| It's been 18 years since Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, not one of the world's greatest defenders of freedom of speech, reacted to the publication of Rushdie's The Satanic Verses by calling for a fatwa and demanding Rushdie's death. One commentator described this as an act of "extreme literary criticism". The fatwa forced Rushdie into hiding for the next decade and triggered a slew of protests across the world. |
| The Satanic Verses begins with two actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, falling out of an airplane, conversing on their way down. Thanks to the efforts of magical realism rather than gravity, they land safely, but discover that Gibreel is transforming into the Archangel Gabriel while Saladdin Chamcha is becoming the Devil. In a controversial section, Rushdie's fictional prophet Mahound writes and then repudiates what are known as the "Satanic Verses"""verses where he apparently agrees to the worship of three desert goddesses. |
| Rushdie was aware of some of the risks of what he was doing, if not the full implications: the Satanic Verses also includes a character called Salman, employed as a scribe to the prophet, who takes the liberty of changing some of the prophet's words. For his blasphemy, he is told that the punishment will be death""but in the book, the prophet Mahound eventually relents. |
| The Indian government, fearing an outbreak of communal tension, became the first in the world to ban the book on October 5, 1988. By the end of November that year, the book had been banned in South Africa, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Bangladesh, Sudan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Qatar. Later, South Africa would lift the ban. |
| Speaking at the Jaipur Literary Festival this year, Rushdie mentioned a visit he'd made to Egypt after the ban had been enforced. He was accosted by an eager young man: |
| "So this man came up to me and said, Rushdie! Rushdie! I said, yes, yes? He said, I read That Book! I said, oh. He said, I like That Book! It's banned in Egypt! It's TOTALLY banned! But everyone has read it!" |
| It was the same situation in India. Except for the people who were busy burning copies of the book in protest""who, on principle, wouldn't read Rushdie, and who, in practice, seem to read very little""the rest of us read the Verses in poorly Xeroxed copies that were passed from hand-to-hand. |
| A few months ago, though, a curious thing happened. A close friend came by with a copy of Satanic Verses""the 2006 Vintage edition, with a proper bill of sale. "Has the ban been lifted?" he asked. |
| A book ban is a curious instrument in India, hedged over by all sorts of technicalities. In the strictest legal sense, Rushdie's book has not been banned in India""it is only its importation that has been disallowed. In the eighteen years that followed the ban, it has not been officially reviewed, and so it remains in force. But all it would take to remove the ban is a ruling by a few key people in the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Customs departments. When the distributors discovered that they had imported and sold the Satanic Verses, though, the reaction was frozen terror. Two copies of the book had been ordered, imported and sold by mistake. The ban, I learned, was still in force. |
| Because the Satanic Verses is still officially banned in India, I cannot identify the bookshop, the purchaser and the importer involved, for fear of landing them in legal trouble. |
| But the incident made me think, yet again, of the unfairness of the ban. In 2007, these two copies created no general unrest among the public. It is fair to assume that the situation that provoked the initial ban on Satanic Verses""contributing to a series of similar bans that taken as a whole, threaten to severely limit this nation's sometimes shaky commitment to freedom of speech""has changed. Rushdie has travelled to India often in the last decade, and as the crowds at local literary festivals testify, has a loyal base of readers and admirers in the country of his birth. |
| We may not be in a position to give him a knighthood in compensation for the years of persecution he has suffered. But eighteen years later, it is time to take another look at the ban. The political costs of overturning it may be high, but the moral costs of keeping the ban in force are unconscionable. I hope some day Sir Salman will be able to step into an Indian bookshop and see copies of Satanic Verses for free and legal sale available on the shelves. The author is chief editor, EastWest and Westland Books; the views expressed here are personal |
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