Salman Rushdie on Protests in the Middle East - The New Yorker Festival - The New Yorker

good afternoon I'm David Remnick editor of The New Yorker and want to welcome you to what alas is the final event of the terrific weekend at The New Yorker festival and I want to thank all of you for coming to this event and I even presumed some more events so thank you very much for that it's my great privilege well first of all it's my great privilege to ask you to turn off whatever phone you might have and in a contradiction in terms you should also know that the hashtag for tweeting is tny fest so you figure out whether you should keep it on or off at the very least silence it it's my great honor to be in this room for two reasons not first and foremost is that my late great grandmother lived around the block and I've seen hundreds of movies in this theater and I remember one in particular very distinctly I took her to see a film called our man Flint when I was 8 years old or maybe she took me and I remember distinctly on this screen our man flim was like a take-off on James Bond and only people of a certain age will remember this film and I remember very distinctly 20 women all at once taking off their bikini tops and my grandmother's expression which is called an aneurysm related to freedom of expression I want to welcome a real hero of freedom of expression and literature Salman Rushdie the Salman as you know is the author of 11 novels including Midnight's Children shame the Moors last sigh the enchantress of Florence he's won the Booker Prize for fiction the best of the Booker award and his and his novel which we'll talk about Midnight's Children has been adapted for film it's that I had the privilege of seeing it recently it's an extraordinary movie I wouldn't have thought it possible at all it's it's a it's a absolutely beautiful movie Joseph Anton has his new memoir about his years of struggle against the Iranian fatwa on his novel and on himself on the Satanic Verses and on Salman is out now it is number three on the bestseller list and as soon as it shoves aside two more it'll be on the top it's a source of pride that he's been contributing to the New Yorker since 1987 the literary brilliance of Joseph Anton cannot be underestimated and neither can its importance as a document about freedom of expression freedom of the individual and I don't think it was any plan of Salman to say the least but this this book really joins the work of people like Joseph Brodsky and Cyn Yoshi and Danielle and Havel as one of the most important documents that we have about the importance of individual and also communal courage in the face of cruelty and and ignorance in the face of a great imagination I welcome Salman Rushdie who's going to begin by reading from Joseph Anton and then we'll have a conversation and then we'll have some questions from you Salman well those are those are great names to be bracketed with thank you David um you know my life could have turned into a parody of a James Bond movie too but the thing with the girls of the bikinis did not happen I'm sorry to report I'm just going to read a little bit which is which comes from a bit but I'm talking about having studied the origin story of Islam at Cambridge University and and and this is uh this is sort of the bit where I first found out about the so called incident of the Satanic Verses it's describing Makkah and Madinah as it was in the middle of the seventh century they were nomads who had just begun to settle down their cities were new not car was only a few generations old yatra later renamed Medina was a group of encampments around an oasis without so much as a serious city wall they were still uneasy in their new urbanized lives and the changes made many of them unhappy a nomadic society was conservative full of rules valuing the well-being of the group more highly than individual liberty but it was also inclusive the nomadic world had been a matriarchy under the umbrella of its extended families even orphan children could find protection and a sense of identity and belonging all that was changing now the city was a patriarchy and its preferred family unit was nuclear the crowd of the disenfranchised grew larger and more restive every day but Mecca was prosperous and its ruling elders liked it that way inheritance now followed the male line this to the governing family is preferred at the gates to the city stood temples to three goddesses a lot al-manar and al-azhar winged goddesses like exalted birds or angels each time the trading caravans from which the city gained its wealth left the city gates came back through them they paused at one of the temples and made an offering or to use modern language paid attacks the wealthiest families in Makkah controlled the temples and much of their wealth came from these offerings the winged goddesses were at the heart of the economy of the new city of the urban civilization that was coming into being in the building known as the cube or Kaaba in the in the center of town there were idols of hundreds of gods one of these statues by no means the most popular represented a deity called Allah meaning the God just as a lot was the goddess and love was unusual in that he didn't specialize he wasn't arraigned God or a wealth God or a war God or a love God he was just vaguely and everything God it may be that this failure to specialize explained his relative unpopularity people making offerings to gods usually did so for specific reasons the health of a child the future of a business enterprise a drop a drought a quarrel a romance they preferred gods who were experts in their field to this nonspecific all-rounder of a deity however Allah was about to become more popular than any pagan deity had ever been the man who would pluck Allah from near obscurity and become his prophet transforming him into the equal or at least equivalent of the Old Testament God I am and the New Testaments three and one was Mohammed Abdullah of the Banu Hashim family which had fallen in his childhood upon hard times and often living in his uncle's house as a teenager he began to journey with that uncle Abu Talib on his trading journeys to Syria on those journeys he almost certainly encountered his first Christians adherents of the Nestorian sect and heard their stories many of which adapted old and new Testament stories to fit in with local conditions according to the Nestorians for example Jesus Christ was born in an oasis under a palm tree later in the Quran the Archangel Gabriel revealed to Muhammad the Sura known as Marie marry in which Jesus is born in a palm tree under a palm tree in an oasis Mohammed Abdullah grew up with a reputation as a skilled merchant an honest man and at the age of 25 this brought him a marriage proposal from an older wealthier woman Khadija and in the next 15 years he was successful in business and happy in his marriage however he was clearly a man with the need for solitude and for many years would spend weeks at a time living like a hermit in a cave on Mount Hira when he was 40 years old the angel gabriel disturbed his solitude there and ordered him to recite naturally he immediately believed he had lost his mind and fled he only returned to hear what the angel had to say when his wife and close friends persuaded him that it might be worth a return trip up the mountain just in case that it was probably a good idea to check if God was really trying to get in touch it was easy to admire much of what followed as the merchant transformed himself into the Messenger of God easy to sympathize with his persecution and eventual flight to Medina and to respect his rapid evolution at the Oasis community of Yathrib into respected law giver able ruler and skilled military leader it was also easy to see how the world into which the Quran was revealed and the events in the life of the messenger directly influenced the revelation when Muslim men were killed in battle the angel was prompt to encourage their brothers to marry their widows in order that the bereaved women might not be lost to the faith by remarrying outside it when the prophets beloved Aisha was rumored to have behaved inappropriately while lost in the desert with a certain saffron evening Mehran the angel of the Lord came down in some haste to point out that no in God's opinion the virtuous lady had not fooled around here was a fascinating paradox that an essentially conservative theology looking backwards with affection towards the vanishing culture became a revolutionary idea because the people who visit R acted most strongly were those who had been marginalized by urbanisation the disaffected poor the Street mob this perhaps was why Islam the new idea felt so threatening to the Meccan elite why it was persecuted so viciously and why its founder may just may have been offered an attractive deal designed to buy him off the historical record was incomplete but most of the major collections of hadith or traditions about the life of the Prophet those compiled by Edna sock Makeda even Asad Bukhari and Tabari told the story of an incident that afterwards became known as the incident of