Linkage of 9/11 with Iraq war utterly spurious

Salman Rushdie
Press Trust of IndiaLondon, August 21, 2005

Describing the linkage of 9/11 with the Iraq war as "utterly spurious", NRI novelist Salman Rushdie has said the fiction of weapons of mass destruction has completely changed his view of New Labour.

"The lie is a terrible thing," he said in an interview to The Times, daily. And yet, he said he cannot object to the removal of Saddam Hussein describing the dictator's rule as tyrannical.

Asked if he is not concerned that by attempting to view the world through the eyes of the terrorists in his new novel Shalimar the Clown, he runs the risk of drawing attention to himself as a target once again, Rushdie said: "If you're a writer at this time in the history of the world you have to deal with what's there and this is the subject of our time, you can't avoid it, you run into it round every corner. Otherwise, you know, don't write books."

He did not use the word "brainwashing" for what goes on in the terrorist training camps and the madrassas, Islamic religious schools, saying it's too loaded. But in the novel he showed, most feelingly, how one can persuade people that they have been seeing the world wrong. "... You must unlearn everything you have learnt in order to understand the truth."

He said, "There is no way to negotiate with those whose goal is the Talibanisation of the planet. And I'm afraid what is difficult for most English liberals to accept is that the only thing to do is defeat them. And it's what I wrote years ago, that the way it's got to happen is from inside the Muslim community not from outside it. Rushdie said for the first time since the July 7 London bombings Muslim leaders have started saying, "Yes, it is our problem and we've got to fix it."

It's the first time that they've been willing not to talk in paranoid language but to say, "These are our children who have done this, and we have to fix it."

But Rushdie of all people knew how intimidating the extremists could be. The translators and publishers of his controversial book The Satanic Verses were threatened and attacked. Shop owners in Britain's Muslim community were told that if they didn't stick anti-Rushdie posters in their windows their shops would be damaged.

Asked whether they would not be frightened, Rushdie said: "They're damn well going to have to. Because up to now they have been passive and that won't do.

"This sort of language, the language out of which these suicide bombers came, has been tolerated in many Muslim communities, not just in England, and people may have rejected it but nobody spoke up.

"And as there is a large majority who wants nothing to do with any of that, they're damn well going to have to stand up and do something. It is their children doing this and they need to know what their children are doing."

According to the report, Shalimar, the Clown is not a novel about terrorism. Rather, it is a story of trampled love and innocence, a central personal murder and institutionalized murder on a wider scale, which takes the reader from modern-day California, to wartime France, dropping off in England and always circling back in some of the most direct and moving passages Rushdie has ever written to the willful destruction of the Eden which was Kashmir.

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