SALMAN RUSHDIE: I was in Houston, Texas 'cause I was in the middle of the book tour for Fury when it first came out. And of course like everybody else whose book tour was then cancelled because nobody was in the mood for book tours. And also because, it became impossible to fly around.
I was supposedly flying to Minneapolis and never got there of course. I was rung by a radio producer who asked me if I'd seen what was happening in New York . I turned it on just in time to see the second plane hit.
And then like everybody else I just stood there, . It was very strange. You couldn't sit down and watch television that seemed inappropriate. I just stood there in front of the television watching this disaster.
INTERVIEWER: Would you have written Fury differently now?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: Yes, because the city is different now. It was a book written about a specific moment and that moment came to an end that day.
INTERVIEWER: Which moment?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: This last, golden age moment of New York. There's been these 15 or 20 years of endlessly increasing prosperity and for many people here there was a spirit of a very good life. It was also, of course, a very materialistic period, very money driven. But this has always been a money-driven city.
I had felt a strong urge to try and capture that moment which now if I look back at it, it seems like actually quite strange to me that I was suddenly possessed by this desire to try and capture this very immediate moment, right now, not in six month's time but now.
And of course I thought that one of these days this moment will end. If you're at the top there's only one way to go which is to fall. That makes the book in a way look more prophetic than it is. Because the book really is an attempt to capture a moment as vividly as it could. What I didn't expect is at that age in the history of the city would come to an end so catastrophically. So that now, the book which was written as a satirical novel about America, turns into a historical novel almost overnight because if you read it now it's like writing about another world.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think there was really that moment of change?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: No. But I think everybody in this city has been marked by that event to some degree. And I think it's true that there were people who talked about how everything was different. That there would be no more gossip columns and people would be kinder to each other and so on.
For a little bit people were different to each other here. There was a kind of solicitude and courtesy that certainly is very uncharacteristic of New York. But it's all changed back now. It's all gone back to normal.
So no, I mean the deep nature of a city is its' deep nature and New York is a certain kind of city and still is. But I do think that it's a city that received a body blow and carries the memory of that body blow and the further downtown you go it's still very strange. Below Canal Street is very, very odd indeed. It feels, you still feel the wound. You can see it.
And one of the things I think people who haven't been to New York in this period don't realize is how big a hole it is. You've got a large piece of the city was destroyed. It feels terrible down there. And I know people who have to go and work down there every day who, in a way people are now, people like them are adopting strategies of like trying to block it out, like not looking in that direction, avoiding those streets.
I know people who work in buildings which overlook the ground zero site who will never go to the side of the building where the view is. They stay on the other side of the building so they don't have to look down into it. In those ways you can see that the trauma is very profound.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think September 11 was an attack on capitalism or US imperalism, as many do outside of America?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: I think it is something more profound. I think that if you look at the utterances of al-Quaeda and its supporters, yes, well, they hate America and they want to destroy America, but actually what is really hated which America represents is modernity, the entire project of modernity. Because if the truth was revealed, in the Seventh Century in the Arabian Desert, then everything since then has been a falling away from the truth.
If you try to get back to that truth the modern is the enemy. And it's not unlike what Khomeini used to say. Khomeini's main ideologues used to call the Khomeini revolution a revolt against history. And I think this in a way also is a revolt against history.
INTERVIEWER: Isn't it a revolt against secularization of the world?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: It's a revolt against everything that happened since Mohammed preached in Saudi Arabia in what was then not Saudi but just Arabia. But they think iconically. They think in terms of symbol and allegory. The attack on the World Trade Center only incidentally murdered several thousand people. I think frankly had the buildings been completely empty in their view the attack would have had the same meaning.
The tragedy is that they killed 3,000 people without particularly caring whether they did or not. What they wanted to do is to show that the symbol of the modern world, the tall city, the airplane, the tall building and the airplane, that the two kind of defining symbols of the modern world, you smash them into each other, you destroy both of them. And what you're saying is this is what we will do. We will send the modern world to destroy itself.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think that the non-islamic world understands the difference between a suicide bomber from the Gaza strip and a suicide bomber from al-Quaeda?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: I think so because well there's a very straightforward class difference. The suicide bombers from the Gaza strip really are people who have nothing, whose lives have been devastated and who are often offered irresistible inducements such as their families will be looked after and their sick relatives will be given medical care and their children will go to college and, etceteras. Things they could never dream of offering their family and it, in that situation of desperation you will find people who are willing to do things like that.
In al-Quaeda they're all middle class. They all came from good families and so on. There are ideological issues. This is not to do with despair. So they are very different kinds of people. You just have to look at who they are and where they came from.
