If ‘Satanic Verses’ Is Grave Folly, Writers Must Stand and Immortalize It

By my limited comprehension of the Muslim religion, martyrdom is implicit in the faith. While all faiths sooner or later suggest that a true believer may have to be ready to die for the governing God, it is possible that the Muslims, of all religions, have always been the most dedicated to this stern test.

Now it seems as if the spiritual corruption of the 20th Century has entered Islam’s ranks as well. Any Muslim who succeeds in assassinating Salman Rushdie will be rewarded with the munificent sum of $5 million. This must be the largest hit contract in history. Islam, with all its mighty virtues and vices, equal of the least to the virtues and vices of every other major religion, has now introduced a novel element into the history of theology. It has added the logic of the Syndicate. One does not even have to belong to the Family to collect. One has only to be the hit man. Of course, the novelist in me insists on thinking how I would hate to be that hit man trying to collect that $5 million. My Iranian paymaster might say, “We really cannot afford the sum. So many men lost in the war with Iraq. So many widows in need of alms. Tell you, kind killer, we think you might make a charitable contribution.”

This is but a novelist’s speculation. That is what we are here for--to speculate on human possibilities, to engage in those fantasies, cynicisms, satires, criticisms and explorations of human vanity, desire and courage that the blank walls of mighty corporations like to conceal from us. We are scribblers who try to explore what is left to look at in the interstices. Sometimes we make mistakes and injure innocent victims by our words. Sometimes we get lucky and make people with undue worldly power a bit uncomfortable for a short time. Usually, we spend our days injuring each other. We are, after all, a fragile resource, an endangered species. It is not untypical of the weak and endangered to chew each other up. But now the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini has offered us an opportunity to regain our frail religion, which happens to be faith in the power of words and our willingness to suffer for them. He awakens us to the great rage we feel when our liberty to say what we wish, wise or foolish, kind or cruel, well-advised or ill-advised, is endangered. We discover that, yes, maybe we are willing to suffer for our idea. Maybe we are even willing, ultimately, to die for the idea that serious literature, in a world of dwindling certainties and choked-up ecologies, is the absolute we must defend.

We have had the example of our largest corporate chain of booksellers in America, Waldenbooks, withdrawing “The Satanic Verses” from its bookshelves in order to secure the safety of its employees. Honest motive, doubtless. What is the use of being upwardly mobile in one’s job in a massive corporate chain if security cannot be guaranteed? Get killed selling a book? Worse! One could get killed buying a book on how to improve oneself. Who would ever forgive the corporate chain? Of course, the option of assessing such danger calmly and informing employees and customers of the real odds was never engaged.

Waldenbooks has something like a thousand outlets. In one working week from Monday to Saturday, if one terrorist succeeded in making one successful attack on one store, the odds that it would not be the store you worked in would be 6,000 to 1 in your favor. If, as a customer, you spent half an hour in any one of these thousand stores, while it was in the course of being open for eight hours a day for six days, the odds in your favor would increase to 16 times 6,000, or close to 100,000 to 1 on your side. I think such odds, if loudly promulgated, would have brought in as many prospective customers looking for the spice of a very small risk as would have been frightened away; for the employees, a 10% increase for temporary combat pay could have been instituted. What are contingency funds for?

No, the answer to why Waldenbooks shut down “The Satanic Verses” is that it sells its product like soup cans. Only the homeless will ever endanger themselves over a can of soup. The largest purveyors of our books do not care about literature, whether serious, half-serious or failed. The purveyors see books as a commodity that rots into the lively spirit of money if the books stay too long on the shelf. So they hire clerks who tend to reflect their own mores. If Saul Bellow were to purchase one of his own novels in a chain where he did not normally shop, and paid for it with his own credit card, the odds that the clerk would recognize his name are about the same as the odds in Russian roulette--one in six. Saul Bellow could walk in and out of a chain bookstore like a ghost. So could I. So could many another established writer who has been around 30 or 40 years. Tom Wolfe might be recognized, but then Tom, for this year anyway, is the fastest selling can of soup around.

No surprise, therefore, if retail chains of American booksellers seem to have more respect for terrorists than for culture. How then can they not help to accelerate the latest mega-farce down the media road?

A serious book that may or may not have been irresponsible in part, as most serious books are--I cannot pretend to define the issue more closely since I, I fear, in company with the people issuing the death threats, have not yet read it--yes, this serious yet possibly irresponsible contribution to serious literature, if it had been treated like other serious novels, which are almost always in part sacrilegious, blasphemous and secretly against the state, would, if it had encountered no formal outrage, have suffered the fate of other serious books. It would have received good, even hearteningly good, but still modest sales, it would have been discussed, and taken its small place on the shelf of serious works to be picked up again by a few devoted readers. Islam might have been injured by one part in 100,000. Now Islam is injured vastly more. Oceans of publicity have been given to the sacrilege. I say the act of attracting such attention was a willful chosen act by the Muslim leaders. The wise men of Iran know that the Western moral conscience is dulled, and no one in our Yuppie overlay of skillful surface floating above incalculable horrors such as drug wars and acute poverty is ready to die for any idea, other, conceivably, than receiving a big payoff in cash. So the Ayatollah may have wished to show the great length of the whip he can crack, the whip whose secret name is found in our bottomless fear of the bottomless pit of terrorism. If we believe in nothing, how can we bear to die? The wise men of Islam know that about us.

One would have to respect the incisiveness of such understanding, if not for the fact that the wise men of Iran are also wholly indifferent to the fate of our literature and are savagely opposed to those freedoms of expression we wish to believe we hold dear.

In this week of turmoil, we can now envision a fearful time in the future when fundamentalist groups in America, stealing their page from this international episode, will know how to apply the same methods to American writers and bookstores. If they ever succeed, it will be due to the fact that we never found an honest resistance to the terrorization of Salman Rushdie.

I would suggest, therefore, that it is our duty to form ranks behind him, and our duty to state to the world that if he is ever assassinated, it will then become our obligation to stand in his place. If he is ever killed for a folly, we must be killed for the same folly, and we may indeed be, since we will then vow to do our best to open all literary meetings with a reading of the critical pages in “The Satanic Verses.” A folly repeated is no longer a folly but a statement of intent. If what Salman Rushdie wrote was grave folly, then by killing him you will be obliging us to immortalize that same grave folly. For if one writer can be killed on a hit contract, and all concerned get away with it, then we may be better off being hit each of us, one by one, in future contracts, until our chiefs in the Western world may be finally aroused by the shocking spectacle of our willingness, even though we are selfish creative artists, to be nonetheless martyred in a cause.

I will not, however, put my name on such a list alone. Like others, I have my family, my projects, my life to see through to its conclusion. Join with me, rather, 10 good American authors, male and female, or 20, or 100 in such a vow, and we are relatively safe. At least, we are safer to a considerable degree and can feel honorable to ourselves. We will have struck a real blow for freedom. For the wise men of Iran will know then that we possess our spiritual wisdom too. Certain acts count for more than others in the defense of freedom, and the willingness to embrace an idea at perilous cost to our inner calm may be at the center of what the Western world is all about. If we would ask bookstore clerks to stand and serve, then we must demand more than that of ourselves.