushdie be killed. The sentence was provoked by the author's latest novel. The Satanic Verses, in which Rushdie depicts the prophet Moham­med in a way that, according to Khomeini, was blasphemous. The fatwa was no idle threat. In the ensuing years, the book's Jap­anese translator was killed, and stores that carried the book were firebombed. Rushdie remained in hiding for a decade before the order was lifted.

Along with The Satanic Verses, Rushdie, born in Bombay and raised in London, has authored nine novels, two children's books and dozens ol essays and other nonfiction. His most venerated novel. Midnight's Chil­dren, won the 1981 Booker Prize. Since then he has received nearly every major literary award on both sides of the pond. In 2007 he was knighted.

Last year Sir Salman published an au­tobiography. Joseph Anton: A Memoir. "Jo­seph Anton" was the code name used by Special Services while they were protecting him—and when our interviewer. Contrib­uting Kditor David Sheff, met him at the secret location in downtown Ixmdon. Sheff reported in our April 1996 issue. "Despite the cloak-and-dagger routine required to meet him. Rushdie didn't appear the least bit nervous or concerned." Indeed. Rushdie hadn't been silenced by the death sentence. Quite the opposite.

PLAYBOY: How have these veal's in hiding changed you?

RUSHDIE: When I was younger. I was quite excitable. I waved my arms a lot and talked too much. I was more argumentative. I feel calmer because of a sense of who I am. a sense of what is in my heart. It comes from facing the big stuff—facing the great reali­ties of life and death, and who you are and why you did what you did. You find out what you think about yourself when your inner­most core is under attack. The worst moment came in 1990 when I lost who I was. PLAYBOY: That was the time you announced you had converted to Islam. I lad you actu­ally converted, or wen- you trying to placate those who were threatening your life? RUSHDIE: Not so much to placate them but to show to the people who viewed me as some kind of terrible enemy that I wasn't one. It mostly had to do w ith despair and disorienta-tion. I had lost my strength and felt completely bereft. Many of my friends pointed out that it was the (continued on page 171)

RUSHDIE

(continued from page 145) stupidest thing I had ever done in my life. But I had hit bottom, and maybe it was necessary to hit bottom. PLAYBOY: Was hitting bottom brought on by the fear of being killed? RUSHDIE: No. It was brought on by hav­ing done something I didn't believe in. I had given up who I was. I could no lon­ger speak if I had been converted. I was supposed to be reverent but didn't know how to be. I didn't know how to be devout, for God's sake. But by depriving myself of what was, in fact, my nature, I showed my­self what my nature was. PLAYBOY: And so you therefore recanted your conversion.

RUSHDIE: Yes. I made strenuous steps to get out of the false position and immediately felt clearer about everything. From that point on, I felt that I would fight for what I believed, and what I believed was what I was. PLAYBOY: Had you initially been reluctant to fight back against the fatwa? RUSHDIE: It's hard to exaggerate the extent of the political and public pressure put on me not to fight back. That's one thing that had brought me to such a low point. I had listened to the purveyors of public opinion. Every time I tried to defend my work, I was accused of making trouble again. The only thing I was ever supposed to say in those days was that I was sorry. But I didn't feel sorry. I felt as if the crime was being committed against me, not by me. And so it was. I decided I would speak out and fight, and I decided I would not convince every­one. It was a great liberation to realize you don't have to convince everyone—in fact, you cannot. I decided I would not apolo­gize and would write what I write. If you don't like it, the hell with you. PLAYBOY: Before the announcement of the death sentence, there was the banning of the book and other protests. Did you feel in danger?

RUSHDIE: No, but things began to change when the book was burned. Something exploded in my head. I've never been so angry in my life. The image of that burn­ing book enraged me in my deepest places. They nailed it to a post, then set fire to it. They crucified and then burned it. Standing next to the burning book in a famous photo­graph was this little man looking so proud of himself, so smug, so righteous. I had rarely seen so ugly a photograph. Until that point I felt that my best defense was the normal arguments—to explain the book, to get peo­ple to read it. For a long time I took that posi­tion: The book—i.e., the work of art—speaks for itself. But when the work of art was nailed to a post and set on fire, it occurred to me that maybe I should speak for the work of art. That is when I began to argue and to confront various Muslims involved in the at­tack on the book. But although I was angry as hell, I had no sense of danger. PLAYBOY: When did you first hear about the fatwa?

RUSHDIE: I got a call on my way out the door one morning. I had arranged previ­ously to do an interview on CBS television.

