The Iconoclast

Salman Rushdie discusses free speech, fundamentalism, America's place in the world, and his new essay collection

Shikha Dalmia from the August/September 2005 issue

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���� There may well be another alternative. I grew up in a Muslim family in India, and I know what is meant by that other Islam. My grandfather was a very religious man. He went to Mecca for the Hajj and prayed five times a day. Yet he was the most tolerant and open person I ever met. If you go into any Muslim country, you will find that dispute between radical Islam and moderate Islam. It is not a question of how the West perceives the East, but of what's happening inside the East. If you go to Muslims in India, they can tell you immediately about that battle with those other Muslims. For example, the kind of Islam that is being forced on Kashmir is very much a kind of Arabist Islam, which is alien to Kashmir. It is not liked by Kashmiris, who have a more Sufistic tradition, which is much more mystical and much milder.

���� The problem is, how do you tell the truth while not demonizing the people who don't deserve to be demonized?

Reason: If you were President's Bush's speechwriter, how would you do it?

Rushdie: You would just have to make that argument. You have to say, "Not everybody is like this, but this is a part of what there is." This is the problem with the truth. Truth is never one-dimensional. It is contradictory sometimes. But politics wants clarity.

���� My job is not to make a politician's life easier. As for Bush's speechwriters, I have met some of them, and they are very able people.

Reason: Where does this leave us on the question of democratic reform in Islamic countries? Do you think that Islam lacks a crucial piece to build a foundation for freedom?

Rushdie: What it has is an extra piece that believes that religion can be the foundation for a state. It's a question of removing that piece rather than adding something. There have been various moments in the history of Pakistan when attempts to Islamize the country were resisted strongly by both generals and civilian governments. It's not inevitable that a country full of Muslims will seek to Islamize its structures. But I do think there is a need for a widespread realization among Muslims that you cannot build a state based on religion. Pakistan is proof of that. Here was a state that was built on religion, but a quarter of a century after it was founded it fell apart, because the glue is not strong enough.

Reason: There is a debate in the West as well about the best way to separate church and state. America's constitutional formula was designed to keep the state neutral, not hostile, to religion. France and Turkey go a bit further in using the state to actively secularize their country. Where do you stand on using the state as a force for secularization?

Rushdie: In this particular case, I think that the French have more or less got it right, if I may be allowed to use the F word. The idea of separating church and state was exported into the American constitution from France courtesy of Tom Paine. The idea was central to France ever since the French revolution, that the church has no part in the state.

���� The First Amendment is one of the great achievements of any democracy anywhere. It jointly supports the freedom of religious belief and the freedom of expression. They are both in the same clause. And it is interesting to see that. Because what it means is that of course people need to be free to believe what they choose to believe but the state is not going to favor any of those beliefs.

���� But there is an important difference between Europe and the United States. In Europe, the Enlightenment of the 18th century was seen as a battle against the desire of the Church to limit intellectual freedom, a battle against the Inquisition, a battle against religious censorship. And the victory of the Enlightenment in Europe was seen as pushing religion away from the center of power. In America, at the same time, the Enlightenment meant coming to a country where people were not going to persecute you by reason of your religion. So it meant a liberation into religion. In Europe, it was liberation out of religion.

���� It becomes hard in this country to have a dialogue suggesting that religion be removed from the state. Even though this is the theory of this country, it is decreasingly the practice of this country.

���� I was very struck when Joe Lieberman was chosen as the vice-presidential candidate, and there was a certain amount of rubbish talked about whether Americans would vote for a Jewish candidate. I remember a big opinion poll taken by The New York Times in which people were asked whether they would accept as a presidential candidate a woman, a Jew, an African American, a homosexual, and an atheist. In four of those five measures, the result was resoundingly yes, by a gigantic majority, but for an atheist it was no better than 50-50. Somebody who overtly professes not to have religion can't get elected dog catcher in this country. That's a problem, because it creates a political discourse full of sanctimony. Hypocrisy sanctified by religion.

Reason: Leftist intellectuals have typically viewed world politics as a struggle between the powerful West and the powerless Third World. For some, 9/11 changed this--one person who did a complete turnaround is your friend Christopher Hitchens, to whom Step Across This Line is dedicated, who has become an enthusiastic supporter of the Bush foreign policy. Arundhati Roy, the Indian writer and activist, continues to view America as the source of many of the problems in the world. Like her, you were a critic of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. Which camp do you put yourself in now?

Rushdie: You can say that I'm the third point of the triangle. I find myself sometimes agreeing with both of them and often disagreeing with both of them. Christopher's journey toward Wolfowitz is a lot further along than mine. And I don't think that I am yet convinced of the theory of the democratic domino effect. Even though we see these stirrings in those countries in the area, I think you could easily attribute those stirrings to things quite independent of American policy, which have to do with local history. The hatred of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon has existed for a long time, and at some point that was going to burst out. If you look at the consequences of the death of Arafat, it seems to me that what's happening in the Palestinian community right now has great echoes in Northern Ireland in the Catholic community. There comes a point when people get sick of that stuff, sick of violence and terrorism. Catholics in Northern Ireland simply grew to detest what the IRA was doing.