September 20, 2002, Toronto.

Background: Salman Rushdie's latest book is a collection of essays entitled Step Across This Line. Many of his essays reflect upon Islam and "the plague years" - the time Rushdie spent under Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa.

IM: You “crossed a line” in writing The Satanic Verses, but with the benefit of hindsight, can you see where many Muslims are coming from in their belief that you went too far in crossing the line? That there was something gratuitous about your transgression?

SR: The more I look back on it, the more I think the opposite of that. I mean, I actually think it’s pretty mild, The Satanic Verses. For a start, most of it isn’t about Islam at all, you know, most of it is a rather sympathetic portrait of Indian immigrants coming to live in England. And that bit of it that is to do with Islamic themes goes to enormous trouble to distance itself from Islam. There’s a prophet not called Muhammad living in a city not called Mecca, inventing a religion not called Islam.

IM: But many Muslims argue that you know you were really talking about Prophet Muhammad when you used the name “Mahound.” After all, Mahound” was the epithet hurled against the Prophet by Christians during the Papal Crusades.

SR: But the book goes at various points through an argument about reclaiming language. A lot of epithets, a lot of words by which people are now known, were originally insults hurled at them. You know, the word “Tory” was an insult about Conservatives, the word a “Whig” was an insult about Liberals. The word “black” was originally a term of insult, and then the black-is-beautiful campaign in the sixties tried to reclaim that.

The trouble is that The Satanic Verses was understood in very oversimplified terms by those people who attacked it. And that kind of nuanced reading of it was for a long time not permitted, or was thought to be in some way redundant, you know. I mean, the reason it wasn’t called Islam and Makkah and so on is because I was trying to suggest that, yes, it arises out of my knowledge of what I know best. But, there’s some more general point about religion being made, which is an exploration of the nature of revelation. I mean that’s really what I thought I was doing in those passages of the book, you know.

IM: And you knew as much as anybody that revelation is, in many ways, the solar plexis of Islam. Many of the people who are still angry at you say, “Rushdie, you didn’t need to go there. It’s true that only five pages out of 550 went there, but by hitting the core of Muslim identity, you helped politicize Islam. You help make Islam as radical as it is today.”

SR: Oh come on, the Khomeini revolution happened way before The Satanic Verses. (Laughs.) Let’s not get the chronology of this wrong. If there hadn’t been a Khomeini revolution there wouldn’t have been a fatwa, you know, so one thing comes before the other.

The fact is that books exist, in part, to ask difficult questions. It’s one of the reasons why writers exist, and why writers are often persecuted. Because they say what people would rather not have said. And one of the ways in which the world advances is through the through disputes about ideas that are put out there. Here’s the idea. I say I love it. You say you hate it. You debate it and somebody likes it a bit and somebody wants to change it a little bit. Once you have the argument, the world moves on and you’ve hopefully gained a little from it.

That was in a way beginning to happen with The Satanic Verses, in the six months after it was published and before Khomeini jumped in. What the fatwa did was change the conversation. Instead of it being a conversation about ideas, and serious themes, it became a conversation about life and death and terrorism and so on. Made it a much more benign conversation, in a way. It was dangerous and so on, but actually, it’s not a difficult conversation whether you should kill somebody or not kill somebody, you know. The other conversation, which was more important and more complicated, was sidelined, you know. And I think one of the things that’s happening now, as the book goes back to being a book, and is being studied a lot and read a lot, is that the original conversation is beginning to happen again. That’s good, you know. I don’t expect everybody to agree with me. Why would I?

IM: Let me ask you a “Why would I…” question of my own. In your new collection of essays, you invite readers to “step across this line.” But knowing that I might be inviting death threats and other madness into my life, why would I, or any other Muslim, even in the West, consciously cross the line?

SR: Well because the world has to change, you know, and in the end, people have to change their own societies. They can’t wait for it to be done by somebody else, or to blame somebody else for it not happening, you know. You have to take responsibility.

I mean, I remember receiving enormous numbers of very moving letters from Muslim readers of The Satanic Verses. Particularly from Muslim women, who thanked me for opening a door, you know.

There’s a line in a play that I once acted in, called The Physicist, in which one of the characters says what has once been thought cannot be un-thought. And that’s the business of writing – to just put it out there. People sometimes disagree with a given thought for a century. Later on, they are grateful that the thought was had at some point. All you can do is truthfully and honestly try and put out there what you have to put out there.

IM: And not worry about your life?

SR: I mean, what’s a life? That's not much, you know. A book’s much more important.

IM: (Laughs.) Words to live by, I suppose.

SR: I’m not in favour of dying any time soon, I should say.

IM: Fair enough. What do you make of the widespread claim that there’s a backlash against Muslims in the West?

