After the Fatwa

Following the vicious attack on Salman Rushdie last August in Chautauqua, New York, following the news that the writer had been stabbed at least ten times and lost the use of a hand and sight in one eye, following the requisite denunciations of his assailant, there began a hagiography. In The Atlantic, Bernard-Henri Lévy lauded “The Immortal Salman Rushdie.” The New Yorker’s David Remnick argued that Rushdie should win the Nobel, in part due to his “role as an uncompromising defender of freedom and a symbol of resiliency.” The French parliamentarian Benjamin Haddad called Rushdie a “symbol of freedom of expression and intellectual courage in the face of Islamist fanaticism.” He was heralded as a paragon of Western liberalism, a martyr for civil liberty. But the Rushdie I admire, a bellicose writer who once rejoiced in contradiction and multiplicity, might be made uncomfortable by his sudden prophethood; he might go so far as to find it ironic, considering. Yet after a death sentence, a decade of exile during which he relied on the former colonial powers he once derided, and decades more of international celebrity, Rushdie has become a willing abstraction of his former self. His new novel, the warmed-over and didactic Victory City, suggests that he is uninterested in a reclamation.