the Satanic Verses the Prophet came down from the mountain one day and recited the surah number 53 called an atom the star it contained these words have you heard of unlap and al-azhar and Al Manar the third the other one they are the exalted birds and their intercession is greatly to be desired at a later point was it days later or weeks or months he returned to the mountain and came down abashed to state that he had 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 therefore not divine but satanic and should be expunged from the Quran at once the angel had on this occasion brought new verses from God which were to replace the Satanic Verses in the great book have you heard of a lot that honors our and Alba not the the third the other one they are but names that your forefathers invented and there is no truth in them shall God have daughters while you have sons that would be an unjust division and in this way the recitation was purified of the devil's work but the questions remained why did Muhammad initially accept the first false revelation is true and what happened in Mecca in the period between the two revelations satanic and angelic this much was known Mohammed wanted to be accepted by the people of Makkah he longed it nosaka wrote for a way to attract them and when the people heard that he had accepted the three winged goddesses the news was popular they were delighted and greatly pleased at the way in which he spoke of their God if miss arc wrote saying Mohammed has spoken of our gods in splendid fashion and bihari reported the Prophet prostrated while reciting undone and with him prostrated the Muslims the pagans the jinns and all human beings why then did the Prophet afterwards recant Western historians the Scottish scholar of Islam W Montgomery what the French Marxist Maxime rodents in' proposed a politically motivated reading of the episode the temples of the three winged goddesses were economically important to the city's ruling elite and elite from which Muhammad was excluded unfairly in his opinion so perhaps the deal that was offered ran something like this if Muhammad or the Archangel Gabriel or Allah could agree that the bird goddesses could be worshipped by followers of Islam not as the equals of Allah obviously but the secondary nessa beings like for example angels and there already were angels in Islam so what harm could there be in adding three more who just happened to be popular and lucrative figures in Makkah then the persecution of Muslims would cease and Muhammad himself would be granted a seat of the city's ruling council and it was perhaps to this temptation that the Prophet briefly succumbed then what happened did the city's Grandy's renege on the deal reckoning that by flirting with polytheism Muhammad that undone himself in the eyes of his followers did the followers refuse to accept the revelation about the goddesses did Muhammad himself regret having compromised this idea by yielding to the siren call of acceptability it was not possible to say for sure imagination had to fill the gaps in the record but the Quran spoke of how all the prophets had been tested by temptation never have we sent a single prophet or apostle before you with whose wishes Satan did not tamper it said in surah 22 and if the incident of the Satanic Verses was the temptation of muhammad it had to be said that he came out of it pretty well he both confessed to having been tempted and also repudiated that temptation hibari quotes him does I have fabricated things against God and I've imputed to him words which he has not spoken after that the theism of Islam having been tested in the cauldron remained unwavering and strong in spite of persecution exile at war and before long the Prophet had the victory over his enemies and the new faith spread like a conquering fire across the world shall God have daughters well you have sons that would be an unjust division the true versus angelic or divine were clear it was the femaleness of the winged goddesses the exalted Birds that rendered them inferior and fraudulent and proved they could not be the children of God as the angels were sometimes the birth of a great idea revealed things about its future the way in which newness enters the world prophesied how it would behave when it grew old at the birth of this particular idea femaleness was seen as a disqualification from exaltation good story he thought what he read about it even then he was dreaming of being a writer and he filed the good story away in the back of his mind for future consideration twenty years later he would find out exactly how good a story it was someone as I understand it you grew up in a house that was not especially religious at all yeah what was the attitude toward Islam in your household well in religious practice you know there was the only religious practice really was that we did not eat the flesh of the swine no Pig was essentially as far as Islam got into our house because my mother didn't like it and every so often I mean like not even all the time every soft and I would my father would take me to the big Eid prayers and just tell me to go up and down when everybody else went up and down and that was it there was one attempt by my mother I think to hire a religious teacher to instruct me and my sisters I was kind of dreadful goody-goody as a kid made up for it later but my sisters were kind of much more mischievous than I and and they started poking fun at him at the teacher and he complained to my mother that the children were insufficiently respectful and unfortunately my parents took our side and the teacher got fired and that was the end of religious instruction so but how did you how did you absorb the history and the stories of his lungs because my father was really interested you know that's the interesting thing about him is that he was completely lacking in religious belief but he was really interested in it as a you know as a subject so he I know he was much more scholarly than me because he could speak Arabic and farsi what did he do well I mean my father was my father was inherited a lot of money my grandfather was in the textile business and made a lot of money and died young and my father was the only son inherited it then he made that money even bigger by some shrewd investing in the property market around the time of of Independence and then he spent the rest of his life losing all the money and so when he died which was in 1987 he was absolutely flat broke I mean when I had to go and look at his affairs there was no money any of the bank accounts and in the top left-hand drawer of his desk there were sort of blocks of rupee notes which were basically all the money he had left in the world so when you were sent abroad to boarding school in England and then to Cambridge do you think you were gonna live the life of a wealthy man's well I mean yeah I first of all I had no expectation of doing anything other than going back to India you know what I didn't do to be well I mean I don't know I was early rebellious of it I thought you know the textile industry and property speculation didn't sound like fun what I wanted to do you know yeah but my father said I was the only son three sisters my father assumed that I would take over the family business and was very very disappointed when I graduated from university and not only said that I didn't want to do it but then said this terrible thing which is that I wanted to be a writer and this this cry burst out of him really couldn't restrain itself he said what will I tell my friends I mean you know fortunately he lived long enough for his friends to start calling him up and congratulating him Jim I think he worked out that maybe wasn't completely dumb idea but when you were at school and in in England and then University were you reading heavily into the history of in the text of Islam not in school no not at school not till I got to university at school I was mostly reading science fiction novels so you're a serious still the same thing no no but I got to university or and I did a degree in history and in the final year of the Cambridge University history degree you're asked to choose three special subjects right and just knew that nothing else and I just had there were these three I seem to be unusually interesting centuries one was Indian history from 1857 with the so called Indian Mutiny until independence in 1947 that 90 year period which of course afterwards became really useful when I was writing midnight still served you well ii was american history from the declaration of independence until the end of reconstruction so 1776 to 1877 also amazing century you know and the third was muhammad and the rise of islam and so i studied that and that's where i found out and there was never any tinge along the way of edging into religious belief no i don't know no i mean i say in the book there's this moment when I first went to boarding school and you know as I say it had not ever in my life eaten the flesh of the swine and I thought it was my mother's not here now so so I went to the school shop and bought a ham sandwich which I with enormous