SALMAN Rushdie has started work on perhaps the most anticipated literary memoir of them all: the story of his decade in hiding from a fatwa.
No other leading writer has endured an experience remotely comparable with Rushdie’s life under the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini’s death threat, and the episode now stands as a grim turning point in the relationship between Islam and the West.
This year Rushdie, 63, announced that in the future he would tell his side of the story.
This week, at an event organised by the literary magazine Granta, he confirmed that the moment had arrived. “I am writing it now,” he said. “I found it kind of annoying that other people kept offering versions of it that were all bulls***.”
It was on Valentine’s Day in 1989 that Khomeini called for the death of everyone involved in the publication of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie’s allegedly blasphemous fourth novel.
For the next nine years the author was driven underground, guarded round the clock by Special Branch officers at an estimated cost of ₤11 million ($19.4m).
He is believed to have lived in 30 different locations but apart from occasional last-minute appearances at literary gatherings, dinners and, once, on stage at Wembley Stadium during a U2 gig, his exact whereabouts and activities for most of that time remain a mystery.
Around the world the feelings of hatred, fear and condemnation stirred up by the fatwa hastened the emergence of radical Islamism and the erosion of free speech.
British bookshops were bombed. A would-be assassin accidentally blew himself up in a London hotel room; a Norwegian publisher was shot; the novel’s Japanese translator was stabbed to death in Tokyo; 37 people died in an arson attack in Turkey aimed at a Turkish translator.
Thousands of articles and at least six books have explored what became known as the Rushdie affair but the author and his friends have kept largely silent about what actually happened to him, until now.
“I just thought it might be time to tell that story,” Rushdie said. “I always for a long time didn’t want to tell it. First of all I was in it and that was not likeable. Then I got out of it and I thought the last thing I want to do is put myself back in it and think about it for the next few years. Of course there were people telling me I should write it but I just thought, ‘Don’t want to. I want to get back the day job and write novels, stories etc’.”
Part of the reason he changed his mind was that his personal archive has now been properly organised for him by Emory University in Atlanta, which bought it in 2006. Commercial considerations may also have helped, especially as memoirs have become the geese that lay golden eggs in bookselling. Jon Howells, of Waterstone’s, said: “A memoir from Salman Rushdie would probably be his best-selling book in a decade.”
Clearly, though, the main motivation is personal rather than practical or financial. Rushdie wants to address the myths surrounding his captivity, such as the idea “that I had spent those entire years living in Bono’s guesthouse” in a smart Dublin suburb or with Ian McEwan (“I had dinner. Didn’t even spend the night!”).
In 2008 Rushdie went to court to denounce as lies a gossipy book by a former member of his protection team, which was serialised in The Mail on Sunday. He won.
“There was a point at which I thought the only way to get rid of this bulls*** is to tell the story,” he said at the Granta event. “I suddenly just literally woke up and thought maybe I’m ready. And I think I am. I have spent a lot of this year exhuming the material.
“I had journals of my own but as well as that there was obviously so much material written by other people at that time. I have been trying to get all that together and what is interesting is that it doesn’t upset me and I think if I had even looked at it a couple of years ago it would have.”
He has written 70 pages so far.
“I think I can really use my novelistic abilities and approach the material exactly as I would approach a work of fiction. I think of it as a non-fiction novel in which my name happens to be a character.”
One likely area of interest is the literary feuding over the fatwa between Rushdie and other writers, including Germaine Greer, John Le Carre and V.S. Naipaul (who publicly referred to the death threat as “an extreme form of literary criticism”).
Another is the story behind Rushdie’s announcement on Christmas Eve 1990 that he had rediscovered his Muslim faith. Years later Rushdie described that announcement as the biggest mistake of his life, a “deranged” moment that came at his lowest ebb.
It made no difference to the new Ayatollah in Tehran, who insisted that the fatwa would remain in place “even if he repents and becomes the most pious man of his time”. Rushdie’s confinement ended in 1998 when the Iranian Government gave a public commitment that it would not carry out the death sentence.
It cannot be rescinded, however, and the author will never be able to live a normal life. Writing about the fatwa period will not change that, and it might just stir it all up again.
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