Living to tell the tale

Joseph Anton: A Memoir
by Salman Rushdie
Random House, September 2012
656 pages / $18  Buy from Amazon





















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  1. Don

      Great review, thanks!

  2. alan

      Great point about those writers all having J in their first names but I wish you had gone further and drawn attention to the fact that J is the INITIAL letter in those names.

  3. Caleb Powell

      Kaya, this review is troubling on two fronts. One – the book, two – your analysis.

      I read the excerpt in The New Yorker, a mighty pedestrian bit, which compelled me to avoid the book. He’s Rushdie, and he will always carry an important spot in literature, much of it deserved, but from the small excerpt he was evening scores. Not attractive in any writer.

      I wonder if he wrote about the Sivas Massacre, not mentioned here, but 37 people died in Turkey as a result of an attack aimed at one of his translators. I’d be interested in Rushdie’s two cents.

      Finally, Kaya, I’m not sure if you captured his views about “Islamophobia”, but I find your take odd. For example, the following: “Islamophobic acts of violence in Europe and the US whose narrow-mindedness equals some of Rushdie’s extremist enemies”…what the fuck???? Talk about beyond absurd. Eight countries currently have the death penalty as law for apostates from Islam (data from Pew Research), Islamic countries, one after the other, mitigate honor killings (read Irshad Manji or Rana Husseini) to the point that murder of a “disobedient” woman can be exonerated or worthy of less than a year in prison. Over 80% of the citizens in Egypt and Jordan back the death penalty for apostates (Pew Research). How can you compare the violence directed toward Coptic Christians in Egypt, Christians in Nigeria via Boko Haram, and Indonesia (Google the beheaded school girls in Sulawesi) to violence in Europe and the US? The only violence in the US of similar nature are the honor killings carried out by Muslim parents and terrorists acts by dickheads such as Nidal Hasan who get protected by mushbrains like you. There is violence in the West, and evil, and warmongering, but it’s not the same. I repeat, can you cite “equal” acts of violence, in quantity and extremity and in the name of “God/Allah”, in the West?

      No, you can’t.

  4. Caleb Powell

      PS – If you try to bring up Anders Breivik and isolated incidents of terror by fringe groups and right-wing extremists, remember, they are equivalent with Nidal Hasan in terms of moral vileness, but not in social and cultural terms. Norway immediately arrested Breivik, and the society and culture are unanimous in their condemnation. But suicide bombers in Afghanistan are looked at as heros and martyrs by the Taliban.

      I’m with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her take on the definition of Islamophobia.

      If I’ve gone on too much, man, it’s because your comment was just that unsettling in its lack of nuance. If I sound pissed, I am. Go ahead, I challenge you again, back up your statement: “Islamophobic acts of violence in Europe and the US whose narrow-mindedness equals some of Rushdie’s extremist enemies.”
      Just go ahead. Please.

  5. deadgod

      Genc himself highlights the “score”-settling aspect of the book: “As historian of his life, Rushdie never forgets a negative review or an act of animosity.”

      Genc does not make a false equivalence between “Islamophobic acts of violence” and violence committed in the name of Islam; no such “compar[ison]” is present in his equation of the “narrow-mindedness” of “Islamophobic acts of violence” and self-appointedly Islam-motivated violence.

      What he says is that he doesn’t “like” the fact that an identification of Islam with “intolerance” is the grounds for Rushdie’s dismissal of the term “Islamophobia”, and that Rushdie makes “too broad a claim” with this identification in the light of anti-Islamic extremism. (He could have added that not only is there anti-Muslim violence in the West, but there’s also plenty of “intolerance” which has nothing to do with Islam.) The synonymy does not obtain.

      Nowhere does Genc support violence committed in the name of Islam. Your insistence that he does is inaccurate and degrades only whatever point you might have been making.

      To the contrary, Genc praises Rushdie’s advocacy for the freedom of expression Rushdie and his interpreters and readers had and have been somewhat denied by violently intolerant Muslims.

      In short, Genc thinks that Rushdie’s largely admirable book is slightly marred by an exaggeration of Islam’s “intolerance”–indeed, by Rushdie’s “claim” that “intolerance” is intrinsic to Islam–, which Rushdie’s “personal experience might [have] suggest[ed]”.

      Perhaps a reader of Rushdie’s whole book will find this characterization of Rushdie’s point of view itself hyperbolic, but even then, one fair word for this kind of balanced review is nuanced.

  6. alan

      US imperialism is engaged in direct military operations in a number of supposedly sovereign Muslim-majority countries; is threatening at least a couple more with the same; supports and has historically supported brutally repressive and anti-democratic regimes in the Near East, Pakistan, and Indonesia (including that of Israel), and is largely responsible for keeping these parts of the world economically backward and thus mired in the traditional social and religious reaction you claim to be concerned about. The CIA sponsored and armed Islamic fanatics in Afghanistan against the Soviets who were there to protect a modernizing government that was letting girls go to school.

  7. deadgod

      In addition to the militarization of engagement by the West (and particularly by the US) with Muslim-majority countries–which looks reasonably to most in those countries like uncomplicatedly anti-Islamic warfare, yes?–, there are terror cells and networks in the US devoted – incredibly – to the cause of compulsory incubation.

      In many parts of the US, if women’s reproductive autonomy were argued for more emphatically, its advocates would be the targets of more–much more–lethal violence.

      Christian-superficialist America is not the “same” as, say, Taliban-dominated Muslim society, but the former is much closer to the latter than it is to anything like a community of ‘free’ agency.