Salman Rushdie, Free Speech, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories
I. Salman Rushdie's Biography
On June 19, 1947, Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India. He received his M.A. from Kings College, Cambridge. The same year, 1968, he became an actor in London. From 1970-80, he had a job being a free-lance advertising copywriter. In 1975, he began his authorial carreer with the publication of Grimus. He went on to write novels such as Midnight's Children (1980), Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), andHaroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). His authorial carreer has not gone very smoothly however. After the publication of The Satanic Verses, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a FATWA in which he states:
I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses book which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all involved in its publication who were aware of its content are sentenced to death.
It took over a week for the British and American governments to respond to Khomeini's FATWA and eight days for the first editorial to speak out against Khomeini's actions to appear in the New York Times. Many countries had already banned the book and even more did after the FATWA. Riots broke out in Bombay and Great Britain and bookstores in the United States, Great Britain, Norway, and Australia were bombed. That year, 1989, Rushdie went into hiding bcause the Ayatollah Khomeini announced that whoever killed him would be rewarded $5 million. After that announcement Rushdie was, of course, being hunted throughout the world.
In 1990, Salman Rushdie published his first book since The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories . Rushdie wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories as a children's book; however, there are countless motifs, allusions, and symbols that would be almost impossible to catch in the first reading. Haroun and the Sea of Stories is about the sacredness of words and language which became especially important to Rushdie after the uproar over The Satanic Verses . There are many references to what happened to him after the publication of The Satanic Verses. Khattam-Shud is the leader of Chup, a country of silence, who is polluting the Ocean of the Streams of Story to completely abolish words and language. The Ayatollah Khomeini issued the FATWA for Salman Rushdie to abolish his ability to tell stories which furthured the fight against free speech and language.
The Gup culture in the novel worships language and words. The Gups are gregarious and love to debate every side of an issue before they take any action which makes it difficult to get anything done. However, their insistence on debating about everything turns out to be an important asset at the end of the novel. When the Chup and Gup culture battle at the end, the Gup culture prevails because their communication with one another helps them have a strategy, whereas the Chup culture does not communicate during the battle and faces the consequences of a lack of strategy. The Gups victory symbolizes the victory of language and words over censorship.
Rushdie has begun to make more and more public appearances and almost all of the hype about The Satanic Verses has died down. In 1995, Iran ceased to support any more assassination attempts on Rushdie. Salman Rushdie won a victory for free speech and language, as the Gups did, by surviving six years of this manhunt and for not stopping his fight for free speech.
II. Salman Rushdie and Free Speech
Khomeini's fatwa had an interesting effect on the publishing world. Western scholars who spoke out against Khomeini's actions likened the fatwa to a form of censorship they labeled, "the chilling of the freedom of expression." The largest retail booksellers in the United States, B.Dalton, Waldenbooks, and Barnes and Noble, refused to carry Rushdie's book fearing retaliation from extremist Islamic groups. Some retail chains stopped carrying books critical of Islam all together. What Khomeini did, essentially, was to silence Rushdie's ideas by targeting not only the author himself, but also on a larger scale, initiating an act of state terrorism against a single individual left virtually unprotected by either the United States or British governments. Many of Khomeini's followers and advocates surmised that Rushdie and Penguin Publishers were little more than pawns in a large scale conspiracy by the West against the entire Islamic culture. Those individuals were under the impression that Khomeini's threats were necessary to secure the Islamic culture from Western attacks.
The issue that these ideas raises is that, while Khomeini was definitely unjustified in placing a death warrant on Rushdie, to a degree, Rushdie himself was irresponsible in publishing a volatile, yet esoteric work that spoke out against Islam and was intended for audiences largely unfamiliar with the intricacies of the Islamic religion. Rushdie's response to these accusations was that he wrote a fictional account of the origins of Islam, not a critical analysis, and therefore it could not be debated. This parallels Haroun's question, "What's the point of stories that aren't even true?" For many Muslims, this was exactly the response given to Rushdie's work: what's the point of writing a book that isn't true yet obviously offends many Muslims? Did the fictitious nature of The Satanic Verses absolve Rushdie of accountability for the controversy he caused? Or, did the fact that it was fiction make it even more a target for criticism?
