When Salman Rushdie’s Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992-2002 was published in 2002, I read it cover-to-cover. His essays became my bedtime stories — and opportunities for politico-cultural ruminations — for several weeks thereafter. Reading it again some two years later, I can’t help but feel a bit giddy at times as I alternate between thinking, “he gets it,” and longing for Rushdie to produce another collection of essays if for no other reason than to flirt with my wit, and offer me insightful new perspectives that remain pertinent this political season.

The essays cover a huge amount of territory: temporally, geographically, and culturally. He reflects on both his first screening of The Wizard of Oz as a young child in India in “Out of Kansas,” and his attendance at a Rolling Stones concert in “In the Voodoo Lounge.” He pays homage to literary greats J.M. Coetzee, Edward Said, and Arundhati Roy, and muses on both the predatory nature of photography in “On Being Photographed,” and the value of the press “in keeping the issues alive” in “Farming Ostriches.”

Now transplanted in, but never wholly of, the United States, Rushdie explores the mundane with a high-caliber literary brilliance. Throughout, Rushdie’s fascination — even boy-like obsession — with contemporary culture is linked to politics. The perfect example of this is his tale of joining U2 onstage during a concert and his admiration of Bono’s success at “reducing Jesse Helms — Jesse Helms! — to tears, winning his support for the campaign against Third World debt.”

For Rushdie, though, it’s not simply such acts of cross-cultural solidarity or unions of the Left that constitute politics. Rather, Rushdie finds politics in the very act of frontier-crossing inherent in both reading and writing: opening one’s eyes, elevating one’s consciousness, allowing oneself to be simultaneously astute and vulnerable to political and moral malleability. As the author explains in “Step Across This Line: The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Yale, 2002”:

To cross a frontier is to be transformed … At the frontier we can’t avoid the truth; the comforting layers of the quotidian, which insulate us against the world’s harsher realities, are stripped away and wide-eyed in the harsh fluorescent light of the frontier’s windowless halls, we see things as they are … At the frontier our liberty is stripped away — we hope temporarily — and we enter the universe of control. Even the freest of free societies are unfree at the edge, where things and people go out and other people must go in and out. Here, at the edge, we submit to scrutiny, to inspection, to judgment. These people, guarding these lines, must tell us who we are. We must be passive, docile. To be otherwise is to be suspect, and at the frontier to come under suspicion is the worst of all possible crimes … what we mean when we reduce ourselves to these simple statements is, I’m not anything you need to bother about, really I’m not … I am simple. Let me pass.

Did I step across that line and let myself be challenged the last time I read Rushdie’s essays? Certainly. Many times. And re-reading Step Across This Line some two years later, I get the feeling that I’m being questioned once again. This time, though, I cannot help but read from a slightly different position — that of an American who, since her first reading, has seen this country wage a unilateral war in the name of securing the world from terrorism — under the leadership of a man who scarcely knew the names of foreign leaders when he came into office four years ago and who may again win another tight election, even though he has alienated most of those whose names he has since managed to learn.

“About Islam”

Rushdie’s insight on U.S. domestic and foreign policy demands our attention in this election year — even if the publication date makes his essays appear outdated at first glance. Given the author’s personal experience with terrorism in the form of a fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini calling for Rushdie’s assassination, the essays offer a unique perspective on the United States’ war on terrorism — likely the deciding factor for many voters. Perhaps predictably, this traumatic experience, which forced Rushdie to go into hiding until the Ayatollah’s 1998 death, has forever changed his life, his politics, and his characterization of Islamic “extremists.”

Born to Muslim parents in India, Rushdie vehemently criticizes what he calls “militant Islam” in several selections in Step Across This Line at a time when demonizing Islam and conflating it with terrorism isn’t exactly politically correct. Somewhere in the process, he contributes to a political reality that may burn as many bridges as many of his other essays seek build.

Consider, for instance, his seemingly trite, yet highly personal and deeply internalized, position concerning the causes of September 11 and the resulting war on terrorism in his November 2001 essay “Not About Islam?”:

Let’s start by calling a spade a spade. Of course this is ‘about Islam.’ The question is, what exactly does that mean? After all, most religious belief isn’t very theological. Most Muslims are not profound Quaranic analysts. For a vast number of ‘believing’ Muslim men, ‘Islam’ stands, in a jumbled, half-examined way, not only for the fear of God — the fear more than the love, one suspects — but also for a cluster of customs, opinions, and prejudices that include their dietary practices; the sequestration or near-sequestration of ‘their’ women; the sermons delivered by their mullah of choice; a loathing of modern society in general, riddled as it is with music, godlessness, and sex; and a more particularized loathing (and fear) of the prospect that their own immediate surroundings could be taken over — ‘Westoxicated’ — by the liberal Western-style way of life.

