The Fatwa - Salman's Story imagine...

"Nobody is going to take away my father," Luke cried.

Not even you, Mr Whatever-Your-NameIs, with your scary tales.

Haroun went with his father whenever he could,

because the man was a magician. It couldn't be denied.

He would climb up on some little makeshift stage in a dead-end alley

packed with raggedy children and toothless old-timers,

all squatting in the dust.

"How do you know about the fire of life?" the Fire Bug wanted to know, becoming cross.

"Water is everyone's favourite.

"And when they call it the Fountain of Life,

"well, that just bugs me to bits.

"Life is not wet, young man. Life burns."

23 years ago, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa - a death sentence -

against the British writer Salman Rushdie.

VOICEOVER:

Now Rushdie has written a memoir about the ten years that followed,

in which he lived in hiding, fearing for his life.

The book is written in the third person,

under the name of Joseph Anton.

No-one really knows what happened,

no-one really understands much about what it was like,

and the book explains both.

-NEWSREADER:

-The Ayatollah Khomeini this morning sanctioned the death

of the author Salman Rushdie.

-NEWSREADER:

-The Ayatollah Khomeini

has ordered Muslims to kill a British author on sight.

A BBC reporter called him at home

without explaining how she got the number.

"How does it feel," she asked,

"to know that you have just been sentenced to death

"by the Ayatollah Khomeini?"

It was a sunny Tuesday in London but the question shut out the light.

This is what he said. "It doesn't feel good."

This is what he thought: "I'm a dead man."

I put down the phone

and sort of ran around the house locking the doors

I mean, a stupid thing to do, but it's the sort of thing you do.

And...I really did think at that moment

that I probably didn't have very long to live.

I had agreed to go to my friend Bruce Chatwin's memorial service.

So I'd better go.

I left the house that morning

and didn't go back again for several years.

"The wings, the beating wings."

-Every time I come here, I pass this, I remember that day.

-Me too.

"Always the wings of that giant blackbird, the exterminating angel,

"beating close at hand."

'By coincidence on that day when the world as he'd known it stopped,

'all literary London was gathering here,

'to commemorate the writer and traveller Bruce Chatwin.'

It was a strange event in itself,

Bruce Chatwin's memorial service in the Greek Orthodox Church.

-Yeah.

-None of us really knew that he had such an interest

in Greek Orthodox Christianity.

We were all stuck there listening to this thing

that almost none of us could understand.

I was in a place of religious belief,

which is not something in which I find myself very often,

when there was this religious attack.

I've always thought that it was sort of Bruce's last joke.

Like his father, he was fascinated by God,

even if religion had little appeal.

The concerns of these religions with the great questions of existence -

where do we come from?

And now that we are here, how shall we live? - were also his.

By the end of the service there was a buzz

going all the way round the congregation really.

Paul Theroux said something to you, didn't he?

He was sitting in the pew behind me and he leaned forward and said,

"I suppose we'll be here for you next week."

When I came out, there was hundreds of photographers over there.

And then I was sort of mobbed and didn't know how to get away,

and that's when you showed up with your car

and it was incredibly helpful

because I was able to get in there and be driven away.

And then I remember we switched on the radio and there it was

on the bulletins.

Ayatollah Khomeini makes a death threat

against the British author Salman Rushdie.

Ayatollah Khomeini has ordered Muslims

to murder Salman Rushdie and his publishers

for blasphemy against Islam.

Did you yourself ever think during this day,

as we were circling in the car,

this is something that would end an ending sooner rather than later?

I was 41 at the time,

and I thought it was pretty unlikely that I would see my 42nd birthday.

You didn't know that you might not be able to see your son any more.

All of that, I didn't, I didn't understand how...

Uh, how radically my life was about to change.

When I got home I tried to phone him, and couldn't.

As Martin Amis put it,

he'd disappeared into the front page.

He was everywhere but nowhere.

He'd become a secret.

The crisis around the book had been building up for months.

It was publicly burned in Bradford and just two days before the fatwa,

five protestors were killed in Pakistan.

"Rushdie, you are dead," the demonstrators shouted,

and for the first time he thought they might be right.

Violence begat violence. Blood will have blood, he thought.

I remember having lunch with Salman in about '85 or '86

and he said he was writing a book called the Satanic Verses,

and I wrote down the words,

"And he said he thinks it will cause trouble."

But of course nobody could ever have anticipated what happened.

I'd read the novel, admired a great deal,

and thought in a strange way,

the novel almost foresaw the events that were coming.

First of all, just that sense of dream sequence followed by reality.

So the dreaming of a novel followed by the reality of the publication.

But also religious absolutism

is one of the central matters of the book.

And suddenly here it was.

He couldn't go home, so he and his then-wife,

the novelist Marianne Wiggins, went to a flat nearby

that she used for writing.

They weren't getting on, but on this day their private difficulties

-felt irrelevant.

-CHANTING

On this day there were crowds marching down the streets of Tehran

carrying posters of his face with the eyes poked out,

making him look like one of the corpses in The Birds.

This is the latest stage in a campaign

that began with smears and vilifications

and distortions of the book,

which has escalated through all sorts of levels of violence.

Frankly I wish I had written a more critical book.

I mean, a religion that claims... That is able to behave like this,

religious leaders, let's say, who are able to behave like this,

and then say that this is a religion

which must be above any kind of whisper of criticism,

that doesn't add up. It seems to me that Islamic fundamentalists

could do with a little criticism right now.

Thank you very much for joining us.

Didn't you think you might be exacerbating the situation...?

I don't know what I was thinking, just, "This is what I think, I'm going to say it."

My heart was pounding.

I mean it was absolutely, I didn't know what to think, what to do.

Salman was very good - he rang immediately

and said "Don't worry," and, "I'll be in touch."

And I picked up my daughter from nursery

and just drove straight home.

I could see outside tube stations, as I drove, large hoardings that,

that said "death sentence".

Were you worried about your son Zafar?

I was very worried about him.

First of all I was worried about seeing him so that I could...

try and talk to him about it in a way that would reduce his fear

and panic and so on, you know. I just...

As a parent I felt this is not just happening to me,

it's happening to him, and he's a kid, you know.