This also raises the issue of the peculiar nature of free speech: it is not an inherent, natural right, but rather one that must be procured through conflict with institutions and people who disagree and wish to censor the given work. Salman Rushdie once said, "What is the freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist." Rushdie has long been an advocate of free speech, even before the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses. He has often asserted that there must always be suppression of free expression before anyone can actualize it as a right. The value of individual expression is obviously crucial to the survival of a free society, but as Rushdie points out you cannot truly have a right to individual expression without some institution that wishes to oppose it. Rushdie also asserts that authors should be absolute in their criticism. In his critique of Islam, a culture that Rushdie views as extreme in The Satanic Verses, he feels that he must be just as extreme and absolute.
How Iran responded to Rushdie's "absolute critique" was probably more extreme than even Rushdie felt that the Iranian government was capable of. Through essentially terrorizing publishers, booksellers, and libraries, Khomeini and his followers were able to wage a six year war on Rushdie, Penguin Publishers, and the public intellectual discourse at large by inhibiting the free flow of ideas to occur within an academic or even quasi-academic framework. What Khomeini and Muslim extremists did not realize, however, is that ideas live beyond their authors. Even if Iran were successful in assassinating Rushdie, the ideas expressed in The Satanic Verses would inevitably survive. Before Iran could revoke the death warrant, however, Khomeini's fatwa was responsible for multiple deaths in three different countries and bannings out of pure fear of the work throughout the world.
For further information on free speech and Salman Rushdie link to: Peter Graham's presentation on free speech, an informative speech regarding Rushdie's role in free speech struggles since the The Satanic Verses was published.
III. Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Haroun and the Sea of Stories, being Rushdie's first book published after The Satanic Verses, mirrors many of Rushdie's sentiments about Iran's treatment of him and his work (see above). Ostensibly a children's story, Haroun and the Sea of Stories is written as a very recognizable code about words, censorship, and code itself.
The novel is full of allusions to both traditional tales and modern culture. The frame story in the book can be directly related to One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, a work that is specifically refered to several times in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Some subtle and some outright allusions to traditional stories like Alice in Wonderland and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp suggest many different themes that are included in these stories, and they also add to the fairytale motif. More modern allusions, including songs by the Beatles and even UFOs, give the book a dreamlike atmosphere, mixing various mediums and eras of work.
Although the overriding theme can be seen as the triumph of language over censorship, the book also presents a need for opposition. Both dark and light are needed on the moon Kahani, as are both speech and silence. Instead of a destruction of one society, the two societies on the moon discover the good in having the opposite as well.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories is full of foreshadowing, word play, and imagery, as any book about stories should be. His use of water imagery in relation to stories is particularly brilliant. At the end of the novel, as the citizens of the city Kahani rejoice over their newfound name, water pours from the sky, suggesting the lasting happiness that language can bring. Showing the memory of the name Kahani, which happens to mean story, as the one thing that can make a sad city happy, Rushdie implies the vast importance that words have. Representing stories by an ocean is no mistake on Rushdie's part. Water is essential for life, can be very beneficial or very frightening (as in a storm), and oceans flow and mix together in much the same way that stories do. By playing with the meanings of words and having characters named Iff and Butt, there is a general questioning of things that is suggested, emphasizing Rushdie's desire for the questioning of censoring governments. Rushdie fills the book with multiple other allusions as mentioned above, each of which adds its own flavor to the novel.
IV. Questions Addressed in Class
1. Why are there so many literary and cultural allusions in the novel?
2. What is the relation of P2C2E to religion?
3. What do you make, knowing Rushdie's history, of Rahsid, the storyteller, not being able to tell stories about himself?
4. What's the use of stories that aren't even true, or what relation does this question have to the novel overall?
References
Graham, Peter S. "Free Speech and Salman Rushdie." The Journal of the Rutgers University Library: June 1989. Vol. 51.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. Granta Books: London, 1991.
Ruthven, Malise. A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Rage of Islam. Chatto & Windus: London, 1989.
Turkoz, Semseddin. "The Satanic Verses is libel against Islam." The Tech: February 1989. Vol. 109.
This report posted by Claire Huie (particularly section I.), Erik Marshall (section II.), and Morgan Denney (sections III. and IV.) on March 31, 1997.