 OK. Good evening, everyone. My name is Jonathan Pledge. I'm a curator here at the British Library. I'm very pleased to welcome you to our event, Standing with Salmon. Looking back at the controversy arising from the publication of the Satanic Verses almost 20 years ago. This event is part of the British Library's programme for Ban Books Week 2017. Ban Books Week began in the US under the auspices of the American Library Association in 1982, and inaugural UK events were staged last year by the British Library, Free Word, and the Literary Inheritage Services for Islunds and Council. Sorry, I beg your pardon, Library Inheritage Services for Islunds and Council. We're pleased to say this year we've been joined by the Royal Society for Literature, spread the word, index on censorship, and many others, and we'll be looking to expand our programme next year to promote the freedom to read. As a taste of things to come, I should mention that this event is being webcast live to Exeter, Huddlesfield, Poole and Sheffield as part of the British Library's Living Knowledge Network, so smile. In the case of Salmon Rushdie and the attempted censorship of the Satanic Verses by a religious decree, is probably the most famous case of censorship in the last 30 years, dealing as it did in its most basic form with the condemning to death of an author for something he had written. As we will shortly hear, Salmon Rushdie himself recognised the importance of what had occurred and what it pretended a prediction that has sadly turned out to be true. The Salmon Rushdie campaign group demonstrated the willingness of individuals to stand up for the principles of free speech at any price. The British Library is very proud to hold the campaign group archive, and events like this are a welcome opportunity to demonstrate the value of our contemporary archives beyond their research value. As well as our distinguished panel, which includes in a particular order, Melvin Bragg, Francis de Souza, Caroline Michelle and Yasmine Raymond, I'm pleased to say that in the audience tonight we have the historian and writer, Lady Antonia Frazier, who along with her late husband, Harold Pinter, was a close personal friend or supporter of Salmon. Finally, before I hand over to the chair for this evening, Lisa Abpinion-Yazy, I would like to extend a special thanks to our co-sponsors for this evening, the Royal Society for Literature. Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. Well, it's very good to see you all here. I think this is quite a remarkable gathering of people that we've got here, and I'm going to introduce them not with the full weight of who they are now, but also tell you a little bit about who they were almost 30 years ago at that extraordinary moment in our contemporary, still contemporary history, when the satanic verses became the object of a fatwa by the Ayatollah Homeini. So, sitting at the far side for me is Baroness Francis de Souza, who was until recently Lord Speaker. But at the time of the fatwa 1989, she was the head of an organisation called Article 19, which those of you who are interested in free speech will know well since it's monitored and championed free speech around the world. Sitting next to her is Melvin Bragg, another Lord, who I don't think was a Lord back in 89, and nor were you then Chancellor of the University of Leicester, were you? No, okay, too long ago. But who was, even then, our foremost arts and ideas broadcaster and ran a programme called the South Bank Show, which was on ITV, and which had quite a lot to do with Salman at the time. Caroline Michelle, who is the most beautiful woman in London, but a partner was back then, too, and is the head, the CEO of a literary agency called Fraser Dunlop. I'm going to get it wrong, Caroline. Fraser Dunlop, thank you. He's also chair of the British Film Institute now, and a Hay Literary Festival. At the time of the fatwa, she was the publicist at Faber and Faber, a very important publisher. And Yasmin Raymond, who's sitting next to me, is the CEO of the Greenwich Inclusion Project, and was named secularist of the year in 2017. I think she's too young to... No, I'm not under-seriously hot. All right, she's not too young, but she's certainly younger than me. Well, I, at the time of the fatwa, unlike this horary age that I have now reached, was the deputy director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, which had quite a lot to do with Salman, who at that time, even then, was one of our great leading writers, had already won the Booker Prize, and for Satanic Versus Itself had won the Whitbread Prize by the time the fatwa came. So what I'm going to do is I've been asked to give you a little history, which I know quite well because I was there, but that's not the case because I remember nothing, but I did put together this book called The Rusty File, which actually documents through the press around the world the events leading up to, and then immediately after, the fatwa. And quite an extraordinary read it is, as I now see, because, of course, at the time when you're in it, you don't see things in the same way. So, right now, I'd like you, for those of you who are under 55, to close your eyes and imagine yourself in a different time. This is a little thought experiment, and it is quite extraordinarily a different time. So, first of all, the Berlin Wall is still standing, and the Soviet Union, though relaxing under Gorbachev, is still in place. Margaret Thatcher is our Prime Minister, and she figures in the satanic verses, which in many respects is also a satire of Britain at the time. Ronald Reagan is just stepping down as President of the United States to be replaced by George Bush