ritual and slightly scared consumed and you know no funderbolt and pretty good soon had pretty it was pretty lousy homicide which we felt amazing at the time I know the feeling and no thunderbolt answer and so I thought that was the moment at which I realized that God did not exist no it's not as if Satanic Verses was the first book of yours to make a little trouble I mean you or your view of Indian history your view of Pakistan and the subsequent novel shame certainly brought upon you what in terms of critical opprobrium or nervousness or critical because I think both those books were pretty well received I mean literary illiterate known on literary opprobrium yeah well the problem with shame is that one of the characters was based on the then dictator of Pakistan Zia ul-haq and he was still in power so he wasn't fond of it and and bandit and interesting me I discovered afterwards that quite large numbers of copies of Shame got into Pakistan through diplomatic pouches but for some reason the the diplomatic community decided that everybody should you know working working at embassies should read it so they smuggled in lots of books through the diplomatic pouch then sort they'd spread out into the society so that was an interesting use of the diplomatic bag as a way of countering censorship Midnight's Children I just had this problem with mrs. Gandhi where she tried to sue me and because of the passages about the emergency no not you know oddly you would think but no it was because there's there's one sentence in the book in which I said I repeated a well-known the thing that people used to say about mrs. Gandhi which is that her son Sanjay used to blame her for the early death of their of his father my heart seizure because because because she had separated from him and because he would blame her for his father's death she was sort of that his mercy and would deny him nothing would let him get away with everything he did that this was I mean commonplace saying it's his days that's it and and what is interesting is that when I first wrote the novel and showed it to the British publishers you know they were a little bit nervous about this or that because after all the Prime Minister of India was sort of the villain of the novel and they asked me to you know to provide supporting evidence and and I did and I said you know this this sentence it comes from this and this from this till the lawyers y-yeah to the publishers of their lawyers and I said in this eight-page letter or something I said there's this one sentence which I can't justify because it's about three people and two of them are dead and the third the third is the one who'd be suing you right and but I said this has been in the papers very often it's being repeated in print many times before and she's never sued anybody so it seems to me we're probably okay and they they agree to that and then some years later that was the sentence but she sued about so it seemed to me clear that she'd had somebody read the book and they'd come up with the same sentence as the weak point you know but well III asked this someone as a kind of preface to when you sit down to write The Satanic Verses you are not unconscious of the fact that the in trouble before that there's been trouble before what did you anticipate when you took on these stories and played around them in effect way I didn't expect a lot really maybe also set the scene of where we were in the world at that time in terms of Islam and its end well this was 19 the book came out in 1988 and I suppose I started writing it in around 1984 probably and the world is very different I mean let's say the Khomeini revolution had happened I mean that was 1979 but I mean I the Khomeini revolution was Iran I thought what do I have to do with Iran it's not I'm not even from a Shia Muslim family and it's got nothing to do with me also I think I was buoyed up very much by the success of Midnight's Children shame you know which had really done a lot to you know establish me as a writer and and I was feeling you know they'd both been colossal successful commercially and so on and I thought you know I thought I could actually try and write a very difficult book mm-hmm I mean after all the Satanic Verses it's quite formally complicated and so on it's not the kind of book that you write ordinarily if you're trying to write a best-seller but I thought well they've got all these readers you know maybe they'll come along for the ride and I can try and do something difficult and ambitious you know and that was sort of the going in spirit of it and you know I did I showed the book to various people in manuscripts I remember showing it to Ed would say at Columbia and saying what do you think and he read it and he said well Salva and the mullahs aren't gonna like it and I thought I said yeah but they never liked anything else I wrote right and he went yes you know I mean what was it both of us thought yeah you know we're not we're not writing for the mullahs you know if you were writing I mean what is worse than a bad review from the Ayatollah Khomeini would be a good review exactly so it struck me that you know how many mullahs are going to read a 600 page novel in English you know and yes maybe there'll be a few people yelling and screaming but fine right you know and that's sort of what I thought would happen have there been any precedent to to trouble from novels from the from the West or from South you know there have been a little I mean I find out a lot about this afterwards I mean there had been attacks against writers in various Arab countries but at the time I was pretty much unaware of that I'm not from the Arab world you know it's from I mean India free democratic society you know living in England another free democratic society and I thought I'm just writing a book here and I as I say I assumed that conservative Muslim figures wouldn't like it and I thought so what so the book is published and on Valentine's Day 1989 yeah tell us what happened this is the beginning of the day of the well they're horrifying there had been an escalating arguments by the book had come out it's different you see because it came out in England six months earlier came out in England in September 88 it didn't come out here until after the fourth one so very different climate when it was published here but in England been out for six months and in those six months yes there had been a kind of escalating argument about it and I'd been taking part in that I've been you know writing articles and going on radio and television and so on and you know arguing my side against people who disagreed night there was a bit of me that thought this is all right actually it's one of the things that books can sometimes usefully do is to stop difficult conversations you know and it was on the level of what things on the radio in the papers radio television newspapers and nothing scary no nobody I mean nobody thought it was frightening and then various things happen which began to change the climate one is it exactly one month before the fatwa January the 14th 1989 was the what became the famous book burning in Bradford Yorkshire north of England which is the town with the largest Muslim population and and and I remember just the feeling of revulsion when I saw these images of my book set on fire not just set on fire first nailed to a post and then set on fire so first crucified and then burned I just thought this is a disgusting image and it was surrounded by people looking really smug and pleased with sells remember there was one particular gentleman in these famous photographs where they were wearing a little pork pie hat and that so little Poirot mustache and looking fabulously pleased with himself and I thought you know I'd like to smack you upside the head anyway so I got very after that that the the the let's say that the climate change became last year and then there were demonstrations in India and Pakistan and they became violent and suddenly was getting beginning to get dangerous and did you change the way you were living your life and what about time no not really and then on the don this particular day of 14th with Valentine's Day 1989 14th of February I just got phoned at all I got called at home by a woman from the BBC who told me who said you said how does it feel to know that you've just been condemned to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini great yeah I thought that's a hell of a question on Valentine's Day and I said something stupid like it doesn't feel good and then I ran around the house locking things you know as if that was going to make everything okay mock the front door then you'll be all right and and I mean I immediately thought this is very dangerous because because of the nature of the Iranian regime and its willingness to use assassination as a weapon you know and but I was still hoping that this was largely rhetorical I mean I had to go immediately afterwards I'd said I'd go to the studios London Studios of CBS television because I was supposed to do a live interview into the morning show here and I showed up there you know and this