Highly motivated organizations of Muslim men (oh, for the voices of Muslim women to be heard!) have been engaged, over the last thirty years or so, on growing radical political movements out of this mulch of ‘belief.’ These Islamists …  include the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, the blood-soaked combatants of the FIS and GIA in Algeria, the Shia revolutionaries of Iran, and the Taliban. Poverty is their great helper, and the fruit of their efforts is paranoia.

In this passage and numerous others in Step Across This Line, Rushdie can, at times, seem reminiscent of Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington, whose “Clash of Civilizations” thesis foreboded that the post-Cold War world would be fraught with civilization-changing wars between Eastern and Western religions and cultures, with Islam playing a central role. In progressive academic circles, Huntington has long been heavily criticized for his oversimplified characterization of Islam and of relationships between peoples across cultures.

But when Rushdie makes such statements, they seem to reflect authenticity; one cannot simply dismiss the speaker’s words as racist or essentialist. Not only does Rushdie hail from a part of the world and a history where conflict is often the norm, but the Anglo Indian writer-in-exile has literally had his very existence at stake and been affected by so-called terrorism more intimately than almost any American politician waging the war on terrorism. It also doesn’t hurt that Rushdie, in his usual fashion, tells his own narrative in such a compelling manner in “Messages from the Plague Years” that even opponents and skeptics of the war on terrorism can’t help but empathize with Rushdie’s alienation. He has been shunned not only by Iran, but also by his Indian homeland, which quickly renounced The Satanic Verses as anti-Muslim, even though, as the satirist-novelist suggested in a recent interview with St. Petersburg Times writer Margo Hammond, the book was actually intended to depict metropolitan life in Thatcherite London.

At the very least, Rushdie invites those on the Left — many who oppose everything from the war on terrorism to the war in Iraq to the Bush administration — to reconsider the way in which their position allows them to divorce themselves from genuine political action. It also encourages us to consider how — and if — one can reconcile discriminating against “militant Muslims” while demanding that civil liberties and freedom of speech not be sacrificed in the name of the war on terrorism.

“It Wasn’t Me”

On the other hand, Rushdie’s book, which was published prior to the Bush Administration’s March 2003 declaration of war on Iraq, can seem outdated when read in the context of the 2004 election. That is, his demonization of so-called militant Islam certainly has some relevance today, but it cannot effectively address the question that has dominated much of the 2004 campaign: Why did the Bush Administration invade Iraq unilaterally when the Presiden allegedly knew all along that Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction?

While many leftist writers and publications dubbed Rushdie a “Hawk” when, citing the terrible toll taken on the Iraqi people under Saddam, he voiced his support for the dictator’s overthrow, Rushdie has never gone so far as to support Bush’s war. Last month he told C.F. Niles of the People’s Weekly World Newspaper, “President Bush did not tell the truth to the United Nations. Things in Iraq are not getting better, they are getting worse. This is not my opinion — everybody knows that Bush is just electioneering …”

Perhaps Rushdie was borrowing a page from his own book here. Some three years ago, writing about Bush’s claim that there was no proven link between greenhouse gases and global warming in his April 2001 essay “It Wasn’t Me,” Rushdie relayed, “The president has a big microphone, and if he goes on repeating his claims, he may even make them stick for a long, damaging time.” When I initially read “It Wasn’t Me” — an essay suggesting how fitting Shaggy’s hit single (about a man denying an affair even when his girlfriend witnessed him in the act) is at a time where denial keeps the world spinning ‘round, I didn’t fully appreciate Rushdie’s accuracy. Today, however, the truth that those in high places can right their wrongs with countless doses of denial is more evident.

After reading Step Across This Line in the current election milieu, I was repeatedly reminded of President Bush’s insistence that he had made the right choice in unilaterally invading Iraq, even though he justified that invasion with the false information that Saddam did indeed have weapons of mass destruction. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and many others have conceded, to some extent, that Bush misled the American public to invade Iraq, and yet billions of dollars and thousands of lost lives later, he remains poised to win a second term. Perhaps the best support for Rushdie’s argument comes from an October 22 Boston Globe article, which reveals that “A large majority of self-identified Bush voters polled believe Saddam Hussein provided ‘substantial support’ to Al Qaeda, and 47 percent believe that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the US invasion.” All of this despite a flood of stories and high profile reports to the contrary. Bush is apparently at the center of it all — he is, after all, the one with the microphone, as Rushdie says — and everyone else just can’t quite capture the attention of diehard Bush followers. No one else gets as much air time to deny, deny, deny.