INTERVIEWER: From a humanist or Judeo-Christian standpoint, conflicts should if possible be solved by debate and discussion. Do you think there is even grounds for that at this moment of history?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: No. I don't. I think, let's just say that there's two subjects. There's the subject of terrorism and there's the slightly different subject of injustice. And clearly on that subject we need to all work to lessen the degree of injustice that exists in the world, . The Middle East is one obvious place where a great injustice is taking place. I spent a lot of my life arguing on behalf of the Palestinian homeland and I still am absolutely convinced that that has to happen and it has to be something better than these kinds of scraps of territory that they now have and there has to be an acceptable solution to all parties. And it's never been more urgent or less likely that it's going to happen.
So yes, the subject of injustice exists and is a very big subject. I've always argued when people attack globalization and the globalized economy, the problem is not globalization in any way. Globalization isn't going away. The problem, as people have argued is, including me, is that the problem is not globalization itself but the inequitable distribution of resources in the globalized world. The question is how do you reduce that inequity? How do you increase the amount of social justice inside a globalized world rather than try and pretend that some way the world can be de-globalized.
So there's that discourse which I think is very important and on that subject, yes, that's about diplomacy and politics and argument so on. But then there's the discourse of terrorism and as I say, I don't think al-Quaeda gives a damn about Palestine. That's not, they're not there as the knights on white charges coming to rescue the Palestinian people.
INTERVIEWER: They just insrumentalize it.
SALMAN RUSHDIE: Yes. They use it. When I was in Washington a few months ago and had a chance to speak to senators of both parties, I said to them, look, there is no link between al-Quaeda and the Palestinian issue. But if you remove the Palestinian issue, if you resolve that, you also remove the terrorists' greatest rhetorical argument. You take away their recruiting slogan, because the Muslim world is full of people who are not terrorists, who dislike al-Quaeda, but who are appalled by what is happening in the Middle East. And, therefore, when somebody comes along to them and says the way of fighting this is by these extreme means, sometimes people will listen. .
INTERVIEWER: Do you think that al-Quaeda managed already to turn their struggle and the war in Afghanistan into a Spanish Civil War of the Muslim world?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: No. They notably failed to do that. A jihad from all the Muslim countries didn't happen. Nothing happened is what happened. Al-Quaeda has a pretty busted flush. Here are these leaders who boasted about what a great thing martyrdom was, but when they were in danger they run for the hills. These are not very impressive leaders. But I think they demonstrated that a relatively small number of highly motivated people can have a very big effect in the world. Where they have succeeded is that they have seriously shaken people's sense of their own safety. And the consequence of that is that we see a security state being developed around the western world which, I mean in many ways is in itself quite a worrying thing. Oddly, I think, they've had relatively little effect in the Muslim world. But they've had quite a large impact on the western world.
INTERVIEWER: Didn't bin Laden try to style himself into a prophetlike figure? The symbolysm of him talking in fron of the cave was a direct quote from the Quoran, when the prophet goes into the desert for 40 days to struggle with the demons.
SALMAN RUSHDIE: Oh yes, yes. He does try. But look at the symbolism now. Bin Laden is somebody hiding in a cave while pushing his men in front of him to be shot. That's what he looks like now. If he thinks martyrdom is such a great idea why isn't he riding a horse into battle? I think you find in the Muslim world people much less interested in saying what a great guy he is. Obviously there are extremists and they still say so, but , I think in general this has been a big defeat for al-Quaeda. , it really has been smashed up. That doesn't mean that there is never going to be any act of terrorism in the future. But I think the ability of al-Quaeda to act as a unified organization is very largely destroyed. Now, whether they can reconstruct it or not is another question. And they might well be trying to. But they have been hit in a way that I think they didn't think they were going to.
A lot of bin Laden's rhetoric was based on an assessment of America as not having the balls to come and get me. And they kept saying that, American soldiers are too cowardly to fight. There was a lot of taunting going on as if they felt secure in their cave fortresses. And they colossally underestimated the military power of this country. Not just that, but actually the resolve of this country to go and get them. And actually, they're not making those boasts anymore if you've noticed.
INTERVIEWER: In '96 bin Laden basically spoke a collective fatwah against the whole secular world, both against Saudi Arabia and against the west. How much meaning does that actually have?
SALMAN RUSHDIE: None. Bin Laden is just a businessman. This isn't about theology. It just isn't at all about theology, it's about power politics. Bin Laden's end game was to try and take control of Saudi Arabia when the old Saud dies. And of course, at the point at which he controlled that percentage of the world's oil he would become colossally important. I think he's going to find that quite difficult to do now. But I think that was his plan.
INTERVIEWER: Let's start with the inevitable question - where were you on 9/11?
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