news was all over the place and I remember asking a lot of the journalists who were wandering around what they made of it you know and how seriously should one take it and I remember there's this foreign correspondent there who said oh don't worry about it he said Khomeini sentences the President of the United States to death every Friday afternoon and I thought I wanted to believe that or think okay it's just rhetoric it's just it of somebody shaking her fist and making a noise and unfortunately that wasn't the case and I think by the end of the day I mean I was in touch with the police and the reviews that it was very serious and at that moment did you think I think you make it plain that sooner or later in the in the in this book that you thought my time is up you know I thought yeah no I did I've never I thought I was probably gonna be killed quite soon I mean this is then the next morning I was visited by a couple of gentlemen from the British intelligence services as well as police officers as these two separate things there's the the spies and the police and the secret police and I mean they work together but they're different basically the the spies the intelligence services their job is to assess the level of the threat against any individual their how dangerous is it and then it's the police's job to decide what protection needs to be given how quickly did it take did the the the life of as it were internal exile and complete protection taking shape well within 20 like the next morning and and then a number of things happen which I don't know I mean retrospect I wonder if I did the right thing because first of all the reason for having done the wrong thing is that everybody thought it would be over in a few days everybody including the police that this was outrageous you know that the head of state of a of a foreign country should point across the world and order the murder of a British citizen in his own country who had committed no crime you know impossible how could this happen this was late 20th century you know and it would in the midst by the way of a historical wave of freedom not an amazing year later in Europe amazing year I mean well some of it not so good chair and men not so good lest it but you know fall of communism the freedom of Nelson Mandela all these things happen that year and later anyway everybody thought this is going to get fixed because it's so outrageous that it can't stand and so the police said to me just let's just go away somewhere for a few days it's just lie low don't don't stick your head up too much let the diplomats do their work let the politicians do their work you know it'll be fixed and I agreed to that not to go home and literally never went home again when I left left the house in the clothes I stood up it never went to him again and instead of taking a few days it took a decade before it was fixed someone you one of the remarkable things about this book is that it's often in the midst of this tragedy and robbery of a life for a decade or more hilariously funny you know there was even at the time friends of mine and I would say to each other that if it wasn't for the fact that this isn't funny at all it would be quite funny so for it's also I learned because you're the police as I grew who I got to know quite well have a particular line in black comedy and I can internalize some of this so for instance there was a police driver who was known by all his tallest colleagues as the king of Spain I mean he wasn't Spanish or anything I said I said why is he called the king of Spain to vet you they told me that one day he had been guarding his when he'd left his police jagira unattended to go into a shop and buy some cigarettes and when he came out the the Jag had been stolen right and he was called the king of Spain because if you say the name of the king of Spain slowly his name is one Carlos and what and one of the things you and now this is not the first time you've ever invented a name for yourself in a book but in real life you had to invent a name for yourself and you came up with a well explained Joseph and Anton was the first names if they were known what was to serve two purposes really one was because I needed to you know you need to rent places to live I needed to write checks and I need I needed to do all sorts of things which obviously shouldn't be done in my own name so I mean the bank manager was in on it and almost nobody else that was one thing but the other reason was that the police wanted to train themselves to not use my actual name by accident but if they were if they won't you know go because these are very active man you know it was difficult for them to be cooped ups and they were always going for walks and runs around the block and stuff like that and they didn't want to accidentally say Oh Salman said pick up a bar of soap you know have somebody hear it and kind of blow the cover so they said you have to choose a name that we can use and so you and then they said don't use an Indian names too obvious so I thought this is very you know a to be asked to give up your name and then to be asked to give up like the ethnicity of your name you know it's quite I mean it's profound anyway so I thought if I can't have India that I can have literature which is like the other country you know hey you live in yeah and so I eventually made up this name from the names of four the first names of Conrad and Chekov yeah hence Joseph and John and and why then well partly because it sounded like it might exist you know unlike some of the you know vladimir pinch lad amir Joyce you don't know Marcel Beckett maybe maybe and but also I thought here's what I thought I thought Chekov I thought I was in a funny way in a in a mixture of the worlds of Conrad and check off if you could even imagine such a thing that you know check off this great poet of alienation and melancholy melancholy and people in one place wishing they were somewhere else you know I felt thought I mean I've got three sisters two we don't you know yearning for a Moscow to which they couldn't return I thought I was old that's that's in a way my condition and Conrad after all it's not just that he writes about the heart of documents but it's also that he that he has all these secret agents and plots and conspiracies and revolutions and explosions in his writings I thought that wasn't inappropriate and then there was this sentence from you know they're now improperly named of the narcissus in which the title character this sailor called James wait is dying of tuberculosis or the ship and and one of his shipmates says to him in one point you know why did you get on the ship I mean if you knew you were sick why didn't you stay home why'd you get on the ship and and he says rather it's a famous man he says I must live till I die I must know and I thought that line you know I must live till I die became for me like a sort of motto but while you were absorbing and then enduring it son imagined a condition of life with death looming all around you had every reason to believe that you could expect the support the stalwart support at the very minimum of champions of the First Amendment and freedom of expression meaning writers you didn't get that well I got it from lots of writers but to be fair that's true I did and then there were some who were less supportive some of whom were surprising I mean I remember being very surprised by the opposition of someone like John Berger for example here's an you know old-school Marxist you know old the old British left as as secular and non-religious a writer as you could wish to find and yet there he was in the newspaper accusing me of you know opportunism doing it to make money John the Kerry to David corner I'm John McCurry as well yes John de Kerry I can almost understand because I gave one of his books about review you know these are we're talking about writers here yeah and I waited truthfully I wish it hadn't happened with the Kerry I mean Kurt Vonnegut got across to because I wrote a bad review of one of his books I stopped doing book reviews after that yeah you don't make any fresh you know you you get a book and you give it a rave room but how do you understand that kind of resistance to to what should be an absolute automatic support well I'll tell you what I think in retrospect I think at the time that this thing happened nobody including me I mean nobody really had a context for it nobody had a kind of narrative to set it into you know and so it just seemed like exceptional and bizarre it seemed like a one-off you know and and it was easy for people to think well if he's if he's annoyed them that much he must have done something really annoying mm-hmm you know I mean we don't understand their culture but he does and so if they're that I agree he must have done something that really annoyed them and that's because I say there wasn't this larger narrative did any of these offenders come back and say you know I was wrong John Licari I haven't seen him since then but he I saw an intern that he gave in which he rather sweetly said that he thought maybe he'd been wrong hmm but if