Baiting Religion, American Style : Persecuted Rushdie Becomes a Protestant Hero

I went to a matinee the other day. At the popcorn counter there was a clear glass mug designated, as is now so often the custom, for tips. Inside the mug there was a plastic straw to which someone had affixed a small crucifix. When I inquired of the man behind the counter the meaning of the crucifix in the tips-mug, he shrugged, he grinned. “It’s just a joke,” he said.

In the San Francisco morning paper, a columnist chided American writers for not speaking out--as we all must--in defense of Salman Rushdie. The same columnist proposed that we all pin on buttons proclaiming ourselves thus: I AM SALMAN RUSHDIE.

I have put on my button to say that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini has no dominion here; to say that the placing of a bounty on any man’s head is not to be borne. It falls to the ayatollah to learn the metropolitan virtue of tolerance, if he is to have any commerce with the international city.

So, yes, I am Salman Rushdie. I live in the international city. But I must also say that I believe that there is such a thing as blasphemy, for I believe in God.

Most of the writers I know, some of the names you are seeing in your newspaper this week protesting Islamic intolerance, do they not believe in God? Well, I cannot say. I have been with some of these writers at literary parties, I have listened to their mockery of my own Catholic faith. I have chosen silent irony.

I am Salman Rushdie, but those American writers who charge Islam with mad intolerance should recognize their own bias. Americans, especially Americans of secular habit, tend to think of themselves as colorless, odorless, free-thinking, resolutely blase--thus incapable of giving offense. Certainly America cannot be said to be theocentric, but America has its own theology. Secular America remains fundamentally Protestant in character.

Protestantism began as protest against communal Catholicism, a debate over the ownership of authority. Protestantism asserted the right of the individual to have, to read, to interpret the sacred text--thus, over the years, and by implication, to read, to write, to say anything he chooses.

We take our writers for granted, as we take the beating of our hearts for granted, which makes the ayatollah’s plug so devastating to us, for bringing us up against the medieval world.

I am Salman Rushdie, but I wonder whether in America there is any virtue, any civic virtue, apart from individualism, any line that should not be crossed--not out of fear but out of respect for the notion of civic tolerance. In the past America has banned books and burned witches, and yet the belief survives that freedom of imagination is inextricable from all other freedoms.

The persecution of an Anglo-Indian writer becomes a persecution of the American scheme of things. Rushdie becomes an American Protestant hero.

As it happened, on the same day the ayatollah was pronouncing Rushdie’s death sentence, a group of Latino “community leaders,” liberals all, was attempting to prevent my own essays from being read in the Dallas public schools. I am not saying that I am wounded by such shenanigans. Such is the world we live in--a thousand opportunities for offense.

I am certainly not equating my position with Salman Rushdie’s. I am saying that you must not imagine that there is no one in America who will tell you what you can read, what you cannot. My heresy, according to Dallas, is that I am an insufficient role model. I am not, apparently, proud enough of my “origins.”

My origins. I was raised as a Catholic in the 1950s. I was raised by Mexican Catholic parents and by Irish nuns. Although I was raised to take my slot in an individualistic America, as a Catholic I was taught to trust community above all.

In a generation my church has changed, unraveled. The universal, communal faith has been challenged by individual conviction. Today I am more Protestant, more willful, more independent, more American--solitary in my faith. I am still a Catholic.

Catholic or Protestant, I learned long ago the tact of silence. I have heard America’s intellectuals--American writers and journalists--joke about the faith that nourished me as a boy. As long as I have lived among intellectuals in America, this has been so.

Perhaps none of my reservations matter much in the urgency of the moment. The ayatollah has blasphemed against the basic faith of America. And we will not have it. As I say, I am Salman Rushdie, but pardon me if I choose not to join one of those public readings of “The Satanic Verses,” which seeks to bait the religious sensibility. To reiterate blasphemy through a microphone seems to me a provocation. I do believe that American writers believe that they are protesting censorship. But should one not question the propriety of giving further offense to Islam?

Perhaps most of us in America, perhaps most of our writers as well, do not truly believe that writing can have any real effect. Curiously, I think the ayatollah reminds us that language is efficacious, that it is possible to blaspheme. In many societies of the world that are not, as we say, highly literate, a more ancient authority attaches to the poet. The poet has priestly powers, and priestly obligations as well.