Secularism and the death and return of the author: Rereading the Rushdie affair after Joseph Anton

In an essay titled “Reading The Satanic Verses”, published in 1989, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak cites Roland Barthes’ well-known formulation “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author” (qtd. in Spivak, 1993: 217). Spivak describes this formulation as “a metropolitan aphorism” and suggests that it takes on a different meaning in the context of the Rushdie affair. After a fairly detailed commentary on Barthes’ argument, Spivak turns to the Rushdie affair, and claims that “it is the […] Ayatollah who can be seen as filling the author-function, and Salman Rushdie, himself, caught in a different cultural logic, is no more than the writer as performer” (1993: 218−19). Spivak does not spell out what this cultural logic is, or how it relates to a certain idea of the writer as an effect of discourse rather than a God-like figure who asserts their theological authority over the meaning of a text from a metaphysical position outside the text. Yet in her suggestion that Rushdie is “caught in a different cultural logic”, she gestures towards a wider critical debate about Rushdie’s rhetorical stance as a secular Muslim writer born in India, educated in Britain, and who writes as a postcolonial migrant in a cultural form that is associated with the dominant values of secularism and Western liberal thought. What’s more, by suggesting that Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran occupies the post-hoc position of the “author function” after the publication of The Satanic Verses and the Qur’an, Spivak implies that Rushdie is a kind of Barthesian reader of both the Qur’an and the history of Islam in the performance of his writing. Such a rethinking of the “death of the author” thesis is certainly thought-provoking, but it seems to overlook how Rushdie is also positioned as an elite, cosmopolitan intellectual in the Anglo-American public sphere to the exclusion of many self-identified Muslim readers and non-readers who either read extracts from the novel or heard about the text on the grapevine. This is not to say that Rushdie’s cosmopolitan position as a postcolonial diasporic writer who inhabits different worlds is the cause of his secularism. And nor is it to suggest that such a position is a normative precondition for all secular modes of writing and reading — for this would be to ignore the position of secular writers in Muslim homelands. Yet a consideration of Rushdie’s secularism can help to elucidate the asymmetrical power relations shaping assumptions about authorship, reception, and free speech in the specific context of post-Christian Western liberal democracies such as Britain in the aftermath of 9/11 and subsequent wars of terror.

I begin with Spivak’s essay on Rushdie because I think it raises some interesting questions about the significance of authorship, authority, and misreading in critical debates over The Satanic Verses, and of Rushdie’s recent reassessment of these critical debates in his memoir, Joseph Anton (2012). If, as Paul de Man once suggested, there is a certain sense in which all reading is misreading, how can this poststructuralist approach to reading account for Rushdie’s secular readings of the Qur’an and the history of Islam, or for the supposed misreadings of The Satanic Verses that characterized the Rushdie affair? To what extent are such poststructuralist theories of misreading themselves bound up with the history of Western liberal secularism? And what can such notions of misreading tell us about the ideological function of literary texts such as The Satanic Verses as part of a non-foundational, non-authoritative discourse in a secular democracy such as contemporary Britain? By suggesting that the secular mode of reading that is staged in The Satanic Verses corresponds with de Man’s account of misreading, I am not implying that such a reading is somehow wrong or illegitimate; my point is rather that a mode of secular reading that is concerned with fundamental ontotheological questions about the historicity of religion is framed as a more privileged mode of reading precisely because it draws attention to its status as a mode of reading, and acknowledges the possibility that it could also be a misreading. Considered in relation to de Man’s account of misreading, which follows a temporal logic where a preliminary reading is presented as necessarily erroneous, partial, or reductive, and a second reading is deemed to be more self-conscious and nuanced in its openness to ambivalence, multiplicity, and epistemological uncertainty (Jameson, 2002: 106–118), the reception of The Satanic Verses raises further questions about the uses and meaning of misreading. In what respect does the charge of misreading or not reading work to obfuscate the power relationship between the author of The Satanic Verses and its Muslim readers, who were often framed in the mainstream British media as an angry, violent, illiterate, and, crucially, foreign mob of Islamic fundamentalists — a framing which overlooked other legitimate forms of Muslim response to the novel? And in what way might Rushdie’s own account of the production and reception of The Satanic Verses in Joseph Anton be regarded as a particular form of misreading that calls the authority of the book’s implied author into question? By addressing questions such as these, this article suggests that Rushdie’s literary reworking of Islamic history in The Satanic Verses and his defence of this reworking in Joseph Anton demand a rethinking of the relationship between the ideology of secularism and misreading. Such a rethinking, I suggest, also demands an openness to the alterity of different reception cultures that interrupts the dichotomy between secularism and fundamentalism, a dichotomy which has often framed the reception of Rushdie’s fiction.