He was at that time not even 10

and I could only imagine what it must be like for him

to see such things on television..

He was living with his mother in North London.

I went round to see him and the police were there.

They said, "Oh, there you are, we were wondering where you were."

My dad did a very, very good job, along with my mother,

at giving me enough information

that I felt empowered by knowing something

but not so much that I was reduced to a crying wreck.

"We need to know," the police officer was saying,

"what your immediate plans might be."

He told them about the basement where Marianne was waiting.

"When you do get back, sir, don't go out again tonight."

There were two policemen in the square.

When he got out of his car, they pretended not to notice.

He could hear their footsteps even when he was indoors.

He realised in that footstep-haunted silence

that he no longer understood his life, or what it might become.

The next morning we had a visitation

from a couple of senior officers from the Yard

who then formally offered the police protection.

What the police said to me

was that you just have to lie low for a few days

and let the politicians sort it out.

Ten years later...

Yeah, exactly. That's what's extraordinary about it.

Everybody thought it was going to take a few days to sort it out.

At that very moment thousands were protesting

outside the British Embassy in Tehran.

CHANTING

1989 was a momentous year.

It wasn't just the fatwa - it was Tiananmen Square,

it was the fall of the Berlin Wall.

One felt there was an earthquake going around the world

and everything was shifting.

CALL AND RESPONSE CHANTING

It was ten years after the Iranian revolution

and they were whipping up the masses to keep control of their country.

And Salman was the excuse.

-NEWSREADER:

-The Salman Rushdie affair

took an even more horrific turn today when an Iranian cleric

offered a million-dollar reward for the successful assassination

of the author of the Satanic Verses.

A group of writers led by Harold Pinter presented

a petition at 10 Downing St.

Hanif Kureishi, you've presented your petition today.

What can it achieve?

Well, as I'm sure you know, it's bad enough getting a bad review

in the Guardian - being condemned to death for a book you've written

is obviously a risible matter, if it weren't so deeply serious.

I suppose what we want to do is to impress on Mrs Thatcher

the importance of her trying to persuade the Ayatollah

to repudiate what he said.

If you were Salman Rushdie, what would you be doing now?

I'd be hiding under the bed with a sawn-off shotgun next to me.

At the time we were completely bewildered and frightened,

and completely unaware

of what the consequences of this really would be.

The police brought Salman over to say goodbye,

and that felt like such an emotional thing -

"What do you mean goodbye?", you know.

Cos at the time he said, "I don't know when I'll see you again."

It seemed unthinkable that we couldn't be told where he was,

and why wouldn't we be told?

And he said cos the police say it's for your safety,

the less you know the better.

We were suddenly in this very strange other world,

that didn't make any sense.

They asked me to think of a pseudonym.

"Don't make it an Indian name, cos it's too obvious."

It's a pretty strange thing to be asked to give up your name anyway.

I invented a name out of the first names

of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov.

And that was the name which was used for all those years,

and so that's why it's the title of the book.

The name change was partly for the security guards' benefit,

so they wouldn't make the potentially fatal error

of saying "Salman" in public.

So they called him Joe, much to his annoyance.

I went to meet one of the officers from Salman's protection team.

The threat was...huge.

You've looked after prime ministers and high officials.

How was this protection operation compared to that?

Um...this was the most high risk.

It was certainly the highest security

of any protection that I'm aware of.

There was a massive threat against him.

He had the very best protection he could possibly have

in the Metropolitan Police Special Branch.

Rushdie now had his entourage of policemen.

But short of staying on an army base, where was he to go?

"You can't go home, obviously," the protection officer said.

"That wouldn't be too kosher.

"Is there anywhere you'd like to go for a few days?"

"Maybe the Cotswolds," he said.

There was a famous country inn there he had often wanted to go to.

He was on the front page of every newspaper.

It was alarming to be so intensely visible

at exactly the moment that he was being asked to lie low.

A woman came up to him in the street and said, "Good luck."

In the hotel, the staff couldn't prevent themselves from gawping.

He had become a freak show.

They were given a small private room to eat their meals in.

One of their other guests was a journalist from the Daily Mirror,

who'd taken a neighbouring room for a few days with a lady

who was not his wife.

At that moment when the tabloid press had employed teams of snoops

to find out where the author of the Satanic Verses had gone to ground,

the tabloid journalist in the room next door missed his scoop.

The Satanic Verses was Rushdie's first book with a new agent,

an American who had lured him away

from the British agent he'd had before.

When he appointed them,

he didn't know they would be going to war together

and nor could they have known what lay ahead.

But when the war came, he was glad they were standing with him.

He's the most famous and formidable literary agent in the world.

Here I am.

I like the way this looks.

-Yeah, I like having a little page by itself too.

-Yeah.

They'll be different covers in almost every territory.

You like this?

It's kind of Byzantine,

sort of halfway between western and eastern.

I mean, it looks like a picture of a broken world.

Absolutely.

-I think everything in the bookstore tends to scream, you know?

-Yeah.

And it's nice to be the one not screaming.

What?!

As soon as Salman went into hiding,

we began a kind of...

HE began a new way of life,

and I had a new way of life.

For about two or three years,

I was on the phone with him three times a day,

and more or less once a month I would go across and meet with him.

When you read Satanic Verses the first time,

did you see any likelihood that this could be...

No.

No, and you know, the, uh...

..suggestion which arose later

that somehow Salman intended this

is so preposterous if you think about it,

I mean, you know, "Let me see, I'll write a book

"and the head of a country will condemn me to death

"and I'll be pursued."

Fairly unlikely scenario.

On his second day at the Lygon Arms,

he was told he had 24 hours to find himself somewhere else to go.

He had been making phone calls to everyone he could think of

without success.

Then he checked his voicemail and found a message from Deborah Rogers,

the agent he had dismissed when he appointed Andrew Wylie.

"Call me. I think we may be able to help."

Deb and her husband, the composer Michael Berkeley,

offered him their farm in Wales.

He was deeply moved.

The next day, his strange little circus descended on them.

-Welcome back.

-Thank you. It's been a while.

All disputes swept away by the pressure of events.

-"Stay as long as you need to," Deb said.

-Hello.

He stayed here for the next two weeks.

