Hunted by An Angry Faith

By William E. Smith

It was an absurdist nightmare, a story that all but defied the Western imagination. A middle-aged author, born in Bombay but for many years resident in London, writes a long, sardonic novel, by turns philosophical and comic and fantastic. In the book's opening scene, two middle-aged Indian actors fall 29,002 feet from a jetliner that has just been exploded by terrorists over the English Channel. They have an animated conversation as they hurtle toward earth; they land safely, but then their troubles begin anew. Along the way, the author writes about his schooling and young adulthood in Britain, about his love for Bombay and about the death of his father. He explores the roots ! of his Muslim faith and retells some legends of the Prophet Muhammad in a whimsical and sometimes outrageous way, though taking care to offer up these sequences as dreams, or even dreams within dreams, by characters who may or may not be mad.

The book is praised by critics and wins a literary prize, but Muslims find some of the passages offensive. Soon there are threats, protests, demonstrations, riots in scattered places -- India, South Africa, the Asian quarters of British cities. India bans the book to avoid sectarian violence, and is soon followed by Pakistan, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Egypt. Then a mass protest is staged outside the American cultural center in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan; six people are killed, a hundred injured. Another dies during protests in Indian-controlled Kashmir.

Then, most astonishing of all, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, 88, spiritual ruler of fundamentalist, revolutionary Iran, announces that the author must be killed for the sin of insulting Islam, the Prophet and the holy Koran, and for good measure exonerates any Muslim who manages to perpetrate this deed and promises him the rewards of martyrdom. And not only the author, but anyone else involved in the publication of the book. A day later, another Iranian cleric announces that a bounty has been placed on the author's head: $2.6 million if the avenger is an Iranian, $1 million if he is not. The following day, thanks to the generosity of still another Iranian philanthropist, the reward is doubled. Governments are angered, publishers intimidated, airlines subjected to bomb threats. The author and his family scurry into hiding, protected by Scotland Yard.

This was the extraordinary plight of Salman Rushdie, 41, whose fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, has precipitated what some Islamic experts regard as the most incendiary literary fight in the 14 centuries of Islamic history. Last week the controversy spread from the dusty streets of Pakistan to the offices of European publishers and to the shopping malls of America, where the nation's largest booksellers ordered all copies of The Satanic Verses removed from the shelves. Suddenly the name Salman Rushdie was on the lips of millions, many reviling him but others expressing sympathy and genuinely wondering how a novel could elicit such deadly passion. The dispute reminded Westerners once again of the zealous rage that Khomeini is capable of; it also raised questions about how free societies can best protect themselves and their citizens against so furious and mercurial a form of intimidation.

The conflict cut to the heart of Muslim and Judeo-Christian values, with centuries of cultural misunderstanding and mistrust finding a flash point in Rushdie's novel. After Khomeini's call to murder, many Muslim leaders worldwide disagreed with the ferocity of his action, but none had a friendly word for Rushdie, his literary intentions or his right to free speech. To be sure, few of his prosecutors had read the book, as the author pointed out repeatedly; most seemed to feel they had learned enough from printed excerpts or merely word of mouth to convict the author of blasphemy compounded by apostasy, the crime of renouncing one's religious faith. In the Muslim faith, the traditional punishment for an apostate is death.

Asked if he took Khomeini's threat seriously, Rushdie, clearly shaken, replied, "I think I have to take it very seriously indeed." He canceled a planned book tour in the U.S., moved out of his four-story house in North London and, under protection of Scotland Yard's antiterrorist squad, quietly disappeared. Then, in a formal statement released on Saturday, he declared, "I profoundly regret the distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam."

The Iranian news agency initially observed that the "Muslim heretic" had not repented. Later it said the apology might be accepted, and still later it dismissed the previous comment as the personal opinion of one of its employees. At the same time, the news agency reported that a local newspaper had denounced the offer of money to anyone who would kill Rushdie, observing that "to pay one man to kill another man is murder at a premium and not a religiously inspired act." This remarkable display of vacillation, played out in the dispatches from Tehran, suggested that pragmatists in Iran had begun a campaign to control the damage caused by the Ayatullah's earlier pronouncement.