In the early chapters of Joseph Anton (2012), Rushdie offers a suggestive account of his childhood and intellectual formation in India and the United Kingdom. Specifically, the third-person narrator of Rushdie’s memoir explains how it was Rushdie’s father, Anis, who had invented the surname Rushdie. As the narrator proceeds to explain, “Muhammad Din Khaliqi died young, leaving his son the fortune which he would squander and a name that was too heavy to carry around in the modern world” (2012: 22). ¹ It was for this reason that

Anis renamed himself “Rushdie” because of his admiration for Ibn Rushd, “Averroës” to the West, the twelfth-century Spanish-Arab philosopher of Cordoba who rose to become the qadi, or judge, of Seville, the translator of and acclaimed commentator upon the works of Aristotle. (22)

This detailed account of the history of Rushdie’s last name contributes to Rushdie’s own self-fashioning as a secular Muslim writer who is concerned to explore the experience of revelation as an event that takes place within history. As the narrator puts it, “his father, a true scholar of Islam who was also entirely lacking in religious belief, had chosen [this name] because he appreciated Ibn Rushd for being at the forefront of the rationalist argument against Islamic literalism in his time” (22−23). The parallels do not end here. Writing in the late twelfth century, Averroës had not only been tried and exiled by the caliph Yaqub Al-Mansur for his rationalist belief that truth can only be attained through philosophical reason; his works had also been banned and burned (Casarino and Negri, 2008: 249 n.21). If such ideas were once seen as “dangerously heretical”, they also “constituted a crucial antecedent of modern secular arguments for the separation of church and state, religion and philosophy, [and] faith and reason” (2008: 249 n.21), as Cesare Casarino and Antonio Negri have argued. By invoking the legacy of Averroës, then, the narrator of Joseph Anton presents the life of Salman Rushdie as the heroic struggle of a secular intellectual against the violent forces of Islamic fundamentalism. Such a representation is further borne out in the analogy the narrator draws between The Satanic Verses controversy and a war:

“At least”, he told himself when the storm broke over his head, “I’m going into this battle bearing the right name”. From beyond the grave his father had given him the flag under which he was ready to fight, the flag of Ibn Rushd, which stood for intellect, argument, analysis, and progress, for the freedom of philosophy and learning from the shackles of theology, for human reason and against blind faith, submission, acceptance, and stagnation. Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called “Rushdie”, and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotlean, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd. (23)

By framing his defence of The Satanic Verses as a rational inquiry into the history of Islam through the metaphor of conflict or war, Rushdie’s narrator recalls some of the criticisms of the novel, which focused on the use of tropes from medieval Christian Europe to discredit the claim of the Prophet to be the true messenger of Allah. It may not strike us as surprising that Rushdie seems insensitive to the implications of such an analogy, given his apparent unwillingness to consider how the cultural form of the novel is itself bound up with a liberal, secular tradition — a tradition which is itself imbricated in the history of European colonialism. Instead, Rushdie’s self-fashioning as part of a rational, intellectual tradition works to reassert his authority over the meaning of The Satanic Verses. And that he does so via the history of the proper name “Rushdie” tells us something about how Rushdie’s narrator misreads The Satanic Verses controversy in this autobiographical text, which is subtitled “a memoir”.

In his essay, “Autobiography as de-facement”, Paul de Man challenges the assumption that “Autobiography seems to depend on actual and potentially verifiable events in a less ambivalent way than fiction does” and that it “seems to belong to a simpler mode of referentiality, of representation, and of diegesis” (1979: 920). Rather than a genre or a mode of reading, de Man contends that autobiography should be understood as “a figure of reading or of understanding that occurs, to some degree, in all texts” (1979: 921). In de Man’s account, the proper name of an author such as Rousseau or Rushdie is not a stable referent that is anterior to the autobiographical text; on the contrary, the proper name is a figure that produces the illusion of reference. As de Man puts it:

[A]re we so certain that autobiography depends on reference, as a photograph depends on its subject or a (realistic) picture on its model? We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences, but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of [their] medium. (1979: 920; emphasis in original)

In a certain respect, the distance between the third-person narrator of Joseph Anton and its main protagonist may appear to dramatize how the figure of “Rushdie” produces this illusion of reference. Indeed, during the height of the Rushdie affair, the narrator remarks how the “gulf between the private ‘Salman’ he believed himself to be and the public ‘Rushdie’ he barely recognized was growing by the day” (131). In a later episode he speaks of how

his name had been stolen from him, or half his name anyway, when Rushdie detached itself from Salman and went spiralling off into the headlines, into newsprint, into the video-heavy ether, becoming a slogan, a rallying cry, a term of abuse, or anything else that other people wanted it to be. (164)

On one level, the narrator’s observations about the splitting of the private “Salman” and the public “Rushdie” can be read as a sign of anxiety about the way in which the very act of writing leads to the symbolic death of the author. In this respect, Rushdie’s memoir may seem to parallel Roland Barthes’ staging of the division between the subject who is writing and the autobiographical subject who is written about in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. “I am speaking about myself as though I were more or less dead” (1977b: 168; emphasis in original), announces Barthes in his autobiography. In so doing, Barthes foregrounds the fluid boundary between the body of work and the body of the writer. Such a distinction also illuminates how autobiographical writing and indeed writing in general is bound up with the thanatographical, or the writing of death. In a discussion of Jacques Derrida’s memorial for Roland Barthes, Jane Gallop (2011) has written of how writing about the death of the author entails a reflection on the temporality of reading and writing — of how acts of writing and reading take place in time. For Gallop, Derrida’s suggestion that acts of writing about the death of the author who is also a friend are somehow indecent or obscene entails a certain ethical relationship to the corpus/corpse of the author. Such an ethical relationship between reader and author also implies a sacralization of the textual body of the author — an insight which complicates the predominant assumption that reading and criticism are inherently secular practices.