Michael said, "Look, because you have been so publicly, in a way..."

..erm...

..sort of separated, I don't know what the word is,

denounced by Salman, we would be probably

one of the last places anybody would ever think of looking.

Before they let you come here, they sort of vetted the place

and the police went along the...

-Up on the ridge?

-On the road along the top with binoculars

to see how easy it would have been for them to...

They thought it was pretty good, actually. Unless there was somebody

with a high-velocity rifle up there, but yeah.

Everybody has a very vivid memory of the details of the security

because it was unusual that people would come to your house

and they'd look through your windows and they'd kind of snoop about

but me, because I had to live with it all the time,

I tried to wipe it out, you know

so I could sort of pretend that I was just there by myself

so in my memory of these visits to various people's houses,

I sort of don't remember the police at all,

whereas it's all they remember.

One of the funniest things was

because Steven, who we do the farm with,

he prides himself on being able to read tyre marks

and who's been here and who hasn't been here

and he said to me one day,

"I just can't understand it! There's a Jaguar there,"

but he said the tyre marks were from a sort of ten-tonne lorry

and he said, "I can't work this out,"

and of course it was an armoured car.

Those armoured cars, they weigh as much as a small tank.

He couldn't be seen at the farm or its safety would be compromised.

A farmer came to talk to Michael.

"You'd better get out of sight," Michael told him

and he had to duck down behind a kitchen counter.

As he crouched there, he felt a sense of deep shame.

To hide in this way was to be stripped of all self-respect.

To be told to hide was a humiliation.

"Maybe to live like this would be worse than death."

He had written about the workings of Muslim "honour culture,"

honour and shame.

He came from that culture, even though he was not religious,

and had been raised to care deeply about questions of pride.

To skulk and hide was to lead a dishonourable life.

He felt, very often in those years, profoundly ashamed.

Both shamed and ashamed.

One of the things that people perhaps didn't understand

about those days - sometimes it looked very grand, the protection.

You know, you're zooming around in armoured Jaguars

and people are jumping out and opening doors.

It didn't feel grand on the receiving end. It felt like jail.

He's just a person lost, locked away and the keys are thrown away,

finding a way to carry on,

I think that must have been incredibly hard.

So this sitting room was the one we provided for the protection team.

The thing that was most worrying and stressful

was that it was made clear to me right at the beginning

that it was up to me to find these houses to live in.

I owned a house which I wasn't allowed to go to

and I had to constantly find other places

and also, places which they would approve of.

So one of the constant worries, even when I was here,

was, "Where do you go next?"

It was just very cooped up.

To go out even and stretch my legs was worrying in case somebody saw me.

When I wanted to go on a walk, they would have to take me somewhere...

..somewhere else.

We're going to try to start now.

VOICES SHOUT

APPLAUSE

In America, a group of eminent writers led by Susan Sontag

were organising support, with readings from The Satanic Verses

by the likes of Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo.

American PEN has called this meeting

to express our solidarity

with Salman Rushdie...

..with his publishers,

with the independent booksellers who are continuing to sell his book...

APPLAUSE

When I sat down to write this morning,

the first thing I did was think of Salman Rushdie.

It is an essential part of my daily routine.

I pick up my pen, and before I begin to write

I think of my fellow novelist across the ocean.

I pray that he will go on living another 24 hours.

I pray that his English protectors will keep him hidden

from the people who are out to murder him.

The man's life is in ruins,

shunted from one safe house to another,

cut off from his son,

surrounded by security police.

Salman Rushdie is fighting for his life.

Most of all, I pray that a time will come

when these prayers are no longer necessary,

when Salman Rushdie will be as free

to walk the streets of the world as I am.

I don't think people can imagine the pressure of living in small rooms

without an ability to go out,

completely uprooted,

moving from one room to the next

because of perceived and real threats.

Satan, being thus confined to a wandering condition,

is without any set and abode

for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature,

a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air,

yet this is certainly part of his punishment -

that he is without any fixed place allowed him

to rest the sole of his foot upon.

In the third week of the fatwa,

my partner Philippa and I drove up to a cottage

that Ian McEwan had rented near Gloucester,

so we could all spend an evening together with Salman.

It was a shock to see men with machine guns at the door.

I remember packing up a kind of hamper

to go out to the cottage to cook for us,

and feeling panic and paranoia.

I stopped two or three times along the way, on the A40,

with this idea that I might be being followed.

The evening, there was a kind of horrible merriness in the air,

as if by raising a glass of red wine together,

we were defeating the whole lot

and then remembering even as the wine had slipped down our throat

that we had not defeated anyone.

As I remember it, you'd been to his house in Islington,

you'd picked up his toothbrush, his pyjamas.

I saw these being handed over

as if he was going in for a long hospital stay.

Another memory that is very clear to me was the next morning,

he was the lead item on the 8 o'clock news.

Some fresh group in the Middle East

had sworn to join in to hunt him down.

And I remember feeling this sort of huge love for him

and feeling, um...

..suddenly how alone he was, actually,

for all the expressions of support,

it was him, it was no-one else they were after. It was him.

This village here, Gladestry,

is a place I stayed in for a few nights in 1989.

A sort of bed-and-breakfast place

that was run by a retired policeman and his wife

and we needed a place for a few nights

and we actually rented the whole thing,

so there were four police officers and me staying there,

somewhere in this little village here.

When it comes to our role,

come the, you know, the worst-case scenario,

he has to react to our reactions to get him to safety.

It had to be a grown-up relationship.

You couldn't be too pally.

He was protected in hiding.

He's with a bunch of policemen.

Every time we saw him, there were different people

and that was very unnerving,

he was always living intimately closely

with a different bunch of people.

I remember being with him in a house...

..and I was sleeping on the sofa.

Every car that came towards the house,

you'd have that thing of headlights coming at you

and I kept waking up, thinking, "I'm about to get blown into...

"space."

Late in the night, we were all lifted up and put in cars

and the reason we were lifted up and put in cars

was that someone was in the neighbourhood,

so this was a pretty ghastly way to live.

The worst day I had

was the moment when I thought that they'd got my son.

There'd been a king of ongoing deal

that at 7pm every night, he would call for a chat and a catch-up.