In the West, political leaders and the general public alike reacted with anger and disbelief to the outrage of a foreign despot declaring a death sentence on another country's citizen whose only crime, at least in Western eyes, was to probe the meaning of his Islamic heritage. In Washington, the State Department said it was "appalled" by Khomeini's statement as well as by the reward for Rushdie's murder. The Dutch Foreign Minister canceled a trip to Tehran. The British government found itself at the center of the controversy -- because Rushdie is a British citizen and because its Tehran embassy, reopened less than three months ago after being closed for eight years, had been attacked by an angry mob earlier last week. The Foreign Office summoned Iran's lone diplomat in Britain and told him that Khomeini's threat was "totally unacceptable," demanded special protection for its embassy, and disclosed that London was "freezing" its plan to strengthen diplomatic ties with the Islamic state.

British airlines received bomb threats, causing security delays at London's Heathrow Airport. Viking Penguin, Rushdie's publisher, was also the target of such threats at its London and New York City offices. Thanks to the Muslim broadside, sales of The Satanic Verses boomed -- more than 100,000 copies were in print around the world -- and a second U.S. printing was on the way, but distribution was a growing problem. Waldenbooks ordered copies of The Satanic Verses removed from its more than 1,300 stores after getting several threats. Next day B. Dalton and Barnes & Noble followed suit. "We have never before pulled a book off our shelves," said Leonard Riggio, B. Dalton's chief executive officer. "It is regrettable that a foreign government has been able to hold hostage our most sacred First Amendment principle. Nevertheless, the safety of our employees and patrons must take precedence." Though American writers' groups were at first slow to react to the controversy, the 2,200- member PEN American Center later issued a statement in support of Rushdie.

In addition to the problem of distributing the book in the U.S., Viking Penguin faced a threat by 44 Islamic countries to ban the sale of its other books within their borders. In a statement, the company insisted that it had not intended to offend anyone and did not plan to withdraw the book from circulation. Andrew Wylie, Rushdie's New York City-based agent, said the book was still scheduled to be translated into 20 languages, but publishers in France and West Germany were reconsidering plans to issue editions of their own. The Canadian government halted imports of the book while it decided whether, as alleged by Muslims, the novel violates the country's laws against hate literature.

The actual risk faced by Rushdie and his publishers if Khomeini sought to follow through on his threat was difficult to gauge. Of the roughly 25,000 Iranians in Britain, it is believed there may be as many as 1,000 radical extremists, including students on short-term visas. Tehran-backed groups have a history of violent mischief in London, mostly bombings aimed at Iranian dissidents. Says Ian Geldard, head of research at London's Institute for the Study of Terrorism: "In the Islamic world, a call from the Imam is a full command . . . The worst of it is that this threat could remain in effect for months." Or even years. In a BBC radio interview, an exiled Iranian film director, Reza Fazeli, who himself has been the target of a Khomeini death threat and whose son was killed in a 1986 terrorist attack in London, said Rushdie faced a "living hell." He continued, "I had to learn to look over my shoulder. If they kill you, it's over -- it's finished. But ((this way)) they are killing you a hundred times a day."

What exactly did Rushdie do to merit such a threat? By Western standards, nothing -- at least nothing that could not be punished with a bad review. But among Muslims, and not just fundamentalists and extremists, there was an almost universal judgment that he had dishonored the faith (see box). Every Muslim critic seemed to have a favorite offending passage from his book. But, in sum, they felt he had insulted the faith, ridiculed the Prophet, trivialized the sacred -- and that the sin was compounded because it was committed by a born, though not a practicing, Muslim.

In Britain, Rushdie had no shortage of defenders. A group of writers led by playwright Harold Pinter presented a petition in Rushdie's behalf at No. 10 Downing Street. Author Anthony Burgess, writing in the newspaper the Independent, stated the Western position precisely: "What a secular society thinks of the Prophet Muhammad is its own affair, and reason, apart from law, does not permit aggressive interference of the kind that has brought shame and death to Islamabad," where the rioting took several lives. "If Muslims want to attack the Christian or humanistic vision of Islam contained in our literature," Burgess observed, "they will find more vicious travesties than Mr. Rushdie's."