The narrator’s reflections on the splitting of the private “Salman” and the public “Rushdie” also foreground the way in which the proper name of the author has a juridical function. As Michel Foucault claimed in “What is an Author?” (1998), discourse in Western Europe was historically understood as an act before it was framed as a product or a thing — “an act placed in the bipolar field of the sacred and the profane, the licit and the illicit, the religious and the blasphemous” (1998: 212). In this “bipolar field”, the author stood as a liminal figure who marked the legal boundaries between discursive acts that were deemed sacred or religious and those deemed profane or blasphemous. Before the category of the author came to be associated with the “circuit of ownership” (1998: 212), it served to define the legal limits of religious propriety. Indeed, this is why “authors became subject to punishment” (1998: 212). By holding authors legally responsible for acts of discourse that transgressed the boundaries of religious propriety, Foucault suggests that the act of writing in early modern culture was an inherently dangerous or subversive activity. Yet he also adds that this act of transgression “took on the form of an imperative peculiar to literature” (1998: 212) once a system of ownership for authors’ rights came into being. In so doing, Foucault suggests that the emergent legal order of the literary marketplace also licensed transgression as one of the defining characteristics of literary discourse.

One of the difficulties with Foucault’s essay is that it is not very historically specific about when the author figure comes into being. As a consequence, Foucault’s theory tends to be read in one of two ways, as Roger Chartier explains:

One way stresses the connection between the author function and the philosophical and juridical definition of the individual and of private property […] The other way emphasizes the dependence of the author-function on church and state censorship. […] The first reading leads to emphasizing the eighteenth century; the second, the sixteenth century. (1994: 102 n.35)

This is not to suggest, however, that these two historically specific understandings of authorship can be neatly disentangled in a stadial model of historical time. For in the case of the Rushdie affair, these historically specific conceptions of authorship, authority, and reception were themselves revealed to be a product of a conception of history that was specific to Western Europe. Rushdie’s literary representation of Qur’anic revelation as an event that took place in the (secular) time frame of history was framed by those who defended the novel as the implied author’s legal right according to dominant Western cultural norms of free speech; for the Ayatollah Khomeini, however, Rushdie’s literary representation of Islamic history transgressed the religious strictures on representations of the Prophet — a transgression for which Rushdie as the author of The Satanic Verses was “subject to punishment” (Foucault, 1998: 212). These mutually opposing views of representation highlight the ways in which the two distinct aspects of the author function that Foucault outlines — as a juridical figure who was “subject to punishment” for discursive acts of religious transgression and as a legal individual bearing certain rights over the publication and reproduction of their work — coexist in contemporary debates over freedom of expression and Islamophobia. Indeed, it is significant that Rushdie selectively cited from Foucault’s essay in his own essay “Is nothing sacred?”. While acknowledging the problems with Foucault’s “absence of supporting evidence” (1991b: 424), Rushdie finds in Foucault’s essay an author figure that challenged “sacralized absolutes” (1991b: 423); what is more, Rushdie draws the following inference from Foucault’s argument:

If [Foucault] is right about the novel, then literature is, of all the arts, the one best suited to challenging absolutes of all kinds; and, because it is in its origin the schismatic Other of the sacred (and authorless) text, so it is also the art most likely to fill our god-shaped holes. (1991b: 424)

Here, Rushdie refashions a Romantic myth of the author as a secular figure who speaks (secular) truth to (religious) power. Yet Rushdie’s use of Foucault also downplays the way in which his fictional satire of Islamic history is a form of literary transgression that is not only marketable as a global literary commodity, but was also defended by the British liberal state. Indeed, it is important to emphasize that Rushdie’s memoir of the “fatwa years” in Joseph Anton offers an account of how the British government protected the author’s right to freedom of expression against the threat of death. Paradoxically, this defence of freedom of speech also entailed placing the author’s body — code-named Joseph Anton — in the protective custody of the unit of London’s Metropolitan Police known as Special Branch.

