There is little doubt that Salman Rushdie is a master story-teller, and his recent 600 page memoir is further proof, if proof be needed. But unlike his magically imaginative novels, this one is his very own grim real-life story, focusing primarily on the ten years of living life under an Iranian inspired fatwa a criminal death sentence pronounced on Rudshdie for daring to write critically and creatively about Islam in his marvellously sardonic and satirical Satanic Verses. But the real central protagonist, as I’m sure Mr Rushdie would agree, is not Mr Rushdie himself, but that half completed, ill-defined, largely forgotten creature of the 18th century, The European Enlightenment.

Rushdie’s is a story where reason and science, tolerance and diversity, scepticism and doubt are under sustained attack, from not just the fascistic Islamic Mullahs, but from all religions, all superstitions and all ossified dogmas. And Rushdie does a fine job of repudiating all the medieval clap-trap dressed up as god-sent immutable truth. Rushdie proves to be a true soldier, nay, a true general, in the fight to preserve and extend the ideals of the Enlightenment. True, he makes one relapse, one concession, one step back, in his crusade for the right to doubt, but that relapse is quickly acknowledged, and the battle is soon re-joined. I salute the man for his honesty and dogged determination under horrendous duress. I take my hat off to a great spokesman for the beleaguered forces of human progress and culture.

And yet there is something missing, something not quite right. There is no doubt that Rushdie is that steadfast combatant in the never-ending war against ignorance, superstition and bigotry, but at the very same time, he singularly fails to mention that other war that is also raging across our planet; the war against human want. Here is a war that sees five out of every seven citizens denied the most basic of human needs. A war that denies food and clean drinking water, basic health and housing provision, and a comprehensive education that would allow each and every one of us to reach the same cultural and material level that has wondrously befallen Mr Rushdie himself. It is a war that has been raging since the dawn of civilised man, a war whereby clever elites have magically expropriated the labours and wealth of the many. It is a class war that is currently unfashionable to talk about but one that is no less intense in spite of its unfashionability.

Consider this. These two wars, one against ignorance and one against human want, are inextricably linked, sometimes overlapping, sometimes running parallel and on occasion, even at odds with each other. And here is the rub. Great champion that Mr Rushdie has become against religious obscurantism and all that flows from it, there is no direct acknowledgement that such obscurantism flows directly out of the debilitating impoverishment of huge swathes of humanity, not least of course in his own native Indian sub-continent.

Not only is Mr Rushdie silent on the deeply dialectical relationship between these two parallel wars, he is at times quite dismissive of what he refers to as actually existing socialism. To equate, as Mr Rushdie does, the now defunct Soviet Union, complete with all its failures, mistakes and outright crimes, with the openly fascistic pronouncements of the Islamic Mullahs is simple sophistry of the worst type. The superficial parallels may be tempting for the lazy commentator but the essence of the two projects is fundamentally different, The Islamic Mullahs and their global adherents dream of a world-wide medieval caliphate under sharia law. Science and reason will be obliterated. The Soviet Union set out to liberate humanity by unshackling it from the inhumanity of global capital. Yes, it spectacularly failed in that mission through a complex tapestry of subjective and objective factors, some domestic and self-inflicted, others beyond its control. That failure to progress the human project, a failure we must all bear some responsibility for, resulted in a massive ideological vacuum to which the reactionary mullahs, priests and rabbis have been only too happy to fill. Rushdie must at least consider the uncomfortable premise that the forces of reaction will never be put back into their box until actually existing socialism re-assesses, regroups and rebuilds. Nature abhors a vacuum and either the forces of reaction or the forces of human progress will fill that political space. Rushdie cannot wash his hands of socialism any more than he can escape the forces of reaction that very nearly did for him. It seems self-evident that to protect and extend the European Enlightenment, itself a very flawed and incoherent phenomenon, we humans will need to break the nexus between human want and human greed. That is a political project as much as a philosophical one. And what could be more irrational than a tiny elite owning and controlling the global means of production while billions of us scrape a meagre existence from the crumbs off their dining tables? Of this Rushdie remains silent.

