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?