If, as Filippo Menozzi has argued (2014: 1−26), postcolonial writing often entails an ethics of custodianship in which the figure of the postcolonial author/intellectual takes on a burden of ethical responsibility for the representation of postcolonial cultures, Salman Rushdie’s narrative of being placed in the protective custody of the British Metropolitan Police casts a rather different light on the ethics and politics of postcolonial literary custodianship. After Roland Barthes’ theory of textuality and his reflections on autobiography, it may be difficult if not impossible to conceive of a concept of authorship that is not mediated by textuality. Far from being a sign of presence, Seán Burke argues, the concept of the author is irreducibly textual: “authorship is given not as a mark of presence but of the absence attendant upon allowing words to take on a life and destination beyond the originator’s compass” (2008b: 36−37). This is not to suggest, however, that the textual figure of the author does not bear some minimal responsibility for the reception of their text. As Anshuman Mondal explains:

For any ethical criticism there must be a reckoning with “intentionality” even if that can only be the intentionality of the implied author as inferred from the sum of all textual strategies and effects which each reader, in the singularity of their encounter with each text (and each reading is always singular, even if that same reader has read the same text before), attributes to the implied author who signs for them. (2014: 86; emphasis in original)

At stake in Mondal’s rethinking of intentionality as a textual effect is an ethics of propriety for which responsibility is shared between the implied author and the singular reader. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’ conception of ethics as the primordial relation between the other and the self that is the condition of possibility for being as such, Mondal formulates an ethics of writing and reading as shared responsibility. Such an ethical reading practice also needs to take account of the ways in which different cultures of authorship, production, and reception are differently positioned in the global literary marketplace — a marketplace which mirrors dominant global economic and political structures of power. That “Rushdie” was placed in the protective custody of the British state may be read as a sign of how the body of the author was subject to the sovereign power of Iran’s religious leader. Yet the British state protection granted to Rushdie also exemplifies how the author can be both a subject of power as well as being subject to power (Mondal, 2014: 197−98). The act of placing Rushdie’s body in protective custody from the death sentence issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini was simultaneously an act of defending the individual author’s right to a certain absolutist idea of free expression. Such an idea includes the freedom to give offence to reading or non-reading publics that may not enjoy the same rights and freedoms or share the same assumptions about critical reading.

By documenting the way in which the body of the author “Salman Rushdie” lived on in the protective custody of the British police, Joseph Anton reinscribes the subjectivity and authority of the author of The Satanic Verses. A powerful instance of this can be found in the narrator’s account of Salman Rushdie’s research into Islamic history as a final year undergraduate at King’s College, Cambridge, during the academic year of 1967–1968. Here, Rushdie’s narrator tries to evoke a sense of the social world of Mecca and Medina in the seventh century in a historical mode of writing that seems straightforwardly realist. Both Mecca and Medina, the narrator explains, were new cities inhabited by “nomads who had just begun to settle down […] Mecca was only a few generations old. Yathrib, later re-named Medina, was a group of encampments around an oasis without so much as a serious city wall” (41). This descriptive historical narrative may seem fairly innocuous. Yet it is worth noting that the narrator proceeds to read the pre-Islamic world of Mecca and Medina in the terms and categories of post-Enlightenment thought:

A nomadic society was conservative, full of rules, valuing the well-being of the group more highly than individual liberty, but it was also inclusive. The nomadic world had been a matriarchy. Under the umbrella of its extended families even orphaned children could find protection, and a sense of identity and belonging. The city was a patriarchy and its preferred family unit was nuclear. The crowd of the disenfranchised grew larger and more restive each day. But, Mecca was prosperous, and its ruling elders liked it that way. Inheritance now followed the male line. This, too, the governing families preferred. (41)

Here, the narrator’s description of pre-Islamic history may seem to echo Rushdie’s repeated insistence that the Mahound sections of The Satanic Verses should be understood as an attempt to make sense of the life of the Prophet and the birth of Islam as events that took place within history. Yet the terms in which that history is represented raise questions about Rushdie’s cultural and ideological standpoint as a literary historiographer of Islam. The narrator of Joseph Anton explains that Rushdie tried to heed the words of his Cambridge tutor, the medieval historian Arthur Hibbert: “You must never write history […] until you can hear the people speak” (40). But Rushdie’s use of phrases such as “individual liberty” and “nuclear family unit” strongly imply a reading of pre-Islamic history through the lens of a post-Enlightenment, secular understanding of history and society. The narrator’s subsequent description of the Prophet’s experience of divine revelation on Mount Hira as one of madness further privileges a secular, post-Enlightenment understanding of Islamic history over an explanation that situates events in Islamic history within the values and worldview of the time. Moreover, the narrator’s recollection of reading about the “satanic verses” episode in “the collections of Hadith […] compiled by Ibn Ishaq, Waqidi, Ibn Sa’d, Bukhari and Tabari” (43) rests on a “politically motivated reading” of the history of Islam that the narrator loosely attributes to the historians, William Montgomery Watt and Maxime Rodinson. The “satanic verses” episode is of course often linked to an apocryphal verse, which follows a passage in sura 53 in which the Prophet sought to convert the people of Mecca to the Islamic faith. In this passage, Muhammad seems to accept three winged pagan goddesses of Mecca into the Muslim faith. Yet as the ninth-century commentator, al Tabari, argues, these verses were subsequently discovered to be the words of a demon rather than the divine words of Allah. Once these verses were discovered to be a mistake by the angel Gabriel, al-Tabari reports that God annulled “what Satan had put upon the prophet’s tongue” (qtd. in Rushdie, 2012: 44). In the “politically motivated reading” of this episode presented in Joseph Anton, Muhammad’s acceptance into the Muslim faith of three pagan goddesses can be understood as a strategic decision (rather than a divine revelation) that would put a stop to the persecution of Muslims by the people of Mecca and “Muhammad himself would be granted a seat on the city’s ruling council” (44). Furthermore, Rushdie’s post-fatwa reflection on his first reading of these apocryphal verses during his undergraduate years seems to challenge the patriarchal basis of Islam:

