Rushdie shares hard-earned lessons on free speech

By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

Author Salman Rushdie told a sell-out crowd at Montana State University on Monday night that he had learned his lessons about free speech the hard way.

Rushdie, 57, was introduced by MSU President Geoff Gamble as one of the century's "most controversial and inspiring authors," and the Bombay-born writer didn't disappoint the students, professors and community members who came to hear him.

Rushdie criticized religions, defended blasphemy, jabbed at the Bush administration, denounced Saddam Hussein and said it's the writer's job to tell the truth. The audience cheered for his most provocative statements and gave him a standing ovation at the end.

Winner of the Booker Prize, England's top prize for fiction, Rushdie is best known for living for a decade under a death threat from the Ayatollah Khomeini, who condemned "The Satanic Verses," as blasphemous.

"One of us is dead," Rushdie joked. "Don't mess with novelists."

Not long after the book sparked an international uproar, Rushdie said, a film was produced in Pakistan depicting al-Qaida-style guerrillas as the good guys attacking himself as an evil, whip-wielding, whiskey-drinking torturer. In the end, God himself smites Rushdie's character dead.

A British film board didn't want to license the film, arguing that it could be sued for allowing the defamatory film into the country. Rushdie said he found himself in the bizarre position of upholding free speech by promising not to sue.

So the film was shown in the largest theater in the largest Muslim community in England, but no one came, he said, because it was a bad movie and people didn't want to waste their $10. Yet had it been repressed, it would have been a hot underground video.

"By letting in the light of day, like a vampire, it shriveled," he said.

Rushdie was born in 1947, the year India gained its independence but saw the slaughter of at least half a million people as the country split in two along Hindu and Moslem lines. It showed, he said, "what people will do in the name of God." His parents were Muslim but "didn't give a damn about religion" and passed the feeling on to him.

"Now I find religion is coming after us all and if we don't confront this particular fish, it may fry us all," he said. "And I don't just mean radical Islam. The fish, I recall, is a Christian symbol."

Now a New Yorker, he worried about the direction America is heading -- sealing off borders and undermining free speech.

"In order to defeat the enemy that needs to be defeated, we must not stop being what we are," he said.

Free speech is an Enlightenment idea that Americans owe in large part to French writers, who saw the greatest threat to freedom not from the state but the church.

"Blasphemy was a very important part of winning that battle," he said. "It's OK to be disrespectful about religion."

"What is this shit about moral values?" he asked. It's a code term for "religious bigotry," he said.

He criticized the left for underestimating the evil of Saddam Hussein, who killed untold thousands in his torture chambers.

But he also criticized the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq, saying it has created the united Islamic jihad that even Osama bin Laden couldn't pull off and made the word "America" a negative word around the world.

Rushdie speaks up for human rights, criticizes Patriot Act

The U.S. Patriot Act is an absurd attack on people's rights, author Salman Rushdie told a small group of Montana State University students Monday afternoon.

"I don't think patriotism is a particularly good quality," the world-famous author said during a private session with two-dozen MSU students from the honors and English programs.

"It's important you not be on the side of your country when it is wrong," Rushdie said. "That's how the Vietnam War was stopped."

Rushdie answered students' questions for more than an hour on everything from literature to rock'n'roll to human rights. He peppered his comments with wry humor, references to an astonishing variety of world literature and anecdotes about famous writers and musicians.

Rushdie said he just finished his latest novel, "Shalimar the Clown," set in Kashmir, after four years of work. "Please all buy it," he quipped.

On the Patriot Act, he said it is one thing to protect the nation from attack, but quite another to force librarians and booksellers to disclose what people are buying or borrowing. The idea that librarians and bookstores are the gateway to uncovering al Qaeda is absurd, he said.

The notion that you can discover someone is a terrorist from their books supposes there must be a list of subversive literature. What's be on the list, he wondered. "'Slaughterhouse 5?' 'How to Make an Atomic Bomb?' 'How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb?'"

The last title, an album by the rock band U2, suggests the band must have nuclear weapons, he joked.

Rushdie said U2 used his words as song lyrics after he showed the manuscript for "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" to Bono in an effort to avoid factual mistakes in his novel set in the world of rock'n'roll. He recalled Bono calling him to Ireland to approve the song, and sitting in Bono's car while it played on the singer's powerful sound system.

On writing, Rushdie said he doesn't choose ideas for his novels so much as the ideas seize him. He writes the way he thinks it should be written, not to please some audience.

"That's the gamble of being a writer," Rushdie said.

"Everything interests me -- sex, work, everything," he said. "The novel is about real life as it's actually lived. ... Love and death and the whole damn thing."

Among writers who influenced him, Rushdie listed Luis Borges, who "blows open the doors in your head," and Charles Dickens, a "genius."

Powerful literature becomes a part of you, he said. "It changes the world one reader at a time."

Asked about the state of human rights today, Rushdie said they are in a "great crisis." Human rights, once held as universal, are under fire, particularly in the Muslim world and China, as being relative to different cultures.

"Once you fall into the relativistic trap," he said, "none of us have any rights at all."

Students were excited after the hour with Rushdie.

"It was amazing," said Brian Johnsrud, an English major. "His books have so much myth and history and mystery about them. ... It's like being in the presence of a shaman."

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