‘I must live until I die, mustn’t I?’

On writer Salman Rushdie who was grievously injured on Friday, the man whose name he inherited, and the resonances 

Salman Rushdie: File Picture

Upala Sen   |  TT  |  14.08.22: The irony of it was never lost on Salman Rushdie. His father had borrowed the family name from the 12th century Spanish-Arab philosopher Ibn Rushd, whose rationalist views were not exactly a hot favourite with Islamists. Rushd had been exiled at one point, his writings banned and his books burnt. When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie on February 14, 1989, for his work, The Satanic Verses, he brought the sword down on life as Rushdie knew it. A life whose broad pattern resembled that of the man’s whose name the writer had been given. Years later, in his memoir, Rushdie wrote of himself in third person, “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…”

A lot is in a name

Rushdie’s memoir is titled Joseph Anton. The inheritance of the Rushd name at birth had been the universe’s little joke on him, and one that he had seemingly embraced. But when the death threat came and it was up to him to take a new name, one that would afford him protection, Rushdie went with Joseph Anton. It was a combination of the names of Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad and Russian playwright and short story writer Anton Chekov. Speaking of assumed names, the French translator of The Satanic Verses went by French Renaissance writer Francois Rabelais’s pseudonym, Alcofribas Nasier, thus protecting himself and possibly making a point too.

Thirty Three Years, Five Months, Twenty Nine Days

Rushd appears again in Rushdie’s 2015 novel Two Years, Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights. In Lucena in Andalusia, where he is living in exile, Rushd meets the jinnia Dunia and falls in love with her. Ibn Rushd whispers to his lover, whose name in translation means ‘the world’, “You will see, as time goes by… that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates.” Salman Rushdie was born two months before Independence. Two days before India turned 75, he was attacked just as he was going to deliver a lecture in New York. The theme of it --- United States as asylum for writers and other artists in exile and as a home for freedom of creative expression. At the time of writing this piece, the attacker had been identified, but the exact motive was yet to be made clear. Preliminary reports suggested he was "sympathetic to causes of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard". Rushdie is in hospital battling for his life. To think this happened thirty three years, five months and twenty nine days since the fatwa.