he'd been wrong he said he'd been wrong for the right reason whatever that me whatever that exactly I wouldn't even dare to ask you know but I did this is just injured oh just pried speaking doesn't matter I mean I you know my fights not been John McCurry I think he's a fine writer you know there's only one thing that he said that I think it's important to take issue with he said he said I've now paraphrase it he said something like if you take on a known enemy after that you're not allowed to cry foul let's say if you know what they're like and then you know you you goat them and then they respond as you must have known they would you can't then say help see which is that sounds sensible except that it eliminates one of the most magnificent things about the history of literature which is that writers have always done this the capacity provoke writers have always taken on tyrants and confronted them and you know spoken truth to power and often expose themselves to great danger by doing so you know when when Mandelstam wrote his poem but Stalin he knew what Stalin was like you know Lorca knew what Franco was like you know that it's actually one of the most glorious things about the history of literature that writers have gone up against known enemies and told and told them the truth about themself in Satanic Verses when you were doing what you were doing in the in the composition of that book did you have any precedents any any foreknowledge of as it were going up against Islamic Orthodox the wind I think weird thing is I think I thought the book was actually quite respectful about about it's love I mean yes it was the point of view of somebody not religious it's like it's a secular retake you know on that on that on that story and remember that in the novel the religions not called Islam and the prophets not called Mohammed and the city is not called Makkah and it's all happening in the dream as a dream sequence in the mind of somebody who's doing insane now this is what we in the trade call fiction but nevertheless yes of course it was the origin story of Islam that inspired it and I thought I'm asking two serious questions one is about the nature of Revelation and the other is about how a new idea behaves both in weakness and in strength you know when its weak does it compromise when it's strong is it merciful you know and I think both those measures the early history of Islam comes out quite well you you were conditioned that of that decade had phases within it I know this because in 1991 late 1991 you came to New York and a kind of secret mission and were interviewed in a hotel room with bulletproof curtains by my wife for the New York Times and then spoke very quickly at Columbia and off he went no they because they threw me out of the country the moment I finish speaking I mean the moment the applause began I was a little grabbed and thrown onto a plane and hurled out of the country they didn't want me around any longer it was the United States behaved badly as well no no they didn't actually what happened was it the United States said to me would I please not come because they were there were hostages in Lebanon you know and there were negotiations Terry wait and yeah well also American hostages and there were negotiations underway to get them out and they said please don't come till we've done that and to be fair to the US authorities the day that the last American hostage was released they said find no problem in country you know so in that sense they actually behaved you know they they did what they said they do and that's when I was able to come to speak at Columbia in this yes in this got a bit better this hotel on the Upper East Side with the Marconi mattresses yeah of the windows and and I mean it's you talk about comedy moments I was met at the airport by this 11 vehicle motorcade with in the center of it that normally doesn't happen on book tour not too much no in the center of it an armored white stretch limo that was for me right just in case you wanted to be like low profile you're like Don King yeah exactly like that who's you rushing to holla at high speed with every kind of everybody in Harlem out to the street saying who that anyway so there was this police officer who I call lieutenant Bob in the book who was I think clinically insane that she anyway but in a nice way in a nice way I said I said we tell it Bob this is a lot you know wouldn't it be better wouldn't it be better to put me there like a secondhand Buick and drive me through the back streets he looked pityingly at me and he said no sir that would not be better and I said I said well who else would you do this for I mean this is a hell of a lot who else reduced well he said sir it's what we do for Arif at this point I understood what it's like to be the new york then I said well supposing it was the president lieutenant Bob what extra would you do what would you do move because this seems like everything what else would you do and he said well sir if you were the president these United States you closed down a lot of these streets here sir we'd have men up on the roofs there sir we probably have a helicopter or two we didn't do that in your case because we thought it would look too conspicuous the effect of this life had on the life of the imagination of now very crowded imagination crowded by a sense of fatalism a sense of inability to communicate with friends and family on at least in a regular basis even though you had very tight ring the iron ring I think you referred to it or end xand your sons you know I think I was saved by being a novelist I think you know I think if I'd be in for instance supposing to be in a play you know exposing the Satanic diocese was a play and I was a playwright it would have been very very hard for me to go on working be very hard to get you know theatres to be willing to put on work by me and so on I think because I did something which you could do alone in a room no I was able to go on doing it and I think it actually saved me you know that I did righteous you know know what it's like to sit alone in a room for hours of the day staring out of the window wondering what the to do next you you know and so that was not unfamiliar and and just that ability to to have an interior life you know to go into the imagination what I'm asking was your interior life impinged upon robbed from you in any way the way your exterior I mean they did for a while it was up and down you know there were moments when it was worse than at other times and but it wasn't just that it was all frightening and all that it was also that once I had to start organizing a political campaign you know to try and bring pressure on the Iranians to do something about this I mean you know if you're one person and you have small human rights groups helping you out at a few friends it's very very limited resources it's extremely difficult to try and arrange an international political campaign to get free Internet yeah pre-internet but just to get in not wrong my powerful people in various countries it's really hard you know and so there were certainly a couple of years when it was a like a full-time job and I want a public level on a political level acted early in her end and decently well interestingly see the British attitude was always quiet ISM it was always yes we'll give him the protection we'll keep it alive and what we'll do is just you know if everybody could just shut up about this including him preferably it'll it'll it'll graduate on down it'll gradually fade away and one of the things I knew is that that wasn't going to happen and so you knew it why because I you know I knew who I was dealing with you know and one of the things about the Iranian regime is that you know a lack of confrontation is always interpreted as weakness mm-hmm and and so they would certainly why would they stop that they had no downside why would why would they cancel it if nobody was making it necessary for them to cancel it you know in the end states as we know act in their own self-interest and and if so I always work thought you have to create a situation in which there's so much pressure on the Iranians that they understand that it is in their self-interest to get rid of this problem you know and that's the lowest which they will do it so that's and we thought if the Brits won't take that lead we have to see what other countries might and hopefully activate the Brits if there's enough of them and initially the countries that were helpful were the Scandinavian countries particularly particularly Norway but just certain degree Denmark and Sweden as well and then Canada and then France hmm and unsurprisingly these are countries which have historically been very closely associated with human rights issues and and they reacted in that way one of the many dimensions of the book is that there's there's obviously the detailed granular dimension of the personal story and the various relationships going on here but there's also a capacity in the book to with default in the fullness of time to to see what this affair meant historically in relation to larger historical forces