Learning to Appreciate Rushdie in Pakistan

As a writer and journalist in Pakistan, it has taken me over three decades to appreciate Salman Rushdie and his work. 

It is not as though I grew up in a house without books. My father and grandfathers were all bibliophiles who could discuss books for hours. Sometime in the 1990s, I heard them talk about Rushdie – his roots in Bombay and what went wrong. When I asked what they were talking about, they did not specify anything in particular, but tried to explain that I should avoid disrespecting holy figures for there can be consequences. At the same time, my father acknowledged several times that Salman Rushdie was a genius.  

The next day I asked my Quran teacher for some guidance on the Rushdie controversy. Only a seven-year-old could have considered this a good idea! The young, lanky and bearded man flared up like never before. He depicted Rushdie as a monster who had written a book against the Prophet for which he had to be killed. He would like to perform the exalted deed of killing Rushdie himself, my teacher said. 

At that time, I didn't know the book was already over ten years old and that Rushdie didn't live in Pakistan. Also, I wasn't even aware that it was illegal to kill people, let alone understand a concept like the freedom of speech. So I accepted my teacher's opinion that Rushdie was a monster to be hated. 

Opening eyes

When Rushdie was knighted in 2007, the controversy around him was reignited. People around me felt bullied by the UK because it had knighted a person they found offensive. For some reason, they took it personally, just as they had two years earlier, when a Danish newspaper published some cartoons of the Prophet. That incident had led to days of violent outbursts in Pakistan – thousands of people protested, set motorcycles on fire and shut down Lahore's main roads and the Danish Embassy in Islamabad. 

It was chaos. A couple of people were killed and millions of rupees were lost in damage. The reaction seemed unreasonable bordering on absurd. Why would you burn a poor man's motorcycle because someone in Denmark published a cartoon? My Quran teacher had retired by then and my opinion of Rushdie had dampened a little. 

But this time I was old enough to access the internet. When I researched Rushdie online, I looked at his eyes and was reminded of my Quran teacher who had called him a monster. I later found out Rushdie had had ptosis and nearly lost his sight because of it. Much later, I saw that Rushdie had been among a dozen authors who had signed a statement in a French weekly, Charlie Hebdo, warning against Islamic "totalitarianism".

Also read: Salman Rushdie and the Story of India

Rushdie is intensely vilified in Pakistan to the extent that it is almost a uniting force for the nation. His books are banned and so is he, even though he has family connections and high-profile relatives in Pakistan. In 1990, International Gorillay, an Urdu film disparaging Rushdie, was released. In the film, Rushdie is a criminal sadist and stooge of the 'Jewish' lobby who plans to infest the world with bars, casinos, and brothels. Eventually, he is killed by flying copies of the Quran. 

The plot is as ludicrous as the graphics. But there are songs and some dances in the film to keep viewers entertained. The film was banned by the British Board of Film Classification, but Rushdie intervened to allow its release. Even so, it did not catch anyone's fancy in Britain. 

Discovery of a voice

By the time Rushdie won the Booker of Bookers, I had a fair idea about the partition of India and was interested in literature about it. My grandfather, a partition survivor, had finally broken his silence and gradually explained to me how dreadful that time was. I realised that Rushdie’s novel Midnight's Children deals with the 'great divide'. When I started studying at the University of Hong Kong, I borrowed his books from the library and my grandfather and I started reading his works. Our opinion of him gradually changed. 

However, I did not understand Midnight's Children. The prose was lyrical and non-linear and I could not follow it effectively. Still, I turned to YouTube and started listening to Rushdie speak. I found him funny, astute and acerbic. He spoke splendid UK English but had a profound understanding of the subcontinent. He even recited the poetry of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, at Emory University. Rushdie later revealed that he had named his firstborn after him. And then there were his fierce discussions with Christopher Hitchens about freedom, democracy, and censorship, among other things. They informed my understanding of these issues as a journalist. 

Also read: The Pain of Partition, as Seen in the Literature of Many Languages

I finally found an audiobook of Midnight’s Children produced by the BBC for the 50th anniversary of the partition. It was a dramatisation that included the street sounds of the subcontinent, native accents and a very moving background score using classical Indian instruments. This wonderful recording was probably intended to take the book to more people like me, who did not comprehend it well in the first place.

I listened to the joyful audiobook over and over until Saleem Sinai and his perplexing clan became as familiar to me as my own relatives. The book is a seminal work on Indian partition. I have read some of Rushdie's other works, but they have not had as much impact on me as Midnight's Children. 

One attack too many

Over the years, as I researched Rushdie and watched his speeches online, I began to see him as a distant friend whom I had never met. So when I heard that he had been attacked, it broke my heart. 

Rushdie had spoken with pride about surviving the fatwa. In the past few years, he had tried to move on from the controversy and recreate his life. He had shifted to New York to get his life back from the security apparatus in London which restricted his movements and privacy. His commitment to moving on and reclaiming his old freedom was commendable. He continued to write, teach and lecture.

Like most of us, I had not anticipated this attack. But I was also shocked to hear that Rushdie has no security these days. The attack made me depressed. It was a step back in time. Pakistan has experienced many high-profile deaths in the name of blasphemy. When Rushdie was attacked, I feared we would never hear his joyous voice again. 

Ammara Ahmad is a journalist and writer from Lahore. She tweets as @ammarawrites.

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