Others, looking for parallels to the Rushdie case both inside and outside Islam, referred to Muslim resentment of the medieval Christian mystery plays, with their satanic portrayals of the Prophet as "Mahound," the name Rushdie gives his crypto-Prophet. In 1977 a fanatical band of Hanafi Muslims shot their way into three buildings in Washington, took more than 100 hostages and, among other things, tried to halt the showing of a $17 million movie epic called Muhammad, Messenger of God at theaters in New York City and Los Angeles. Though the tone of the movie was reverential, the producers had met endless difficulties in making it, including expulsion of the film crew from Morocco. In 1980 Saudi Arabia vehemently protested a British-American TV "drama documentary" called Death of a Princess, which told the story of the 1977 executions of a young married Saudi princess and her lover. Some Muslims have even objected to Children of Gebelawi, a 30-year-old allegorical novel based on the development of the world's great religions, by Egypt's 1988 Nobel laureate, Naguib Mahfouz.

Last year's furor over the Martin Scorsese motion picture The Last Temptation of Christ demonstrated that Christians, particularly those who believe in the literal interpretation of Scripture, are similarly sensitive about fictional portrayal of the sacred, though their protest generally takes less violent forms. Even secular gods are sometimes held by their followers to be above scrutiny; in earlier times the Kremlin was notoriously thin-skinned about revelations concerning the private lives of Lenin and other members of the Communist pantheon.

Practically nobody, however, has managed to touch the sensitive nerve of a vast section of mankind as effectively as Salman Rushdie. In Bombay seven prominent writers and intellectuals, all non-Muslims, declared in a joint statement, "The pain of scurrilous intrusion into the regions of the sacred is not felt by the so-called fundamentalists only, but is the common experience of the whole, besieged ((Muslim)) minority. While there can be rational opposition to their faith, there should be no outraging of it by obscenity and slander."

Many Oriental scholars have raised questions about Islam or the actions of the Prophet, but they have generally been ignored, often because they were understood to have a political bias. Rushdie's actions seem somehow more galling to Muslims because, though essentially free of political motivation, he appears to be tampering -- and mischievously, at that -- with the faith. Karim al Rawi, a lecturer at Cairo's American University, maintained that on this occasion Rushdie's propensity for provocation just went too far. Said Al Rawi: "In his other novels," in which Rushdie wrote, often scathingly, of post-independence India and Pakistan, "the writer acted like a little kid poking at a sleeping lion. In The Satanic Verses, the beast has awakened, and this time did not feel like playing." Most Muslims were simply offended by the material. "He attacked the wives of the Prophet," declared Ahmed Baghat, a writer for Cairo's Al Ahram. "He brought disgrace upon them." Said another Egyptian author, Sheik Muhammad Al Ghazaly: "We do not view this as freedom of opinion, but freedom to be insolent."

Having made their case against the book, Islamic authorities divided sharply over how the author should be punished. Georges Sabagh, director of UCLA's Near East Studies Center, took an unyielding line, saying Khomeini was "completely within his rights" in sentencing Rushdie to death. Added Sabagh, taking full advantage of the free speech available to him in California: "If the man is struck by a thunderbolt, all the better." But should Muslims feel they have a right to kill Rushdie? "Why not?" he replied.

On the other hand, Sheik Muhammad Hossam el Din of Cairo's Al Azhar Mosque argued that to execute Rushdie, as ordered by Khomeini, would be "virtually impossible" under the tenets of Islam. His solution: ban and burn the book and give the author a chance to repent. Issuance of a death decree, he went on, "makes Islam seem brutal and bloodthirsty." Many Islamic clerics were offended by Khomeini's pronouncement, regarding it as vengeful and contrary to Islamic teachings of mercy.