as a kind of precursor as you say - even 9/11 yeah so where do you place the you'll forgive me the Rushdie affair yeah with what's going on with what's been happening in the last 20 years well it's the same there I think you see what's what I was saying earlier that back then we didn't have a narrative in in which to place this event you know and now we do I mean now we've seen how in this 24 years since the publication of the book that narrative is now pretty well-known and yes 9/11 obviously was a very big moment in that what is that narrative this well it's the it's two things it's on the one hand the growth of highly aggressive form of Islam which is willing to use extreme violence to serve its ends and and the other is the what I what I and other people have begun to call the outrage industry you know I mean we live in an age in which identity politics has developed into a thing where you define your identity by the things that I trade you you know you define yourself by what you hate not by what you love but this isn't unique to Islam no maybe seeing it's it's it's eruptions more often now in Islam that elsewhere but is by no means unique - yeah no no but but you put that together with Islamic fanaticism as expressed for example by Al Qaeda and you see how the two things put together become an explosive combination and I mean I think you can draw pretty much a straight line from from the attack on the Satanic Verses through attacks on many other people in the years that followed to the 9/11 attacks and one of the things I strike to show was that this was not a unique event that in those years that followed the attack on my book there were attacks on many writers intellectuals journalists philosophers across the Muslim world many of whom were murdered by Islamic fanatics and we should say people associated with your book translators and also it's also killed yeah well so well the Japanese translator and I professor Igarashi was killed and they were attempts to kill several other people who were badly injured and fortunately survived but you know for instance one of the most important Turkish journalists O'Gorman chu was killed by Islamic fanatics a Egyptian philosopher for an photo was murdered and the Egyptian Nobel laureate Najib Mahfouz was a tabbed in the neck and only just survived the algerian novelist Uhuru was murdered and in all these cases the the allegations against these people were the same medieval crimes the blasphemy you know heresy apostasy blasphemy crimes we hadn't heard of since the Spanish Inquisition you know and suddenly these were reasons for killing people you know and and I was I would try and argue this I would try and say look just look look what's happening you know and and very often people in the West would would hear what I was saying as self-justification you know he's trying to make excuses by showing that there's happening to other people it felt like special pleading do you feel that this has changed your politics from say the politics you might have had on February 13 1989 in anyway well in this way yes that I think that I've been quite disappointed I mean I've always seen myself as somebody sort of roughly speaking on the left you said and I still certainly don't see myself as being on the right because look who's there but I have been very disappointed very often by the reactions of the left as for example in that case I was mentioning about John burger and I really don't fully understand it but to an extent that I think it's to do with like one of the reflex positions of the Western left is that the people can't be wrong you know so if there's a large number of the people of whatever community who object to a given individual the given individual must be wrong you can't have a kind of mass erroneous reaction you know it's not allowed that's the history is not like that you know so your view of this altered my view of that altered because in my view in this case the people thanks to the way they were guided and led and so on were pretty wrong and then there's of course in the European Left there's a kind of default setting which is anti-american and so the people who were anti-american which were to do with which meant Islamic radicals made a kind of curious alliance with the European left you know because of the joint opposition you know your enemy's enemy is your friend and there was there was some of that but it was very odd and I think it goes on even now because that what has developed in this period this quarter century is is a to a much greater degree that it existed before is is the is the idea of cultural relativism you know the idea that you have to treat different communities different because differently because of their different cultural heritage or stages of development yeah so so what it means is that while you may strongly object to what female circumcision are we supposed to tolerate this in cultures which still think it's okay you know and so on I mean that I felt and yet your politics are not the same as ayaan Hirsi Ali its no you know I mean I think you know I mean there's things I agree with a yarn about but not not everything I mean I think she has moved pretty firmly to the right you know and and and so there's lots of areas where I think we wouldn't agree but but I mean you know personally I like her she's a brave woman and she stood up for what she believes in even if I don't always agree with it but this is this this idea of separate treatment for separate cultures I think essentially if we follow that to its conclusion destroys our ability to have a really moral framework for a society somebody the fatwa more or less officially ended after a decade yeah and and and yet several weeks ago three weeks ago I went to the annual what I call the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad breakfast oh yes wouldn't miss it for the world first time I went they served LOX and bagels on ironically he does true story he does stand-up he's he is a funny guy and and I you there 20 reporters and editors sitting around a table and there's off medina Giada and translators and so on and there's there were questions about Israel bombs and all this and and sanctions and all the rest and I was my turn and I asked him about about you hmm and rather than just said you know the fatwa ended and let's move on to another question he was he gave a grin that could only be described as maybe satanic and impish at the same time if that's possible and said where is this Rushdie where does he live he ought to be careful of where he is hmm I think this was what was of a dinner jobs idea of a joke I think it was very funny yeah well you see why he doesn't make a career in that field but you live your life now if someone as freely as anybody yeah there are things I can't do I mean there are countries in the world I can't go to I mean either because they won't let me in or because it would be stupid to go there because the danger would be when they are well they're mostly they're essentially the Islamic world you know the countries of Islamic majority population I mean as I say something sometimes I can't I can't go to Pakistan where your parents so I you know both my parents are buried in Pakistan I mean when my mother died I was not allowed the visa to go and bury her and not only that but there were articles in the newspapers they're saying that anybody who went to her funeral should go and apologize to God at the local mosque because she was the mother of you know my mother and you can imagine that doesn't endear me to Pakistan it is true actually that if I if I had gone it put it in colossal II dangerous mm-hmm because you see what Pakistan has become even India's complex for you I should we should point out that India banned set the Satanic for us and by the way I don't believe it's lifted the no and no but we unfortunately we live in an age in which you can't ban books right because there's this we're not effective there's the thing called the Kindle yeah so if you if you're in India and you want to buy the static verses you can download it to be delivered to you know so which makes the kind of official ban even more ludicrous but you know most people in this room think of India they think of world's largest democracy freedom of speech and so on and and and it shocked me and my ignorance going there to the Jaipur literary festival that it became impossible for you to go because of threats of violence and and all kinds of there hasn't been quite as liberal as as it used to be for some time and I think in many ways the banning of the Satanic Verses back in 1988 started something no because what it did was that you're not alone in this what it did was to create a kind of bidding war between different religious communities oh if the Muslims can get that banned said the Hindus that we want that bad and then the Sikhs and we want that man you know and and suddenly there was this escalation and these constituencies are so enormous in electoral politics that you can't resist it but what has happened now I mean it's very worrying and I think I actually did go to India about a month