the Elder. Soviet troops are leaving Afghanistan after a 10-year long military occupation. There is no 24-hour news. There is no email. There are no mobile phones. The internet is an idea on paper. What we have are fax machines, those now out of date technologies which were instrumental in the rise of Solidarnoes in Poland, and that's the end of the Cold War, and indeed played an important part in this particular story. India is in the midst of growing sectarian descent of a kind which really began the present that we now have. Rajiv Gandhi is Prime Minister. Few in the UK speak publicly about their religion. I think that's one of the things that is hardest to remember. If they have any, certainly not in cultural circles where most are public secularists. Religion is very much part of the private sphere. It is certainly not part of the decade's identity politics, which include blacks, a term that also back then covers people from India and Pakistan, and we do think in terms of geographic regions certainly far more than in terms of religions. Identity politics is about blacks, gays and women. Class is still in the picture, but the so-called cultural turn is displacing it, and I think that class is only beginning to have a comeback in the last few years. Censorship is something we associate with the Soviet bloc, with zamestat, or with Nazi book birdings. We had a lot of zamestat events at the ICA, I remember. Or we think about the Papal Index, already a very dusty and unheeded blacklist which included amongst many, many, many, many titles, all of our literature basically, also Simon de Beauvoir. But nobody pays heed to the Papal Index, I think, very much. Certainly not in France or here. Britain still has a rarely used, only once in my time for a gay Christ image, blasphemy law. We got rid of, like, the blasphemy law when I was still at Penn, I think. And calls for censorship come largely from the Mary White House Brigade who are interested in banning four-letter words and smut, and that was the word that was used from our screens. Offence is not something people feel as a matter of course, and it is certainly not an inditable wrong. It's a term associated, I remember this very, very clearly, with an uptight right wing. To offend, to disturb is what all artists are meant to do to make you think, to make you see the world afresh. Satire is crucially important. To disrupt your preconceptions and prejudices, that's why it's there. Fundamentalism is not part of ordinary vocabulary, except to refer to some very odd Christian groupings in the US. Nor is the word global in great currency. We didn't yet have a global world. We haven't even reached Francis Fukuyama's adage of the end of history in order to enshrine an other arguably no better one. Salman Rushdie really is one of our greatest writers. He's won the Booker for the Midnight's Children. He's been shortlisted for the brilliant book, Shame. He's one of the stars, and I stress this, of the anti-racist movements. He's core amongst anti-racism campaigners. He has a very fine public intellectual, one of our best. It's very sad to me that he's now in the United States and we don't get quite so much of him here. He's also, of course, a friend of mine, as he is of many of the people on this panel. I'll just add this before we start properly. When I read his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses and Proof, in the summer of 1988, before it was published on the 26th, I thought of it then primarily as a brilliant surrealist and satirical expose of Thatcher's Britain, a splendid portrayal of what it meant to be a migrant, the inhabitant of at least two bodies and more minds. I knew back then that Midnight's Children had angered Mrs. Gandy because of a sentence in it which linked her to the stranglehold her son might have had in her, and indeed she brought a defamation suit against Salman in the courts in 1984. I also know that shame is banned in Pakistan, but those countries still feel very far away, something they no longer do. When Satanic Verses is published here, there's nothing at all in the reviews throughout the press to indicate why Syed Shahubuddin, an Indian Muslim MP, is trying to get the book banned in India and eventually succeeds. I don't understand why there are mounting death threats, why the publishers are receiving letters calling for the book to be banned here and in the US. It's a book which many of us, even among Salman's closest readers, found not his easiest to read. And when there are calls to have it banned in Pakistan, which eventually it is in South Africa and through what we now call, but didn't back then the Muslim world, this is quite difficult to grasp. Nor do the newspapers report the first book burning by young Muslims in Bolton on 2 December 1988. We really only hear of local contention in Britain when the book burning in Bradford takes place on January the 14th, 1989. And apparently that book burning, there's been a lot of research to prove that is the case, was sparked by faxes, that wonderful ancient technology from India and the MP Shahubuddin. So to set us off properly, here is Salman Rushdie himself on the day of the Bradford book burning in January 1989. This is, for me, a very sadly appropriate day to be at an event against censorship, because today in Bradford, 1,000 militant Muslims met at the town mall and burned copies of my new novel, The Satanic Verses, this one. On the grounds of an aged blasphemy, I think many of us will find the idea of burning a book pretty revolting. And I think it's an indication of not only the force of militant Islam in the modern world, but also it seems to me of the growth, of the beginnings of a movement very