The terror of Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa has faded but the challenge it posed to artistic freedom has not, as a brush with the Indian authorities has shown
For Salman Rushdie, the "affair" is over. When he walks into a Notting Hill restaurant, his eyes do not scan the room for signs of danger. The other diners do not wolf down their meals and scuttle for the exit, in case today is the day when the bomber gets through. They treat the entrance of a writer, who once could not move without a posse of suspicious security guards, as an unremarkable event.
Rushdie is fine. More than fine, actually: he's flourishing. Deepa Mehta has filmed Midnight's Children. Rushdie has written the script, so if viewers wish to protest that the film diminishes, trivialises or otherwise fails to match the glittering standards of his masterpiece they must direct their complaints to him. A US cable network has commissioned him to write a sci-fi series and, like so many others, Rushdie relishes the space and freedom American television gives to dramatists.
The terror, which once dominated his life and the lives of everyone associated with his work, is history now. When Ayatollah Khomeini ordered Muslims to kill him for his blasphemies, Julian Barnes gave him a shrewd piece of advice. However many attempts were made on his life and lives of his translators and publishers, however many times Special Branch moved him from safe house to safe house, he must not allow the "Rushdie affair" to turn him into an obsessive.
Totalitarians are like stalkers or internet trolls. They want their targets to think about them constantly. Rushdie did not become like his enemies. He never replicated the fanaticism they directed against him. He has been a good friend to other victims of religious terror, but in his novels and children's stories he has tackled new themes. Despite the entreaties of his agent, he put off writing his autobiography until he was able to view the "affair" with detachment. It should be out in September and I would be astonished if it is not read around the world.
Rushdie has had a flat in London for decades, but tells me he spends more and more time in New York. Like Martin Amis, he finds the viciousness of the British media towards writers mystifying. Journalists who rely on their exercise of freedom of speech to put food on their tables and clothes on their children's backs hate a man who had to risk his life to defend the liberties they so thoughtlessly take for granted. I am not going to go into why English literature's first great Asian novelist is the object of such venom, and was cheered to find that Rushdie did not want to speculate either. Aware of the danger of sounding like a moaner, he adds that Americans may not turn on their writers with the passion of the British because they care so little about what novelists have to say that they lack the energy even to loathe them.
He laughs and looks every inch an artist at ease with himself. Khomeini is dead and he is still alive. The Satanic Verses is still in print. Film producers, TV executives, publishers and readers all want him. Why shouldn't he relax?
When I began a book on modern censorship, it was obvious to me that I could not avoid The Satanic Verses. Before the ayatollahs went for Rushdie, writers in secular or religious dictatorships could find a place of sanctuary in the west. The fatwa stopped all that. It redrew the boundaries of the free world, shrinking its borders and erasing zones of disputation from the map of the liberal mind. The terror that the bombs and the attempted murders spread meant that London, New York, Paris, Copenhagen and Amsterdam were no longer places of safety for writers tackling religious themes. From 1989 onwards westerners and refugees from religious terror knew that it could happen here because it had happened here. The hypocrisies and evasions that so disfigure our culture began then.
As I typed I worried that I was writing for readers in their early twenties who were not even born when The Satanic Verses was published. I shouldn't have fretted. Rushdie has found peace, but the "Rushdie affair" will not go away. It cannot because it is the starkest representation in our times of the conflict between individual conscience and the authoritarian mind, which is never won but must always be fought.
I saw Rushdie a few days after India had forced him to cancel an appearance at the Jaipur literature festival. The authorities said his physical presence or even an address via video link might lead to assassination attempts, riots, injuries and deaths. India, a supposedly secular democracy, was now banning its greatest writer from talking to his fellow Indians.
As Rushdie realised, religious sectarians and fabulously cynical politicians were once again using The Satanic Verses, which is banned in India, to whip the faithful into line. Although he had visited India many times since 1989 without incident, Muslim leaders saw a chance to create a controversy where none existed. They told the festival organisers that they must not allow "an enemy of Islam" to speak. Rushdie is an atheist. If his intelligence had not already made him one, his experience of fascistic violence would have done the job just as well.
But, as he asked the viewers of Indian television, who is the real enemy of Islam here? Rushdie, who used his right to speak his mind to criticise its founding myths, or "various extremist leaders and their followers, who … strengthen the extremely negative image of Islam as an intolerant, repressive and violent culture [that] every time it's crossed ... resorts to threats and violence?"
Congress, once the secular party of Jawaharlal Nehru, is now thoroughly debased. It is as keen on fomenting communalist scares as its Hindu nationalist opponents. It wanted the Muslim vote to turn out in elections in Uttar Pradesh, the most important Indian state. India's Muslims are among the most disadvantaged groups in the country. Instead of offering them healthcare, jobs or anything so radical as education for women, however, Congress politicians schemed to stop Rushdie visiting his native land. As India Today concluded, they manufactured "a massive threat perception" so Rushdie would not appear and Congress could "showcase" itself as the "caretaker of Muslim interests".
In You Can't Read This Book, I argue against the comforting idea that progress is inevitable and that we must be freer than our supposedly repressed and stuffy ancestors. Rushdie's case was the best evidence I could find. He and his contemporaries in the 1980s thought they could challenge religions that claimed dominion over minds and bodies. Since then our world has changed, and not for the better. "The change can fit into a sentence," I say. "No young artist of Rushdie's range and gifts would dare write a modern version of The Satanic Verses today, and if he or she did, no editor would dare publish it."
Rushdie half agrees, but thinks the cowardice resides almost exclusively in the offices of publishers, broadcasters and newspaper editors. Writers should be braver. Far from being cowed by the clerical-political alliance that targeted him, Rushdie went on Indian television and lacerated the cynics who threatened "the liberty of ordinary Indian citizens to hear differing points of view".
The Indian press took up the charge and accused Congress of making their country look sinister and preposterous in the eyes of the world. Congress's attempt to whip up sectarian hatred has exploded in its face. Rushdie's Indian enemies are now in full retreat.
As he walked out into London's winter sunshine, I reflected that after all these years Rushdie remained an example worth following. Decline is no more inevitable than progress. You never have to accept it.