Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 168
168 Mohamed Arshad Ahmedi “When people first started to make a connection between me and 9/11, I resisted it because of the disparity of the scale. But I have come to feel that what happened with The Satanic Verses was a kind of prologue and that now we’re in the main event,” he says. “At the time there was an unwillingness to see it as representative of a larger phenomenon. The people attacking me wanted to say, ‘There’s no larger thing to be drawn from this. It’s just that he did something uniquely horrible and so he deserves a uniquely horrible fate. ’ “And even the people defending me wanted to say, ‘Here is a uniquely horrible attack against a writer. ’ But I was trying to say that this is happening to writers all over the world. But what hap- pened to me is no longer the story – there’s a different story now, and I don’t think anybody gives a damn about The Satanic Verses any more. ” (The Times, 09/2005) If this is the case then why did he publicly declare at the Media Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival in August 2005 that The Satanic Verses was the subject of a small screen adapta- tion, and that TV rights to the novel were still available? He further confirmed that there was a French project to make a theatrical ad- aptation of the novel. Rushdie clashed with the Labour MP George Gallaway on Sunday 28 August 2005 in a debate about TV and religion at this festival, and was in his element arguing the right to express what- ever he wished. Rushdie was also at this festival to promote his new novel. As usual, Rushdie had to write a supposedly “fictitious” novel to refl ect the notable events affecting Islam/West relations. His latest novel Shalimar the Clown is about modern day terrorism despite his insistence that it is not. He has the audacity to say that despite the fact that he has never been in a terrorist training camp, nevertheless the fact that having lived under the threat of the fatwa (from 1989 to 1998) he has “had plenty of time to think about the mentality of those who have. ” His talents seem to have no limits!