Hamid Dabashi on Salman Rushdie

Hamid Dabashi is an Iranian origin Professor of Comp. Lit. He has a theory that the real Rushdie died because of the Ayatollah's fatwa and that an impostor penned the rest of his tripe. The more conventional view is that Rushdie gained global prominence from the fatwa and thus rose from being a Martin Amis- i.e. a clever provincial- to becoming a Saul Bellow- a literary giant. He doesn't have to bother with exposing the vileness of the East's tin-pot dictators or dynasties- they do a far better job themselves- and can simply revel in his own celebrity as a Great Hyphenated American novelist whose unreadable shite is accepted at his own valuation of it.

Compare Rushdie's productivity to that of S.P Somtow- who is now better known as a composer- or to Vikram Seth or Timothy Mo. All were Public School educated Oxbridge men whose beginnings were promising. Mo now self publishes. Seth appears to have been blocked for a number of years. A similar fate might have overtaken Rushdie but for the fatwa. He is a fortunate man whose enemies enabled him to prosper and find peace while pursuing his vocation.

On the other hand, something did die- though this was not glaringly obvious to all till recently- when the Iranians failed to kill Rushdie. It was the notion that political Islam could fuck up aught but its own shitty little intellectual spite slum and vast political ghetto of gormless corruption, criminality and gadarening incompetence.  It would be unfair to say that the Iranian 'liberal intelligentsia' died because of the fatwa. They were already brain dead with their food tube linked up to their anus.

Dabashi writes-

Thirty years ago, on Valentine's Day, February 14, 1989, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran, issued a religious decree, a fatwa, condemning the British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie to death.Up until that fateful decree, the name Salman Rushdie was known only to a community of South Asian literary aficionados admiring a gifted Mumbai-born novelist whose piercing prose and wicked sense of humour had given the world such literary gems as Midnight's Children (1981) and Shame (1983).

This is nonsense. Rushdie was well known in England precisely because he was posh, relatively hip and well connected in literary London and, once he gave up Science Fiction, could appeal to a 'Raj nostalgia' kindled by the same socio-economic conditions which were fueling Thatcherism.

By contrast he was little known in India. Most South Asian 'literary aficionados' made it a point not to read South Asian 'literary novels' because they were utterly shite. On the other hand, they did read Collins & Lapierre's 'Freedom at Midnight' because White journalists know how to write in a racy manner. Still there were some who liked 'Midnight's children' because of the vivid, albeit  vulgar and gossipy, way it evokes the  the Mumbai of the Fifties and early Sixties- things like the Prem Ahuja case which still inspires Bollywood films- and approved its 'compare and contrast' approach to India and Pakistan- Rushdie was unusual in having been a teenager in Karachi- with India coming out ahead. However, even Rushdie's admirers thought he was a light-weight. Naipaul, on the other hand, was taken seriously. He had a journalist's instincts though, unlike Ved Mehta, he didn't understand New Delhi.

Rushdie's third novel 'Shame', set in Pakistan, was not liked by Indians who, for some reason, had a soft spot for Bhutto and a sneaking regard for Zia who looked like the movie star Shatrughan Sinha. However an unauthorized translation was published in Iran where it was well received. It was given a prize by a Government Ministry. Thus Rushdie was considered an 'approved' author and 'Satanic Verses' was freely imported into Iran, but not India, prior to the fatwa.

What had triggered the Ayatollah's ire, and indeed the fury of many other Muslims, particularly in Pakistan, was Rushdie's novel called Satanic Verses which had just come out.

The fatwa came out about 6 months after the book was published. India had banned the import of the book and various other countries had followed suit. Only Iran had given a state sponsored prize to the wretched fellow. Thus they upped the ante by putting a price on his head.

The book was written and published in English. The ayatollah did not read English. He was reacting to the reaction of others who had not read the novel either. It was all a comedy of terrors.