The “true” verses, angelic or divine, were clear: it was the femaleness of the winged goddesses — the “exalted birds” — that rendered them inferior and fraudulent and proved they could not be the children of God, as the angels were. […] At the birth of this particular idea, femaleness was seen as a disqualification from exaltation. (45)

Here, the narrator’s reflections on the patriarchal foundations of Islam may align him with Muslim women writers such as Assia Djebar and Fatima Mernissi, who have sought to articulate the position of women in Islam (as Sara Suleri [1994] has argued). In foregrounding this aspect of the “satanic verses” episode, however, the narrator downplays the way in which Rushdie drew on Orientalist stereotypes of Islam to suggest that the Qur’an is an invented text rather than a Holy Book. For it was after all the early twentieth-century Orientalist scholar William Muir who first described these verses as the “satanic verses” in Chapter Five of his Life of Mohammad (1912). By adopting the description of this episode as this title of his novel, Rushdie clearly aligns his imaginative representation of this apocryphal story with Western Orientalist accounts of Islamic history.

It is worth noting too that the narrator’s concluding reflections on Rushdie’s reading of Islamic history at Cambridge are immediately followed by a brief reference to the évènements of 1968 in Paris. Such a juxtaposition of these events would seem to reinforce Timothy Brennan’s observation that Rushdie’s provocative representation of the “satanic verses” episode in The Satanic Verses can be read as a sign of the “‘soixante-huitard’ sensibility of a uniquely situated cosmopolitan” (2006: 24). But if Rushdie’s encounter with the “satanic verses” episode in Islamic historiography in the late 1960s at Cambridge and his subsequent fictionalization of this history in The Satanic Verses 20 years later are to be understood in the terms of a challenge to cultural and political authority (in the spirit of 1968), it is curious that this challenge to the authority of a religious text ends up reinscribing the authority of the individual author.

Rushdie’s retrospective narrative framing of his first encounter with the “satanic verses” episode at Cambridge in relation to the events in Paris of 1968 might suggest a connection between his own intellectual formation and Roland Barthes’ (1977a) declaration of the death of the author in 1968. Certainly, the tone of Barthes’ essay is couched in anti-theological metaphors that recall Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God. As Seán Burke has argued:

For a culture which thinks itself to have come too late for the Gods or for their extermination, the figures of the author and the human subject are said to fill the theological void, to take up the role of ensuring meaning in the absence of metaphysical certainties. […] Not only does the author become the cosmological and teleological principle of the text, he is made its eschaton also, its end understood as both goal and cessation. (2008a: 22−23)

Burke’s critical assessment of Barthes’ deicidal analogy is illuminating, but it overlooks the ways in which the figure of the author is also bound up with the ideology of secularism. Burke notes an interesting slippage in Barthes’ essay between two different conceptions of the author: a “tyrannical deity” on the one hand and the secular figure of “bourgeois man” on the other (2008a: 25). He does not explicitly comment on the significance of this slippage or its implications for poststructuralist theories of reading. If the theological analogy of the Author as God implies that there is “a unitary cause, source and master to whom the chain of textual effects must be traced” (2008a: 22), the figure of the author as “bourgeois man” (2008a: 22) evokes a secular history of capitalist individualism in which the proper name of the author has a juridical and discursive function in the literary marketplace: to name the individual who bears legal responsibility for the production of the text. If, as Foucault suggests in “What is an Author?” (1998), the author function is historically specific to the formation of Western capitalist modernity, one might also infer that the author is both a worldly and a secular figure. In contrast to Barthes’ somewhat hyperbolic construction of the author as a tyrannical deity, Foucault’s account of the author function may seem to offer a more meticulous genealogy of authorship. Nonetheless, Barthes’ deicidal analogy also highlights a lacuna in Foucault’s essay: that the author functions as a sort of secular God. This investment in the secular figure of the author has important implications for reading Rushdie’s own framing of the Rushdie affair, as we will see.