like the fascist movements of the past. And I think it's a movement that we all need to take some notice of. It rather changes the political agenda, but there it is. To exacerbate that, I should say that I heard this evening about a couple of hours before I came here that in response to this act of book burning, W.H. Smith and sons have decided to withdraw my novel from all their branches in England. In quick succession, through February, there were riots around the world. In Islamabad, six are killed and 100 injured as 10,000 storm the American Embassy. America has just published the Downing Verses. On the 14th of February, Iran's revolutionary leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, seeking to put his stamp of revolutionary Islam on what is happening, sends a killing Valentine to Rushdie and issues a fatwa, a death threat. On the 15th, the great Harold Pinter, together with Antonia Fraser, a leader delegation of writers to Downing Street. A few days later, Rushdie and his then wife, the American writer Marianne Wiggins, go into hiding. He remains in hiding through ten grwling years under government guard and several intents on his life are foiled. So that's the scene. And I haven't invoked to you anything of what I think will come out here of how frightened we all very quickly became. The barricades went up around Penguin Books and so on. I'll turn over to Francis de Souza now to give you something of the sense of the campaign for friend Salman. Thank you so much, Lisa. Let me start by saying there were countless numbers of people who were involved in this celebrated case of censorship, of trying to fight this celebrated case of censorship. There were hundreds of individuals around the world, notably of course writers. There were publishers and writers groups. There were non-governmental organisations notably index on censorship as well as article 19, all of whom joined in one way or another to fight this because it was as a preeminent case of censorship in the sense that it was attacking a fundamental right which some of us believe is actually the cornerstone of democracy. Now memory is a very funny thing. I'm sure you'll all agree that we each have different memories and I'm sure that people here will remember certain events very differently. So what I'm really emphasising is that there were a lot of people involved but my memory is really just about the campaign to begin with. The Russia Defense Campaign, eventually called the International Russia Defense Campaign, I'll call it the campaign, was set up in the immediate aftermath of the fatwa when it was announced on the 14th of February 1989 by my predecessor who was the director of article 19. I took over from Kevin Boyle two months later and that taking over of article 19 coincided with a poll run by the Daily Telegraph in which the majority of people believed that Salman should apologise for the book and on the same day the evening standard published a cartoon showing Salman in a coffin. So the offensive had really begun. Now article 19, as Lisa has said, existed to promote and protect freedom of expression and the purpose of the defense campaign was twofold, to ensure that the fatwa was rescinded and also to alert a wider international community of the dangers of censorship and how this case in that it was symbolic of so much freedom that we fought hard for and cherished should be fought. One of the messages that we repeated time and time again was the difference between incitement and freedom of speech because it was an important distinction. Lots of people talked about it being a criminal act, incitement because it angered the Islamic world or some of the Islamic world. I go back here in order to explain it in shorthand to the very famous ruling from the US Supreme Court many, many, many years ago in which it was said that falsely shouting fire in a crowded, all of you know this, falsely shouting fire in a crowded theatre was incitement because the resulting panic would result in violence and damage and injury, whereas of course falsely shouting fire on a street corner is freedom of speech and rather bizarre freedom of speech but nevertheless freedom of speech and not incitement. The strategy of the campaign group was to exert political, diplomatic and economic pressure but this could only be achieved if governments refused to condone Iran's gross abuse of human rights and international law. I think I have to say that from the start perhaps we didn't realise it in the first few weeks but from the start it was a political campaign dealing with a political issue and someone was the political football in all this. It moved from writer's outrage to persistent political lobbying. The campaign had meetings with government and MPs and on one memorable occasion with authorities or officials at the Iranian Embassy in London which they subsequently denied had taken place. We held rallies, media events, we published numerous papers and reports, we lobbied the European Parliament and the Commonwealth very rapidly a number of national rushdie defence groups were set up throughout Europe and indeed beyond. We provided evidence for cases against those who threatened Salman with violence and documented events surrounding the fatwa and the stunning verses over the next 3,000 odd days. Meanwhile of course Salman himself was using his own considerable channels of considerable influence so there were lots of parallel goings-on as it were. Initially the Thatcher government was supportive of the free speech principle within days of the fatwa. Thatcher said our commitment to freedom of expression is unshakeable and in 1990 she said religions can survive the comments of a few people who