The spirit of fatwas past

“Bad verses
The readers’ curses,
Aphorisms
The soul’s prisms…”
From Curry Boli by Bachchoo

O tempora, O mores! All I ever got from defending Salman Rushdie’s right to write was a few seconds’ eternal notoriety on something called e-bay — or is it U-tube or Facelift — believe me I am bewildered when my children tell me that I am somewhere there.

Their derision offends my dreams and recollections as I live through the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) this year where I am by generous invitation to read my translations of Rumi.
At the festival, an enclosed, protected space in the Diggi Palace, I listen to the array of grand speakers. Richard Dawkins attacks God. Simon Sebag Montefiore attacks Stalin. I sit or stand — such is the mass attendance — through each of their sessions feeling totally secure that the disciples of God, however noisy or militant, and the supporters of Stalin, however revisionist, cannot assail the peace of our festival as hundreds of policemen have been deployed to protect it.
My session on translations of Rumi is scheduled for the last day and as I sit through and attend these interesting sessions, I think that perhaps I can generate a stir, and focus media attention on myself and stand up for God and Stalin by reading verses or segments from the Zend Avesta, the Bible, the works of Comrade Stalin or other documents that would offend Dawkins and Sebag. Copies of the Zend Avesta and the works of Trotsky, I assure you, are impossible to get hold of at short notice in Jaipur.
I confess I was in a near desperate dilemma. Perhaps I should switch allegiances and read from firstly Nietzsche who declared that God was dead and from some programme papers of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) declaring that Stalin was not such a bad chap after all — people had to be murdered by the million so that Comrade Basu could get Bengali lentil production on the road.
I searched for copies of “Thus Spake Zoro” and for the speeches of Comrade B in the JLF bookshop but found that they stocked neither. The shop was full of the novels of Chetan Bhagat which were selling merrily and of other
novelists and writers whose books were in, shall we say, slower currents.
Disappointed in my quest for self-seeking controversy, comfortable in the fact that I could at least read from the works of Rushdie which seemed to be freely available in Jaipur as several participants had got hold of them, and so get my name in the international press, I awaited my chance of a place in the sun — or if not the sun at least the lights of the artificial tan.
And as I slept on the night before my own appearance on the festival stage, as Scrooge was on Christmas Eve, I was visited by the “Spirit of Fatwas Past”.
“Don’t you, like, remember, dude that your worthless life was once threatened by persons well known for professing the mere likelihoods of the transference of the Salmanic Proses?”
Oh, it all came back to me.
The year: 1989
Interior. A TV studio improvised on the nth floor of a Manchester hotel.
The British ITV Channel, the national commercial and vastly popular alternative to the BBC, is broadcasting a programme known as a “Hypothetical”. The subject is Rushdie’s controversial book which has invited the fatwa from Ayatollah Ali Khomeini of Iran, has been protested against in the cities of the world, has caused the deaths of several people through their own intransigent and ill-judged protests of faithful objection and is now the subject of polite, liberal debate on British TV.
The programme takes the form of invitees from different walks of life with possible connections to the forbidden book being questioned by Geoffrey Robertson, a lawyer by profession and TV questioner by inclination as to their attitude to the above-mentioned book.
Among the gathering of believers and non-believers around the table are Farrukh Dhondy, commissioning editor for Channel Four, Mr Cat Stevens, a pop singer who now calls himself Yusuf Islam and wears the costume he thinks Muslims in general are known by and one (the late!) Mr Kalim Siddiqui, a bearded fellow who is the bag-man of the Iranian regime. His public mission is the furtherance of the regime of Iran as a legitimate power and to that end he has set up several front institutions, one of them at least absurdly calling itself The Islamic Parliament of Britain. (This struck me at the time as the Chinese restaurant owners of the city of Los Angeles setting themselves up as the Maoist Parliament of the US, but Britain is ever tolerant of idiocy.)
The programme begins. Mr Robertson delivers his peroration and begins his questioning. He soon comes round to Dhondy.
Robertson: “Now Farrukh, you commission films, so would you commission a film of the said book?”
FD thinks it over for a moment.
Dhondy: “Well, there seem to me to be three narratives in the said book and yes, if someone could produce a good screenplay, I would certainly commission the film from it.”
Consternation in the hall. Stevens/Islam and Siddiqui get to their feet. They point aggressively.
Siddiqui: “Kill him. Anyone who perpetrates this book in any from should die!”
Islam: “Yeah yeah yeah, Whisper words of wisdom, Don’t Let it Be.”
Dhondy (Voice Over): “These may not be his exact words, Your Honour, but what he said was backing the threat and passing the fatwa or buck!”
Robertson: “Let’s move on to…”
Siddiqui: “Kill him, kill him…”
The programme moves on (my kids tell me it lives on via the U-Tube!) and at the end the very worried producer asks me if I want to change hotels in order to get away from the people who’ve threatened my life.
I tell him I’ll stay put, barking dogs… etc but that night I push the writing table of my hotel room against the door.