If the Indians and the South Africans had banned the book, how could Iran do less? They and they alone had given the man a Government award. Furthermore, Rushdie had come across as an arrogant fool in his attempt at getting the Indians to withdraw the ban. The fact is it was a Sikh, Khushwant Singh, who had said the book could not be printed in India. A Hindu official banned the import of the book. Rushdie did not challenge this decision in a court of law. More importantly, he did not play the Kashmir card- i.e. accuse Syed Shahabudin- a former Indian diplomat- of being a Nationalist who was trying to muzzle Rushdie's speaking up on the Kashmir issue by painting him as a kaffir.

From the Iranian point of view, killing Rushdie would be popular in India and Pakistan because Rushdie had insulted the Gandhi dynasty, the Bhuttos as well as the dictator Zia. Iran's traditional paranoia about Great Britain would also be served by striking against their poodle.

By contrast, Dabashi thinks the fatwa was about internal Iranian politics.

It was just a novel  In the events that unfolded 30 years ago, timing played a key role. Satanic Verses was first published in the United Kingdom late in September 1988, around a month after Ayatollah Khomeini had begrudgingly agreed to the end of the calamitous Iran-Iraq War.

The ending of the war, though a disappointment to the maximal project of exporting Revolution, strengthened the Iranian regime. Basiji and Pasardan militants were now available for internal repression. Had Khomeini been in better health, this might have been the time when he took direct control. At this time, Montazeri- his official successor- was the 'Trotsky' intent on exporting Revolution, while Rafsanjani (who had been marketed to the Americans as the 'moderate') was the Stalin focused on not Socialism in one Country but its equivalent Islamic imbecility.

At that time, his rule was shaken from the discovery of a scheme in which Iran was receiving arms shipments from the United States - or "the Great Satan" as the ayatollah was publicly calling it - in exchange for its help in securing the release of American hostages held by his client outfit, Hezbollah.  

These revelations- which harmed the Reagan administration- began to leak out in the fall of 1986. It is plausible to say the thing was aimed at Rafasanjani, though it actually damaged Montazeri and his relative who was the leaker. The background was this. Montazeri's people had more leverage over the Hizbollah kidnappers holding American hostages and didn't want to give it up. Moreover, Rafsanjani could be embarrassed because the McFarlane deal involved a SAVAK double agent, turned arms dealer, as well as the Israelis who had been supplying Iran with arms all along. Montazeri probably learned of the deal from the ex-SAVAK arms dealer- thus Montazeri's hands became as soiled as Rafsanjani's. On the other hand, Rafsanjani could appeal to a war weary people as doing a pragmatic deal necessary to defend the country from Saddam's greatly superior air force. The chronology of events suggests that the 'pragmatic faction' had moved against the militant Montazeri faction- imprisoning its foremost member- and that the leak re. the McFarlane visit was their misguided attempt at retaliation. However, Rafsanjani was able to get on top of it and spin things his way. Montazeri's henchman was charged with treason and tortured. Eventually his public confession would sink Montazeri's chances of inheriting Khomeini's mantle. One reason for this was that Khomeini's own son, Ahmad, knew about the McFarlane visit and was unhappy with Montazeri's henchman for leaking the matter.

It is probably unwise to put too fine a point on the precise chronology of events. The truth was bound to come out one way or another. The Montazeri faction had kidnapped and beaten up the Syrian Charge d'affairs and so the Syrians were certain to leak the story when it suited them. Rafsanjani now sought to put in his own people to liaise with Hezbollah and the Syrians. Still, on paper, Montazeri remained Khomeini's heir apparent.

Between "the Iran-Contra Affair" in 1986, as it was more notoriously known in the US, and the end of Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), Khomeini was politically outmanoeuvred and in desperate need of subterfuge for his next moves.

