A voice that won’t be quieted

Salman Rushdie was in a Houston hotel room preparing to do a phone interview the day the twin towers fell when the reporter called and told him that because of the attacks, the chat would have to be canceled. Rushdie turned on his TV just in time to see the second plane hit. He realized immediately it was a terrorist operation, and because he had been living in New York for the last few years, “had the feeling of someone having attacked my house.”

Four years later to the day, Rushdie is sitting in the plush lounge of one of New York’s most exclusive clubs, Soho House, casually dressed in jeans and sneakers, sipping a tall glass of lemonade. He is, on this day of remembrance, the perfect person to be talking to, a man who is intimately involved with Islamic fanaticism on a personal level.

Rushdie has been world famous since 1989, when his novel “The Satanic Verses” caused Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then the Iranian leader, to issue a fatwa, or ruling, calling for Rushdie’s death on grounds of blasphemy. Forced to go underground for several years and travel everywhere with a phalanx of bodyguards, Rushdie was given a reprieve of sorts in 1998, when a reformist Iranian government distanced itself from the previous ruling. He now travels without an entourage -- arriving this day sans security detail, publicist or even his glamorous wife, actress-model Padma Lakshmi.

Despite this, Rushdie has not settled into a life of hedonistic comfort. He has been active in American PEN, speaking out vigorously on issues that affect writers around the world. And in his latest novel, the critically well-received “Shalimar the Clown” (“The genius of Rushdie’s new novel,” wrote Deirdre Donahue in USA Today, “comes from the writer’s ability to illuminate a global disaster through a microcosm”), Rushdie has taken on terrorism in the best way he knows how: by exploring the personal nature of fanaticism and how it has made the planet a more dangerous place.

“A thing that interests me a lot is collisions of culture,” he says. “I find I’ve been writing about that more and more, and this book tries to show how very different parts of the world have to take cognizance of each other in order to understand what’s happening in their own neck of the woods.”

Rushdie’s novel ranges geographically from pre-World War II Alsace-Lorraine to the Indian province of Kashmir and present-day Los Angeles. It plays out on several levels: It is an in-depth look at a Kashmiri “golden age,” showing how the peaceful relationships between Muslims and Hindus were eventually destroyed by political machinations and religious fanaticism after Indian independence; and it is the intimate story of Shalimar, a clown in a traveling show who turns to murderous fanaticism after his wife, Boonyi, is seduced by Max Ophuls (yes, the same name as the famous filmmaker), the American ambassador to India.

The novel is a sprawling canvas that opens with Shalimar’s murder of Ophuls, flashes back to the formative years of the major characters and ends with a deadly confrontation between Shalimar and India, the daughter of Max and Boonyi.

Rushdie says the idea first came to him in 1999. “The germ of the book came in two bits,” he notes. “One was this image of the murder scene with which the book begins. It then connected for me with having been in Kashmir and having met a group of traveling players not unlike the one in the book. Somehow, I realized this murderer was Kashmiri, he might come from that village and, somehow, that might give me a way of uniting the two worlds.”

Yet Rushdie had to set “Shalimar” aside for a while because it wasn’t coming together. He picked it up again partly, he says, because of Sept. 11. “What that made me see was this idea that the world was interconnected and is one of the things that everyone saw in this city on that day,” Rushdie says. “And it made me think that what was wrong with my original conception was that I hadn’t made the canvas big enough. You have to go back into Strasbourg, back into India. By enlarging the story, you get to see how different bits of the world connect.”

With its occasional magical-realist moments and slick, almost soap opera-like story line, “Shalimar the Clown” sometimes reads like a convergence of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mordecai Richler. But there are also moments that show it was written with incredible passion and firsthand knowledge, especially when Rushdie describes human rights violations in Kashmir -- with obvious reverberations to Iraq -- and the particulars of personal security arrangements.

“I knew that echo [to Iraq] would be there,” Rushdie says. “But I think the book is good when it’s about what it’s about. Those resonances are there, but in order to make the book work, you have to concentrate on what you’re actually writing about. And believe me, that stuff is not made up. It’s one of those occasions where my imaginative gifts were not required.”

Rushdie was raised a Muslim in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) but has not practiced the faith for years. Yet he remains a key player in the debate over how and why the religion seems to have been hijacked by fanatics and what can be done about it. In a recent op-ed piece in the Washington Post, he proposed that one way out of this morass was for Muslims to begin thinking of the Koran as a historical document, of “their religion as an event inside history, not supernaturally above it.”

Placing the Koran firmly in its 7th century origins is, says Rushdie, “a question of power. When you deny people the right to examine the fundamentals of what they think, you’re taking away from them a very important power. The truth is, most Muslims have these conversations every day. But it can’t come into public discussion because then it gets attacked. It’s a way of crippling intellectual and just ordinary social discourse. It’s necessary for a different kind of culture to come into being, otherwise the crazies hijack the religion.”

If Rushdie has thought long and hard about these issues, he was, in a sense, forced into it by the fatwa. Yet, in person, he is not at all pedantic -- down-to-earth and chatty, Rushdie is a New York Yankees fan with a droll sense of humor. Asked, for example, what music he’s been listening to recently, he replies, “The soundtrack to ‘Madagascar,’ which I listen to a lot because of my son [Milan, 8, by his third wife, Elizabeth West]. If you haven’t heard a massed tribe of lemurs singing ‘I like to move it, move it,’ you haven’t lived.”

Yet Rushdie does not deny that he is something of a celebrity. His friends include U2’s Bono and former Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler, and he is seen out and about at the usual buzz-worthy benefits and openings. He believes that celebrity confers a certain responsibility, and as the poster child for freedom-of-speech victimization, he is adamant about fighting for the rights of other writers.

“What I think I can do is put my celebrity to work,” he says. “My major spare time activity in the past few years has been with American PEN. There’s no question that what I can do is use all the stuff that’s accumulated around my name to good effect, on behalf of people who really need it. A letter that’s signed by me gets read. If I phone somebody of influence, they will come to the phone. It’s at that level. If I can put it to work like that, the celebrity is worth having.”

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When: 4 p.m. Sunday

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