Joyful Rushdie Steps Out From the Shadows

For the first time in nearly a decade, author Salman Rushdie opened his famously hooded eyes Friday morning without an official Iranian death threat hanging like a macabre canopy over his head.

And what was the first thought that popped into his literary mind at the dawn of his freedom? On the day of his dreams?

“I thought, ‘God, it’s only half past five,’ ” Rushdie said with a playful laugh. “It was very exciting, although there was a residual fear that I would switch on the TV and discover it wasn’t true.”

But the television reconfirmed the news: The Iranian government had disavowed the fatwa, or religious edict, that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had issued against Rushdie in 1989 condemning the author to death for his portrayal of the prophet Muhammad in “The Satanic Verses.”

The sentence remains, because Khomeini died without lifting it, as does a $2.5-million bounty on his head from the militant Tehran-based 15 Khordad Foundation. But the Iranian government no longer backs the foundation’s offer.

“It is a great day,” Rushdie told a press of reporters from around the world.

Rushdie, 51, was the picture of a man who has had the pistol digging into his temple for the last 10 years suddenly removed. Light. Buoyant. He joked and laughed freely. He beamed, his salmon silk shirt mirroring the pink in his cheeks.

Sure, police still were standing guard at the offices of Article 19, the international center against censorship where Rushdie was speaking to the media about this victory for free speech. And, yes, the media have crowded into this office because the larger hall that had been booked was canceled after someone complained that it was dangerous to have Rushdie in the next room.

But Rushdie said he feels free now. Free to attend next week’s opening of a play adapted from his book “Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” Free to go to the supermarket or simply to take a walk, as he did in the northern London neighborhood of Islington with a gaggle of camera crews in tow like parents recording a child’s first steps.

“Normality is a very simple thing, and yet it is the thing that I have been denied. Spontaneity. To do things at the moment you feel like doing it, like taking a walk,” Rushdie said. “I am very pleased just to go back to being a writer. It is all I ever wanted.”

Officials to Assess His Security Needs

But can he ever really live a normal life when the fatwa still stands and any extremist with a gun could decide that the authority of the dead ayatollah is greater than that of the current government of Iran?

“I feel there is a small, continued need for caution of the sort that any person who becomes prominent has,” Rushdie said.

He said security officials will assess his situation to determine whether he still needs the round-the-clock government protection that he has had for the last decade. The implication was that eventually he will not.

“The reason I needed state protection was because I was threatened by a state,” he said. That is no longer the case.

Scores of people were killed or injured in protests after “The Satanic Verses” was published in 1988. Bombs were planted outside bookshops in Britain owned by its English publisher, Penguin Books. Rushdie’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death in Tokyo; his Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, was knifed in Milan; and William Nygaard, director of the Norwegian publishers of the book, was shot three times in Oslo.

Rushdie’s marriage to American author Marianne Wiggins broke up during his time in hiding. His marriage to writer Elizabeth West a year ago and the birth of a son, Milan, weren’t publicized in order to keep them out of danger.

Rushdie acknowledged the casualties and hardships but said he had no regrets at having written “The Satanic Verses,” and he defended its publication.

He said it had been “a fight worth fighting, not just to save my own skin but because it represented many things in the world that we care about.”

Among them, he said, were “the art of the novel, the freedom of imagination, the overarching issue of free speech, the right of a human being to walk down the street of their own country without fear.”

Death Edict Blamed on Politics, Timing

Rushdie described Khomeini’s edict against him as the result of internal politics and bad timing. The book came out, he said, just as the ayatollah was looking for a cause around which he could rally Muslims. If it had been published a year later, he said, he believes that it would not have become an issue.

By the same token, he said he believes that he is now out of the gun sights of the Iranian government because of how the stars have lined up: The election of Prime Minister Tony Blair in Britain and President Mohammad Khatami in Iran are Rushdie’s “two pieces of good fortune.”

Blair’s government negotiated with Khatami’s for several months to reach the deal by which Iran disavowed the death edict against Rushdie in exchange for full diplomatic relations with Britain, a move that the Iranian government hopes will lead to improved ties with the United States.

Rushdie said he received “categorical, no caveats” assurances from the British government that the deal has the support of all segments of the Iranian leadership, implying that the hard-line clerics are on board.

“It is not easy for the Iranian regime to do this. For them to stand up before the world media at the U.N. is something we never thought would be done,” Rushdie said.

As for extremist Muslims in Britain who continue to call for apologies and the banning of “The Satanic Verses”--and who view the edict against Rushdie as still valid--the author called them “dinosaurs” of another era.

“There is not a chance in hell for the book to be withdrawn,” he said. “We have not fought a battle for free speech for 10 years to give in now.

“I could ask for apologies. I’ve had 10 years of my life deformed,” he added.

But he is not seeking apologies.

“I would say, ‘Get over it.’ The world changes very fast. The world has just changed,” he said. “I would say: ‘Look, we had a disagreement. Not all of us, some of us. This is a moment for a fresh start.’ ”

Rushdie described two low points during the decade since “The Satanic Verses” was published. The first was the beginning.

“It had nothing to do with fear. It was the shock and grief. It is an extraordinary thing to see people walking down the streets of foreign countries carrying your picture with the eyes poked out and calling for your death. It is as if someone were trying to break up your picture of the world,” he said. “That is one definition of insanity.”

The second nadir, he admitted, was in December 1990, when, in an effort to have the edict against him lifted, he publicly declared he had embraced Islam, agreed not to publish new translations of “The Satanic Verses” or to allow a paperback edition in English. The move failed, and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the fatwa was irrevocable.

Rushdie said this attempt “to compromise . . . and to say things that weren’t true” was wrong.

“I am not a religious person and never was. I don’t feel like an enemy of those people. But I shouldn’t have said what wasn’t so,” he said. “I tied myself in a knot, and it took awhile to untie it.”

The high point, he said, came Thursday with the joint announcement by British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook and Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi. Also with the love that was shown by his many supporters, he said.

“I’ve learned that the answer to violence is love. I think that has affected my writing. . . . It will continue to do so,” he said. “It is an issue for the rest of my life how I will repay what has been done for me.”

Rushdie, who has just finished a novel called “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” said he has tried not to let the death threat overwhelm his literature.

“One of the things I have been very determined about over the last decade is that this threat against my life should not determine the kind of writer I was,” he said. “As a writer, I didn’t want to be a creature of the fatwa. I wanted to write with a full orchestra, with a full range of feelings and thoughts.”

But won’t he be writing about his experiences of living in hiding for a decade?

Rushdie smiled.

“I’ve always wanted to write about this matter, and I always felt the time to write about it was when I knew what the last chapter was,” he said. “I think that time might be very close.”

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