Khomeini's position was unassailable precisely because everything was delegated. His health was poor. He was the Lenin whose stamp upon the regime would persist no matter whether a Trotsky or a Stalin succeeded him. What was unclear was Montazeri's true position. A Leader may deliberately designate a successor more unpalatable than himself. Was it plausible that the Imam would let a non Sayyad be Supreme Leader? As a matter of fact, thanks to Rafsanjani, the succession went to Khameni, a Sayyad like Khomeini himself.  Meanwhile, the guy who leaked the Iran-Contra deal was tortured and had publicly confessed on TV that he had been sexually seduced by SAVAK and Satan and so on, to do unspeakable things. His close connection with Montazeri was emphasized. He was executed in Sept. 1987

The mass execution of political prisoners in 1986 by his direct order,

This started in July 1988, not 1986. How can we trust this Professor's pronouncements on his own home country if he gets such elementary facts wrong?

the sustained course of university purges since the commencement of the revolution, and the engineering of Hezbollah in Lebanon since the Israeli invasion of 1982 were necessary but not sufficient for him.

There was no subterfuge about the purging of the Universities. Helping Lebanese Shias- for which Mohtashemi must get much credit- was a sound policy which continues to this day. It is unclear what internal enemy the author thinks Khomeini had to fear at this time. The truth is the Regime was settling scores and dealing with unfinished business. The War was over and the Imam's battle hardened basijis were available to secure total control over the country. It is true that the MeK had launched a suicidal attack with just 7000 troops in July '88, but this just confirmed Khomeini's unassailability. I suppose it was a good time to free up prison space. There was no longer any need to keep prisoners as a possible bargaining chip, or a means to split an opposition coalition.

He wanted to guarantee the perpetuity of the theocracy he had established and he had a reason to worry about its future.

Khomeini did guarantee precisely this. What reason had he to worry about the future?

Mehdi Hashemi, the Iranian liaison who helped expose the Iran-Contra Affair in 1986, was a close ally to Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, an heir apparent to Ayatollah Khomeini, who had incensed him with his opposition to the mass execution of political prisoners and who was about to be demoted for his disobedience.  

Hashemi was much more than a 'liaison'. The guy was a nutter smuggling arms into Saudi Arabia and beating Syrian diplomats and getting up to all sorts of crazy shit. He had been the leader of Montazeri's armed following and now proved to be that worthy's Achilles heel. It was said that 'dog did not eat dog' in the Ayatollah's Iran- i.e. the clerics did not kill each other- but Hashemi was so crazy, he was defrocked and executed for some sort of Satanic deviation.

Rafsanjani had fooled the Americans into thinking he was a 'moderate' and that they should ship Iran the arms it needed in return for help with the hostages. But the go-between was a crook who inflated the price tag while Montazeri's people were determined to keep their Hizbollah contacts to themselves.  McFarlane made a farcical trip to Teheran, in May 1986, with a Bible personally inscribed by Ronald Reagan. Rafsanjani revealed the comic details of this in November 1986- when the story broke in Lebanon. By then, Hashemi had been arrested for treason and was being tortured. He confessed a few months later. At this time, Montazeri found it convenient to repackage himself as a 'liberal', resiling from the business of exporting terror. It is this narrative which some progressive Iranians latched on to but it bears little relation to the facts.

So in February 1989, the Iranian supreme leader was very much preoccupied with guaranteeing the continuation of the Islamic Republic he had established.

Khomeini was 86 years old, in poor health, and not directly involved in most things. His son, Ahmad, was his chief of staff. He had become incensed with Montazeri over the latter's support for Mehdi Hashemi.

With hindsight, it is Rafsanjani who emerges as the smoothest operator. He is believed to have accumulated a billion dollar fortune while retaining an albeit fluctuating political influence to his dying day.

He needed to order a redrafting of the constitution in a way to allow his devoted follower Ali Khamenei (the current supreme leader of Iran), who had nowhere near the qualifications of Montazeri, to succeed him.

Montazeri's days were numbered. He was linked to active treason at a time when 'the War of the Cities' was at its worst. The Hashemi confession had damaged him beyond repair. The returning Basijis would in any case be in no mood to tolerate the re-emergence of 'liberal' politicians.

I suppose one could say that Montazeri's criticism of the Rushdie fatwa, which was reported by the BBC (an organization whose Persian desk was blamed by Shah loyalists for Khomeini's rise to power) sealed his fate. The Imam denounced and sacked him. His successor wisely showed forbearance, preferring to trample his rival's turban in the dust rather than make a martyr of him.

