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Salman Rushdie discusses free speech, fundamentalism, America's place in the world, and his new essay collection
SALMAN RUSHDIE IS a political novelist whose political and novelistic instincts have long been in tension with each other. From age 15 he was drawn to the Marxist left, an attraction that eventually led him to the jungles of Nicaragua as a guest of the Sandinista regime. The result was 1987's The Jaguar Smile, which issued an overly optimistic account of Nicaragua's future under its socialist rulers. The book made Rushdie a darling of the left and a pariah among conservatives.
Rushdie's novelistic sensibility, in contrast to his political sensibility, is individualistic, even entrepreneurial: Even at age 58 he is a literary risktaker, a stance underscored by the title of his new essay collection, Step Across This Line.
At a time when Western writings about India were dominated by E. M. Forster-style nostalgia about the Raj, Rushdie wrote Midnight's Children (1980), an Indian perspective on the end of colonial rule. The book's most remarkable feature was that instead of adapting India to fit the prevailing English idiom and style, as most writers, Western and Indian, had done until then, Rushdie adapted English to fit India. He invented a whole new prose and narrative style to capture the colorful, chaotic, and cacophonous reality of his homeland. Breaking from cool Forsterian tones, Rushdie's prose has a frenetic energy that is enhanced by a generous peppering of Hindi and Urdu words used without italics, much less explanation, as if India's bustling polyglot cities leave no time for such linguistic courtesies.
Rushdie's literary iconoclasm derives not merely from the demands of his subject matter but from a deep personal instinct: his hatred of all orthodoxies, especially religious ones. Although he grew up in a Muslim household, he rejected his faith at a young age and still remains a resolute unbeliever. While Rushdie's literary iconoclasm has earned him a place in the pantheon of the world's great contemporary writers, his religious iconoclasm has not produced such happy results. His 1988 book The Satanic Verses included a parody of Islam that incensed Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, who charged Rushdie with apostasy and issued a fatwa calling for his death.
For years the fatwa forced Rushdie...