In a certain sense, Rushdie’s attempt to understand the experience of revelation and the foundation of Islam as events within history also entails a tacit investment in, rather than a decentring of, the Romantic idea of the author as a secular God. Rushdie’s self-fashioning as a literary hero is certainly evident in his choice of alias during the “fatwa years”: Joseph Anton is of course an invented name borrowed from Conrad and Chekhov. Furthermore, it is the comparison Rushdie’s narrator draws between the role of the contemporary writer in 1986 and Shelley’s often-quoted statement that poets are “‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’” (qtd. in Rushdie, 2012: 78) that seems to reinforce Rushdie’s belief in the Romantic idea of the author. By invoking Shelley’s essay, Rushdie may invite readers to draw parallels between Shelley’s secular appropriation of Prophetic motifs from Christian scripture as metaphors for the Romantic imagination and Rushdie’s literary representation of Islamic history. Bryan Shelley has noted how for Shelley in A Defence of Poetry “the biblical idea of God as Creator becomes the supreme metaphor of poetic creation” (1994: 123). In The Satanic Verses, the figure of the author is similarly presented as a subversive and secular figure that appropriates the creative power of God. Such investment in a rather belated idea of the author may seem antithetical to the anti-foundational idea of literary representation with which much of Rushdie’s fiction has been associated. And yet the authority with which Rushdie’s third-person narrator speaks of the “satanic verses” episode as both a historical event and a “good story” in Joseph Anton also confers a significant degree of knowledge and authority onto the authorial figure of Rushdie. In this respect, the account of Islamic history presented in Joseph Anton lends support to Timothy Brennan’s argument that the novel “projects itself as a rival Quran with Rushdie as its prophet and the devil as its supernatural voice” (1989: 139).

In his illuminating reading of Rushdie’s fictional reworking of Islamic history in The Satanic Verses, Mondal (2014) highlights many of the difficulties with Rushdie’s self-consciously presentist interpretation of Islamic history, and how this reading generated further misreadings in some of the responses from self-identified Muslim readers. Specifically, he points to Rushdie’s conflation of Islamic history and Islamism, and his suggestion that one can trace an unbroken historical line between the foundation of Islam in the seventh century and the authoritarian interpretation of sharia law associated with Muslim fundamentalists such as Ayatollah Khomeini; he also offers some subtle reflections on Rushdie’s rather glib treatment of Islamic history, and his conflation of different cultural and historical understandings of the satanic (2014: 97−146). It might of course be argued that to challenge Rushdie’s imaginative rewriting of the “satanic verses” episode on historical grounds is to ignore the postmodern terms in which Rushdie re-presents Islamic history in the novel. To be sure, Rushdie’s account of revelation in Chapter Two of The Satanic Verses involves a complex layering of narrative frames in which the narrator puts words into the mouth of the film star, Gibreel Farishta, who in turn puts words into the mouth of the Prophet. The following passage exemplifies this point well:

It happens: revelation. Like this: Mahound, still in his notsleep, becomes rigid, veins bulge in his neck, he clutches at his centre. […] The dragging again, the dragging and now the miracle starts in his my our guts, he is straining with all his might at something, forcing something, and Gibreel begins to feel that strength that force, here it is at my own jaw working it, opening, shutting; and the power, starting within Mahound, reaching up to my vocal cords and the voice comes.

Not my voice I’d never known such words I’m no classy speaker never was never will be but this isn’t my voice it’s a Voice.

[…] My lips moving, being moved by. What, whom? Don’t know, can’t say. Nevertheless, here they are, coming out of my mouth, up my throat, past my teeth: the Words.

Being God’s postman is no fun, yaar.

Butbutbut: God isn’t in the picture.

God knows whose postman I’ve been. (1988: 112; emphasis in original)

The slippage between pronouns and registers here foregrounds a complex scene of narrative ventriloquism in which it is not quite clear who is speaking for whom. While this chapter is supposedly set in seventh-century Jahilia, it is also reported from Gibreel’s point of view as a migrant and a former film star in late twentieth-century London. Roger Clark (2001) has claimed that the voice that possesses Gibreel is that of Rushdie’s satanic narrator. This satanic narrator’s mode of operation, Clark argues, is a diabolical form of indeterminacy, which “moves in and out of the text in order to insinuate that there is no such thing as a single, transcendental Meaning and Unity” (2001: 75). By suggesting that the historical event of revelation can be understood through the analogy of an embedded series of narrative frames, this quoted extract can certainly be seen to highlight the way in which the rhetorical organization of the text draws attention to the necessity of misunderstanding The Satanic Verses. By embedding the revelation of this fictionalized prophet in the dreams of an Indian film star, who is in turn possessed by the third voice of a satanic narrator, Rushdie prevents readers from deciding with any certainty whether a satanic narrator has possessed Gibreel, whether Gibreel is a prophet, or whether he is suffering from mental illness (Clark, 2001: 76). Such a narrative technique may serve to reinforce Rushdie’s stated aim in The Satanic Verses: to expose the invention and interpretation of Islam through (a secular idea of) history. Yet to read the novel in this way is to confuse the stated intentions of its implied author in “In Good Faith” (Rushdie, 1991a) and Joseph Anton, and the radical indeterminacy that Clark attributes to the rhetorical function of the satanic narrator. The novel certainly encourages such a contemporary reading in its suggestion that Satan is a post-Romantic hero who challenges religious authority in the manner of a postmodern Prometheus. But this would be to valorize a certain ethos of secular reading that ignores the way in which Rushdie’s postmodern representation of Islamic history assumes a secular reading public that is broadly sympathetic to the post-Christian, secular ideology of the novel. In doing so, we run the risk of foreclosing the value and significance of some of the more polemical readings of the novel that led to the emergence of what Aamir Mufti has called the Islamic public sphere (1991: 112).