He had to call us

because I wasn't allowed to know the number for wherever he was.

Remember, this is happening at a moment before cell phones.

And I said, if for some reason they could not be there,

would they leave a message on my answering machine at my old house?

I was living in a small rented cottage in mid-Wales.

I called, there was no reply.

I checked the messages and there was no message.

And I began to call more and more compulsively

and to get more and more worried about it.

One of the police officers who was with me said,

"We'll get a police car to do a drive-by."

They said, "The front door is open and all the lights are on."

You can imagine what one sees in one's mind's eye.

The police said, "Given the circumstances,

"we can't just ask officers to go in there.

"We have to..." I've never forgotten the phrase,

"We have to prepare an army."

I was in a state of, you know, complete collapse, really.

I remember saying to one of the police officers

that if that if this is some attempt to ransom him for me,

I'm going to go.

And then this police officer said to me,

"That only happens in the movies.

"If they've taken him and his mother,

"they're probably dead

"and what you have to decide is if you want to die as well."

Suddenly,

the phone's answered

and there's Zafar's voice

and he's saying, "Dad, what's the matter?"

We kind of tottered home

to find a lot of police outside our house

and my father kind of panicking down the phone.

It turned out the police had looked at the next-door neighbour's house

and it hadn't been our front door that was open,

it was our neighbour's.

We'd been stuck at a parents' evening

or some kind of school function.

My mother had tried to leave him a message and it hadn't worked

and there'd just been a big miscommunication.

I mean, it was just beyond...

You can't imagine what it was like.

Or perhaps you can imagine

because, I mean, anybody who has children could imagine.

We'd get calls at home from people

telling us they knew our number and were coming to kill us.

I'd pick up the phone and there'd be a voice down the end of the phone

saying they knew your number, they know your address,

somebody will be there soon,

at which point I would sort of say, "Mum, it's for you!"

He spent an hour with his mother and Sameen at the Pinters' home.

Just as in the days before and after his father's death,

his mother hid her fear and worry

behind a tight but loving smile,

but her fists often clenched.

She lived in Pakistan.

Her starting position when she came was to say to him,

"Oh, this is not Allah's fault -

"there's a just a few Muslims and it's not everybody."

And her own position began to shift.

Her own sisters didn't really stand by her.

At my parents' house, the name Rushdie is on the gates outside.

And um, they asked her to take the name down, her sisters,

and she said, "No. That will stay there,"

and that name always stayed there, and she never took it down.

The other thing that will surprise people

is that you're not really Salman Rushdie anyway, are you?

So that's a second pseudonym you have here.

My father decided he had to have a modern...

You know, like a surname and so he chose this name Rushdie

because he was a great admirer

of the medieval Arab philosopher Imni Rush,

known in the west as Averroes,

who was, in his time, a very modernising sensibility in Islam.

It seemed extraordinary that my father had chosen that name,

another modernising voice.

We grew up in a secular but Muslim family,

but aware of there are areas that you don't touch.

One of the important things that Salman did

was to throw open that door.

Things don't have to be out of bounds, you can talk about anything.

When, during the smoother passages of their bumpy journey

as father and son, they sat on a veranda in a warm evening

and argued passionately about the world,

they both knew that although they disagreed on many topics,

they had the same cast of mind.

Everything, even holy writ, could be investigated

and, just possibly, improved.

I first met Salman in 1981,

making a programme about his novel, Midnight's Children, for the BBC.

That was the book in which he took on his multifarious birthright.

I was born on August 15 1947

and the time... The time matters, too.

Well, then at night. No...

It's important to be more...

On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact,

clock hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came.

Oh, spell it out, spell it out.

At the precise instant of India's arrival at independence,

I tumbled forth into the world.

-JAWAHARLARL NEHRU:

-At the stroke of the midnight hour,

when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.

That 1981 film was literally the first time

I'd ever been on television, which is why I looked so posh.

I felt I had to dress up for it.

Now, as you see, it's all different.

I'm going to Cambridge.

I must say, it's nice to be going, I haven't been for some years now.

I was very happy at Cambridge,

after having been very unhappy at boarding school.

To middle class Indians of my parents' generation,

the British public school was the acme of educational possibility

and so they decided that they wanted me to go to one and sent me.

So I went to Rugby.

I had a certain amount of racist trouble,

with people writing slogans on the wall of my room

and tearing up my essays for me and nice things.

Suddenly I realised that I didn't actually belong.

He didn't tell his parents what school had been like

until after he left it.

So, in his letters home, he created his first fictions

about idyllic schooldays of sunshine and cricket.

Cambridge was like a discovery

that being educated in England could be fun.

I studied history. One of the subjects I chose

was about Muhammad and the rise of Islam.

That was the year in which I first came across

the so-called incident of The Satanic Verses.

-SAMEEN:

-Some of his engagement on that subject comes from my father.

My father always said that he loved the prophet Muhammad,

but he loved him as a man in a time in history

who he thought did interesting things,

and that's the way in which that subject was discussed in our home.

The thing that interested me about the origins of Islam

are basically that it's the only one of the great world religions

that really was born and developed

in what we could really call recorded history.

We know about Muhammad as a historical person

and we also therefore know about the birth of this idea

as an event inside history.

At the gates to Mecca stood temples to three goddesses,

winged goddesses, like exalted birds.

Or angels.

Each time the trading caravans went through the city gates,

they made an offering - paid a tax.

The wealthiest families in Mecca controlled the temples

and much of their wealth came from these "offerings".

In the building known as the Cube, or Kaaba, in the centre of town

there were idols of hundreds of gods.

One of these statues, by no means the most popular,

represented Al-Lah, meaning "the god",

just as Al-Lat was "the goddess".

The man who would pluck Al-Lah from near-obscurity

and become his prophet was Muhammad.

He may - just may - have been offered an attractive deal,

designed to buy him off.

If Muhammad could agree that the bird-goddesses could be worshipped

by followers of Islam then the persecution of Muslims would cease.

The Prophet came down from the mountain one day

and recited this sura.

"Have you heard of the exalted birds?

"Their intercession is greatly to be desired."

