The historic Rushdie

“I resolved to die as I have lived -- in defense of flippancy.” The line comes from Brian Friel’s play “The Freedom of the City,” and it is spoken during the Northern Irish Troubles by an Irish patriot who refuses to succumb either to common sense, which would mean abandoning Irish nationalism, or to Anglophobia, which would mean abandoning thought altogether.

True idealism wears flippancy like a feather in the cap. Fanaticism, ever anxious beneath the frown, insists that you wipe that smile off your face, mister: It is nothing if not utterly serious. Salman Rushdie’s second-greatest triumph, after the preservation of his life, has been the preservation of his flippancy. He hasn’t yet had the last laugh, but he has had many an intermediate chuckle, while his opposition -- think of the visage of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini -- wears a terminal scowl.

The cap beneath flippancy’s feather is the homely cap of everyman’s private life. As an Indian-born Englishman, Rushdie has, genius aside, more or less the private life that such a history would predict. He’s an avid soccer fan, for openers. I am not a fan myself, but something in me lets out a cheer when I read (well, when I start reading) the long, spirited appreciation of the sport that he includes in this 10-year miscellany, “Step Across This Line.” It’s not for me, that piece, but I’m glad it’s there. I want Rushdie’s life to be as indomitably miscellaneous as this collection. The very variety proves his side is winning, and his side is my side.

Salman Rushdie, literary genius aside (we’ll get to it), is a world-historical figure. Before Sept. 11, before even the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Islamist terrorism had demonstrated -- by its reaction to his work -- a capacity to kill anywhere in the world. As early as 1989, Muslim leaders who defended him were slain in Belgium. In Japan, Hitoshi Igarashi, a translator of “The Satanic Verses,” was murdered in 1991. His Italian translator and his Norwegian publisher narrowly escaped Islamist attempts on their lives.

Rushdie himself was sentenced to death in the infamous fatwa of Khomeini. (Through Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, renewed the sentence as recently as Feb. 14, 2003.) The existence of an Islamist network with so global a reach and so lethal a capacity was unrecognized before Rushdie. Its significance was underestimated even after Rushdie because the world thought Rushdie would be its only victim.

Rushdie is a historic figure because he has become, for the whole world to see, a rich, happy, admired and successful ex-Muslim. In his worldwide fame, Rushdie is undoubtedly the most prominent apostate in Muslim history. The longer he lives, the more he changes the sociology of apostasy within the religious community into which he was born.

For long centuries in their linked histories, Judaism and Christianity unhesitantly punished apostasy with death. Apostasy was defection to the enemy, whether the enemy was another faith or outright unbelief. It was religio-cultural treason; and as such, it was no less serious a crime than defection to the Soviet Union was for an American during the Cold War. In much of the Muslim world, apostasy is still a crime of this magnitude. But Muslims will eventually acquire the same freedom to change or abandon their religion that most Jews and Christians now enjoy. And when they do, Rushdie, unsaintly chap though he may be, will be honored as Spinoza and Hus are honored in the West.

In the first months after the fatwa, Rushdie insisted that he could not be an apostate because one cannot apostatize from that in which one has never believed. But for most Muslims, his audibly Muslim name was a more than adequate refutation of that claim. As for “The Satanic Verses,” though it was “only a novel,” it was undeniably seething with hatred of Islam. But so be it: In a free society, hatred, even hatred of religion or of a religion, is not a crime. Hateful actions are criminal when they become violent, but hatred itself, even when expressed in hate-filled oratory -- or fiction, is not.

In a free society, freedom of religion includes the right to change your religion or simply desert it. When the police power of Britain was enlisted to protect Rushdie’s right to speak his novelist’s mind and to serve notice in this way that he had deserted Islam, a quintessentially Western, post-Christian, Enlightenment-derived freedom began a historic advance into the Muslim world. Not long after, unsurprisingly, the Muslim world began an equally historic defense against that advance.

This defense, properly grasped, is one side of a struggle within the Muslim world, but the outcome of that struggle matters for the whole world, not just for the world’s Muslims. If Rushdie’s soccer essay (“The People’s Game: A Fan’s Notes”) marks the lower end of his collection, a manifesto entitled “The Struggle for the Soul of Islam,” published in the New York Times in 1993, may mark the upper end. In that eloquent statement, Rushdie assembled a chilling collection of documented incidents of Islamist violence against Muslim dissidents and called on the world to take notice.

Rushdie is, in my honest opinion, a novelist of genius. It was said of James Joyce that he did not write “Finnegans Wake” in English but in “Eurish,” a kind of fusion dialect of English and all the languages of Europe. Urdu is for Rushdie what Irish was for Joyce. I read Rushdie’s novels knowing that they metabolize cultural ingredients that will remain forever beyond my capacity to digest. (I read him also, let me add, wishing that he had Joyce’s preternatural capacity to ponder, edit, revise and wait.) One glimpses in his novels, as in few others, old worlds dying and new worlds coming to birth. In the history of literature, this will be his eventual importance.

But in the history of religion and of culture in the broader sense, Rushdie is historic because he has helped to catalyze a dissent of world-historical importance. He concluded his 1993 “Struggle for the Soul” manifesto as follows: “So the next time you stumble across a story such as the ones I’ve repeated here, perhaps a story tucked away near the bottom of an inside page in this newspaper, remember that the persecution it describes is not an isolated act -- that it is part of a deliberate, lethal program, whose purpose is to criminalize, denigrate, and even to assassinate the Muslim world’s best, most honorable voices: its voices of dissent. And remember that those dissidents need your support. More than anything, they need your attention.”

Thanks in part to Salman Rushdie, Muslim dissidents everywhere now have the world’s attention, and they are most unlikely to lose it any time soon.