PERSPECTIVES ON SALMAN RUSHDIE : First Victim of the 21st Century : The hunted novelist is the victim of religious atavism that is filling the vacuum left by vanished Cold War ideologies.

Dear Salman,

The last time that we met, a year ago, we had dinner together at the home of an admirable woman, an English friend and writer, in a London suburb. But we cannot say who she was. We might expose her to the criminal furies of your own persecutors. This fact is enough to measure the hopeless pit to that our love and will might be condemned by the increasing intolerance and fanaticism that surrounds us.

In the name of ideology or state security, other writers have been persecuted, imprisoned, murdered or driven to suicide in our time. All of them were nevertheless victims of the perversions of the philosophies of progress. You are the first victim of the vacuum left by these same philosophies and hastily occupied by the resurrected rites of the tribes and their idols. The fanaticism that has denied you the right to live and write no longer does so in the name of progress, but in that of the intolerance, religious atavisms and fundamentalisms that have, vigorously if in confusion, rushed in to fill the ideological vacuum left by the end of the Cold War.

You are menaced by the return of the priests, beckoned by the need for a collective imagery, a moral foundation and a transcendental mission, in a world that refused to be contented with the poverty of wealth, the philosophy, as the Italian thinker Michelangelo Sovero calls it, “of the supermark and the supermarket.” You have become the last victim of the 20th Century, but also the first victim of the 21st Century. You inherit the pain of poet Osip Mandelstam, and writers Walter Benjamin and Richard Wright, but you announce the pain of all the victims of the forthcoming ayatollahs.

What can we do except support you, accompany you, search you out and think about you? In the reading of your works lies the clue to your possible defense, and even, perhaps, to both your salvation and ours. For there is a menace even more terrible than the death sentence that hangs over you, and that is the danger of boredom and amnesia.

Kafka retells the myth of Prometheus in which the gods, the eagles, and even Prometheus forget all about the tragedy itself. “The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily.” Your executioners are betting on the same thing. Let the world forget you. Let the world grow weary of you. And may you grow weary of the world and fall into the vice of so many persecuted beings: whining self-pity.

Your life and your work rebel against this. You cannot end with a whimper. The bang of your novels is indefatigable, mutinous, permanent because it announces the big reality, the big drama and also, with luck, the great joy of the future: the meeting with the other, with the man and woman of the other faith, another race, another culture, who are not like you and me, but who complete and reveal who you and I truly are.

Your “Satanic Verses” is not the caricature denounced by the ayatollahs. “Islam” is not the target of your novel. Quite the contrary. In your pages, Islam lives critically and imaginatively so as to better meet, with the doubts and the humor of the work of literature, the planetary world. For it is not you, but the global village, which can be anti-Islamic.

You are the first novelist of the local village on its way toward a global village. Your characters instantaneously pass from the village ritual to the TV round table, from cornmeal to Corn Flakes and from the film sets of Bombay to the set filming of London. They fall from a jet, disguised still in their elephant-god masks. But they do not truly fall into London. They fall into the cemetery of broken mirrors where the stranger, the victim, the Jew, the Palestinian, the black, the Indian, the child and the woman, the homosexual, the communist victimized by McCarthy and the democrat by Stalin, all lie.

Like all great writers, you are here to remind us that we need the stranger in order to know ourselves. You tell us that no one, by themselves, can see the totality of reality. And that we are only unique because others exist along with us, different from us, but occupying with us the time and space of the world. I hope to see you soon, to talk to you of bullfighting and hear you talk about cricket, and to tell each other, out loud, where we are, and with whom.

Your friend,

Carlos Fuentes