Four years none the wiser: Lessons from 2000

Of course, while the free speech — er, free denial — of one American man is helping this election shape up to be as close or closer than the last, the outcome will affect far more than the American people. As Rushdie wrote in his essay entitled Senator Liberman” four years ago, “The citizens of the rest of the world [are] already disconcerted that only about 30 percent of American voters feel it’s worth bothering to vote at all, and the thought that the relative perceived holiness [of the candidates] may be of decisive importance does nothing to reassure us … Today, even the United States’ friends are beginning to wish a Rest of the World candidate were permitted to run. We all live under the aegis of the American Empire’s unchallenged might, so the victorious candidate will be our president, too.”

If Rushdie’s argument made sense four year ago, it’s even more fitting in 2004, at a time when a combination of Bush’s pre-emptive doctrine and the United States’ disregard for its allies’ opinions have spurred a drastic decline in the world’s opinion of the United States. Not that long ago, I mulled over the possibility that non-Americans should get to vote for the U.S. president. Often it seems that there are far more people across the globe who criticize — and sometimes praise — the ways in which they’re affected by U.S. policy than there are Americans who concern themselves with the far-reaching consequences of Washington, D.C., decisions. But given the controversy that has arisen in several states over new Americans registering to vote, the possibility that the Republicans or Democrats would so much as entertain the idea of opening the U.S. presidential election up to citizens of the world seems extremely remote, to say the least.

Fortunately, the next best possibility — heeding the advice and insight of those looking in — is well within reach thanks to the wonders of modern media. While Rushdie can’t vote here, he can offer an outsider’s view of how the democracy we practice in the United States can impact billions of people worldwide. He can offer as well an insider’s view into another democratic system — that of his Indian homeland, which, he writes, “is like the United States a large federation of regionalisms, where people define themselves first as Bengalis, Tamils, Kashmiris, and so on, and only after that as Indians. But India, with far fewer resources than the USA, has managed — albeit imperfectly — to run a constituency-based, direct-election democracy for over half a century. It’s hard to grasp why Americans can’t do the same.”

While Rushdie certainly raises useful questions concerning indirect democracy’s necessity and its ability to represent minorities — many whose ballots went uncounted or who were barred from voting on Election Day 2000 — his criticism of American democracy could not, of course, be fully realized when he wrote this first essay after Election Day 2000. Sure, he correctly indicated that the Electoral College foolishly allows for the possibility of a tie. He also pointed out — quite eloquently — that the United States often provides election assistance to developing countries to teach them how to build “fair” and “efficient” democracies while it can’t even count all of its own votes or find a non-partisan way to quell the political bickering that predominates during election season — particularly during election overtime season.

But it was in his December 2000 piece “A Grand Coalition?” that Rushdie raised a question deserving of far more attention then and now. That is, when an election ends in what essentially amounts to a tie, might it make more sense to resolve it through a coalition government — one where, for instance, the Bush/Cheney Administration serves half the term and the Kerry/Edwards Administration serves the other two years, or where the vice presidential candidate on the ticket that garners a few more votes steps aside and allows the other presidential candidate to serve as vice president?

As President Clinton said back in 2000 during the 35-day election standoff, “The people have spoken. It’s just that we don’t yet know what they mean.” Might it be possible that some sort of coalition government — a system that has worked reasonably well in many other democracies — provides the best answer to the problem of the divided nation? Perhaps it would even help unite it, as Bush promised — falsely — to do four years ago.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS >

Iraq War >

“Edward Said, Salman Rushdie, and the Iraq War” by Dr. Sabah Salih
URL: http://home.cogeco.ca/~kurdistan3/11-5-04-opinion-sabah-rushdie-and-irq-war.html

Islam >

”War on Iraq: Where are the Islamic Moderates?” by Mark LeVine and Raymond Baker
URL: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/15050/

Interviews >

A Conversation with Salman Rushdie
URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1177360

Salman Rushdie, Out and About
URL: http://www.powells.com/authors/rushdie.html

Election >

”How the Grinch Stole America” by Salman Rushdie
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/US_election_race/Story/0,2763,417622,00.html

Marketplace >
(A portion of proceeds from all books purchased through the Powells.com link below help support InTheFray)

Step Across This Line by Salman Rushdie
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=2-0679463348-3&partner_id=28164

“

Laura Nathan-Garner