Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 130
130 C H A P T E R SI X T E E N : R US H DI E T U R N E D I N T O A N IC O N The literary world has stayed united in its condemnation of the fatwa and in its support for Rushdie. But it seems that to make things more unbearable for Muslims and to rub salt in their wounds, they have vied to make Rushdie into some sort of a hero, a literary icon even; so much so that they recently bestowed on him one of the greatest of all literary awards. He beat 23 past Booker Prize winners to take the very first Booker of Bookers Award on 20 September 1993 for his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children. An editorial in The Times of 21 September 1993 almost gives the game away by trying to justify the award when it says: ‘The award of the first Booker of Bookers to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a just recognition of a magnificent work of fiction. It also reclaims a persecuted novelist from the spiteful shadow of the ‘Rushdie Affair’ and of The Satanic Verses. ’ It is almost a prize for being made the scape-goat and for defying the fundamentalists and sticking rigidly to his views The facts however tell a different story. Rushdie felt that he had been let down by a lot of people who had promised him much more and in the end he had to revert to going ‘bowl-in-hand’ to all and sundry for putting pressure on Iran to retract the fatwa. The campaign for this even reached America. On his behalf, famous American writers like Norman Mailer and Arthur Miller heavily lobbied the American President, Bill Clinton, to meet with Salman Rushdie. Clinton fi nally agreed to meet with Rushdie at the White House in November 1993 which Alexander Chancellor of The Times calls ‘a happening of immense symbolic significance which just might be the beginning of the end of Mr Rushdie’s nightmare. ’ This was done