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INTERVIEWER
Did the fatwa shake your confidence as a writer?
RUSHDIE
It made me wobble a lot. Then, it made me take a very deep breath, and in a way, rededicate myself to the art, to think, Well, to hell with that. But at first what you feel is: That book took me more than five years to write. That’s five years of your life giving your absolute best effort to make a thing as good as you can possibly make it. I do believe that writers, in the act of writing, are very altruistic. They’re not thinking about money and fame. They’re just thinking about being the best writer they can be, making the page as good as it can be, making a sentence the best sentence you can write, the person interesting, and the theme developed. Getting it right is what you’re thinking about. The writing is so difficult and makes such demands of you that the response—sales and so on—doesn’t signify. So I spent five years like this, and what I got for it is worldwide vilification, and my life being threatened. But it wasn’t even so much to do with the physical danger as with the intellectual contempt, the denigration of the seriousness of the work, the idea that I was a worthless individual who had done a worthless thing, and that, unfortunately, there were a certain number of Western fellow travelers who agreed. Then you think, What the fuck am I doing it for? It’s not worth it. Just to spend five years of your life being as serious as you can be, and then to be accused of being frivolous and self-seeking, opportunistic: “He did it on purpose.” Of course I did it on purpose! How do you spend five years of your life doing something accidentally?
INTERVIEWER
When people said you did it on purpose, they meant you set out to provoke, that you asked for it. Were you conscious, while writing the book, that your secular take on Islam might be provocative?
RUSHDIE
I knew my work was not appealing to the likes of radical mullahs.
INTERVIEWER
Still, it’s a big leap from that to a fatwa.
RUSHDIE
Well that was, of course, something that nobody could have foreseen. Nobody. It had never happened before. It never occurred to me to wonder what they might think. |
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