receive publicity because of their adverse comment. That's slightly ambiguous one wonders who she's talking about there. However later that year in 1990 partial diplomatic relations with Iran were restored with the exchange of Charger d'affaires. Thereafter the consistent message from the FCO to us and I suppose to others was an insistence on quiet diplomacy and I quote, to press loudly for the fatwa to be lifted would be a mistake and reduce chances of securing the British hospitals still held in Lebanon. Time and again advised that any publicity would be counterproductive. The plan which I think Caroline may talk about to hold a thousand day vigil was cancelled because of strong advice from the foreign office saying that this was a dangerous thing to do. Of course Iran began to milk this link. Their rhetoric became ever more explicit. They said for example every Muslim is duty bound to carry out the fatwa. They said that hit squads were being dispatched to murder him. The bounty money from the 15 cordad foundation was increased to include material and political expenses and after the meeting with Clinton which came a little bit later they sent out a statement saying that Rushdie is as the goose being flattened for slaughter. One or two UK ministers remain steadfast on the principle involved at least. At least in public. Douglas Hurd who at that time was president of the European Council of Ministers said the fatwa was incitement I quote incitement to murder and expressed deep concern at the failure of the Iranian authorities to repudiate the incitement to murder a British citizen. Douglas Hurd who was at that time a minister of state said people should realise that this is a human rights issue of great importance and I hope that international leaders and organisations will rally behind Mr Rushdie's courts and of course the Clinton administration was no less supportive saying we do not believe it is a private matter we do not believe that people should be killed for writing books. Terry Waite the last of the British hostages was released in November 1991 however in early 1992 about three months thereafter a sympathetic mo in the foreign office told me that the UK government is considering resuming full and normal diplomatic relations with Iran in which case of course the pressure points because Iran very much wanted this relations would disappear into the mist. So the strategy then became one of mustering as much foreign government support as possible in order to make it difficult for the UK government to renaig on the support of the principle of free speech. This involved helping to set up number of visits first of all to the so called softer targets for Nordic countries then Germany, France, Belgium, Ireland, Canada and eventually the USA and the meeting with Clinton. These journeys to 17 countries in all some of them several times were somewhat fraught as you would imagine. Airlines refused to carry Salman security was over the top in one case when we arrived in Germany and we were driven straight from a private airfield into what we eventually realised was a police barracks where we held because they thought that was the only way to protect Salman and his entourage. But I think the strategy achieved its aim and I again have to add that there were so many people involved in helping to set up these meetings and to make sure that they took place. But it caused the UK government to pause in its resumption of relations with Iran. I do believe that and the evidence would suggest that vigorous campaigning works rather better than quiet diplomacy. There were times of utter despair not least for Salman of course himself. How could we as an impecunious human rights organisation raise the resources to invigorate the Roshiti campaign and to actually confront a powerful state with murderous intent. We also had a number of donors who were a little bit unsure as to whether or not we should devote so much time to this. The organisation was threatened. We had sort of a mock-bom sent to us. There were all kinds of issues as director of Article 19 that one had to consider. I have to say also of course that there were trustees who were fully in support and the majority by far. The other issue that I think that some of the trustees were concerned about and indeed so was I was how could we continue to deal with cases of censorship which ranged from South East Asia through South Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and North Africa of which there were a huge number. This wasn't the only case as you can well understand. So my friends, I don't have much time. What about the man himself and the book itself? The satanic verses like all Salman's work was his cherished baby. He has since written movingly about how the book was conceived and born. Yet daily it was traduced and misrepresented mostly by people who had not read the book. The affair was not only acutely political. It was also personal. The toll of almost nine years of hiding or defending his work of defending himself was not only heavy but utterly demoralising and it is a testament to everything that he is, that he's survived that as well as he did and has gone on to do such wonderful fiction. Anyhow, my friends, the day came, as some believed it never would, when Salman walked out onto the streets of Islington without minders. He was free and a mammoth struggled to assert freedom of expression lived to fight another day. Thank you. Well Frances, it was an extraordinary campaign and I remember a great deal of it and the nervousness on all sides was tangible. Caroline, you were involved in the writer's grouping. Tell us about that. Frances and her organisation led all the heavy lifting