Salman Rushdie discusses his experiences as a marked man, life in New York, and his participation in a music video with CBS News Sunday Morning reporter Martha Teichner as they eat hot dogs on the Coney Island beachfront.
The author of “The Satanic Verses,” Salman Rushdie, is still in good health. He no longer has bodyguards or death threats from Iraninan since he now resides in New York City.
Rushdie said, “That’s all I ever wanted, so I’m just going down to the everyday job of being a writer,” and he was delighted to be there.
Rushdie now feels secure when wandering the streets of the city where, not so long ago, the controversy around his book put his life in danger. Fundamentalist Muslims said “The Satanic Verses” mocked Islam.
They backed the 1989 fatwa, or decree, issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini demanding the execution of Rushdie.
Finally, in 1998, Iranian government representatives struck a deal that gave Rushdie a reprieve in return for the reestablishment of diplomatic ties with the United Kingdom.
Salman Rushdie has a special knowledge of the September 11 assaults on the United States since he spent nine years being the target of religious vengeance.
“I find it fascinating that in this year that has passed, not only have people recovered emotionally from it, but that they have learnt… what I have always regarded to be the most crucial lesson of how you confront terrorism, which is that you do not become afraid.” Rushdie said.
“I had some personal lived knowledge of this type of stuff because of the accidents in my life, which I think provided me some weapons with which to tackle it.”
He thinks there is a global conflict taking on inside the Islamic faith over the right to free thinking.
“After September 11, I saw how many individuals made a strong effort to claim the attacks had nothing to do with religion; they were not related to Islam, they said. There was another topic involved “said he.
“You know, it wasn’t really about Disneyland. It was unrelated to chess.
Of course, Islam was mentioned. It was about a repulsive and obsessive interpretation of Islam, but to claim otherwise would be to completely miss the point.”
Rushdie states in his most recent book, in the final two articles, that “religion is the poison of the blood.”
According to Martha Teichner, that is a very forceful remark, particularly in light of the fact that children are being burnt alive in Gujarat, India, in the name of religion, or that aircraft are being used to slam into buildings.
We all crossed a frontier that day, an invisible line dividing the conceivable from the impossible, according to Rushdie.
“Like every writer in the world, I am trying to find a manner of writing after September 11, a day that has become something like a borderline,” he said.
And it ended up being the unthinkable that really happened.
Rushdie’s most recent book is an anthology of essays and journalism.
The book’s title, “Step Across This Line,” comes from a series of lectures Rushdie delivered in February at Yale University.
It is about borders — both literal and abstract barriers — and crossing them. Salman Rushdie is aware of this.
Rushdie said that migration was the genuine reality of his existence. “It has to do with relocating and dealing with the effects of that type of relocation, you know.
And I believe that has been the topic of my work.”
Rushdie claims that when out on a stroll at Coney Island, Brooklyn, he was drawn to New York because he thought it to be the hub of the action.
Rushdie published “Fury,” a comic book about an Indian who is somewhat Rushdie-like and who, like his creator, comes from England to New York at that incredible time, just before the bubble bursts, as soon as he arrived in New York in 1999.
In America, the idea of limitless riches and opportunity was already fading. As in the late 1990s, the city wasn’t awash with cash.
Because I’ve always been a sucker for life’s popular culture, Rushdie replied, “The task is merely to be attentive, you know — to tiny things as well as huge.”
According to Martha Teichner, they were searching for the cultural jumble that drew Rushdie to New York City.
They eventually arrived to Coney Island, the same place he had brought his five-year-old kid the week before.
Rushdie’s parents were wealthy, multicultural, and not very devout Muslims.
However, they were so alarmed by the prospect of persecution in a primarily Hindu nation that they relocated from New Delhi to Bombay, which was India’s most liberal metropolis.
Salman Rushdie was sent to an English boarding school when he was 13 years old.
He developed a fascination for rock and roll. It brought him to a foreign location hundreds of miles from his home, where he began a love affair that would last the rest of his life and found the inspiration for all twelve of his works.
Rushdie said, “We all got Elvis at the same moment as you did. “So you’re sitting in Bombay at the age of nine and listening to “Rock Around the Clock.”
The fact that rock and roll was the first international cultural movement is one of the factors that makes it so fascinating.”
In the instance of “The Ground Beneath Her Feet,” a 1999 book, it gave his tales a physical soundtrack.
A rock ‘n’ roll epic, that. So Salman Rushdie creates a song for one of his key characters who is a rock star.
U2’s Bono then composes the music. Then he realised he was in the movie.
Rushdie said, “He’d contacted me and said he’d composed this music and he really loved it.” “Then I really travelled to Dublin, and he became pretty anxious.
He forced me to sit in his vehicle since there was no one else around. And played it for me on Bono’s car’s sound system, which is different from your car’s. Fortunately, I found it appealing immediately away.”
Rushdie believes that fiction may become truth and fact can become fiction. In the movie “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” he portrays his literary superstar self at Cambridge University. He wrote less than he did acting.
He is, however, content to leave acting to Padma Lakshmi, his actress, model, and ex-cook show host girlfriend, who made her American film debut in the Mariah Carey vehicle “Glitter.”
“She possesses skills that I lack. She’s just finished filming another one, after all “Rushdie laughed and said.
“I don’t have a career in film, but she does. However, I’m completely open to offers.”
He enjoys being happy right now. After three failed marriages and difficult child separations, he is content.
He is content to put the Fatwa and the harm it caused in the past and welcomes recognition for his true self and the calibre of his writing.
Rushdie remarked, “It was to me the worst damage of the whole thing.” “I’m talking about how people perceived me differently than who I actually am.
People assume I must be a dark, unfunny, obscure theological person because of this dark, unfunny, kind of theological thing. I’m not; in fact, I’m this way (laughter).”
Some people could think that Rushdie’s famous status is a result of the threats against him.
However, he claims that before the threat to his life, he had been a very well-known writer for ten years. He thinks that the fatwah did not create him.
“The Satanic Verses” was Rushdie’s sixth novel, he said. “I mean, you know, it’s a horrible destiny to become renowned for the wrong thing. You also spend.
I mean, I’ve been trying to get out from beneath it for the last twelve years of my life. To have less notoriety for doing the right thing would make me pleased.”
Salman Rushdie and the city he has selected for his most recent move have a lot of similarities. His biggest dread has come true.
He concludes his most recent work in the following manner: “The frontier both moulds our personalities and puts our mettle to the test.
Will we become the suits of armour that our fear compels us to put on, or will we remain as we are? I hope we succeed on the exam.”