TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/030689/03068900.036

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 100 lines

ESSAY, Page 84

Prosaic Justice All Around

By Pico Iyer


    It has, from the beginning, been a story much stranger than
fiction; if a novel had been so riddled with ironies, it would have
been condemned for implausibility. In Salman Rushdie and Ayatullah
Ruhollah Khomeini, the world has two master plotters, celebrated
controversialists both, with unusually lively imaginations, each
of them now in his own embattled hideout while the War of the Words
rages on. Yet even Jorge Luis Borges -- or Rushdie -- could
scarcely have dreamed up a scene in which a Muhammadan cleric vows
to kill Salman Rushdie for a book in which the Prophet condemns an
apostate called Salman for "polluting the word of God." Who is the
prophet here -- Rushdie, for predicting the confrontation in the
first place, or the Ayatullah, for taking it upon himself to be the
living embodiment of Islam? Life imitates art imitates life . . .

    Both scriptures and stories have always assured us that people
create their own destinies, bring down upon themselves the justice
they deserve. In this case, however, the justice could hardly be
described as poetic. Both sides have, in a sense, got exactly what
they wanted -- only to find that perhaps they should not have
wanted it after all. In banning the book, various wise bodies have
ignored the truth that every parent knows: a prohibition is often
an invitation in disguise. And in making his Valentine's Day call
for massacre, Khomeini seems to have gone beyond overkill to
hubris: unlike, say, the Christians who opposed The Last Temptation
of Christ, he appears unwilling to let God take care of ultimate
justice himself.

    Rushdie, meanwhile, has all the controversy, and attendant
celebrity, he has often seemed to crave -- yet with a cruel
vengeance.  For years Rushdie has been one of Britain's most vocal
polemicists, an agent provocateur who has delighted in mixing it
up -- even if "it" means politics and literature.  His first great
novel, Midnight's Children, about India, was successfully
challenged by the Prime Minister of India; his second, Shame, about
Pakistan, was banned in Pakistan; now the last in his unofficial
trilogy, about both India and England, has been banned in India and
burned in England. As one who was born into the Islamic faith and
studied "the Satanic verses" at Cambridge, he must surely have
known that his skeptic's accounting of Islam was certain to offend;
yet the very title of his book went out of its way to flaunt its
hereticism.

    Thus some of Rushdie's detractors can now say that a
symmetrical justice has been served: those who court fame end up
with infamy.  The man who notoriously abandoned the longtime editor
who backed him for more than a decade in order to get a contract
of roughly $1 million has now got a $1 million contract on his
head.  And in the same breath as he became a household name,
Rushdie has become a missing person.  Almost worst of all, for a
writer, his work of the imagination -- and an exceptionally complex
work of an uncommonly fertile imagination -- is now being treated
as if it were a heretic's pamphlet; The Satanic Verses has been
turned from a book into a talking point.  With the drama bringing
more and more readers to a novel that most readers will find almost
impossible to unravel, one is ironically reminded of the end of
that classic discussion of faith vs. doubt, Matthew Arnold's "Dover
Beach," in which "ignorant armies clash by night."

    Yet the saddest irony of the affair of the death, and the
deadly, sentences is that the writer and orator have somehow
produced one of those rare situations -- like the Iran-Iraq war --
in which everyone is the loser. In vilifying the book, some Muslim
extremists have promoted it much more effectively than Viking
Penguin could ever have  done, and condemned themselves, in some
eyes, of blind intolerance much more convincingly than Rushdie
could ever have done. Rushdie, for his part, becomes a man with a
past, and a difficult future. Until recently, for example, it was
not impossible to consider him a potential candidate, one day, for
the Nobel Prize; now it seems hard to imagine the timid souls of
Stockholm endorsing his vision. Publishers too may become wary of
him. Most dangerous of all, he may become wary of himself, may be
tempted to censor his own ravenously anarchic imagination -- or
else, perhaps, to forfeit the realm of art for the altogether
meaner alleyways of argument.

    At the same time, one's heart goes out to a man now marked for
life, and hiding away in London like the Ayatullah-ish Imam he
describes in his novel. Khomeini's threat is a trick as old as
Hasan-i Sabbah, the 12th century Iranian ruler who founded the
order of the Assassins, based on the knowledge that the very threat
of murder can be as disabling as its execution. A man who fears
that he may be killed is often no stronger than a man already dead
-- and a good deal more unsettled. Now, as the British government
rallies behind one of its most persistent critics, Rushdie, as
connoisseur of dislocation, finds himself an exile in his own
adopted home. In fact, ironically, he has ended up in much the same
situation as the statesmen he has always attacked -- the Gandhis
and Khomeini -- living under the perpetual shadow of assassination.

    The final irony of the whole sad affair is that it has, in its
perverse way, vindicated the power of the written word (even a
writer can make nations tremble) -- and of the spoken word (even
an aging foreign cleric can make merchants turn their back on
Mammon). Whether or not the pen is mightier than the sword, both
literature and religion have shown their strength. Yet who would
want to assent to the darkest heresy of all: that he who lives by
the word should die by the word?