Journalists asked me about it and I was be­wildered. One journalist said, "Oh, don't worry about this Khomeini character. He condemns people to death all the time. He condemns the president to death every Fri­day. Forget it." And I thought, Oh well. May­be this is just hot air and it will blow away by tomorrow. But it didn't blow away. It became clear that it wasn't some rhetorical flourish. PLAYBOY: You quickly issued an apology. RUSHDIE: Yes, but I didn't write it. At that point, people involved with the British government—I won't say who—informed me that they were talking with the Iranian government. I was given to understand the situation would be resolved if I would sign a statement they wrote. You have no idea what the hell is going on. You think you might be dead in a day or two. So this state­ment was put out in my name. PLAYBOY: But Khomeini refused to reverse the order and a price was put on your head. RUSHDIE: Yes. It's an odd thing to have a price on your head. At the same time, though, the reward has never been a real problem. The real threat has never come from people who are trying to claim the money. PLAYBOY: Does the real threat come from Muslim fanatics?

RUSHDIE: Not them, either. The only real threat has come from the Iranian govern­ment itself, and it is the Iranian government that remains the danger. It would be foolish not to recognize that there is a small risk from a fanatic. But there has been no evidence, over this whole period, of any real threat from anyone other than the government. PLAYBOY: Yet Khomeini said that "it is in­cumbent on every Muslim" to kill you. RUSHDIE: Nobody was interested. Iranians have tried to get other Muslim countries involved, but nobody else wants to. Even the hard-line Islamic states such as Sudan are not interested. The Islamic leader there, Turabi, made explicit statements to the general public that the fatwa is against Islam. I mean, it's not that they like me, but they don't believe I should be killed. PLAYBOY: Who in the Iranian government is behind the attacks?

RUSHDIE: People under the direction of the Iranian intelligence ministry. PLAYBOY: What did you mean when you said, early after the fatwa, that you wished you had written a book more critical of Islam? RUSHDIE: It struck me that a religious leader who arbitrarily condemns people to death and is willing to resort to interna­tional terrorism to carry out the sentences probably merits a little criticism. PLAYBOY: When the death sentence was an­nounced, did you go into complete isolation? RUSHDIE: Yes.

PLAYBOY: We read that you became a televi­sion addict—watching endless Dynasty reruns. RUSHDIE: You say things to journalists as a joke and they become part of the myth. It's true that it was very difficult to see anybody for the first couple years. Later I was told by people who came into Scotland Yard that the degree to which my freedom was circumscribed at the beginning was com­pletely unnecessary.

PLAYBOY: When you did go out, were you paranoid, looking over your shoulder?

RUSHDIE: The opposite, really. I have spent a great deal of time reassuring other peo­ple. I can't tell you how many newspaper articles there are about me in which the journalist gets very upset when a nearby car backfires. The backfiring car is a kind of motif for these people. PLAYBOY: Didn't you ever jump when you heard one?

RUSHDIE: No. In the stories about these backfiring cars, it's always mentioned that I did not twitch. One of the writers called this denial. It was not. It was knowing the sound of a backfiring car. So I spent a lot of my time telling other people that there was nothing to worry about. PLAYBOY: Yet there was something to wor­ry about.

RUSHDIE: When you know what there is to worry about, you also know what there isn't to worry about. If you're talking about a professional hit, you know you are safe in certain situations. I came to understand what was risky and what wasn't. It was not risky to be eating in a cafe, because terror­ists know that the risk of being identified and captured is great. We are safe in this room, because even if there were a guy with a submachine gun in the street out­side, he would not enter this building to at­tack me, because he doesn't know what he would meet. There is zero risk here. PLAYBOY: Did you ever use a disguise? RUSHDIE: There was one ridiculous occa­sion when they offered me a wig. I looked ridiculous, but I decided to try it out on a London street. I got out of a car in the wig and there were all these stares and comments: "There is Salman Rushdie in a wig." It was so ludicrous that I determined I would never succumb to that kind of thing again. I wore a hat and occasionally dark glasses and I began to venture out a bit more. PLAYBOY: British Airways and some other airlines would not allow you to fly on their planes. Is that still true? RUSHDIE: It's getting better. The fact is, I've flown all over the world on all sorts of air­lines and nobody has ever had the faintest bit of trouble as a result. PLAYBOY: What was your reaction when your translators and publishers were attacked? RUSHDIE: I was devastated. It was appall­ing and tragic. It happened long after the initial declaration of the fatwa too, so there had been a sense that surely it was safe now. These attacks showed that to be untrue. It was terrible and so senseless. PLAYBOY: Did you feel responsible? RUSHDIE: I did—I knew I was the one who was meant to be murdered. It was such a tragedy, such a waste. Immediately after this began, some of the bookstore chains in America pulled the book off their shelves, claiming they were protecting their staffs. But their staffs refused to be protected in that way. That act of heroism got the book back on the shelves. So did the actions of the writer Stephen King, which people don't know about. A lot of literary writ­ers received credit for the way they stood up for me—the Susan Sontags and Don DeLillos and Julian Barneses. But King has not. According to people inside the book chains, he was incensed and did a

great deal of arguing on behalf of The Sa­tanic Verses. He went so far as to threaten the chains that he would pull his books off their shelves if my book was not on them. He also apparently talked to other best-selling writers to get their support. PLAYBOY: Was King a friend? RUSHDIE: I have never met him. But I cer­tainly owe him one.

