Hamilton, NY -- Salman Rushdie — an author who was condemned to death by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini for his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses — told students at Colgate University that writers have always been at odds with people and parties in power.
“It is one of the most honorable parts of the history of literature,” Rushdie told a capacity crowd at Colgate’s Memorial Chapel this afternoon.
“People who have no weapon other than a pen will go up against people who have lots of weapons,” he continued. “And yet somehow those people are afraid of them. Writers are the people that tyrants are scared of.”
Rushdie began the public lecture with excerpts from his recent memoir,’ “Joseph Anton,” which describes the years he spent living under the clerical death sentence for blasphemy against Islam. Joseph Anton is the pen name he used while in hiding; the name came from two writers he loves: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov.
Rushdie said Khomeini’s fatwa, or ruling, transformed his life “into the kind of book I don’t like to read, let alone write.”
“Life became a spy novel, in which there were armed men in the kitchen, and I would be told about anonymous groups entering the country with lethal intentions,” Rushdie said of his nine years in hiding.
Rushdie said it was like becoming a character in one of his novels, and joked that he would have rather been cast in a more recent literary phenomenon.
“Send me to that woman writing about ‘Shades of Grey,’” Rushdie said as the crowd laughed. “That sounds more interesting, and more gymnastic. Possibly more painful, but you might get out alive.”
Rushdie said he found himself dragged into a religious controversy by people who had never read his book, and did not realize it was fiction.
“A text of one kind was read as a text of another kind,” he said. “In the history of attacks on literature, that is always the case. The people that accused the author of ‘Lolita’ of pedophilia had never read that extremely moral book.”
The fallout from the international incident can still be felt in many ways, Rushdie said.
“That level of fear has had a chilling effect,” Rushdie said. “It makes it harder for people to publish work that is critical of Islam, or about Islam in general.”
And while he survived Khomeini’s threat, Rushdie mentioned other authors in Turkey, Egypt and Iran who were killed because of their writings.
He attributed the same religious fanaticism to the recent shooting of Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousufzai by members of the Taliban.
“A 14-year-old girl was shot in the head because she wanted to go to school,” he said. “This attack hasn’t ended. The narrative continues.”
Before the public lecture, Rushdie met with students and faculty taking part in the college’s “Living Writers” course, which accompanies the lecture series that has brought authors to campus for the last 30 years.
The class included interaction with alumni and parents who had followed the curriculum online throughout the semester, part of the college’s effort to reach out using technology.