Rushdie Makes Surprise N.Y. Appearance : Islam: The author, under a death threat from Iran for ‘The Satanic Verses,’ talks about free speech amid tight security at Columbia University.

Under extraordinary security, author Salman Rushdie was smuggled into Manhattan, where he made a surprise appearance Wednesday night at a Columbia University dinner celebrating the 200th anniversary of the First Amendment. As the audience listened, riveted, Rushdie said he refused to surrender to despair.

It was Rushdie’s first trip abroad since the Iranian government offered a multimillion-dollar award and called for his death after publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses.”

In a move that could further escalate the controversy, the author announced that the book would be published in paperback.

About 400 people at the dinner stood and applauded for a full minute when Rushdie was announced as the surprise guest, according to those present. The bearded author raised his hands, trying to quiet the audience. Finally, when they were seated, he delivered an impassioned attack on human rights abuses in Iran and an equally passionate defense of free speech.

“Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ballgame,” he said. “Free speech is life itself.”

Rushdie, who earlier this year announced that he had “embraced Islam,” likened his existence since the death threat by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to life in a bubble “within which I’m simultaneously exposed and sealed off.”

“The bubble floats above and through the world, depriving me of reality, reducing me to an abstraction,” he said. “For many people, I’ve ceased to be a human being. I’ve become an issue, a bother, an ‘affair.’ And has it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can’t recognize religious persecution when you see it?

“What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: ‘Not a lot.’ But I refuse to give in to despair, because I know that many people do care and are appalled by the upside-down logic of the post- fatwa world, in which a novelist can be accused of having savaged or ‘mugged’ a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its victim) and the scapegoat for its discontents. (The fatwa Rushdie referred to is the decree that he should be killed.)

“What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?” Rushdie asked.

“I refuse to give in to despair, even though for a thousand days or more I’ve been put through a degree course in worthlessness, my own personal and specific worthlessness,” the author said. He went into hiding under the protection of the British government after Khomeini said the novel blasphemed Islam.

After long months in hiding, Rushdie has made some brief public appearances in Britain. When he came to the United States, security was so tight that Columbia University’s chief spokesman said even he was not informed by the dean of the journalism school that Rushdie was to be the guest of honor at the celebration of the First Amendment’s freedoms.

After Khomeini’s death, Iran reaffirmed its order to kill Rushdie and increased the bounty on his head.

In his speech, Rushdie spoke directly of the peril he faces. He said his book’s Italian translator was severely wounded and its Japanese translator was stabbed to death.

“Sometimes I think that, one day, Muslims will be ashamed of what Muslims did in these times, will find the Rushdie affair as improbable as the West now finds martyr-burning.”

” . . . I have never disowned my book, nor regretted writing it,” he said. “I said I was sorry to have offended people, because I had not set out to do so.”

During the speech, Rushdie criticized Iran’s government for its treatment of women and other writers.

“You must decide what a man’s conscience and heart and soul are worth,” he said to his audience. “You must decide what you think a writer is worth, what value you place on a maker of stories and an arguer with the world.”

And sounding a sad note about his own world, which he likened to life in a leaky hot-air balloon, he said: “Ladies and gentlemen, the balloon is sinking into the abyss.”

Rushdie, who was invited to the United States by the school of journalism and Joan Konner, its dean, said he would soon return to Britain.

Scores of plainclothes policemen guarded the controversial author when he appeared at Columbia University’s campus.

The author indicated that he was worried that British diplomats were more interested in improving relations with Iran than they were about him.

“The national interest is being redefined; am I being redefined out of it?” he asked. “Am I to be jettisoned, after all?”

“The Western hostages and the jailed businessmen have by good fortune and the efforts of others managed to descend safely to Earth and have been reunited with their own free lives,” Rushdie said. “I rejoice for them and admire their courage, their resilience. And now I’m alone in the balloon.”