NOT A PROPHET SALMAN RUSHDIE'S JOSEPH ANTON

1 5 0 Y N O T A P R O P H E T R A C H E L T R O U S D A L E I spent the evening of 10 September 2001 rereading the opening of The Satanic Verses. At the beginning of the novel, the two main characters fall from the sky after the airplane in which they are travelling is blown up by terrorists. I was writing a dissertation on Rushdie, and the novel had started to dominate my thoughts. The next morning, the story had expanded beyond the bounds of the book, and now the whole country shared my horrified vision of exploding airplanes and falling bodies. Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton: A Memoir describes a more complete and complex translation of his novel into reality: it tells the story of his eleven years in hiding under the protection of the British government after the Ayatollah Khomeini sentenced him to death for the alleged insults to Islam in The Satanic Verses. Rushdie’s memoir is framed by his experiences of the World Trade Center, beginning with his first night in New York in the 1970s when friends took him to Windows on the World to look out J o s e p h A n t o n : A M e m o i r, by Salman Rushdie (Random House, 636 pp., $30.00) 1 5 1 R over Manhattan and ending on the morning of 11 September when he watched the destruction of the towers on a hotel television. What comes between these images is a tale of how the apparently personal experience of reading and writing takes on geopolitical significance; how novels can and cannot predict the future; how the literary community responded to a new kind of censorship; and how Rushdie’s case was a harbinger of things to come, marking the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new tension between secular and fundamentalist societies. One of the main subjects of The Satanic Verses is how the dramas of history echo in our lives – and how our responses a√ect the next round.Soitisperverselyappropriatethatthisnovelwastotransform its author from a successful but private individual into a polarizing public figure. That change, and its significance for international diplomacy, is an apt outcome from a novel which both historicizes the life of the prophet Muhammad and imagines the physical transformation of a present-day migrant into a horned, hoofed devil. Joseph Anton is in many ways a companion piece to The Satanic Verses, not just because it chronicles the e√ects of what came to be called the ‘‘Rushdie a√air’’ on Rushdie, his family, his friends, and his publishers, but because it returns to the same central concern with the relationship between history and the individual. In his memoir, Rushdie presents himself as one of the first residents of a secular Western country to be directly threatened by militant Islam ; the fatwa, he suggests, was a sign of how Islamic fundamentalism would change life in the West after the planes hit the towers. Rushdie’s life began at a moment of great historical change: he was born in Bombay (Mumbai) on 19 June 1947, less than two months before India achieved independence from Britain. The child of a secular Muslim family, he was educated at the Cathedral School in Bombay, then at Rugby School in England, and finally at Cambridge . His first novel, Grimus, was published in 1975. His second, Midnight’s Children, won the Booker Prize in 1981, ensuring that Rushdie’s subsequent works would receive significant publicity. This meant good press for Shame in 1983, but for The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, it meant that the book came to the attention of critics whose evaluation was not based on its merits as fiction. 1 5 2 T R O U S D A L E Y Rushdie was no stranger to controversy. During a brief sojourn working in television in Pakistan after college, he butted heads with the censors: in Imaginary Homelands he describes how a production of Edward Albee’s Zoo Story had to have the word pork excised...