in the campaign. But I think when you think about Salman you think about what can you do as an individual and as a friend. Salman had many great friends amongst writers around the world and just amongst us, amongst the community. He is someone we loved enormously. So when this happened, Antonia, Harold, Melvin, Ruthie, Richard Rogers, Alan Yn Tobb, Philippa, people, we got together a group because we felt as individuals there must be something we could do to make a noise, to use our contacts to contact writers around the world to say this cannot be allowed to happen. This threatens our very existence. It threatens everything we believe in. It is a tribute that I think in those years we basically concentrated on coming up to a thousand days to three years of Salman not being able to venture anywhere without a funny mask or a silly hat or a whole posse of security people. There was great comedy and the tragedy of it all too. We laughed a lot as well as being furious about the state we found somebody we loved and a writer we believed in. So we decided we would hold a vigil. We worked with Francis and Carmella and all of the article 19 people that we would take over Westminster Hall on the thousandth day of the fatwa and we would have people for 24 hours, a thousand people reading, performing, coming to make a statement about Salman and we went quite big on it. We had a lot of media interest. We wrote all the letters are actually in the archive here. We wrote to every writer, every politician, every Prime Minister, everybody who had come into contact who had said they would be interested and had the most enormous response. I mean it was fantastic the way people just as individuals rose to stand by him. And then as we were getting closer we had these extraordinary, as Francis said, calls from the Foreign Office and I can remember going to the Foreign Office and meeting people called Campbell Bannerman and Asquith and Sones and Churchill and thinking are we in a different age? Are they still the same people? Is this real? And being told that if we would go ahead with this vigil we were going to put Terry Waiter at risk and there was a lot of pressure and Salman didn't want to do anything to put any more, anyone else under more threat of pressure. So we scaled it down and I remember Harold gave an incredibly moving talk and we had a few people speak and we did various programmes for television where we had writers from Seamus Heaney to Gunter Grass to Nadine Gordon and I was saying to everyone, Melvin, all their supporting Salman and I can remember even involving Jeffrey Archer going and seeing Jeffrey Archer with Ruthie Rogers we would try anything and of course he was going a bit far and I can remember... I remember Salman saying to Jeffrey at a conference Yes Jeffrey, every book aspires to the condition of literature. Ruthie Rogers and I, we cornered him at a party and we were always cornering people at parties trying to get people to stand particularly politicians so I think by the end of it all they would see us come into a room and would rush in the other direction and Jeffrey Archer said come and see me in the apartment and off we went to his hilltop his palace opposite Westminster and we got there and of course I was wearing high heels because I didn't wear anything else and he said take your shoes off and you feel rather vulnerable taking your shoes off in front of Jeffrey Archer and we went to sit down and Salman the whole time said I really want to know we went to sit down in his apartment and he had two levels to it he had a balcony above where we were sitting a possive of secretaries and Ruthie and I sat down and he said well my lovely is what can I do for you and we talked about Salman and what had happened and how terrible it was and we felt that John Major should take notice of this and should make a stand so he says to one of his secretaries call John, call John now tell him it's Jeffrey, call John now so the secretary beautifully went off made the phone call and she came back saying and we never heard another word and I think there are many instances like that of writers all over the world in every country who would do what they could to try and further the case of Salman through palaces, governments, ordinary people on the street because it was a time where it was really frightening see it was happening, it was really frightening to have someone who you love as an old friend who's a writer who is renowned the world over arriving at your house under police protection and I remember once with Salman he said God you know I can't remember what it's like going to a supermarket and going out to corner shops sneaking out from the security people Salman in one of his silly hats and him looking at the shelves like this he couldn't, it had been so long since he'd been able to do something that we take for granted and I think that's one of the things that I'll never forget as ten years is how extraordinary brave and good natured and smart he was through it all and how much pleasure there was from those simple things and he carried on writing and I mean Melvin will tell the story of when he wrote the children's book Harun and the Sea of Stories which takes some mental capacity to live under what he lived under and to produce a work of such beauty and such creative storytelling so beautiful and there's another story there Melvin fill us in a little bit from your end fill us in a little bit from your end at the campaign days I'd like to pick up from Caroline we did a lot of these meetings at breakfast and as we were in different parts of London it meant getting very early to get across to these breakfasts but they were sensationally good and