Salman Rushdie Interview

Salman Rushdie graces the cover of this month's Reason Magazine. Inside there is a free-wheeling interview with author. I'm posting only some of his comments if you want to read the whole thing you can do so here.

Reason: Do you think freedom of speech is threatened by cultural relativism—by the idea that principles like free expression are not universal truths but simply local cultural constructs?

Rushdie: The idea of universal rights—the idea of rights that are universal to all people because they correspond to our natures as human beings, not to where we live or what our cultural background is—is an incredibly important one. This belief is being challenged by apostles of cultural relativism who refuse to accept that such rights exist. If you look at those who employ this idea, it turns out to be Robert Mugabe, the leaders of China, the leaders of Singapore, the Taliban, Ayatollah Khomeini. It is a dangerous belief that everything is relative and therefore these people should be allowed to kill because it’s their culture to kill.

I think we live in a bad age for the free speech argument. Many of us have internalized the censorship argument, which is that it is better to shut people up than to let them say things that we don’t like. This is a dangerous slippery slope, because people of good intentions and high principles can see censorship as a way of advancing their cause and not as a terrible mistake. Yet bad ideas don’t cease to exist by not being expressed. They fester and become more powerful.

Reason: The fatwa was in some ways a precursor to September 11. It was the clearest indication of the threat Islamic fundamentalism posed to freedom, pluralism, secularism, and everything we love about the West. You called on Western leaders at that time to unite to defeat the forces of tyranny and terrorism, the "witch-burners" as you called them, pointing out that this was not about religion but about domination and control. Did the West respond?

Rushdie: Pretty slowly. I think eventually it did. One of the things that was interesting was that on both sides of that argument there were people who wanted to describe this as an exceptional event. People who were on my side wished to say that this was an exceptionally horrible attack on a writer and therefore required exceptional resources to defend it. People who were not on my side said that I had done something so exceptionally horrible that the rules of free speech didn’t apply. But on both sides of the argument, there was a desire not to make it typical of anything. It didn’t prove that Islam was against free speech. It was just against this horrible abuse of it. It didn’t prove that there was a large problem of this sort. It just proved that a particularly insane dying religious leader had made a particularly insane fanatical threat.

And when I tried to say that this is not just me, that it is happening in a lot of places to a lot of writers and you need to look at that larger phenomenon, it was often seen as special pleading. This was seen as me trying to attach my case to others to justify myself. It was very difficult to get anyone to see that there was a growing phenomenon that needed to be taken seriously: the attempt to control thought.

This is at the front line of Islamic radicalism. There are all kinds of things that come behind it. You know what [Iranian sociologist] Ali Shariati called the "revolt against history." That’s the project of tyranny and unreason which wishes to freeze a certain view of Islamic culture in time and silence the progressive voices in the Muslim world calling for a free and prosperous future.

People weren’t interested in hearing about this at the time. And then along comes 9/11, and now many people say that, in hindsight, the fatwa was the prologue and this is the main event.

Reason: You wrote an essay criticizing President Bush and other Western leaders for claiming after 9/11 that "this is not about Islam." In what way is this about Islam?

Rushdie: Well, you know, that was said for good reasons. It was said to minimize the backlash against Muslims. But just in terms of actual fact, it is absurd. It is not about football.

The fact that it is about a particular idea of Islam that many Muslims would reject does not mean it is not about Islam. The Christian Coalition is still about Christianity, even if it’s an idea of Christianity that many Christians might not go along with.

Reason: What they mean is that it is not about Islam properly understood. That it is about certain extreme followers of Islam who might not be interpreting the religion correctly.

Rushdie: Yes, but Wahhabi Islam is becoming very powerful these days. To say that it is not about Islam is to not take the world as it really is.

Reason: If you were President’s Bush’s speechwriter, how would you do it?

Rushdie: You would just have to make that argument. You have to say, "Not everybody is like this, but this is a part of what there is." This is the problem with the truth. Truth is never one-dimensional. It is contradictory sometimes. But politics wants clarity.

My job is not to make a politician’s life easier. As for Bush’s speechwriters, I have met some of them, and they are very able people.

Reason: Where does this leave us on the question of democratic reform in Islamic countries? Do you think that Islam lacks a crucial piece to build a foundation for freedom?

Rushdie: What it has is an extra piece that believes that religion can be the foundation for a state. It’s a question of removing that piece rather than adding something. There have been various moments in the history of Pakistan when attempts to Islamize the country were resisted strongly by both generals and civilian governments. It’s not inevitable that a country full of Muslims will seek to Islamize its structures. But I do think there is a need for a widespread realization among Muslims that you cannot build a state based on religion. Pakistan is proof of that. Here was a state that was built on religion, but a quarter of a century after it was founded it fell apart, because the glue is not strong enough

Reason: Leftist intellectuals have typically viewed world politics as a struggle between the powerful West and the powerless Third World. For some, 9/11 changed this—one person who did a complete turnaround is your friend Christopher Hitchens, to whom Step Across This Line is dedicated, who has become an enthusiastic supporter of the Bush foreign policy. Arundhati Roy, the Indian writer and activist, continues to view America as the source of many of the problems in the world. Like her, you were a critic of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. Which camp do you put yourself in now?

Rushdie: You can say that I’m the third point of the triangle. I find myself sometimes agreeing with both of them and often disagreeing with both of them. Christopher’s journey toward Wolfowitz is a lot further along than mine. And I don’t think that I am yet convinced of the theory of the democratic domino effect. Even though we see these stirrings in those countries in the area, I think you could easily attribute those stirrings to things quite independent of American policy, which have to do with local history. The hatred of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon has existed for a long time, and at some point that was going to burst out. If you look at the consequences of the death of Arafat, it seems to me that what’s happening in the Palestinian community right now has great echoes in Northern Ireland in the Catholic community. There comes a point when people get sick of that stuff, sick of violence and terrorism. Catholics in Northern Ireland simply grew to detest what the IRA was doing.

Of course American policy plays a role because it is so powerful. But many of the things that are happening there had local roots.

Reason: Nobody would quarrel with that, but the question is, can—and has—current U.S. foreign policy been a catalyst for positive change?

Rushdie: I think that’s an open question. The next decade will tell us the answer.

Reason: So do you or don’t you part company with critics of American power, like Roy?

Rushdie: I admire a lot of Arundhati’s activism and have written in support of her efforts to stop some of the big dam projects in India. She is an old-style leftist of the sort that there still are in India, and many of them are my friends. But I don’t see the world the way they do, with America as the bogeyman.

I wrote Shame [1983] when there were still two superpowers. One of the ideas of that novel was that it is very easy to blame the superpowers for the problems of, say, India and Pakistan. The premise was, let’s just assume that our problems are of our own making and then exacerbated by this or that superpower. At that point you get back responsibility for your own life. It puts the tools back in our own hands. It’s kind of infantilizing to say that everything comes from the outside.

Reason: When I was growing up in India, every communal riot, every instance of government corruption, every thing that went wrong was blamed by politicians on the "CIA Hand."

Rushdie: Everything. Everything was the Hidden Hand. The Pynchonesque conspiracy running the world.