after nagpur festival and i went you know to Delhi the capital not to this small provincial town and no problem because suddenly there wasn't an election on where somebody was trying to win the Muslim vote my attack nobody cared nobody cared in fact some of the less scrupulous myths of the Indian media went to the people who had made trouble and Jaipur and said look he's over there you know aren't you going to make a fuss he's right over there and they said we're gonna get you to ask ask questions in a couple minutes I want to ask about the book in particular and remember when when you do ask questions please make it a question and not a something more developed and declarative than that in 2005 you were asked in an interview in The Paris Review whether we would ever write a memoir and certain editors have been nudging you about this for some some time and you said the following until the whole worth thing happened it never occurred to me that my life was interesting enough I would just write my novels and hopefully those would be interesting but who cares about the writers life then this very unusual thing happened to me and I found myself keeping an occasional journal just to remind myself what was happening when things went back to normal it occurred to me that a memoir would be a way of being done with it nobody would ever ask me about it again but then I realized I'd have to spend a year researching it at least a year writing it and at least a year talking about it so I'd be sentencing myself to three or four more years of the thing I just got out of I didn't think I could bear to go forward yeah well that's what I thought for a long time I thought it was the last thing I wanted to write you know I wanted to slam the door on those years and go back to the life I'd wanted you know write novels and stories and so on and but I always knew that I would write it one day you know because good story and I didn't want anybody else to I thought if anybody's gonna do that I'm gonna do it first yeah I mean I remember there was a moment when when Christopher Hitchens told me that he had met the film director Miller's Foreman who had sent a message by a Christopher to say that he was interested to make a film of my life on the one hand I was very flattered because I loved his films and so on but I slightly less flattery but he added that he saw it as a companion piece to his film about Larry Flynt it's a good point though but anyway I thought I thought I'm gonna tell this one day and I remember I used to say jokingly to people that I thought of it is my old age pension that you know when I was old and had nothing to write I would write this story and it would like pay the hospital bills you know and I mean I'm almost there you could always go into the textile business but that's I mean I knew that I would tell it but I just truthfully I just wanted to wait until I felt in a in a calm place I wanted to wait until I felt I was able to do what one should do which is to reflect in tranquility you know to look back objectively it's rather than right when the when the emotion of that stuck time was still boiling up in me no and and how did you go about figuring out how to do it I did one distinguishing feature is the name another is the third-person narrator yeah which you've talked about quite a lot but also there's this the form of the nonfiction novel in cold blood or the right stuff execution of song now how do you feel about that form it with all this pass the fact checkers of a certain magazine or chord you know feel freer than a lot of it's a chunk of it did pass the fact it did this but which as you know is a is no joke is a blessing in the end in the end again you know you're always grateful for it at the end yes always because like surgery because yeah like dentistry yeah anyway without novocaine I'll let them know but yeah I I really thought it's a novel in which everything is true and and the only difference between it and those books you mentioned is which all of which I admire know is that those writers were not writing about their own life they're writing about you know if Tom wills writing the right stuff sure it's about other people and similarly with the malar book so so I thought how do I do this if it's my life rather than somebody else's life and I think that's one of the reasons what for the third person is just to be able to you know if you have an RA and then a lot of he and she's the the I is just by the use of the pronouns separated from the he and cheese you know but but if everything is he and she then all the characters in the book are at the same level of existence if you know what I mean and and and so I thought it was possible for me then to write about myself in this way as you would write about a fictional character except that everything is true yeah but what I mean is how would you write about a fictional character you don't you don't keep secrets about a fictional character you know you reveal the inmost self of the fictional character that's what you're supposed to do you know the novel is there to bring somebody alive on the page as vividly and profoundly as you can do so one of the many things I love about this book is that there's no in the Seinfeld show they used to say no phoney hugging or no false reconciliation or whatever it is it's it's there's a just sense of dispassion about it there's no phony forgiveness handed out like party gifts like swag at the end of this books yeah people often come up awfully badly and at one point so do you yeah well that's the thing I think if if it was only other people coming off badly well everything I did was heroic and heroic wonderful but you know people would see through that in a second I mean I think you have to I thought about other going in positions but if you're going to tell the kind of unvarnished truth about other people you have to also tell the unvarnished truth about yourself and in a way you have to be more critical of yourself than anyone else in the key episode of that is well a key episode of that is this this appalling moment at the end of 1990 when I tried to under long I mean I could justify it I can say was under all kinds of pressure so on to do this when I tried to make this accommodation with Islamic leaders and it was you know it's a pathetic and stupid mistake and I mean that's one of the interesting things I think is that the chapter in the book which deals with that is called the trap of wanting to be loved and I think what I meant by that is that I actually did have this what looks in retrospect like demand believe that I could talk my way out of this yeah that I could I could just say to people look just sit down let me explain to you what I thought I was doing where it was coming from and you know I'm not a bad guy and now that you understand it you see you're not you're not upset anymore and let's be friends it didn't work and and I mean how stupid that was you know but still I did think it from it and at the end of that that sort of failed and and sort of stupid attempted appeasement I just understood something I thought you know there are going to be people who don't like you whatever you say they're not going to like you and you know what it's okay because you're not crazy about them either and someone will finish our part of this with I'd ask you to tell the story of the of the closest you got to getting killed her place in Australia in Australia it wasn't a hit team no well if this was 1995 and the Moore's law saya just been published and with incredible I could only say labyrinthine convolutions I had managed to arrange a weird book tour which took in South America and Australasia and I had gone from no Argentina Chile round Cape Horn across the Dateline up to New Zealand eventually Australia and finished this book tour in Australia and and got the Australian police to agree that since everybody thought I was leaving to go back home that I could actually stay and I had writer friends in Australia one of whom invited me to his little beach house down in the bottom right hand corner of Australian and said why did you come and have Christmas come and spend Christmas you know in the Sun for once and my and my wife Elizabeth West was with me and my older son Milan who was there was offer a rather sorry do this all the time i fro came out just be with us we thought we'll have Christmas in Australia why not you know what fun and so after all the official bit we rented a car you were driving south from Sydney and we went into this small village really with the sort of ironically accurate name of Milton town named after a blind poet and and we were hit by a very large truck which almost killed us which pushed us off the road and we smashed into a tree writing off the car and in most cases all three of us would have been killed as have by a miracle we all walked out walked away from it without a broken bone and I then discovered that this truck was carrying a very large load of fertilizer so it essentially was hit by a truckload of had almost killed mine and then we were sitting there on the on the grassy verge of this road and we