PLAYBOY: Amid your many supporters, there were also some surprising critics. How do you respond to them? RUSHDIE: Whom are you referring to? PLAYBOY: John le Carre, Roald Dahl, Germaine Greer.

RUSHDIE: That's quite a roll call, isn't it? If those people were all together in a room, I'd prefer to be in a different one, okay? But there were so many supporters. It's worth emphasizing that had it not been for their extraordinary campaign and sup­port, I would very possibly not have found the strength to face this thing. So had it not been for this army of people getting it right, I might be more upset about the small handful who got it wrong. It may be wrong to speak ill of the dead, but Roald Dahl, for one, was a bastard. He was a dreadful, horri­ble old man, a racist somewhere to the right of Hitler. The only thing worse than being attacked by Dahl would be to be his friend. PLAYBOY: What about Le Carre? RUSHDIE: Somehow I wasn't upset about Le Carre, and I think it's because he's not a writer I cared enough about. I have a ter­rible feeling he may have reacted the way he did because of a review I once wrote of one of his books—a bad review. PLAYBOY: And Germaine Greer? RUSHDIE: Well, Greer has made a lifetime hab­it of stabbing her friends in the back, so why would she stop now? She has since claimed to have been misquoted and misunderstood, but Germaine has spent her life claiming she was misquoted and misunderstood. PLAYBOY: Among the political leaders who criticized you was Jimmy Carter. Did that surprise you?

RUSHDIE: I was shocked about Carter. How­ever, he's since sort of made an attempt to back off that stance. I know people who asked him about it. He told them that he's a little sheepish about what was said. I nev­er saw the text, and there is a problem of reporting that gets skewered. In this case, I am disposed to let it slide. PLAYBOY: Is it true that President Bush and his administration refused to meet with you or take a firm stand in your support? RUSHDIE: Yes. I don't know why. Somebody suggested that it might have been because at that stage the Iranians knew where all the bodies were buried in the Iran-contra business. Maybe people didn't want to up­set that too much.

PLAYBOY: Did you expect a change when Clinton became president? RUSHDIE: There was a great change. How­ever, it was disappointing that the Repub­licans viewed this through partisan eyes. Republicans as well as Democrats should be able to agree that we don't kill people because we don't like what they write. PLAYBOY: When you were in hiding, how long did it take to begin writing again?

RUSHDIE: I soon wrote a few book reviews as a way of showing that I'm still here, folks. Then I wrote Haroun and the Sea of Storks and then the book of short stories. PLAYBOY: Was it difficult to begin writing again?

RUSHDIE: It was difficult to concentrate. There was also a great sadness in me be­cause of what had happened to my book. I spent five years writing in the most serious way and then had the book reduced to a series of slogans, insulted and vilified and reduced and burned. I felt, for a while, if this is what you get, it's not worth it. Thank you very much, I'd rather be a plumber. Of course that was simply an expression of misery, nothing else. Eventually I realized that I have to write; it doesn't matter what people think or say.

PLAYBOY: Of all of those who have attacked you, it was your wife, who had initially gone into hiding with you, who became your most bitter critic. Why? RUSHDIE: I think she had to invent me as a person worth leaving. Otherwise there would be a tendency to believe that she should have stood by her man in that old-fashioned way. She tried to create an image of me as being worthless, which then made

it possible for her to leave with dignity. PLAYBOY: Otherwise it would have seemed she was abandoning ship. RUSHDIE: Yeah. There are a number of fic­tions about this period that I haven't talked about before now, but I think I just will say it. First of all, to be strictly accurate, she did not leave me. I asked her to leave. The rea­son I asked her to leave was that her behav­ior had become upsetting in ways I don't want to comment on. I preferred to be by myself, which is a mark of how upsetting it was. The idea that Marianne could not live with me because I was unable to live up to history is not true. I asked her to go away because I couldn't stand having her around. There was an enormous amount of dishonesty. There were actions that, in my view, were positively dangerous. So I ended the marriage. Since then she has attempted to construct the view that she decided to leave me, because no doubt it seems no­bler. But the fact is that I discovered many things about her that were extraordinarily shocking and distasteful. I'm very glad to have seen the last of her. I feel foolish is all I can say. It is the problem of falling in love with the wrong person. Your friends tell you, but you don't see it until it is too late.

PLAYBOY: Did that experience disenchant

you with love?