Like most of their countrymen, U.S. experts on Islam were astonished by the intensity of the anti-Rushdie campaign. One academic specialist marveled that he could not "recall anything quite as widespread as this," then quickly asked that his name not be used. "I can't afford a bodyguard," he said. Since Islamic fundamentalism has been on the rise for at least 15 years, how can one account for so explosive a reaction at this time, and against a book that could just as easily have been ignored? The answer is as much political as theological. Now that Iran has settled, if not exactly lost, its brutal and murderous war against Iraq, the Rushdie book has become a tool with which Khomeini can once again mobilize his constituency, this time against a conveniently distant enemy whose offenses are vaguely related to the Ayatullah's "Great Satan," the U.S. Says Marvin Zonis, a political scientist at the University of Chicago: "It's a way to make domestic political capital out of a foreign adventure."

& Such controversies reflect the confusion of a country torn between the more pragmatic forces seeking to moderate the ten-year-old Islamic revolution and open Iran to Western trade, and ideologues determined to retain control. For some months, moderate elements seemed to be in the ascendant. Only a few days preceding Khomeini's rampage against Rushdie, the Iranian leader's designated successor, Ayatullah Hussein Ali Montazeri, made an unusually conciliatory speech in the holy city of Qum. Montazeri lamented the fact that "people in the world have gained the idea that our business in Iran is just murdering people" and called on his country to "set aside past mistakes and harsh treatment," adding that "extremism is to our detriment." At about the same time, Parliamentary Speaker Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani told the Iranian news agency that Tehran erred in seeking a military victory over Iraq. "We took too big a bite," he said.

This was extraordinarily revisionist talk, and it may have been too much for Khomeini to stomach. He struck back, reaffirming his leadership of the Iranian masses with the most convenient weapon at hand, The Satanic Verses. The return of Khomeini's fiery rhetoric may be an isolated rage or it could mean that the hard-liners are once again trying to assert their strength.

Politics also played a role in the anti-Rushdie agitation in Pakistan. Last week's demonstration at the American cultural center in Islamabad was staged by political and religious groups that oppose the government of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and were formerly aligned with her predecessor and enemy, the late President Mohammed Zia ul-Haq. On her return from a trip to China, she seized on this theme in a speech, asking, "Was the agitation really directed against this book, which has not been read, sold or translated in Pakistan, or was it a protest by those who lost the election ((and wish)) to destabilize the process of democracy?"

Toward the end of the week, more violent protests flared in Iran, India and Bangladesh. In Tehran, however, Iran's President Ali Khamenei remarked that the death threat against Rushdie might be withdrawn if he would apologize to Muslims and to Khomeini. A day later, when Rushdie did exactly that, Iran's government-run news agency began to issue its series of contradictory reports and commentaries -- a symbol of the confusion within the Tehran regime.

But what to believe? Even as he was discussing the possible benefits of a Rushdie apology last week, Khamenei said of the author, "This wretched man has no choice but to die because he has confronted a billion Muslims and the Imam." Rushdie of course intended to do no such thing; rather, he used his considerable literary powers to address an audience of educated readers who understood very well that he was offering them a work of the imagination. The fate of both book and author poses a dilemma for Western societies that is not easily resolved. Granted there is a need in the West for greater sensitivity to Islamic concerns, so also is there a need to deny trespass to intruding zealots -- one is reminded of Khamenei's remark that "the Imam knows no frontiers" -- determined to inflict intellectual and sometimes physical terrorism on the rest of the world.

For much of the past two months, Salman Rushdie has been defending himself and his book. "The thing that is most disturbing is that they are talking about a book that doesn't exist," he said. "The book that is worth killing people for and burning flags for is not the book I wrote." As Rushdie saw it, his book "isn't actually about Islam, but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay." The sad irony, he said, is "that after working for five years to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it's about -- people who might find some pleasure and much recognition in its pages."

As the week ended, Rushdie was under police guard somewhere in England, doubtless reflecting on the magical if sinister power that his words had acquired and getting acquainted with yet another place of refuge. It was a situation that he must have understood very well. As he wrote in his first novel, Grimus, more than a decade ago, "It is the natural condition of the exile, putting down roots in memory."

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo, Frank Melville/London and Priscilla Painton/New York