He needed yet another smokescreen, just like the American Hostage Crisis of 1979-1981, which had allowed him to consolidate power by wiping out his political rivals. 

Why would Khomeini need 'smoke screens'? Reagan might. He could be impeached or tried in a Court of Law. But not Khomeini. He had fanatical basijis at his command in 1989 and no internal or external enemy. By contrast, in 1980 he was menaced by Saddam as well as the Left.

Rushdie's Satanic Verses showed up at an opportune time. It had come out of nowhere and the ayatollah would take it somewhere else.

What actually happened was that Khomeini was asked about the book by some visitors. This was in the context of anti Rushdie riots in neighboring Pakistan. Since Khomeini's family was associated with India- his own poetic name being 'the Indian- he uttered the usual sort of fatwa which the Iranian State picked up and ran with. It was a smart move. Had the Iranians actually managed to kill Rushdie, it would have been a big foreign policy win. In particular it would have had a positive effect on Pakistan where the Dictator Zia, who had sponsored some anti Shiah violence, had been killed in a suspicious air crash a few months previously. This meant the Bhutto dynasty- which was considered 'tafzili' or half Shiah- had come back to, if not the reality, then the semblance of power.

It is not the case that senior clerics examine books before giving an opinion- which is all a fatwa is- reaffirming the applicability of Islamic punishments. But this opinion is conditional on the facts presented.

At issue were certain passages in the novel some Muslims had found blasphemous. In November 1988, the book was banned in Pakistan, where demonstrations had broken out. Rallies within expat South Asian communities in the UK also took place. An international bandwagon was emerging and Khomeini readily jumped on it. 

Khomeini was a very old, very distinguished jurist. He did not 'jump on bandwagons'. People came to him. In this case, the Iranian State decided that Khomeini's opinion was binding because, they asserted, the conditions for its application had been met. Rafsanjani, around this time, was telling the Palestinians to kill Brits and Americans coz killing Israelis was difficult and those fuckers retaliate big time. Rushdie was a Brit who could have had Pakistani, but not Indian, dual nationality. The Tory Government of the UK wasn't keen on Rushdie but they had to protect him from an evil foreign government. The Pakistanis, on the other hand, would have been happiest if one of their own won the Iranian prize (which however would only pay out a smaller amount if a non Iranian did the deed).

On Valentine's Day 1989, he issued a fatwa (a legal opinion or decree handed down by an Islamic religious authority) ordering the execution of Salman Rushdie. The misfortunate (sic) author went into hiding. There was a global outcry against Khomeini's illiberal book review. 

But, in South Asia, there was little support for Rushdie even from the Left. In the UK, there was a reaction against Rushdie who came across as an arrogant creep. His Jewish wife left him. It took some time for the Americans to warm to him and there was a period when it was the deeply boring Europeans who alone were fussing over him. Then, it turned out, American women found him sexy- something no one saw coming.  His YA novel- 'Haroun & the Ocean of Stories'- wasn't wholly terrible and had a certain poignancy. The stage was set for him to move to America and to reinvent himself as what he had always wanted to be- a Great, albeit Hyphenated, American Novelist.

As the mostly Western indignation grew louder, the Ayatollah quickly pushed through the formation of a constitutional assembly to revise the constitution of his Islamic Republic and prepare Khamenei to succeed him.

 Nobody gave a toss about 'Western indignation'. The Iranian clerics had prevailed and some would get very rich over the succeeding years.

He knew he did not have much time left. In many significant ways, the "Salman Rushdie Affair" marked the start of the rise of Islamophobia in the US and Europe, affecting millions of Muslim communities and particularly, the refugees forced to flee their homelands.

Muslims killing innocent people in the West caused fear and hatred of Muslims. A number of women from fanatical Muslim countries wrote books about how fucking horrible Muslim men are. That too had an effect. Then you get crazy Egyptians trying to blow up the twin Towers and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Al Qaeeda and so forth. Art Malik goes from playing James Bond's friend, in 1987, to Arnie Schwarznegger's foe in 1994. He was more impressive in the latter role. Hollywood, like Rushdie's 'Fury', proved prescient. The Muslims were the new bad guys and they just kept getting better in that role till finally, with ISIS, they became the ultimate hostis humani generis. 