In an attempt to think through and beyond the implications of the many and varied responses of self-identified Muslim readers to The Satanic Verses, as well as Rushdie’s own defence of the novel, Mondal (2014) has raised some important questions about Rushdie’s use of historical sources, and his equivocation between anti-foundational claims about revelation on the one hand and more straightforwardly empirical claims about Islamic history on the other. The realist account of Islamic history and the apocryphal story of the “satanic verses” episode presented in Joseph Anton can be seen to further exemplify this empirical approach to history, as I have already suggested. This empirical account of seventh-century Mecca as it is understood through the mind of a young Cambridge history undergraduate in the late 1960s is of course subordinated to an account of the narrative of Rushdie’s subsequent development as a novelist. And in this move from superficial historical description to the novelization of Islamic history, Rushdie elides what Mondal has called the distinction between the specific ethical and political reasons for the Prophet’s acceptance of pagan goddesses into Islam on the one hand and contemporary, epistemological questions of belief on the other (2014: 105). In other words, by presenting the moral parable of the Prophet’s ethical commitment to the survival of his community as a sign of the Prophet’s unreliability, Rushdie seems to ignore the lessons of his history professor, Arthur Hibbert. Rather than listening to the way in which the people speak and understand their cultural and historical circumstances, Rushdie seems to foreclose their voices.

In defence of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie has argued “that millions upon millions of people […] have been willing to judge The Satanic Verses and its author, without reading it” (1991: 397). One of the difficulties with such a claim, however, is that it assumes that the meaning of “reading” is self-evident, and that the postmodern ethos of reading exemplified by Barthes’ declaration of the birth of the reader is one that is universally shared. It may be true, as Gayatri Spivak claims, that the postcolonial life world “wrenched [The Satanic Verses] into rumor, criticism by hearsay, a text taken as evidence, talked about rather than read” (1993: 228). This is not to suggest, however, that the transformation of the text into a source of rumour that circulates in an emergent Islamic public sphere is without value or significance. Indeed, what Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson (2011) call “not reading” can also be understood as a meaningful response to controversial books such as The Satanic Verses: a response that challenges the elite and secular assumptions underpinning Rushdie’s sense of an appropriate form of reading. This is not to suggest that the partial forms of reading or not reading The Satanic Verses are the only legitimate forms of Muslim protest against cultural representations that are deemed to be Islamophobic. But a consideration of such forms of reading can help to shed light on the injurious structure of feeling produced by such representations. In a discussion of religion, race, and hate speech, the anthropologist Saba Mahmood claims that the framing of the Danish cartoon controversy “in terms of blasphemy and freedom of speech” (Mahmood in Asad et al., 2012: 79) has rendered unintelligible a specific concept of moral injury that derives from an intimate ethical relationship “between a devout Muslim and the exemplary figure of Muhammad” (2012: 76). Mahmood is primarily concerned with the ways in which Europe’s hate speech laws function “as instruments of secular power [that] demarcate and performatively produce normative notions of religion and religious subjectivity” (2012: 150). Yet her argument about how the dominant discourse of liberal secularism produces “normative notions of religion and religious subjectivity” has important implications for understanding the (secular) meaning of reading after the Rushdie affair. If the dominant discourse of liberal secularism produces “normative notions of religion and religious subjectivity”, the framing of Muslim non-readers or partial readers in the liberal secularist defence of The Satanic Verses produces a normative notion of reading, which claims to be open to multiple interpretations but cannot tolerate literal readings.

Seán Burke has suggested that Roland Barthes’ hyperbolic declaration of the death of the author as God paradoxically participates in its construction (2008a: 26). What Burke implies but does not explicitly state is that Barthes’ theocentric idea of authorship and his post-Nietzschean conception of the reader are implicated in an ideology of secularism, as we have seen. This is not to suggest that Barthes is responsible for producing a normative idea of (secular) reading that renders other forms of (religious) reading unintelligible. And nor is it to imply that a secular reading of religious texts is an illegitimate mode of reading. Rather, it is to say that Barthes’ formulation perhaps needs rethinking in the aftermath of the Rushdie affair. For if the death of the author also instantiated the return of the author as a secular God, whose rights to (a certain idea of) free speech and protection from harm have been guaranteed by the liberal state, this also entails the production of a normative idea of secular reading that excludes consideration of the ways in which the discursive act of writing might, in some cases, wound or injure its readers. This is not to say that all Muslim readers of The Satanic Verses read the novel in the same way, or indeed that there is an essential Muslim way of reading texts such as The Satanic Verses. Instead, it is to suggest that we need a more nuanced account of authorship and reception that considers the ways in which literary texts are also discursive acts that are implicated in structures of power that have the capacity to harm their readers in particular ways.

