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Arise, Sir SalmanRushdie's knighthood reignites "Salmanophobia" at home and abroad.

By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Posted Wednesday, June 20, 2007, at 2:41 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Eighteen years ago, Rushdie was much mocked—at a moment when he lived in danger of his life—by politicians and commentators on the right. Sure enough, in Tuesday's Daily Mail, Ruth Dudley Edwards returned to this theme by sharing her "prevailing thoughts" about Rushdie: "Self-important, pretentious, attention-seeking and ungrateful."

It would take a long essay to explain why Rushdie is so disliked by the right here, though it dates back a quarter-century to his days as self-appointed scourge of post-imperial British racism. Sutherland, his great champion, points out that The Satanic Verses was "extremely rude about England," which makes it the more striking that "he now has pledged himself in the personal service of the monarch!" (A rather literal-minded notion of what a knight is expected to do nowadays.)

The eruption of the Satanic Verses affair on St. Valentine's Day 1989 caught everyone by surprise, and indeed, as with the Danish cartoon affair, it was really factitious. It would never have happened if some zealot hadn't scoured a work of literary fiction previously unheard of in Tehran and thereby inflamed the passions of scores of millions who had not read it, and would never read it or any other novel.

Not that Rushdie was, or is, friendless. During the first drama, he was bravely defended by writers like Norman Mailer, who didn't know him, but still more by his group of friends, the most prominent literary gang in England: McEwan, Martin Amis, James Fenton, Christopher Hitchens. They have spoken out again, and, one could say, with the authority of renewed success: McEwan may shortly reach the top of the New York Times fiction best-seller list with his new novel On Chesil Beach, while Hitchens has already made it to the top of the nonfiction list with his atheistical polemic God Is Not Great. On Monday, Hitchens appeared on The Ten O'Clock News, the main BBC-TV news show, and gave a fine bulldog performance, saying that it was no business of these remote peoples to say who should be honored by the sovereign.

How much good this support will do Rushdie is another matter, and some of his defenders seem to have their own political agendas. Back in 1989, the xenophobic right that turned on Rushdie was personified by Norman Tebbit, one of Margaret Thatcher's chief lieutenants, who called Rushdie "an outstanding villain" and a man whose "public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality. Now he betrays even his own sneers at the British establishment."

But now there is a new group of ardent Anglo-neoconservative supporters of the American alliance, the Iraq war, and the crusade against "Islamofascism" who have rallied to Rushdie's cause. One of them is Daniel Finkelstein, comment editor and columnist at the Times, who is running a campaign to "Support Sir Salman." The decision to honor him was "bold and correct," says Finkelstein's manifesto: Apart from "the merit of his literary work, the author is a symbol of free speech."

That's what McEwan says as well, with his "firm message to the book-burners and their appeasers." Whether Rushdie really wants to be enlisted as a foot soldier—no, a knight is a member of the equestrian order—in this renewed clash of civilizations is another matter.

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Geoffrey Wheatcroft's book Yo, Blair! has just been published in Britain.
Photograph of Rushdie by Sean Gallup/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

It is true that Salman Rushdie as an author is more well known than he is read. But I don't think this is unusual. In general, celebrities and people who receive these types of honors can only be appreciated by a select audience.

For instance, how many people have read A. S. Byatt? She is one of my favorite authors and a dame. I think she deserved the honor. I'm sure most Rushdie readers think the same about him. For the rest of us, he's just another guy who got knighted for something. We shouldn't support him for his work if it is meaningless to us.

We should support him for what he represents: free speech. Salman Rushdie may not have chosen to be a symbol of free speech, but he has accepted that it is now his role. He doesn't deserve our pity or our resentment, and if anything his example should inspire us to fight extremism, even if he does not personally inspire us. The response of the Islamic world is a travesty and only highlights how dangerous tyranny is, whether it's islamofascism or Russian "democracy" or Chavez in Chile.

Just as the Chinese have the right to see friends' photos on flickr, Great Britain has the right to honor a distinguished citizen, and we have the right to read (or not) his books.

--roseburkam

(To reply, click here.)

Poor Salman Rushdie... consistently lauded for works completed nearly two decades ago. Must be frustrating for a writer to keep delivering new prose when all people want to talk about is Midnight's Children and Satanic Verses. It's rough that no one for a second discussed the knighthood in relation to Fury (at having shelled out $24.95 for a hard cover) or The Ground Beneath Her Feet (stomping on this book) or Shalimar the Clown (fool me three times shame on... but shame was a great novel).

Either way, each discussion of Salman Rushdie, by being inextricably linked to Satanic Verses or Midnight's Children, is really just a criticism of his newer work...

--mrbiswas

(To reply, click here.)

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