But later he returned to the mountain and came down, abashed,

to state that he'd been deceived on his previous visit -

the devil had appeared to him in the guise of the archangel

and the verses he had been given were not divine, but Satanic,

and should be expunged from the Qur'an.

After that, the monotheism of Islam, having been tested in the cauldron,

remained unwavering and strong.

The first or second floor, I can't exactly remember.

Ironically, it was here in Cambridge

under the tutelage of an inspirational history don

that he first discovered the story of The Satanic Verses.

Just up there, that was the birthplace of the novel.

Up there by the river.

It was a generation of great historians who were there

teaching me at the time.

Especially Arthur Hibbert,

who was really one of these polymathic figures

who knew everything about everything.

Arthur's rooms were... You can see them here,

that corner room was where I used to go every week

for supervisions on my Muhammad And The Rise Of Islam paper.

The Satanic Verses took 20 years to be born, but that's where it started.

Hello! Goodness, you look so smart.

Well, it's great to see you, too.

I've written a memoir and obviously a part of it has to do

with the special subject I did in my final year,

-which was about Muhammad...

-I can remember.

They stopped it because you were the only person who wanted to read it.

-That's right.

-And I knew a tiny, tiny little bit.

More than that, but it was great because you agreed to supervise me

and I think I therefore became the only person in the university to do it that year.

It was very much you.

It was, kind of, fate, isn't it?

-There was one person at the university...

-You made your fate.

The great questions of history -

you know, are we masters or victims of our times -

gave me my subject as a writer. If I'd studied English literature,

I'd probably have ended up reviewing books.

It's a subject that reshaped itself in front of your eyes

for you, as it were.

Here is a problem, here is something funny,

here is something of breathtaking importance - whatever it was.

There was no set path.

You just wandered around picking and choosing

as your intelligence suggested.

I remember you telling me that people shouldn't write history

until they could hear the people speak.

It's true. I recognise that. That's mine, yeah.

It got stuck in my head and actually when I came to write fiction

I thought that was very good guidance.

-You knew Forster, didn't you?

-Oh, very well. Very well indeed, yes.

I ran into him a few times. He told me a story

about how he sometimes would dream in words rather than images

and that he got in the habit of waking himself up

and writing them down in a diary, but nobody ever found it.

It sounds highly original and therefore highly likely.

Passage To India is a great book anyway

and it's a very important book to me

and to any writers thinking of writing about India in English.

And in a way, I constructed the language of Midnight's Children

as a kind of response to that very cool Forsterian English.

That's not how India felt to me. India felt to me hot, not cool

and so I set about trying to create

if you like a sort of anti-Forster language,

you know, hot, vulgar, crowded, noisy, smelly language.

I used to have rooms on the top floor

and on the floor below were Forster's rooms.

And so literally I would have to pass his door every day

on my way up to my room.

We met each other by chance on the day that Evelyn Waugh died.

He said, "That's a truly great writer, not like me."

He was a very modest man,

but it always felt to me like a real special moment in my life

that I just got to touch the hem of his garment.

I remain to this day inspired by his great novel.

Rushdie began to write.

His battling with his own traditions made him a chapter in history.

He did become a different kind of writer - hot, not cool.

That mix of fable, magical realism, highly political discussion,

as well as dream sequence

was a very highly charged, combustible mixture.

A novel like Satanic Verses, is perfectly constructed

to capture that era, that time of massive global transformation.

Violence, murders, expulsions of suspected assassins

continued from the first year into the second.

Salman was still in hiding, increasingly isolated.

He didn't hear the wings of the exterminating angel,

but they were up there, above him, coming lower all the time.

I can understand Muslim fundamentalists

following the party line and perceiving Salman as a devil,

but anybody in the west with our tradition of human rights...

I don't see how anyone could make that argument, but many did and...

I think it's a failure to make a distinction about, you know,

tolerating plural views and something criminal.

I can think of John Le Carre, Roald Dahl, different people who...

-Who really turned on him.

-Who turned on him and were very abusive.

I mean, writers, of all people,

are the ones who should believe in freedom of speech.

The other thing that people imagine is that Salman is being given protection,

so there must be someone in the Great British Government

who's looking after him.

And actually what happened, for up to a couple of years,

no-one in the government contacted him, no-one spoke to him.

I had been asked not to talk.

It did feel for a long time that I had become this empty space

into which everybody else could pour their opinions

and prejudices and attitudes.

Early on, Rushdie had tried to defuse the situation by apologising.

But Khomeini had again called on

every Muslim to employ everything he has got, to send him to hell.

But in a sense, Salman was in hell already.

This was his lowest ebb. He was desperate for a way out.

It felt like a really bleak moment.

I was in this kind of almost self-destructive frame of mind.

For two years, he'd been heading down a road

towards the heart of darkness.

He saw himself swaying on the edge of a great abyss.

But he was also hearing the seductive murmur of hope.

Muslim leaders said they could see a way out -

if he would declare himself a Muslim.

They met at a maximum security police station in London.

There was this inquisitorial set-up all sitting behind a long table,

I was supposed to face them.

They were saying, "We really want to bring you back towards us

"and there's no question of your withdrawing the book

"and, you know, maybe a good idea to delay the paperback

"while we could go out there and get everybody to calm down

"but we will throw our weight behind you," etc. etc.

But the price of the ticket

was that I had to make this statement of faith.

Well, I just felt in a kind of state of despair, almost,

and, kind of, befuddled myself into signing the document.

I was completely stunned.

And I remember very clearly ringing Salman

and saying, "What is this about? Have you gone mad?"

At that point, he had had a couple of days to think about it

and I think he began to think he HAD gone mad.

The moment I was in the car

I began to feel physically sick.

First of all, it was a really stupid thing to do.

It was kind of a bottom of the barrel moment for me.

But I was, for a time anyway, stuck in the trap

cos I just put myself in it.

-INTERVIEWER:

-And you have now effectively become a Muslim?

What I have said is that in all my writing,

I have moved closer and closer to an engagement with religious faith.

I have no quarrel with the central tenets of Islam,

which is the oneness of God.

And the validity of the prophecy of the prophet Muhammad.

-So you're a believer?

-I am able to accept the central principle

of Islam. As I've been saying, I'm by no means a perfect believer...