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on London of 7 July 2005, the framing of Joseph Anton and the Rushdie affair in relation to the global “War on Terror” exemplifies how the life writing of a “uniquely situated cosmopolitan” author such as Rushdie can also contribute to the cultural narratives that frame the so-called clash of civilizations. Indeed, it is significant that Rushdie concludes his memoir with a discussion of the attacks on New York of 11 September 2001. In this closing section, Rushdie positions himself as a secular humanist and an anti-terrorist. As Rushdie’s autobiographical narrator puts it:

He chose to believe in human nature, and in the universality of its rights and ethics and freedoms, and to stand against the fallacies of relativism that were at the heart of the invective of the armies of the religious (we hate you because we aren’t like you) and of their fellow travellers in the West, too, many of whom, disappointingly, were on the left. If the art of the novel revealed anything, it was that human nature was the great constant, in any place, in any time, and that, as Heraclitus had said two thousand years earlier, a man’s ethos, his way of being in the world, was his daimon, the guiding principle that shaped his life — or, in the pithier, more familiar formulation of the idea, that character was destiny. It was hard to hold on to that idea while the smoke of death stood in the sky over Ground Zero and the murders of thousands of men and women whose characters had not determined their fates were on everyone’s mind, it hadn’t mattered if they were hard workers or generous friends or loving parents or great romantics, the planes hadn’t cared about their ethos; and yes, now terrorism could be our destiny, war could be our destiny, our lives were no longer wholly ours to control; but still our sovereign natures needed to be insisted on; perhaps more than ever amid the horror, it was important to speak up for individual human responsibility, to say that the murderers were morally responsible for their crimes, and neither their faith nor their rage at America was an excuse; it was important, at a time of gargantuan, inflated ideologies, not to forget the human scale, to continue to insist on our essential humanity, to go on making love, so to speak, in a combat zone. (626−27; emphasis in original)

That Rushdie’s appeal to a universal humanism against what he calls the “fallacies of relativism” that lie at “the heart of the invective of the armies of the religious” reinforces a dichotomy between Islamic faith and secularist faith may seem to be self-evident. What is perhaps less clear is how the disappearance and return of the author in Rushdie’s life writing is bound up with the language and imagery of the War on Terror. By retrospectively framing the experience of a life lived in protective custody as a “little battle” that was the “prologue” to “the main event” of the War on Terror (626), the narrator not only implies that there is a causal relationship between the Rushdie affair and the War on Terror; he also mobilizes the quasi-military rhetoric of the clash of civilizations to shore up his writerly self. As a memoir of the Rushdie affair, Joseph Anton commemorates the constraints placed on the author’s private and professional life during the period spent living under house arrest and his struggle to “take back his life” (608). In this respect, the narrative could be read as a singular work of mourning for the symbolic death of the author that the Rushdie affair signified. Yet, in the attempt to “take back his life”, Rushdie also clarifies how the author’s discursive authority in the global literary marketplace is simultaneously implicated in the sovereign power of the liberal secular state. By framing the contemporary author of world literature as an “unacknowledged legislator of the world”, Rushdie also foregrounds how his freedom of speech is bound up with the sovereign power of secular states such as the United States and the United Kingdom. Rushdie’s statements about secular humanism, the reformation of Islam, and the War on Terror in Joseph Anton do not have the force of law, but they can help to illuminate the complex relationship between writing, law, and violent formations of sovereignty. If Rushdie’s statements about Islam and the War on Terror can be understood as sovereign speech acts, they also raise questions about which statements are afforded the rights and freedoms associated with sovereignty and which statements are prohibited. As an account of how the British police protected Rushdie’s body and life from the threat of assassination, Joseph Anton foregrounds how the sovereignty of the secular state was bound up with the sovereign speech acts of the (secular) author. Yet this is not to suggest that all forms of life writing have the same relationship to contemporary formations of sovereign power. A brief consideration of the material form of Mohamedou Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary (2015) — a prison narrative written and published during Slahi’s detention at the US military prison Camp Delta, Guantánamo Bay — illustrates how certain forms of life writing are more threatening to the sovereign power of secular states than others. The subjection of Slahi’s prison narrative to 2500 redactions by the American military before it was approved for publication clearly exemplifies the limits placed on certain forms of speech by the secular state. As a form of prison writing, Guantánamo Diary may seem quite different from the account of the Rushdie affair presented in Joseph Anton. Yet the partial censorship of Slahi’s narrative highlights the political norms that continue to regulate the disappearance and return of the author in the global War on Terror.