SR: I was in fact quite surprised, certainly encouraged, by how relatively little of it there was. There wasn’t some kind of great mob attack, you know, on Muslim people in general. I worry a lot at the official level, though. You know, the way in which people were swept off the street. I know there was an incident reported in the New York Times about a week ago – a group of movie people from India who were in a plane coming to New York and were all excited. When the plane lands these people are hauled off into a room and interrogated for 24 hours and not allowed to make phone calls or see lawyers or they’re not charged with anything. There’s clearly some of that going on, and that's of great concern to me.

In England, what I’ve noticed is something slightly the opposite. There’s been an enormous effort by the big news media to allow Muslim voices to have more access to the pages, especially newspapers like The Guardian or The Independent. You see a lot more Muslim voices speaking there than you’d see even a year ago.

IM: Is that tokenism?

SR: I don’t know. I mean, it’s better that they should be ten than they should be four, you know. Nobody’s perfect, but what I’m saying is that I think there wasn’t a mass backlash in terms of the public or the non-Muslim public turning against the Muslim minority.

IM: From what you’re seeing, then, are Muslims in the West using our precious freedoms to revise us-versus-them scripts?

SR: I hope so. I mean, you’ll have to ask some. (Laughs.) I’m not a person of religious belief so I can’t really speak on behalf of the Muslim community, but I think it’s very necessary that that should happen. I would encourage it to happen.

IM: Are you seeing any of that in the newspapers you’re reading?

SR: A bit. And then a bit not, you know. There’s still a lot of the old jerking of the knee -- that if somebody with a Muslim name is criticized by somebody without a Muslim name, then you have to speak up for the person with the Muslim name even if he’s a bastard. (Laughs.)

IM: And there are some!

SR: There are, believe me.

IM: Many of us already do. (Laughs.)

SR: I think the madressas are a big part of the problem.

IM: You know, I remember attending a madressa in suburban Vancouver and being astounded by the degree to which the pluralism that existed outside the walls of the madressa was denied inside the walls of the madressa. I was often told not to befriend Jews. And if I asked one too many questions, which I did, I was commanded to either believe or leave. When I left the madressa, the feeling of liberation was amazing.

SR: Yeah. I think in England, a big mistake has been made by the current government in their decision to start funding Islamic schools from state monies. They did it because of a desire for parity -- because there are Jewish schools that are state-funded and Catholic schools that are state-funded, so the argument is that why shouldn’t there be Muslim schools. But the fact is that inside the Muslim schools, an atmosphere does pertain which in a way denies the reality of the world outside the school. And that's not the case in the other religious schools. Anyway, in my view, don’t fund religious schools, period.

I think the madressas internationally -- in Pakistan, in Kashmir, in Saudi Arabia -- are actually the breeding place of the problem.

IM: Yet in North America and Europe, we have the freedom to dilute a lot of that fundamentalism and explore nuances. Do you believe that he Islamic reformation starts in the West?

SR: I think the Islamic reformation probably does start in the West and it probably starts with Muslim women. Because they’re the people who’ve understood the problem of Islam better than anyone else, certainly better than Muslim men. I mean, no women on those [September 11] planes.

Now, you know, I came from an Indian Muslim family which was almost all women. I’ve really broken with tradition by having two sons. I had three sisters no brothers, you know.

IM: How do you think that influenced your willingness to speak up?

SR: A lot. I grew up in this world of very noisy, disputatious, strongly opinionated women. Quite unlike the conventional image of the meek, demure, Indian or Muslim woman walking several steps behind the man.

IM: Is that because the women in your family were not religious?

SR: Well, some were and some weren’t. My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a deeply devout Muslim who performed the pilgrimage to Mecca. All his life that I knew him, he said his prayers five times a day, could recite the Koran and did all that stuff, but was also in my memory probably the most broad minded man I knew. And in terms of his daughters -- he had three daughters -- he was absolutely committed that they should be educated to a high standard and that they should work for a living, that nobody was going to arrange a marriage for them. He treated them in that very enlightened and progressive way. And that’s the kind of Indian Muslim community from which I came. That was my generation. It was open and tolerant in that way.

IM: Let’s talk about the next generation. Are you raising your two sons in any faith tradition?

SR: No, no, no. Give me a break. (Laughs.) I have the religion of a flea.

IM: (Laughs.) Which means you fly around and annoy people?

SR: Yes. A lot. No, no. Look, I don’t need religion. Religion’s like a fur coat in summer. (Laughs.)

IM: In a Canadian summer, fur can help sometimes.

SR: Please wear your coat though if you choose, but… (Laughs.)

IM: Do you find anything redeeming about religious faith?

SR: No. I mean, I can see it being valuable to other people, like a consolation in difficulty. For myself, I don’t feel the urge. There’s no hole in me that it needs to fill. But that doesn’t mean I’m telling you what to do. It's just what I’m doing.

IM: Right. I want to quote something that you wrote: “To win this fight against the fatwa is to win one skirmish in a much greater war.” I emphasize your words, “a much greater war.” You wrote this in 1993 – very prescient, I think. Have you won your skirmish?