'Interviews I had to give at the time was kind of strangled

'and tortured and trying to say what I think.

'You're trapped in that language in which you can't operate.'

He came round and I said,

"We've put a little room there. You can go in there

"and say your prayers before dinner.

"I'm certainly not serving you any wine tonight."

And he said, "Oh, piss off! Shut up!"

I don't think anybody blamed him for trying it on.

You know, who wouldn't have done the same,

anything to get out of that terrible situation?

And the awful thing about it was that it didn't really work.

The Ayatollah said, you can't repudiate a fatwa anyway,

so there's no good pretending to be a good man now.

You know it's too late.

You're not getting off the hook by conceding.

That's not how you play poker.

They immediately started demanding the withdrawal of the book totally,

and saying that I was not sincere unless I did that.

But I mean, they're probably right about the not being sincere.

'So anyway, the whole thing just spiralled downwards.'

Right, on the phone to me

is Mr Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses.

-Mr Rushdie, good morning to you.

-Good morning.

Let's go straight to our first question, which comes from Said,

-calling from Southall.

-I would like to know, are you prepared to withdraw

all copies of The Satanic Verses published so far?

No, I'm not prepared to withdraw The Satanic Verses.

I think that would be an unreasonable request.

'I think it's the only time that he made

'a dishonest judgement'

and it was a no win situation, and I think he realised that.

But what I realised was that even I, who is so close to him,

hadn't understood how dark the place

that he was living in had now become.

A month later, the experiment was over.

That was the start for Salman just saying,

"Right, I'm now going to do this my own way."

He grew and grew. He became such a tiger for his corner.

Salman had come out blinking into the light.

Seizing the initiative brought him back to life.

He became inspirational at that point, it was transforming.

If somebody is trying to kill you,

if many people say that they want you dead,

the question is, is it worth dying for?

What is it that you would put your life on the line for?

Free speech and the life of imagination?

Liberty from religious constraint?

These were the things that I cared most about.

I didn't pick this battle but given that it's here,

it's the war I'm prepared to fight.

He later became president of American PEN,

which had sprung to his defence,

fighting for writers all over the world.

Perhaps we can argue that art is stronger than the censor.

And perhaps it often is.

Artists however are vulnerable.

'If the creative artist worries

'whether he will still be free tomorrow,

'then he will not be free today.

'If we are not confident of our freedom, then we are not free.'

I'm from India and I'm very happy that I could read your novel here.

-Can I have your autograph?

-Yes.

As Salman grew into the role of defending himself,

he became the defender of freedom of expression in general.

And took the community,

the literary community and many others outside that, with him.

I mean, that's the story, I think it's a heroic story.

Publishers had to decide whether to risk being heroes.

In Germany, they banded together

to avoid any one of them being singled out.

But when it came time to bring out the paperback,

even this ruse wasn't enough.

Every single publisher in New York

said, "No, we will not publish the paperback.

"Not by ourselves and not in a group."

So I was walking along and inspired by the German precedent,

I thought, "Well if we can publish the paperback ourselves,

"Salman and me, and call it The Consortium,

"then every publisher in New York will not want it known

"that he is not a member of The Consortium

"and will assume that his neighbour is."

And so that's how the book was published.

I've told a couple of people what happened,

but most publishers, if you were to go up to them and say,

"So were you a part of that consortium that publishes?"

"Yes, yes, yes. I was."

People were scared, but with reason.

The gentleman who knifed the Italian translator

wanted Salman's address and the poor translator didn't have it.

In Japan, the translator was killed in an elevator.

His throat was cut and it was horrific.

Earlier, the Japanese publisher had been attacked.

The whole situation was horrific,

but either you cave or you don't

and it always seemed pretty clear to me that you don't cave.

Or there's no freedom of speech.

The Norwegian publisher was the first

to bring out a paperback edition, but there was a price to pay.

He went out to his car one morning

and found the front tyre was punctured.

I went to the other side of the car

to get the phone number of the AA.

I was trying to use my mobile.

The first shot came.

I didn't understand it was a shot.

I didn't understand anything at the beginning.

I was a bit paralysed

until the second shot came.

The shot came from behind.

I started running and jumped down the hill.

I never saw the gunman.

'I feel responsible.'

It was obvious to me that William was the soft target.

They were attacking William because they couldn't get to me.

There were several days when it wasn't at all clear

that he was going to survive. I called the hospital room.

I began to apologise to him,

I began to say, "Look, you know, I feel guilty.

"I feel terrible about what's happened." And he stopped me.

He said, "I'm a grown-up person.

"I run a publishing company and I know perfectly well

"what I'm doing when I publish a book."

And he said, "I'm very proud to be the publisher of the book.

"The true publisher.

"What's more, I've just ordered a very large reprint."

Despite the constant police escort,

Salman, now parted from Marianne, met someone else

at a house he was using for meetings in London.

I'd been house sitting.

In fact, it wasn't house sitting, it was parrot sitting.

He said, "Perhaps we could have supper."

And I said, "Yes, yes! That would be nice."

And he said, "Well, you'll have to cook."

And I put the phone down, thinking, "What have I just agreed to?"

He arrived with a policeman first,

who would always come in and check out the house.

And we had this lovely supper.

I think we saw each other the next day as well,

with the policeman sitting in the next room!

And I... You know, those couple of occasions,

they were kept up rather late before he went home.

Late starts, very late finishes as well.

We'd be out several nights a week.

People may look back now and say,

"Well, yes, it was expensive," but it allowed a British citizen

to go about his own life, rather than having somebody

sort of hidden for, you know, the rest of their days.

Salman decided that he was not going to be afraid,

and he was not going to jump at shadows.

It enabled him to lead a much more normal life.

And I think I enabled him to lead that normal life.

I think I was perhaps

the calm in his life.

My older daughter Maya, she was a baby when this happened.

It became a while before she realised that every time

she saw her uncle, he was in a different house.

Maya thought he was really, really rich

and he had lots of different houses

and lived always with lots of friendly people.

For Zafar too, the abnormal became normal.

What's very weird is to think

that it's not weird to go out

with four armed men

in two armoured bulletproof cars

to drive 40 minutes in the wrong direction,

change cars in a car park for a cinema somewhere,

get into two more armoured bulletproof cars

with eight more armoured armed men,

and drive back to where you were going in the first place,

which sometimes was ten minutes from the starting point.