very very well driven and organised by you it was took a backseat but actually you were the driver of it all I was a friend of Salman's when midnight children came out I thought it was utterly brilliant and different and had changed the nature of the literary relationship between this country and the continent over there I'd read Arcane Orion with great pleasure it was cultivated by Graham Green in the 30s he's a wonderful writer he'd written about India we know that for Boston on the other but this is something different it was a book which came out of the heart of the new India and it was wonderfully written compulsively readable I knew him a little I wanted to make a film about him but then so did one of my two or three closest friends in London at the time and still is Antonio Scosentress from Pearl so graciously or grudgingly I can't remember which and I said okay you do it and he did it for a different channel and I've never not forgiven him so there was that and then almost as good I thought and I was completely consumed by shame he sort of did it again proved that he really was that good and that too enhanced already enormous worldwide literary reputation and the opening up of the continent and the taking on and a different voice was there it's one of the great books of the those two are two of the great books of the 20th century then came stunning verses which became a culture and a political phenomenon more than a book and that more began to obscure the book and that's why people felt that they could talk about the book as you mentioned quite professionally and confidently without having read it because it had ceased to be just a book it was a thing it was a terrible thing it was a book that had been burnt for being a book and writers particularly like myself and here and in every other country were among the first to see the dangers of that and knew the history of that let's not take the obvious history of the book let's take the history of this country the greatest book published in this country was probably published in 1526 written by William Tyndall it was the first proper English translation of the New Testament King James Bible 93% of it it comes in direct from Tyndall it was riotously well received and they burned the books in their tens of thousands when they could get held outside St Paul's Cathedral the Bishop of London bought up a whole shipler which had come over from Holland Tyndall was self exiled to Holland and burnt the one in front took three days to burn them all and people then predicted first the books and it kind of happened then the people soon after that people were being burnt in St Paul's at the same place as they'd burnt the books so one was aware of what the burning of the books could lead to and as you say there was a great fear around it and it's a terrible thing to say but it was a dread but it was a dread which was tinged with a certain excitement because all of a sudden history you turned over a page and you were in the middle of something that was part of a history that you thought you'd outside your off your radar until it happened and Antonia and Harold were very close friends of his and I've now went round to have supper with them one night when we were not told well I think we were at Salman and Marianne were there and that felt like a great privilege and it was very hedged in it was a sort of underground movement you were part of and Antonia and Harold were very close to him and steering him then this book came out this lovely book Harun and the Sea of Stories which if you haven't read it it's a book about a sea full of stories and how it teaches you how to write stories it's beautifully written it's a children's book it's a wonderful book I thought well if he hadn't been in the position he is I'd have gone and touched said I'd like to do a programme with you about this so I rang up and said I'd like to do a programme with you about this he hadn't been on television or as I think it but maybe not even live on radio but he said yes and I loved his answer and I said well I don't quite know where to do it and I said it's quite dangerous and difficult I don't quite know where to do it and he said your house and I thought and I thought good for you ok that's where I'll do it and we set up camera crews went to Croydon supposedly to interview Fair Weldon but then they came to my house and the security people came as we mentioned and susted out and they did all the things that you hadn't thought they would do but they did what you actually later thought that's what they do they come in numbers they check your neighbours they look up at the street and for two days there's a man in the back garden with a gun there's a man in the back room with a gun and he's serious stuff and we did the interview and he was a bit nervous I was more than a bit nervous but not just about getting actually I think if I'm true to myself to try to get a good interview because it's quite difficult but it was a good interview and we did that and then we came to the satanic verses now to attempt in the time I've got to summarise the satanic verses I have to confess ladies and gentlemen is way beyond me but just in brief it came out in 88 the satanic verses are a group of keranic verses that allow intercession replers to be made for the three pagan goddesses and Salman used that Can I stop you for just a second I want to play the clip of Salman reading that section before we talk about it Can we have the clip now I think it makes more sense Moving on to the satanic Here's the point Mahun did not notice the alterations So there I was actually writing the book or rewriting anyway polluting the word of God with my own profane language