The Free-Speech Struggle That Became a Matter of Muslim Religious Choice : Literature: Through the “Satanic Verses” controversy, Salman Rushdie has, paradoxically, promoted a new understanding of Islam.

British novelist Salman Rushdie, a professed unbeliever, has become a Muslim in order to present himself to the world as a repentant Muslim. Such is the strange but unmistakable logic of his signed statement of Dec. 24, 1990, to a group of Islamic scholars.

The four-part statement begins with a clause that has nothing to do with “The Satanic Verses,” the novel for which Rushdie was sentenced to death by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini:

“1. To witness that there is no God but Allah, and that Mohammed is his last prophet.”

These are the words of the shahada , Islam’s profession of faith. It is by reciting them that an infidel “submits” and becomes a Muslim.

Until recently, Rushdie had stoutly refused to submit, maintaining that he was not a Muslim and, therefore, the laws of Islam did not apply to him. Last February, in the London Independent, he wrote: “It feels bizarre, and wholly inappropriate, to be described as some sort of heretic, after having lived my life as a secular, pluralist, eclectic man . . . . I do not accept the charge of blasphemy because, as somebody says in ‘The Satanic Verses,’ ‘where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.’ I do not accept the charge of apostasy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one cannot be said to have apostasized from.”

Muslims who for their own reasons wanted to resolve the Rushdie affair were stymied. They could not rehabilitate a man who kept insisting that he was in no need of rehabilitation.

The most important among these compromise-seeking Muslims seems to have been President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. In February, 1989, Mubarak--risking his life in a country whose last president was slain by Muslim fanatics--denounced Khomeini’s death decree, though he still had to allow the banning of “The Satanic Verses” in his country. Even so, it seems, Mubarak has persuaded Rushdie to say--in words that no Muslim will miss even if some Westerners might--”I am a Muslim.” At a time when the Egyptian president has aligned himself against Saddam Hussein, an erstwhile secularist now portraying himself as a champion of Islam, the Rushdie affair is an irritant that Mubarak would happily eliminate.

Has any harm been done?

Henri IV of France, a Protestant who changed his religion to inherit the throne, said, “Paris vaut une Messe “; “Paris is worth a Mass”--even if you’re not really a Catholic. As the “secular, pluralist, eclectic” and thoroughly Western man he is, Rushdie belongs to a culture where people are forever changing, joining, quitting, half-embracing, half-renouncing one religion or another. If there is any man in the West to whom the full, sloppy measure of this freedom ought to be allowed, it is he.

The second part of Rushdie’s statement is more redeployment than retreat:

“2. To declare that I do not agree with any statement in my novel ‘The Satanic Verses’ uttered by any of the characters who insults the prophet Mohammed, or casts aspersions upon Islam, or upon the authenticity of the holy Koran, or who rejects the divinity of Allah.”

Rushdie’s tone may be conciliatory, but the sentence need mean nothing more than “The Satanic Verses” is a novel. If by this contritely worded act of non-contrition, Rushdie can deprive Hussein of a propaganda weapon and patch up his own relations with at least the Sunni majority of the world’s Muslims, who will say him nay?

Yet, there is something more to be said.

In the February, 1990, newspaper article, Rushdie also wrote: “To those participants in the controversy who have felt able to justify the most extreme Muslim threats towards me and others by saying that I have broken an Islamic rule, I would ask the following question: Are all the rules laid down at a religion’s origin immutable forever? . . . Let no one suppose that such disputes about rules do not take place daily throughout the Muslim world.”

The orthodox view is that because Mohammed was the last prophet of Allah, Muslim rules are indeed immutable. As for Rushdie, what he has come to represent is one mutation in particular: the new possibility that a Muslim might, publicly and with impunity, become an ex-Muslim. As a uniquely public ex-Muslim, perhaps the first such public ex-Muslim in history, Rushdie both suggested and, in some sense, opened that possibility to the billion souls whom Islam counts as irrevocably its own.

We are talking about the right to convert and the right to drop out, both of which are as integral to the Western understanding of religious freedom as they are foreign to the Muslim understanding of religious tolerance. Muslim tolerance means, in general, that born Christians and born Jews are free not to convert to Islam. It does not mean that born Muslims are free to convert to either Christianity or Judaism, much less to any other religion.

Moreover, no provision is made in most Muslim countries for the Muslim who may wish to quit Islam but not adopt another religion. Since religion and politics are not separate in Muslim tradition--and since there is no autonomous, secular alternative to Islam in Muslim countries--dropping out of the religious game altogether is all but impossible.

Or at least it was impossible until Rushdie did it: “I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief.”

But what about your childhood? Muslims wondered. Rushdie may have lived in England and as an Englishman from the age of 14. But what about his first 14 years in India and Pakistan? The boy Salman almost certainly was a Muslim and, Muslims infer, did at some point break with the faith of his fathers. Loyal, personally, to Muslims as people, Rushdie had nonetheless long ceased to believe as they did.

What “The Satanic Verses” did by its bitter mockery of Islam was bring Rushdie’s rejection of his ancestral faith out into the open. The Western ideal of religious freedom--of which Rushdie became, at that point, the trapped and almost unwitting prophet--was freedom defined as including the right to do what he quite plainly had done. As the scandal came into focus, Muslims were able to be offended by the story of Salman the laughing, wealthy apostate even when they had not troubled to read his book. Others before him had left the House of Islam, but they had slipped quietly out the back. Rushdie had left with a spectacularly noisy slamming of the front door.

A struggle that seemed initially to be about freedom of speech in the West has become, in short, a struggle about freedom of religious choice among Muslims--especially Muslim immigrants living in the West. Will they enjoy the same latitude others living in the West enjoy? Or will religious authorities based in their places of origin restrict their options?

In the third part of his Dec. 24 statement, Rushdie writes:

“3. I undertake not to publish the paperback edition of ‘The Satanic Verses’ or to permit any further agreement for translations into other languages while any risk of further offense exists.”

The languages into which “The Satanic Verses” remains to be translated include, obviously, the main languages of the Muslim world. As for the paperback edition, it should be noted that no hardcover novel remains permanently in print. Novels that enter the permanent literature curriculum do so as perennial paperbacks. “The Satanic Verses”--for its now historic importance in Muslim-Western relations as well as for its considerable intrinsic literary interest--will undoubtedly become such a hardy perennial if it finds a paperback publisher. Even a few years of paperback availability in Britain, however, will mean that most of the young Muslims there will eventually see a copy. It is just this that the Muslim authorities of Britain evidently wish to prevent.

The last point in Rushdie’s December declaration is:

“4. I will continue to work for better understanding of Islam in the world, as I have always attempted to do in the past.”

Through the “Satanic Verses” controversy, Rushdie has, paradoxically, already promoted a new understanding of Islam. By saying “I am not a Muslim” in word and deed, this Muslim-born novelist has revised the context of religious belief, however slightly, for one-quarter of the world’s population.

That the conditions of his own life have also changed--drastically--is beyond dispute. But despite that misery, and despite his belated capitulation to Muslim pressure, Rushdie has won a remarkable victory. His British protectors have helped him win it, and for that the West is in their debt, too. But the larger debt is to Rushdie. It is a rare novel that measurably enlarges the realm of human freedom. In its two years of life, “The Satanic Verses” has done no less.