That was our normal way of getting places.

Secrets become a part of everyday life.

That's a hard thing I think to get used to as a kid,

and also to explain to your friends later on.

To understand when it's OK to lie, you have to grow up quite quickly.

Even four years into the fatwa,

Rushdie couldn't go to the toilet unaccompanied.

The most dangerous zone was the space between the exit door

of a building and the door of the car.

The police had suggested a wig. He was extremely dubious.

He was offered bulletproof vests to wear.

He refused them. He would not scuttle.

He would try to walk with his head held high.

He felt caught in a trap. America called.

'I want to be in America.

'America where everyone is like me,

'because everyone comes from somewhere else.

'All those histories, persecutions, all those secret ceremonies,

'hanged witches, weeping wooden virgins

'and horned unyielding gods.

'All that yearning, greed. All those variform manglings of English

'adding up to the livingest English in the world.

'And above everything else, all that smuggled-in music.

'America, a magic land.''

He wanted to come, he wanted to come, he wanted to come.

Eventually the British government

allowed that he could be conveyed

on a navy transport.

He gave a speech at Colombia.

More security than you can imagine.

We had a, for some reason, white stretched limousine

with doors this thick.

We left Colombia

and went down 125th Street,

past The Apollo Theatre.

If you are a James Brown fanatic, as I am,

you can't do better than riding down 125th Street

in a white stretch bulletproof limo

with helicopters and motorcycles.

Everyone in Harlem stopped and thought,

"This is the king of all drug busts or something."

I was sitting in the back, saying, "Salman, this is it.

"This is heaven. This is as much fun

"as it's possible to have in this town."

Security in New York explained that Elizabeth

could not ride in the car with Salman.

She could be a plant, she could kill him.

And I said, "Oh I'm pretty sure that's not the situation!"

The man said, "You don't understand, Mr Rushdie.

"She could have a concealed fork - in the neck!"

So Elizabeth became known as The Forkist.

And then Salman and Elizabeth were allowed to buy their own home.

'It had been agreed at the highest level, the police said.

'It was difficult to explain to the building contractor

'why a publisher like Mr Anton required bulletproof glass

'in the ground floor windows, or a safe room upstairs.

'It took nine months to prepare the house for Mr Anton,

'who lived there for the following seven years,

'and the secret was kept throughout that time.'

Everyone lived behind their wrought iron gates

and no one's really opening their own front door.

I think that's why he went to live somewhere like that,

because it wouldn't seem odd that the owner never opened the door.

It had to be a place that allowed

for four policemen to live in.

And the police said, "It fits our criteria."

I arranged to meet the senior protection officer

who lived with Salman in the Bishops Avenue years,

at the place he loves the most - Lords.

'Whispering Frank the cricket lover,

'the kindly protection officer

'with whom Elizabeth and he had forged the closest relationship.'

95, we came to a test.

As I was a member of MCC,

I was able to go ahead and choose decent seats

and managed to get up there in the Warner Stand.

He and Harold Pinter enjoyed a lovely day's cricket.

Harold Pinter, who was a great, great cricket lover, of course.

Yes, but he's a gentle man.

You could talk cricket with Harold very sensibly.

But it wasn't all cricket.

I remember it was one afternoon.

I was looking at the screen,

and I saw this little chap inveigle his way into the courtyard.

He went over to the cars, tried the door handles.

I thought, "This is a problem."

We had three options.

One was to let him go, which wasn't very satisfactory,

you know, from a police point of view.

The other was to arrest him

but then you'd have to bring in the local police.

But once they know, then everyone would know.

Well, word would get about.

The other option was to...

well, it hardly bears mentioning, but, you know, get rid of him.

In the end, the intruder was released but followed -

he worked on a local building site. They left it at that.

And in that strange situation, Rushdie was writing again.

'Slowly, slowly, his old power returned.

'The world went away.

'Time stood still.

'He fell happily towards that deep place

'where unwritten books wait to be found,

'like lovers demanding proof of utter devotion

'before they appear.'

God knows what it's like to live under that kind of scrutiny

and continue to be an artist.

What you really want to be if you're a writer is anonymous

and to watch other people and write your books.

The nightmare is that you become the subject.

As the fatwa was drawing near to its ten year toll,

Salman and Elizabeth had a child - Milan.

'How could they think about bringing a child into this nightmare,

'into their soft prison?'

He knew how much I wanted a baby.

And so he, he...

Yeah, we eventually got him!

SHE LAUGHS

It took a while. And... and the police were fantastic.

They were terribly thrilled. And I remember,

they took me to the hospital, when I went into labour.

So, you know, there's me, Salman in the back,

-police driving, with me saying, "Ouch."

-SHE LAUGHS

That was quite a tricky protection.

He was born at... in the Lindo Wing at Paddington,

and yeah, we had to not only ensure that, you know,

Elizabeth could get in at the right time,

there was a plan for that,

but also to facilitate his visits to see Milan.

That's when you become most aware

of the intrusion in someone's private life.

They all had families and they said,

"This is our first Special Branch baby."

And after that, Tony and Cherie had Leo.

But they said, "You are our first..."

It was a fun time.

It was kind of awful, it was an awful time as well,

because of what was happening to him.

But during that time,

I think we had a lot of fun.

There was a lot of laughter.

The flowerbed!

"Magic lands lie all around,

"Inside, outside, underground.

"Looking-glass worlds still abound.

"All their tales this truth reveal:

"Naught but love makes magic real."

Salman's first wife Clarissa,

mother of Zafar, was dying of breast cancer.

'The wings, the beating wings.

'It was the hardest thing he ever had to tell his son.

'Zafar was horribly shocked.

'She wasn't the parent Zafar was supposed to lose.'

Even before Milan was born,

Salman was thinking of buying a bolthole in New York.

He'd been wanting to live in New York for many years.

I always felt that...the, um...

the mistress was New York.

-SHE LAUGHS

-And not another woman.

Um...yeah.

Their relationship was coming to an end.

But so, at last, was the fatwa.

