Salman Rushdie Moves Out From the Shadows : Authors: After ‘The Satanic Verses,’ he’s ending his years of seclusion. There are talk shows, debates--and a new book (‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’) to promote.

He has been on the run for six years, hiding under armed guard in a network of safe houses. Now, with old passions fading and a new book to sell, British author Salman Rushdie is ending the seclusion imposed by a zealot’s death sentence.

As a survivor, he is sadly wiser in the ways of the world, Rushdie says, but no less disposed to speak his mind. “One of the things a writer is for is to say the unsayable, to speak the unspeakable, to ask difficult questions,” he said a week ago at his first announced appearance in public since being sentenced to death by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 for blasphemy against Islam.

With European Union diplomats and Iranian officials now fencing for a graceful way to write a formal end to the death warrant fatwa, against him, Rushdie is coming out of the shadows.

Increasingly, he is a man about town in London and a talk-show favorite following publication this month of his first novel since “The Satanic Verses” got him into trouble.

It has been a long way back for the gregarious 48-year-old writer. For a long time, he was unseen. Then he became a wraith, there-and-gone at events favored by London’s literati and glitterati. Rushdie did a walk-on with David Letterman, appeared on stage with U2, attended the Salzburg Festival.

The chapter of the fleetingly seen Rushdie, watched over day and night by British government bodyguards, closed last week at a literary debate under a gigantic organ in a Methodist church hall in the heart of the city. With permission of Scotland Yard, the British newspaper The Times, co-sponsor with a bookstore of an authors’ debate entitled “Writers Against the State,” announced on Page 1 that morning that Rushdie would participate. About 700 people paid $16 each to attend what he would call his “coming out.”

In the end, it was less remarkable as a debate than as a celebration of self and survival. Urbane witticisms from the stage never seemed quite as telling as the knife-edge security, the metal detector, the hard-eyed watchers, the bomb specialists behind the scenes.

“It’s nearly seven years since I have been able to tell my readers where I would be and where they could come talk to me. It’s nice to be back,” said Rushdie. “This is the biggest step yet in the process of resuming a real life.”

The catalyst for the sea change in Rushdie’s life was British publication of “The Moor’s Last Sigh” (Jonathan Cape), a novel set in his native Bombay. “In some way, I’m getting republished myself,” Rushdie joked.

Despite continued hostility to Rushdie in the country’s large Muslim community, the book is generously displayed at stores across the British Isles and is selling well. Rushdie signed a bushelful (at $27 a copy) for the debate audience, as police and private security guards looked on.

The new book has drawn the ire of a Hindu nationalist in Bombay who believes--wrongly--that it satirizes him. But critics in India, where Rushdie was born, and in Britain, where he was educated, are nearly unanimous in their praise. One British reviewer called it “a marvelously inventive display of verbal dexterity, an exuberant, entertaining, zestful novel, which proves, if proof were needed, that Mr. Rushdie’s spirit remains undiminished.”

It will be published by Pantheon in the United States in January.

Rushdie’s debut in London drew one Muslim protester outside and one Muslim questioner after the debate who denounced “Satanic Verses” as obscene.

Accepting the passions he evokes, Rushdie insists that it is a writer’s obligation to push the envelope. “Everybody has answers. Answers are cheap. Questions are hard to find. If you ask those questions and stir up society that’s a proper function of the writer.”

At a reading in Edinburgh, Scotland, this week, Rushdie found about 50 peaceful Muslim protesters waving placards saying “Stop Rushdie’s poison,” and “Rushdie writes filth.” Advertised in the Scottish press, the reading brought a full house to the 250-seat theater despite demands by local Muslims that it be canceled.

Rushdie says that what particularly disturbs him as he struggles to resume a normal life is that his plight is becoming all too familiar: Outspoken writers are fashionable targets in many countries. He lists Turkey, Nigeria, China and Algeria as some of the places where writers face imprisonment and violence for their views.

“There’s a crisis at the moment because somehow it’s beginning to be acceptable to do this again. The language of the gulag is back with us,” he lamented.

The European Union, one of Rushdie’s most dogged supporters, thought it had won an Iranian promise in Paris last June of a written disavowal of any assassination attempt. Instead, there came only lukewarm verbal assurances, Rushdie said. “A verbal promise is not worth the paper it’s written on,” he said, wryly mixing tongue and ink. Last week in Madrid, Spanish, German and Italian diplomats once again sought written guarantees from Iran, apparently without success.

In Rushdie’s view, the pressure of being a marked man may have diminished, but it still exists. Khomeini is dead, but his spirit lingers. At day’s end, only his heirs in Iran can set Rushdie free.

“The problem hasn’t gone away. It’s still necessary to pressure Iran,” Rushdie told admirers.