Salman Rushdie on the burning of The Satanic Verses
30 Mar 2022
Salman Rushdie talks about the burning of his book The Satanic Verses in Bradford that day, and about the decision by WH Smith to withdraw the book from sale in their stores.
Salmon Rushdie:
Good evening, I am Salman Rushdie, I’m a novelist. [Applause] And I just have to say that it’s – this is for me, it’s a very sadly appropriate day to be at an event against censorship, because today in Bradford 1,000 militant Muslims met at the town hall and burned copies of my new novel, The Satanic Verses, this one, on the grounds of alleged blasphemy. Now, I think many of us will find the idea of burning a book pretty revolting, and I think it’s an indication of not only the force of militant Islam in the modern world, but also it seems to me that of the growth of the beginnings of a movement very like the fascist movements of the past. And I think it’s a movement that we all need to take some notice of, it rather changes the political agenda and complicates it in many ways, but there it is. To exacerbate that, I should say that I heard this evening, about a couple of hours before I came here, that in response to this act of book burning WH Smith & Sons have decided to withdraw my novel [booing and hissing] from all their branches in England. Now, well I’m glad you agree [laughs]. There is a petition which has been very rapidly got together by the folks here, and if you wish then please sign it as you leave, and we can send it to WH Smith on Monday and tell them what we feel. I thought that what I would do – I mean the only thing to do in the face of terrorism and censorship is to read the thing that is being banned and attacked and burned. And so I thought that I would read you a few small sections of this very long novel, some of the sections which its so-called opponents, who by and large share one quality which is that they haven’t read the book [all laugh], but some of the passages that they claim to be objecting to. Now I should say in parenthesis that all these passages are in fact dream sequences, they’re – one of the characters in the novel, a movie star who’s losing his mind and is beginning to believe that he might be the Archangel Gabriel, is beginning to have curious surreal dreams in which he seems to live out various scenes from the life of the Archangel. And of course, one of the more distinguished events in the career of the Archangel Gabriel was to – as the person – as the figure who brought the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. However, because this is a dream things are transformed, the Prophet in the novel is not called Muhammad, the city in the novel is not Mecca, and in many other ways the event has the kind of fabulations that one might expect from a dream. I thought I’d just read you a few small passages from this section of the book. The Prophet in the novel, not unlike the real-life Muhammad, was rather strange in that he until the age of forty was a very successful businessman and at the age of forty began seeing the revelations which, in the case of Muhammad, became the Quran. So this is a description of the Prophet. One of the things I should say is that the novel has been talked about in terms – by militant Muslims in terms which seem to me to grossly falsify what it contains. And this is the reason I’m reading this particular little piece is because one of the things I’ve been accused of doing is to call Muhammad in the novel the devil, and one of the reasons for this has been given is that the name given to the dream Prophet in the novel is the name Mahound, which in the Middle Ages was indeed a name used by crusaders and by militant Christians as a term of abuse, and it was in fact the name of the devil. One of the things this novel is about is about trying to reclaim negative images. It’s about trying to turn images that have been used against people to their service. For example, in the novel there are Asians it seems to me are people who are immigrants, they’ve been frequently referred to as devils, and one of the things this novel is is the devil’s view.
Good evening, I am Salman Rushdie, I’m a novelist. [Applause] And I just have to say that it’s – this is for me, it’s a very sadly appropriate day to be at an event against censorship, because today in Bradford 1,000 militant Muslims met at the town hall and burned copies of my new novel, The Satanic Verses, this one, on the grounds of alleged blasphemy. Now, I think many of us will find the idea of burning a book pretty revolting, and I think it’s an indication of not only the force of militant Islam in the modern world, but also it seems to me that of the growth of the beginnings of a movement very like the fascist movements of the past. And I think it’s a movement that we all need to take some notice of, it rather changes the political agenda and complicates it in many ways, but there it is. To exacerbate that, I should say that I heard this evening, about a couple of hours before I came here, that in response to this act of book burning WH Smith & Sons have decided to withdraw my novel [booing and hissing] from all their branches in England. Now, well I’m glad you agree [laughs]. There is a petition which has been very rapidly got together by the folks here, and if you wish then please sign it as you leave, and we can send it to WH Smith on Monday and tell them what we feel. I thought that what I would do – I mean the only thing to do in the face of terrorism and censorship is to read the thing that is being banned and attacked and burned. And so I thought that I would read you a few small sections of this very long novel, some of the sections which its so-called opponents, who by and large share one quality which is that they haven’t read the book [all laugh], but some of the passages that they claim to be objecting to. Now I should say in parenthesis that all these passages are in fact dream sequences, they’re – one of the characters in the novel, a movie star who’s losing his mind and is beginning to believe that he might be the Archangel Gabriel, is beginning to have curious surreal dreams in which he seems to live out various scenes from the life of the Archangel. And of course, one of the more distinguished events in the career of the Archangel Gabriel was to – as the person – as the figure who brought the Quran to the Prophet Muhammad. However, because this is a dream things are transformed, the Prophet in the novel is not called Muhammad, the city in the novel is not Mecca, and in many other ways the event has the kind of fabulations that one might expect from a dream. I thought I’d just read you a few small passages from this section of the book. The Prophet in the novel, not unlike the real-life Muhammad, was rather strange in that he until the age of forty was a very successful businessman and at the age of forty began seeing the revelations which, in the case of Muhammad, became the Quran. So this is a description of the Prophet. One of the things I should say is that the novel has been talked about in terms – by militant Muslims in terms which seem to me to grossly falsify what it contains. And this is the reason I’m reading this particular little piece is because one of the things I’ve been accused of doing is to call Muhammad in the novel the devil, and one of the reasons for this has been given is that the name given to the dream Prophet in the novel is the name Mahound, which in the Middle Ages was indeed a name used by crusaders and by militant Christians as a term of abuse, and it was in fact the name of the devil. One of the things this novel is about is about trying to reclaim negative images. It’s about trying to turn images that have been used against people to their service. For example, in the novel there are Asians it seems to me are people who are immigrants, they’ve been frequently referred to as devils, and one of the things this novel is is the devil’s view.