SR: The skirmish, yeah. But now I’m afraid the much greater war is upon us. Even at the time, there were a lot of things being written in support of me in various countries around the Muslim world, often by very brave Muslim writers and artists. They felt that defending me was defending themselves. They were engaged in the same fight, less visibly perhaps, certainly with a lot less attention from the outside world, but they were engaged in the same fight. And therefore, this became, if you like, a representative struggle of many other struggles. Interestingly, writers and intellectuals and progressive voices inside Muslim countries understood that much more sharply and much more keenly than people in the West, even people who were on my side, you know.

IM: To what do you attribute that?

SR: Well, because it was so odd that everybody wanted to say it was a one-off event. To make the point that actually it was part of a broader struggle – that was something nobody really wanted to hear at the time.

IM: Getting back to a very provocative statement you made earlier, if the Islamic reformation starts with Muslim women, what do you hope Muslim women will do either individually or en mass to get that ball rolling?

SR: I think the first thing that has to be broken are a number of social strictures. It’s not even to do with theology. It's a question of how Muslim societies have constructed themselves into prisons, you know, into places where people are constantly instructed and commanded and ordered around. And the people who feel that prison most keenly are Muslim women. Even in places where they don’t have to wear the chador or burkah, they have direct experience with oppression. So I’m saying, let’s leave aside the great ideas of Islam. I’m just talking about how you arrange your so your societies.

IM: Can Islam be divorced from oppression?

SR: I mean, it’s difficult. It was difficult in Afghanistan. But you know there are places in the Muslim world where a much more open society does begin to obtain, if you go to Dubai, for example. I know Dubai is just a shopping mall surrounded by a desert.

IM: And hotels.

SR: Yes, and hotels. So there’s the air-conditioned world and the non air-conditioned desert. But in fact, women walk around non-shrouded and actually dressed in western dress and so on, and people don’t stone them or abuse them or call them names.

IM: Are they protected by their money?

SR: To an extent. But not many people there have lots of money. It just shows that you there's no real reason why it can’t happen. It’s going take at least a generation of argument and it would be nice to feel that the argument was started.

IM: So we come back to the centrality of argument and Muslim women speaking up, simply asking questions first and foremost.

SR: Yeah, and insisting on argument. Insisting. I’ve always believed that freedom is not something anybody ever gives you. You have to take it. And that's got start happening.

IM: Are you at all interested in mending fences with Muslims?

SR: I don’t have any broken fences. I mean, if you look at who shows up when I do readings, there’s enormous Muslim audience.

IM: And they’re not there to intimidate you?

SR: No.

IM: But to enjoy you.

SR: They’re my biggest fans. One of the things I know about the Muslim world is that the mullahs are the most hated figures in it. Mullahs in Pakistan are notorious for their corruption and their misbehavior, and it’s not even their sexual misbehavior.

IM: Would it be fair to say that fundamentalists are out of touch with Muslim public opinion?

SR: I think they're out of touch with the genera public, yes, but I think one also has to say that were it not for being allowed to survive unchallenged inside Muslim society, they’d have nothing to feed on. There is this unchallenged language of ultra-purity, and also of blaming all your problems on someone else. And because that rhetoric just is sitting there to be used, it can be picked up and used.

One of the things that writers are for is to challenge language. If you say, ‘Here is an area of poisoned language, you know, and out of that comes poisonous behavior,’ then you have to deal with it. And that's a collective act. It doesn’t happen through individuals. It happens through a community.

IM: In light of the give-and-take that you feel is essential to progress, aer you glad to have had the fatwa experience?

SR: I’m glad it’s over. Over is good. I mean, I think everything that happens to a writer is good for a writer. Most writers will tell you that the worse it is, the better it is. (Laughs.) If you live in wonderful, peaceful times where nothing happens and you have a nice, comfortable life without any disturbances, that's a disadvantage. I know a lot of things about human nature that I didn’t know before.

IM: What’s the most surprising lesson that you take away?

SR: I’ll tell you what it is. A lot of journalists have said to me over the years, ‘Did you lose friends? Did people become scared of being near you?’ Actually, what happened is the exact opposite. I found an enormous number of people moving closer to me, in order to be supportive, because they felt something important was happening and that was defining to them. These were defining decisions for them. So I actually got more friends as a result of the threats, not less. And I think that display of human nature, that people for principled reasons, will move closer to the point of danger, not further away from it – that’s very interesting and heartening to know.

IM: Any advice for young Muslims in the West who desperately want to say what they’re thinking, and feel the pressure to shut the heck up?

SR: Just go ahead. How many people can they shut up? And if you have the great privilege of living in one of the relatively few free societies in the world, use the freedom. The point about freedom is to use it. It’s not to say, ‘Oh well, it’s nice to have the freedom but let’s not bother to use it because that would be a bit scary.’ Freedom is scary, and it’s not peaceful either. It's turbulent. 'Speak' is what I would say.