It didn't help that those who might want to challenge this narrative in the West had themselves run away from Muslim countries. Rushdie embraced his new American identity. Professors like Dabashi were more conflicted- but wholly ineffectual.

Dabashi now shifts all the blame from crazy nutjobs like Mehdi Hashemi to poor old Rushdie-

Rushdie himself became a key culprit in fomenting that hatred against Islam and Muslims.

How? He killed nobody. Anyway, he apostatized. Saying 'Veils suck' doesn't carry much of a sting if the guy himself is clearly a double bagger. Had he, like me, retained the obligatory paper bag over his head, his wives might not have left him so frequently.

As Ayatollah Khomeini led the militant Muslim fanatics, Rushdie did the same with Islamophobe liberal imperialists like Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, with Muslim communities inadvertently getting caught in between.

'Liberal imperialists'? Is this guy serious? Nobody wants to rule Muslim lands. Why? It's coz suicide bombers are very effective. Fear is a good thing if it makes occupying forces shit themselves and scream loudly to be allowed to go home.

Rushdie could not lead people like Hitchens or Harris because they felt intellectually superior to him. He was supposed to have the inside track on the mysterious Orient- the fucker used to dress up in a kurta pajama when at Cambridge- but clearly was merely a prancing ninny of a parvenu type.

The venom Khomeini unleashed onto Rushdie, Rushdie directed at masses of millions of Muslims living dangerously exposed around the globe.

Nonsense! In Moor's last Sigh, he attacked the anti-Muslim Shiv Sena thus rehabilitating himself with the Indians- a process completed by his Kashmir book- Shalimar the Clown. True, both are shite but then all South Asian literature is shite. What mattered is that Rushdie was stressing his Mumbaiker, middle class, roots. He married a glamorous South Indian origin Hindu celebrity TV chef just as Naipaul married an aristocratic Pakistani.

Running away from Khomeini's edict, the author rushed back into his own novel and become one of its characters. He nudged Salahuddin Chamchawala out of the book and took his place.

 Dabashi may have run away from Iran- he certainly doesn't seem to have returned to be conscripted into the Army to keep Saddam's hordes at bay- but Rushdie was hiding, not running. He didn't settle in America till a decade after the fatwa. But he was already a meme. The 'Sall Bass' episode of Seinfeld dates to 1993.

Saladin Chamcha represents the Indian cultural cringe to Upper Class Britain. Had Rushdie become that sort of sycophant he would have written Naipaulian or Niradh Chaudhri type shite. He did nothing of the sort. He stuck to his guns and settled in New York as a bona fide literary celebrity churning out Great Hyphenated American Novels of startling banality.

The death of a novel

Critical theorists as diverse as Jose Ortega y Gasset, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes have written on the idea of the death of a novel as a genre.

But they were as stupid as shit. The creations of J.K Rowling and George R.R Martin will live when Barthes is long forgotten.

The heydays of the genre in 18th and 19th century Europe are certainly nowhere to be seen or read any more.

This guy's English isn't very good. I doubt people will stop reading Moll Flanders or Tom Jones or Scott or Austen so long as the English language is spoken.

But the European literary theorists could not have imagined the ingenious ways in which postcolonial novelists like Chinua Achebe, Assia Djebar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Arundhati Roy, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Jamaica Kincaid, or Salman Rushdie would reinvent the genre.

It is foolish to compare people like Achebe or Marquez or Ngugi, who had a political impact on their own people, with Rushdie and Roy who are Anglophile gadflies simply.

 Rushdie's earlier books, Midnight Children and Shame, dealing with the banalities of the postcolonial state, were a delightful read.

They were deeply silly but better written because Rushdie was closer to his material emotionally.

And for those of us who were lucky enough to read it before the storm began (sometime between September 1988 and February 1989), Satanic Verses too proved to be a remarkable novel.