The Islamic Republic of Iran has no intention,

nor is it going to take any action whatsoever,

to threaten the life of the author of The Satanic Verses.

REPORTERS TALK

Mr Rushdie.

Over here, yes.

What was your first thought when you woke up this morning?

When I woke up this morning,

I thought, "It's only half past five."

LAUGHTER

That was my first thought.

It's...it's...

It was very exciting.

There was a residual fear that I would switch on the television

and discover it wasn't true.

So of course, I switched on the television,

and fortunately, there seems to be a consensus

in the Iranian political circles about this.

It does seem that the deal is solid and...

..and that gives me great happiness.

Mr Rushdie, there are those hardliners

who are still calling for you to make an apology

over The Satanic Verses. What do you say to them today?

Well, I think, you know...

I'm saying that this is a moment for a fresh start.

We just need to turn the page.

We can just say we differ, maybe.

We differ about this.

It was never lifted and they said they wouldn't lift it,

but they would no longer pursue it.

They would no longer pursue the death sentence.

I think he decided to make that statement as a way of ending it.

He wanted to draw a line, just to reclaim his life.

What the fatwa was about was state-sponsored terror,

operatives sent from Iran to find him and kill him.

When the fatwa was withdrawn,

what it was a matter of was,

there will be no more state sponsorship.

We can't say that you won't get killed by some passionate person,

but we can say that the Iranian government will not send them out.

The last obstacle for me was other people's fear.

"Should I stand next to you?" fear.

"If you are sitting next to me in the restaurant,

"am I in danger?" kind of thing.

I decided the only way for me to overcome that

was to deliberately lead a very open life,

and I thought if people could see that I wasn't scared,

they might feel a little embarrassed to be scared themselves.

And that was a deliberate strategy, you know,

to go, to be public and be seen.

But three years after the fatwa ended,

the world changed.

'..How unconfident of Itself this Deity was,

'Who reigned by terror,

'packing off all dissidents to Its blazing Siberia,

'the gulag-infernos of Hell...

'burn the books and trust the Book;

'shred the papers and hear the Word...

'He checked himself. These were satanic thoughts...'

One of the things that we all remember is the smell.

That smell hung over downtown Manhattan

for a long time,

the smell of dead people and burned people.

People would call up people living in New York,

saying, "Get out of the city."

You know? Nobody wanted to get out of the city.

It's where you wanted to be, in the city.

Sorry, it's a difficult memory.

I always felt, and I still feel it,

that what happened in the case of The Satanic Verses

was one of the early notes of the music. You know?

And...

I mean, what happened here was the main event.

This was the full crash of the music.

At the time it was easy to see what had happened

in the case of The Satanic Verses as exceptional.

People living in the west didn't see a context for it.

This is not isolated.

Attacks like this are happening elsewhere.

A great Turkish journalist was assassinated by Islamic extremists,

a great Egyptian secularist was murdered,

a great Algerian writer was murdered.

You could see it if you looked. All you had to do was look.

In January 2012, Salman was invited to the literary festival in Jaipur.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I was told

that a couple of hitmen were on their way to Jaipur to take me out.

I was being told that if I go, I'm going to be endangering the lives

of the people of the festival, and the other writers, etc.,

so in the end, I said I wouldn't go.

For, like, five minutes, it felt like a time warp, you know?

It felt like somehow back to 1989.

It felt inadequate just to make a statement of support or sympathy.

We had to do something that would be

a concrete exercise of free speech.

We decided to read from the book The Satanic Verses.

APPLAUSE

Question: What is the opposite of faith?

Not disbelief.

Too final, certain, closed.

Itself a kind of belief.

Doubt.

The human condition.

But what of the angelic?

Halfway between Allahgod and homosap,

did they ever doubt?

They did: challenging God's will one day,

they hid muttering beneath the Throne,

daring to ask forbidden things:

antiquestions.

Is it right that.

Could it not be argued.

Freedom, the old antiquest.

The book is effectively banned in India.

Hari Kunzru downloaded the passages he read from the internet.

What then happened... all hell broke loose.

We had the cops turning up.

We had mullahs and the political establishment

on the phone to the organisers.

Recently I was in Pakistan,

and I made a speech where I mentioned Rushdie,

and people applauded me for my bravery in mentioning his name,

cos they said, "We never mention his name in this country."

"It's impossible to buy any of his books."

Rushdie speaks in the book for Muslims.

This is an extremely important book.

He speaks for their doubt.

He speaks the bits of them

that they actually think and feel sometimes,

"Do I really believe in all this stuff?"

But they can't say.

So he, at considerable personal cost,

has spoken a truth, that millions of other people want to speak,

and for which he's been punished.

If writers are devils, it's because they do speak

in the face of the religious right.

Nice to meet you.

-Where are you from?

-I'm from Belgium.

-Belgium.

-Yeah. We know him... everywhere in the world.

So have a nice visit.

-Bye.

-Thank you. Bye.

I mean, one of the questions I used to get asked was

whether people backed away from me

because of the nature of the threat,

and I said, actually, what happened was the exact opposite of that.

People came and stood closer to me.

-Keep up all of your wonderful work.

-Thank you, sir.

-It's nice to meet you.

-Likewise.

-All right. Thanks.

-All the best.

-Cheers.

-You're on TV.

'It was a courageous demonstration of the value of friendship.

'It certainly was a thing that...

'without which I couldn't have done it.'

As with anyone who's been locked up for the wrong reasons,

when you're set free you think...

HE LAUGHS

"Good. Let's go to a party."

Of course he's a writer, but he's also a guy who has a life.

Now, some people won't allow for that.

Everything is heightened after being locked up.

If I'd been through what he'd been through,

I'd be going to parties every night too.

-Emily Rubin.

-Yes, yes.

-And this is my friend Eleanor Hutchins.

-Hi.

-Hi.

I was at another roof party that your friend June threw.

'I think moving to New York for him was symbolic as well as physical.

'It was a way of removing himself from what he felt as being

'handcuffs and restraints of being in London.'

He always had a very hard time with the media here,

and I don't think that would have changed.

You get a...he got a hard time for leaving as well.

I think being in New York,

he felt like he could kind of start with a clean slate.

-Can you hear me OK?

-Yes.