Enough of the preamble, on to the memoir itself. The thing comes dripping with wonderful philosophical insights on both a political nature and on the individual human condition. All humans are flawed, Rushdie not more or less than the rest of us, and he is not afraid to admit it. Personally, I’m not at all concerned if Rushdie is or is not a tad arrogant and haughty. He produces great literature that will, I suspect, last for centuries if not millennia. And he has principles by the bucket load and furthermore, has been prepared to put those principles on the line. Like most privately educated, Oxbridge graduates, he loves to let you know just how well read he is, and how well connected he is, but none of that detracts from his central theme, nor does it detract from the brilliance of his writing, which is only thing we ought to judge him on.

Rushdie sets out his stall early on. Commenting on the radical historical origins of his name. Rushdie, with a sweep of grandeur, some might say arrogance, has this to say:

At least, he told himself, when the storm broke over his head, I’m going into battle bearing the right name. From beyond the grave his father had given him the flag under which he was willing to fight, the flag of Ibn Rushd, which stood for intellect, argument, analysis and progress, for the freedom of philosophy and learning from the shackles of theology, for human reason and against blind faith, submission, acceptance and stagnation. Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called Rushdie and stand where your father had placed you, in the middle of the grand Aristotelian, Averroes, Abdul Walid Muhammed ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd. P23

Ok, it’s a bit pompous but at the same time it throws down the gauntlet to those shamans of all persuasions, past and present, that want to bind the rest of us to their superstitions while themselves living off the fat of the land. No wonder the Iranian mullahs had it in for him.
Rushdie is no slouch when it comes to a spot of historical research. My favourite few lines concern the nature of pre-Islamic society. The one thing that all religious charlatans have in common is their desire to close the book on what came before. They know damn well that if we plebs have a solid grounding in real history their incantations, diktats and holy pronouncements will simply melt away as the ridiculous hot air that they really are. Rushdie instinctively knows this and heads straight for the jugular:

They were nomads who had just begun to settle down. Their cities were new. Mecca was only a few generations old. Yathrib, later renamed Medina, was a group of encampments around an oasis without so much as a serious city wall. They were still uneasy in their new urbanised lives, and the changes made many of them unhappy. A nomadic society was conservative, full of rules, valuing the well-being of the group more highly than individual liberty, but it was also inclusive. The nomadic world had been a matriarchy. Under the umbrella of its extended families even orphaned children could find protection, and a sense of identity and belonging. All that was changing now. The city was a patriarchy and its preferred family unit was nuclear. The crowd of the disenfranchised grew larger and more restive every day. But, Mecca was prosperous, and its ruling elders liked it that way. Inheritance now followed the male line. This too, the governing families preferred. P41

Great stuff. Good history. Rushdie starts to deconstruct the origins of the Islamic religion, but it could equally be applied to its predecessors Judaism and Christianity. What is implied but not explicitly spelled out is the emerging class dimension that accompanies the transition from nomadic to settled communities. This is a key admission, for if Rushdie is to truly understand the nature of his tormentors he need recognise the exploitative class lurking behind the turbans and the beards. But what sort of class? A strange amalgam of feudal and petty-capitalist patriarchs maybe, but rest assured, the surplus value of one billion Muslims is being expropriated in every Muslim country as surely as it is in the western capitalist nations. The appearance of the oppression may vary but the essence is surely the same.

What makes Rushdie’s memoir so captivating is the ease in which he moves from the big questions of philosophy and politics to the humdrum of daily life and in particular family life. But Rushdie is adamant that family life is anything but humdrum and routine. For in the dreaded family lies, in microcosm, all of life’s dramas, great and small, that in the end, envelope us all. Here’s Rushdie in his own words:

People pretended there was no such thing as ordinary, such a thing as normal, and that was the public fantasy, far more escapist than the most escapist fiction, inside which they cocooned themselves. People retreated behind their front doors into the hidden zone of their private, family worlds and when outsiders asked how things were they answered, Oh, everything’s going along just fine, not much to report, situation normal. But everyone secretly knew that behind that door things were rarely humdrum. More typically, all hell was breaking loose, as people dealt with their angry fathers, drunken mothers, resentful siblings, mad aunts, lecherous uncles and crumbling grandparents. The family was not the firm foundation upon which society rested, but stood at the dark chaotic heart of everything that ailed us. It was not normal, but surreal; not humdrum, but filled with event; not ordinary but bizarre. P104

That’s the sort of passage all families should have pinned up in their kitchen just to remind themselves of what it is they are living through. It might just help to bring a modicum of sanity into the proceedings. But then again, I doubt it. Rushdie lays his own chaotic family business on the table plain for all his readers to admire and it is not always a pretty sight, but at least his memoir chimes with a resounding honesty.

One particularly enjoyable feature that Rushdie offers us is his imaginary, rhetorical, unsent letters to his many adversaries. In these letters he is free from the political and possible legal constraints of a letter intended to be sent. My favourite has to be the one directed to the Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, where the learned rabbi is given a good dressing down for his mealy-mouthed response to the on-going Satanic Verses saga. Here is Rushdie delivering his concluding remarks:

Think, Chief Rabbi, of the Rome of the Caesars. As it was with that great clan, so perhaps it is with the great world religions. No matter how much you may detest one another and seek to do one another down, you are all members of one family, occupants of the single House of God. When you feel that the House itself is threatened by mere outsiders, by the hell-bound armies of the irreligious, or even by a literary novelist, you close ranks with impressive alacrity and zeal. Roman soldiers marching into battle in close formation formed a testudo, or tortoise, the soldiers on the outside creating walls with their shield while those in the middle raised their shields over their heads to make a roof. So you and your colleagues, Chief Rabbi Jakobovits, have formed a tortoise of the faith. You do not care how stupid you look. You care only that the tortoise wall is strong enough to stand. P187

I think both Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens would be proud of that one. Rushdie’s memoir can proudly take its place alongside The God Delusion and God is not Great, as vital texts in the war against 21st century religious obscurantism in all its sickening forms. Remember also Salman that Karl Marx was also on the side of science and reason, no matter that his disparate band of followers often lost their way and found themselves in quasi-religious dead-ends. In the final instance, the struggle for a rational, humanistic communism and the struggle for the ideals of the Enlightenment cannot be separated.

Rushdie’s memoir is a day to day account of living under the Islamic fatwa and it is right and proper that I conclude this blog with Rushdie’s own summation of the real significance of that barbaric, terroristic pronouncement. With the sickening frequency of the Taliban blowing up schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the on-going machinations of the Zionist bigots, backed to the hilt by US imperialism, seeking, in the name of their bloodthirsty, revengeful god, to create a Greater Israel, Rushdie’s words take on an even greater poignancy than ever.

It was difficult not to admire the efficiency of his adversaries. Faxes and telexes flew from country to country, single-page documents with bullet points were circulated through mosques and other religious organisations, and pretty soon everyone was singing from the same song sheet. Modern information technology was being used in the service of retrograde ideas: the modern was being turned against itself by the medieval, in the service of a world view that disliked modernity itself rational, reasonable, innovative, secular, sceptical, challenging. Creative modernity, the antithesis of mystical, static, intolerant, stultifying faith. The rising tide of Islamic radicalism was described by its own ideologues as a revolt against history. History, the forward progress of peoples through time, was itself the enemy, more than any mere infidels or blasphemers. But the new, which was history’s supposedly despised creation, could be employed to revive the power of the old. P131

I would add only this, that if this is all absolutely true for militant Islam, it is equally true for the Christian fundamentalists in the US, the misogynist bigots in the Vatican, the Hindu fascists of the BJP in India, and of course the increasingly bellicose, racist and irrational Zionists of Israel. And the longer decrepit monopoly capitalism is allowed to plunder the planet the more breathing space the forces of feudal reaction will have to peddle their viscous, obscurantist nonsense

So it’s three cheers for Mr Rushdie and to all those that have the foresight and courage to make a stand.