It was dreadful. Rushdie didn't have enough material for it. His method of pastiche turned to pure pantomime. This was the prancing ninny applying for not just aesthetic but also intellectual affirmative action.

It was a masterpiece dealing with the postcolonial immigrant communities moving into the metropole of their tormentors.

Fuck off! London is great for South Asians. Paris may not be for 'colored' immigrants. In London, people own their own houses which appreciate greatly in value which means one can always return home and live it up like a Sahib. But why would one want to return? Everything is here. Your kid can go to her Bharatnatyam or Kathak class while you gorge on authentic biryani or masala dosa or whatever. It is true that one's English suffers because you get used to speaking Urdu or Punjabi or Tamil but the same thing can happen even in New Delhi or Islamabad if you aren't careful. On the other hand, one does sometimes have some unpleasant racialist encounters with White Supremacists from Ludhiana.

But the day after the ayatollah's fatwa, no one could possibly read it as a novel any more.

Why not? Nobody gives a toss about Iran- not even Iranians who have any sense.

The Islamophobes had a field day with it, as did their kindred souls and devoted brethren among the militant Islamists. 

Both types of nutter are seldom encountered by readers of pretentious middle brow shite.

Satanic Verses was the first casualty of the Salman Rushdie affair and the last novel that Salman Rushdie would write - no matter how many more he published. After February 1989, it ceased to be read on its own merits or maladies. It became an allegory, an icon, a dead certainty - non-Muslims used it to explain or to camouflage their anti-Muslim hatred, and Muslims - to denounce "the West" and its plots against the Muslim world.There remained no room in between where any sane human being could sit down and read Satanic Verses for what it was worth, form an opinion one way or another, and move on with his or her life.

The novel did reveal that Rushdie was a silly man- a prancing ninny- but this scarcely mattered. He was providing mere entertainment.

The world demanded a political position on a literary work of art, which had just been "assassinated". Satanic Verses stopped being a novel and became a manifesto.    And like his work, Rushdie, too, met the same fate. He continued to write and publish one book after another, but not a single word of fiction he wrote after that fateful fatwa could possibly be read without the prism of "the Salman Rushdie affair".

Not in India or Britain. People understood that he'd fucked up by going after bigger game than his peashooter could put down. But once he fell back to earth and concentrated on lampooning people like Bal Thackeray, he was rehabilitated.

This was not just the now proverbial "death of the author", but the death of his fiction too, the art of his ventriloquism, where, when, and how he could be heard speaking in tongues.    But the world moves and so does the manner in which a genre responds to the changing realities of life. When Rushdie ceased to be read as a novelist, all it took was for Aravind Adiga to come to the fore with his exquisite and powerful The White Tiger (2008) for us to realise what we lost in once a glorious novelist that lived in Rushdie we have gained in a younger, more potent, more grounded, novelist of piercing power.

Nobody now reads Adiga. He has sunk without a trace.  Why not mention Chetan Bhagat instead?

While Rushdie had begun on the colonial sites of India and Pakistan and moved to the immigrant mayhem of Europe, Adiga would take us back to the pandemonium of the predatory capital now globalised between India and China, made indistinguishable from the amorphous vacuity of the metropole itself. 

Oh dear! This cretin thinks Adiga was a Leftist!

Who now cares to follow the adventures of Salman Rushdie or what he continues to write? Perhaps only the rare chroniclers of our dreams and despairs like Pankaj Mishra and his saintly patience have the capacity to care what the author of that lost novel Satanic Verses has to say to a world that has moved on from his momentary perils and infinite promises.  

Pankaj Mishra chronicles this elderly fool's 'dreams and despairs'. No wonder Iran became, and will remain, a theocracy!
Rushdie and Mishra are doing what they want to do and getting paid for it. They may have zero political impact but then they did not greatly care for the countries that bred them. In Rushdie case- that was England; in Mishra's- it was India. Fair play to both. They supply a globalized market for semi-literate shite and as such obeyed an invisible hand.