Book Review: JOSEPH ANTON by Salman Rushdie

Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The bazaar of conflicting views was the place where freedom rang."

I write this praying for the recovery of the author, who only last month was stabbed in Chautauqua, New York, before he was to give a public lecture, attacked by a man trying to carry out a fatwa issued way back in 1989. It is incomprehensible to any decent human being how someone can behave so barbarously, how a religious fundamentalist can love "a particular interpretation of faith more than human life," so much so that he will charge onstage to execute a man condemned by a dead leader's edict 33 years ago.

The best bits about the memoir are the first 150 pages, where Rushdie the author writes of the events leading up to the fatwa, and the immediate aftermath. Salman the man takes over then, until the book's end at page 636. A major theme in the book was the fact that the man and the author are two distinct beings. The book certainly felt and read that way. Critics will find much to criticize in the longer second part, but the book's value lies (for this reader) in the beginning.

Here there is great beauty, like the explanation of his name. It comes from Ibn Rushd, known to the West as Averroës, the medieval Spanish-Arab philosopher. "From beyond the grave his father had given him the flag under which he was ready to fight... which stood for for intellect, argument, analysis and progress... the freedom of philosophy and learning from the shackles of theology, for human reason and against blind faith, submission, acceptance and stagnation."

Rushdie goes on: "Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it... stand where your father had placed you."

His discussion of the conflict between forces that seek to limit humans' perceptions and identities (exclusively identifying one's self by one's religion or one's political party, for instance) casts literature and art's opposing mission in a new light. While political and religious labels try to make infinite souls narrower, art and literature seek to expand our humanity.

Rushdie warns: "The narrower their identities became, the greater was the likelihood of conflict between them."

Let the conflict remain in the realm of ideas, he entreats. Let this right to free speech be defended by all civilized people.

The true enemy is rage. "Rage killed the mind, and now more than ever the mind needed to live, to find a way of rising above the mindlessness."

Rushdie observed how a vast majority of those who called for his death and persecution had never even read the book that inspired such hatred. This reader can attest to how difficult it is to get a hold of a copy of these books, but we need to try. Because we cannot, we should not, ever make the dishonest mistake of condemning something we have not seen, nor read for ourselves.

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