RUSHDIE: It certainly shook me. I don't deny it. There was so much dishonesty in­volved, and I'm not a dishonest man. PLAYBOY: You were in particularly bizarre circumstances to be single. RUSHDIE: Yes. I remember going on 60 Minutes shortly after my marriage broke up. Mike Wallace rather courageously asked me what I did for sex. PLAYBOY: Well?

RUSHDIE: As I told him, I was rather glad to have a break, actually. He seem shocked by that answer. But life goes on, and I am not afraid to tell you that my sex life since then has been fine.

PLAYBOY: How do you manage to date and have relationships?

RUSHDIE: Let's put it like this: People should not feel sorry for me. PLAYBOY: There was a report that your friends were supplying you with women. RUSHDIE: I sued when that was printed. The paper that printed it had to pay and I gave the money to a free-speech organization. It's ludicrous, this idea that my friends were run­ning some kind of pimping service. PLAYBOY: How religious was your family? RUSHDIE: Not very. I was brought up more or less without God. Although we were Muslim, religion was worn very lightly. I think my father would take me to the mosque twice a year, the equivalent of go­ing to church at Christmas. We did not eat the flesh of swine, but that was about it. PLAYBOY: The religious people in your books are not very admirable. Conversely, secularists are generally the more moral. Is that your view?

RUSHDIE: It is. I object particularly to fun­damentalism, whether it's Hindu, Muslim or Christian. It's completely barren on any intellectual level. Fundamentalism purports to defend culture, but it doesn't know about the culture that it's defending. If religion is supposed to be a repository of a certain kind of truth, fundamentalism seems to me to be a denial of the truth. It is about the creation of falsehoods and goes after the worst sides of people. I'm alarmed by what's happening wherever fundamen­talists rise—such as the rise of the American religious right. It is at least as dangerous as anything happening in the Third World— with more weapons, probably. I don't think Americans can afford any longer to see this as something happening to other people. It's important to understand that funda­mentalism does not even pretend to be a religious movement. It is a political move­ment. It's about power. So watch out. PLAYBOY: Do you view all religion as dan­gerous, even the less extremist forms? RUSHDIE: No. I'm perfectly able to see the ability of religious systems to provide iden­tity, a sense of community and belonging, a sense of hope and comfort and even a kind of moral structure in people's lives. But these past years I've been given an object lesson in the ability of religion to do some other things, which are not so likable. I've experienced the capacity of religion to do harm. So while I am completely fascinated, even mesmerized by the history of religion

and religious myths, I can't stand the system of rules. This inevitably filters into my books, although I have never seen myself as a reli­gious novelist. There are others for whom religion is the central issue. I am instead a writer of memories, a playful writer, a writer who tries to look at history, a writer with some kind of central linguistic ambition. And I see myself as one who wrestles with his times and tries to make sense of them. PLAYBOY: From the outset, did you plan to write political novels?

RUSHDIE: Only indirectly. The thing that made me a writer was the fact that I came from over there—that is, India—and I ended up over here, in England, and I had to make sense of that. I had a bundle of sto­ries I brought with me, my literary baggage, and I wanted to tell those stories and have those stories lead to other stories. Part of the stories is the way history and people's lives rub up together. We find ourselves in a posi­tion in which public life often determines our fates in ways that have nothing to do with what sort of people we are. Economics is des­tiny, politics is destiny, terrorism is destiny. PLAYBOY: How do you feel about having become a symbol of freedom of speech? RUSHDIE: I have no interest in being a sym­bol. I want to be a writer, and that's all. I do want to be a good writer and one who engages in public themes, as well as private ones. I wanted to have my say—to be part of that conversation. But I didn't want to become some kind of statue. PLAYBOY: But isn't there, in your work, an intent to stir up trouble, to incite? RUSHDIE: It depends on what you mean. I think all good art is provocative. Certainly I would hope that everything I wrote provoked people. But that doesn't mean provoke them to anger or violence. It can mean provoke their sense of duty or their sense of horror or their sense of justice or injustice or their sense of humor. It's true that I have a fairly emphatic view of the world and I express it.

You know, I feel that so much attention has been paid to me while so many other writers have been in danger. I have spo­ken about other writers because it would be obscene to use this attention and not talk about those others. I wish people would lis­ten more to this.

There were great writers in the Soviet gulag whom we fought for. We smuggled out their work and published it, and gave them voices and fought for them. Now an­other group of writers is fighting against equivalent tyranny and equivalent injus­tice, in the Muslim world or out. Because our interests do not dictate it, we ignore them, we let them die, we let them go to jail and rot. We must stop a situation in which writers are getting wiped out every five minutes. China continues to persecute its writers. All over the world, writers are be­ing thrown in jail. They mysteriously die in police custody and they are falsely accused of committing crimes. It is open season on writers, and it must stop.

Excerpted from the April 1996 issue.

/ was brought up more or

less without God. Although

we were Muslim, religion

was worn very lightly. My

father would take me to the

mosque twice a year.