were lucky because that has happened there was a little hospital in this town and so the ambulance arrived very quickly and saw me sitting there on the verge and the ambulance driver said excuse me so as far as it's not the best time but could I have an autograph I thought you know give the man an autograph he's got the ambulance and then and then the police arrived and started interrogating the poor truck driver about his connections to Islamic terrorist groups he was just some Aussie truck driver I don't think he had any idea who I was but he was having to answer questions about his alleged membership of al-qaeda anyway I just I just think it's extraordinary really and after I mean about you see if it weren't not funny it would be funny that the closest I actually came to being killed was that truckload of load of questions from the audience I can't you have to bring the lights up though yes bring the lights up just a teeny bit so we can see who's who this fellow is ambling toward the mic yeah thanks so much for coming my question to you is I'm sure you had a lot of time to think about you know the truth is that most of the world is not very tolerant about freedom of expression you know try saying what you want to say in China for example what is it's it's really the other way around what has happened because of a series of historical episodes like the French enlightenment that a part of the world to say Western Europe and America has developed an idea of freedom of expression which is very precious known which actually far exceeds the amount of freedom offered to people in most most of the world all of whom seem to want it you know and if you if you look at those the kids who were demonstrating in Tahrir Square last year that was part of what they wanted they wanted to live in a more open society where they could speak their mind but I've often thought that this is you know this is a this is a privilege that we have that was it was hard-won you know and and that the the writers of the French enlightenment who fought this fight you know on our behalf or to scare Diderot Rousseau Voltaire they all knew that their enemy was not the state the enemy was the church and in those days the Catholic Church had at its disposal you know enough of my excommunication a whole range of your inquisitions they had a whole range of methods by which they could try and limit what could be said and and it was explicitly the the idea of the of the Enlightenment writers that the church had to be deprived of the power to place limiting points on thought and and that victory because it was a victory essentially gave us what we now think of as the modern idea of freedom of expression and that of course came to this country in form of Tom Payne who was very influenced by those ideas and imported them into into America out of which comes the First Amendment so we are lucky to have this you know and it was a battle against the church then and what I came to feel about what was happening to the attack on the Satanic Verses and you know other writers is that you know we thought this battle was long one we didn't think we had to fight this battle anymore because it's this was just over and then we discovered that sadly it's not over it's a different church same battle you know and so here we are fighting it again and many of my Sudanese friends felt deeply offended by the videos and also deeply offended by the attacks on the embassies because in my flat is there a line where people of expression is simply just offensive and puts into danger diplomats lives as we saw in Libya men diplomats had to be evacuated from Sudan aid workers had to stay at home and not work because people were very upset you know what I don't think so I don't think there is because what you're essentially saying is that the people who are willing to resort to violence get to decide where that line should be and I just don't think you can do that you know the fact is there is no right not to be offended it doesn't exist and and if you decide that there is then almost everything can be offend somebody you know I mean I can go into a bookstore and find things that offend me doesn't occur occur to me to burn the bookstore down hmm you know you mean like 50 shades of gray or so for example you know No yeah like fifty shades of gray it's very disappointing I have to say I don't know how much of it you've read they're not enough I don't think men read this book but I did I did go so far as to as to read chapter one on the Amazon side and I must say I've never read anything so badly written that got published I mean it makes Twilight look like war and peace which was by previous record-holder for worse violet got but yeah and doesn't occur to me I don't know so this culture which says that if it offends me look YouTube is full of offensive material you know if you want to find something on YouTube that really pisses you off you can find it there it is YouTube is gigantic and full of crap and and you know some good stuff but if we're going to live in this age which exists that is not going to stop existing this information age in which vast amounts of material are just out there because anybody can put it out there you know we can't allow a situation to exist where somebody says if you put that up there we're going to attack your country you know I mean what America has to do with the with this video you know is negligible and and it's it's completely I mean for it like this if if we don't hold people who commit acts of violence responsible for the violence they commit then we no longer live in a in a moral universe guided by law you know the I mean I could say something here that might annoy David I would have to try hard because it's not easy to annoy him but if I did if he were then to get out a gun and shoot me that would be his fault it wouldn't be my fault he would be the person who would be rightly sent to jail for that you know the criminal is responsible for the crime you know to say oh I was upset and that's why I burned your house down doesn't mean that you're not an arsonist and I think we just have to we're in danger of getting this upside down that we're allowing the people who are willing to resort to extreme violence to set the terms of the debate and that mustn't be allowed to happen in my view over here I think we have time for one more here and one more their table sorry about that try to give short answers yes no no oh I can't say yes or no to that can I because I don't know can I just pass that's too complicated I mean I you know I I feel sorry for Bradley Manning not least because of the way in which he's been exploited by Julian Assange a person that I have very little admiration for while at the same time I can find it you know I could find that I can support WikiLeaks without being particularly fond of right mr. Assange and his self-glorification one one short question that way we can get one more you see I don't think I think houses I hope the answer's no because I think read books for that if you if you had never heard anything about me at all and all you had in front of you was the Shelf of my books and you were to read them in I don't think you would say oh look something terrible happens to him in 1989 and ever after that it's all different no I don't think you'd say that I mean I think the books have you know they're going on their own journey and I tried very consciously it's one of the things I am proud of as I said I said to myself you know you must live until you die be the writer that you are go on doing the work that you set out to do go down your Road don't be deflected by it write your own books etc and that was very much a conscious desire of mine and I think it's one of that's I mean I did things that were wrong one of the things I feel that I did right you have the enormous burden I want to know do you agree with me that there should be more expression against well I'm not sure I completely understand your question but I think the point about an open society is that you should be able to say whatever the hell you want you know and and a lot of support time or I don't see a lot of expression against the violence well you know Kyle so your question but I mean I agree with you in general that you know that violent attacks should be criticized of course and I mean I don't know I think they from I don't know that you're right about that I think that probably has been quite a lot of criticism okay thanks III need we need to end with not a question but an unassailable truth that is your life will be a great deal richer when you read this book and I hope you will and I want to thank some on Rushdie for everything and not just today you

Channel: The New Yorker

Views: 21,466

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Keywords: Festival 2012, David Remnick, Salman Rushdie, protest, anti-American, Middle East, festival, nyer festival

Id: OkzimRYDlFw

Length: 82min 29sec (4949 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 22 2014

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No submission statement, not even an article. Great going dude.