Normal in New York

Normal in New York
Salman Rushdie has dodged a fatwa. Maybe we will too.
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, April 25, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT

NEW YORK--One has to get on with life, and New Yorkers are doing that. But every so often there are these peculiar moments. I had one last night, in realizing that for all the terror last fall, this is a city in which Salman Rushdie--he of the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 death fatwa--feels safe.

I'm guessing that because I saw him onstage Tuesday night, reading from his latest novel, "Fury," to an audience of about 500 people. At the Y, no less. No, not the YMCA, but the 92nd Street Young Men's Hebrew Association, a prominent Manhattan cultural center offering brochures in the lobby with titles such as "All Things Jewish."

Nor did the audience seem concerned about security, which did not even include stopping some of the literati who set off the pair of metal detectors at the door. Judging from chats in the lobby and the questions for Mr. Rushdie, most folks had come simply to hear the author read aloud and talk about his writing, not his status for years as an iconic target of militant Islamic ire.

And at that point the whole situation starts to feel as surreal as some of the weirder sequences from a Salman Rushdie novel. On one level, life feels more normal--even it seems, for Mr. Rushdie. Khomeini is long dead. The Iranian government in 1998 said it would leave Mr. Rushdie alone. Yet as recently as last fall, there were reports that a religious foundation in Iran has yet to revoke a $2.8 million bounty on his head. Perhaps it offers some protection that the Iranian government has officially separated itself from this project. Attempts to collect could prove complex and unrewarding. Certainly the residual threat doesn't seem to bother Mr. Rushdie much. He moved to New York from London a while back, and has been a man about town for some time. But is that because he's really safe? Brave? Delusional?

As a citizen of a country that has come under a death decree from Islamic zealots, I wanted a look at someone who had outlived a killer fatwa. I was pleased to think that maybe such fevered preoccupations can, after all, just fade away. Maybe, with a little time, the terrorists who want to destroy America will figure it is more interesting to take up dentistry, or car repair, and leave us alone. I mused on how Germany and Japan, after World War II, had flipped from mortal fascist enemies to democratic, good pals. Though it also occurred to me that before these conversions took place we had to beat them in a war and occupy them for a while.

On the subway, en route to the reading, I'd had a bout of doubts. Yes, Mr. Rushdie has been out in public for a while now. But was this really safe? What if, even with the fatwa lifted, there were a few guys out there who hadn't heard, or didn't care? Perhaps some rogue fanatic, still roaming the globe, like those lonely Japanese soldiers who kept turning up on remote islands after World War II, unaware the war was over. Or would some well-informed, entirely calculating group of terrorists choose this evening to make a horrible statement? From there, it was a short leap to wondering how close to the stage the press seats might be, and whether any rogue fatwa types, if they struck, would go only for Mr. Rushdie, or include the audience. These did not seem generous thoughts.

The auditorium was almost full. Mr. Rushdie arrived onstage, neat and brisk. Since his pre-fatwa days in the 1980s of writing laudatory nonsense about the Nicaraguan communists, I have been no fan of his political thinking. But he was funny and charming in his chat about literature. Maybe it helped to know that just after the Sept. 11 attacks, he had written in the Washington Post, defending America against criticism from the left. Maybe it was just plain interesting to see this long-hidden man up there on stage, in his dark shirt and dark baggy pants, stroking his beard and telling us, with regard to the fatwa-provoking "Satanic Verses," that "I really think that book is finally able to be read as a book."

Maybe. Though that might mean almost no one would ever bother reading it again. We are not quite there yet.

As for Mr. Rushdie's latest novel, "Fury"--through no fault of his own, the malice of Islamic militants has again left its mark. The formal publishing date for this book was Sept. 11. After the attacks he broke off his reading tour for a while. Now he thinks that "Fury," evokes a "vanished epoch," a New York in which it is forever Sept. 10.

But here in post-Sept. 11, it's not so bad. Mr. Rushdie says he feels "comfortable." If anything, he feels "closer" to the soul of the city. He chalks it up to the culture: "There's no dominant culture here. I'm normal. I'm not used to being normal." Putting it another way, Mr. Rushdie elaborated that in New York, we're all abnormal, and "I feel as abnormal as everyone else."

At the book signing, afterwards, I asked him if he felt less safe after Sept. 11. He said "No, only in the sense that we all do." I left, still trying to figure. It all felt so abnormally normal. But it did not feel safe.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."