“There’s a myth about India that it is a billion people, but it’s not. It’s twenty five, and they all know each other,” said Salman Rushdie. But forget the statement. What’s important is where he made it: Yeshiva University, capital of the Modern Orthodox world.
That’s right. The author who brought us The Satanic Verses and was subject of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa for it, came to Yeshiva University’s Wilf Campus this fall. Rushdie’s visit was part of the Yeshiva College Book Project, a program founded in the wake of Yitzchak Rabin’s assassination with the goal of, according to its mission statement, “fostering a greater spirit of tolerance at Yeshiva University, as well as providing an opportunity for dialogue between faculty and students and for the development of a broader sense of intellectual community.” While last year’s project featured Tim O’Brien speaking on his work The Things They Carried, the 2004 Book Project addressed the double-header of Rushdie’s East West and George Orwell’s A Collection of Essays.
Rushdie spoke to the YU crowd about his experience as the subject of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa in 1989. “I expected something, and that is fine,” Rushdie said, with regard to the response that The Satanic Verses’ provoked – though he adds that he had not expected a violent response. As someone who publicly says, “I ask myself: if I were standing on the mountain next to the Prophet would I have seen the archangel? My answer is probably not,” the castigation he received from Islamic governments likely did not surprise Rushdie.
Rushdie told his YU audience about his approach to writing fiction. “We live in a strange age where people think there is always a story of origin,” he says, explaining that in his own work, he avoids basing characters on real people but rather assumes that they “arrive on the page and develop on the page.” Rushdie also explained that while his version of realism “pushes beyond the naturalistic point” to the surreal, it’s a technique that, if executed well, “can increase comprehension rather than decrease. The project is realistic even if the technique is non-realistic,” he said.
Beyond his own career, YU’s guest lecturer addressed today’s global issues, particularly terrorism. “Radical Islam does exist,” he reminded his audience, but argued that those most affected by it are the people who live in the radical states. “My views are always on the Libertarian side rather than the control side,” he said, noting that many quasi-supporters of his to say believe that Islamic fundamentalist censorship of his work is his own problem: he is one of them, they say, and he is “angering his own kind.” Many, he said, maintain that an internal Muslim communal problem need not extend beyond the local context. “How are Islamic fundamentalists my kind, excuse me?” he wondered.
But more significant than any of Rushdie’s words was the fact that YU hosted a speaker who, to many on campus, would be considered radical. “I think the fatwa days at YU are over,” YU President Richard Joel said. Indeed, Yeshiva has been on the censorship side of the fence on several recent occasions, and Rushdie’s visit represents an apparent paradigm shift. Literature in general, and the Book Project in particular, presents the ideal safe space within which YU can subject its values to rigorous exploration, and perhaps this will mark the beginning of a new openness at YU. At least, that’s what the organizers of the Book Project hope.
