TERRORISM : Threatened Author Rushdie May Emerge From Life of Hiding

With the four-year anniversary of the Iranian execution order against him coming up Sunday, author Salman Rushdie says he may finally emerge from the police cordon that has protected him.

Indicating his desire to maintain a higher profile, the 45-year-old Rushdie told BBC Radio that he would not take any “stupid” risks but added: “I’m trying to do what’s sensible. I’ve had it, frankly, with this kind of stuff.”

And he expressed hope that the British government would press Iran more firmly to lift the fatwa, or death sentence, imposed on him by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when Iran’s clerical leaders judged that Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” was blasphemous to Islam.

British diplomatic pressure has so far failed to move the Tehran leadership. Last week, President Hashemi Rafsanjani said the sentence passed by Iran’s onetime supreme leader was immutable: “Only the person who issued it . . . can change it.”

In a series of statements to the media marking the anniversary, Rushdie described his four-year ordeal of living under cover and the price it has cost--among other things, his marriage to the American writer Marianne Wiggins.

“For the first 18 months, I kept low, kept quiet, which is the advice I was given by the Foreign Office,” he told the Independent newspaper. “It’s taken the government four years to realize that the softly-softly approach does not work. . . . I regret I kept my mouth shut for so long.”

“Four years ago we all thought this crisis would be solved in a matter of days,” Rushdie wrote in London’s Sunday Times. “That in the late 20th Century, a man should be threatened with murder for writing a book, that the leader of a religious-fascist state should threaten the free citizen of a free country far away from his own, was too crazy. “Four years later, it’s still going on. And I’m told . . . there is nobody protected by the (police) Special Branch whose life is in more danger than mine.”

Rushdie said that because of the British and American hostages once held by Iranian-influenced terrorists in Lebanon, he was advised to “go nowhere, see nobody, say nothing. Be an un-person and be grateful to be alive.”

Until British hostage Terry Waite was released in November, 1991, “I was a sort of hostage to the hostages,” Rushdie said. “I accepted that their cases had to be resolved first--that, to an extent, my rights had to be set aside for the sake of theirs.”

Rushdie has stayed at more than 200 addresses while in hiding. At one point, he said, “I slept in 13 different beds in 20 nights. It begins to drive you crazy.

“Right now my victory lies in not being broken, in not losing myself,” he wrote. “It lies in continuing to work.”

Rushdie has made cautious trips to the United States, Canada, and several European countries, often to speak, with little or no notice, at literary events sponsored by PEN, an international writers’ group. He was cheered by the support he received in Germany, a major trading partner of Iran.

But he seems to have mixed emotions about his adopted nation, Britain. In a TV appearance, he maintained that there is a perception here “that the British are having to bail out this uppity immigrant who’s got himself into trouble--that in the minds of many people here, there is no issue of principle, no issue of free speech, of sovereignty, no issue of fighting terrorism.”

The Bombay-born Rushdie came to England in 1961 and studied at Rugby and Cambridge universities. He won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1981 with the novel “Midnight’s Children.”

His foes in Tehran are planning to hold an anti-Rushdie seminar Sunday to mark the anniversary.

As presidential adviser Javad Larijani put it bluntly: “We consider him as a man who tried to betray Islam, to downgrade Islam and to downgrade the sentiments of more than a billion Muslims. He does not deserve to exist.”