Salman Rushdie, Freedom Writer
Salman Rushdie, Freedom Writer
The writer came to L.A. recently to accept the Library Foundation of Los Angeles’ literary award and to talk about his new memoir of his underground years, ‘Joseph Anton.’
In the 1990s, he was the world-famous novelist few people officially laid eyes on. Of Salman Rushdie’s dozen-plus novels, it was “The Satanic Verses” (1988) that raised a hue and cry and sent him undercover: Its supposedly sacrilegious portrayal of the prophet Muhammad brought Rushdie a fatwa, a death sentence, from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (it was lifted in 1998). The writer came to L.A. to accept the Library Foundation of Los Angeles’ literary award and to talk about his new memoir of his underground years, “Joseph Anton.” He and the book have arrived just as the blowback from “Innocence of Muslims” has caused us all to confront the questions that commandeered a decade of his life.
In the new book you write that the protagonist — you — chooses ethics and the universality of freedom over fundamentalist religion and moral relativism. Is this the defining conflict of the epoch?
I think so. I really wanted to sum it up not just in a narrow political way but in terms of what it is about literature and the things that I love that I wanted to defend against the things that were attacking them.
You called the “Innocence of Muslims” video the worst thing on YouTube. It certainly isn’t art, but it is “speech.” Should we draw a line on the protections we extend to speech?
I don’t think so. The correct response to a piece of nonsense on YouTube is to say it’s a piece of nonsense on YouTube. To use that to try to blow up the world just seems, to put it mildly, disproportionate. It’s become clear that the video has become a pretext for the unleashing of a more generalized anti-American rage. And the video has been used by political and religious leaders across the Muslim world just to point an angry mob in the direction of America.
Even as the video protests unfolded, “The Book of Mormon,” which makes light of religion, opened in Hollywood. Nobody burned down the Pantages over it.
It’s a brilliantly clever show, and I know a lot of Mormons have seen it and thought it was funny. This is how to be grown-up. We’re sometimes told that, on [history’s] calendar, Islam is only in the middle ages, so it will mature as the centuries pass. But Mormonism seems to have got there a lot faster.
You were the subject of a rather cartoonishly nasty video by Pakistani guerrillas.