The fatwa ensured that the name Salman Rushdie is better known around the world than that of any other living novelist.
In conversation, Rushdie performs the same mental acrobatics that one finds in his fiction-snaking digressions that can touch down on several continents and historical eras before returning to the original point. Although he claimed he’d exhausted his resources finishing the book, he seemed to gain energy as he talked about his past, his writing, his politics. When he is working, Rushdie said, “it is rather unusual of me to come out in the daytime.” But late last year he handed in the manuscript for Shalimar the Clown, his ninth novel, and he has not yet started a new project.
Then, asked where the photograph is stored, he grinned and replied, “On the wall.”
“My family can’t stand that picture,” he said, laughing. Clean shaven, dressed in jeans and a sweater, he actually looks like a younger version of the condemned man who stared out at his accusers in Richard Avedon’s famous 1995 portrait. But Islamic hardliners regard fatwas as irrevocable and Rushdie’s home address remains unlisted.įor a man who occasioned such furor, who has been lauded and blamed, threatened and feted, burnt in effigy and upheld as an icon of free expression, Rushdie is surprisingly easygoing and candid-neither a hunted victim nor a scourge. In 1998, Iran’s president, Mohammed Khatami, denounced the fatwa, and Rushdie now insists that the danger has passed. By coincidence, the second conversation took place on Valentine’s Day 2005, the sixteenth anniversary of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie, which proclaimed him an apostate for writing The Satanic Verses and sentenced him to death under Islamic law. These days Rushdie lives primarily in New York, where this interview was conducted in several sessions over the past year.
He was educated there and in England, where he spent the first decades of his writing life. Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in 1947, on the eve of India’s independence. Interviewed by Jack Livings Issue 174, Summer 2005
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