But good heavens if my poor words could not be distinguished from the revelation by God's own messenger then what did that mean What did that say about the quality of the divine poetry and what did that say about the quality of the divine poetry and what did that say about the quality of the divine poetry Look I swear I was shaken to my soul it's one thing to be a smart bastard and have half suspicions about funny business but it's quite another thing to find out that you're right Listen I changed my life for that man I left my country across the world settled among people who thought me a slimy foreign coward The truth is that what I expected when I made that first tiny change all wise instead of all knowing what I wanted was to read it back to the prophet and he'd say what's the matter with you so man you're going deaf and I'd say whoops oh God bit of a slip how could I correct myself but it didn't happen and now I was writing the revelation and nobody was noticing and I didn't have the courage to own up I was scared silly I can tell you also I was sadder than I've ever been so I had to go on doing it maybe he just missed out once I thought anybody can make a mistake so the next time I changed a bigger thing he said Christian I wrote down Jew he'd noticed that surely how could he not but when I read in the chapter he nodded and thanked me politely and I went out of his tent with tears in my eyes after that I knew my days in Yathryp were numbered but I had to go on doing it I had to there is no bitterness like that of a man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost I would fall I knew but he would fall with me so I went on with my devilment changing verses until one day I read my lines to him and I saw him frown and shake his head as if to clear his mind and then nod his approval slowly but with a little doubt I knew I'd reached the edge and at the next time I rewrote the book he'd know everything that night I lay awake holding his fate as well as his own if I allowed myself to be destroyed I could destroy him too I had to choose on that awful night whether I preferred death with revenge to life without anything as you see I chose life before dawn I left Yathryp on my camel and made my way back to Jahlilio and now Mahun is coming in triumph so I shall lose my life after all and his power has grown too great for me to unmake him now Why are you sure he will kill you? Salman the Persian answered it's his word against mine I want to ask Yasmin before coming back to you Yasmin when you first read that did you have any qualms about it was it something that disturbed you how old were you if I might ask I was 22 when the campaign started I'm a Muslim and I'm also a member of Women Against Fundamentalist which has now disbanded and we've now become feminist descent along with Geitha Segel and Pragana Patel and others of Southall Black Sisters Brilliant I read the book and I loved Shea Midnight's Children one of my all-time favourite books I did find it difficult but I didn't react in the way that many of my fellow Muslims did my ex-husband who I was married to at the time did and he was on the march with the Bradford council of mosques which happened in March and there was a women's march as well women from Southall Black Sisters women from Women Against Fundamentalism there were 40 women who did account to demonstration on the day of that march and basically marched against 40,000 Muslim raging and green Muslim men with no police protection threatened with death threatened with rape threatened to have their houses burnt down I had a two month old baby daughter my husband would not have allowed me to go it was the thing that stood out for me and we've continued campaigning as a group for free speech since that time as it was the first time that I was ever labelled a garther, a non-believer and I was really taken aback as a British born Muslim what was this did it matter if I was a non-believer I had no understanding even at 22 we even having studied Islam and sort of working in the women's sector and in the anti-racist movement no understanding the enormity of what that meant boy I do now but what I think has been has been really sad and it's incredible to be here this evening sat alongside you because I don't know someone I'm not a friend of because I feel a bit like an interloper no no please don't is that that women's story has been missing from this narrative and we have continued at grassroots level challenging communities often at great risk to ourselves and to our families to keep the story of what happened with the fatwa to raise the fact that we gathered evidence that the fatwa was actually directed from Muslims in Britain Gita Segel and I are part of the centre of secular space and we interviewed Dr Giyaseddin Siddiqui along with Karim Siddiqui set up in the Muslim Parliament I don't know if some of you will remember that that was in the late 80s and we interviewed Dr Giyaseddin Siddiqui probably about seven years ago and he talked for the very first time quite openly about his role in getting the fatwa and going and visiting Iran, speaking to Khomeini directly and having this fatwa issued and I remember just standing there knowing what I know and knowing all of the connections between some of the Muslim groups that are operating in the UK and have been for decades but I didn't know that there was this connection and that there were all of these the connections that we now talk about in terms of the spread of Islamist ideology the political connections the money that flows between different places I just honestly didn't know at that time whether it was because I was very naive or whether it just wasn't public knowledge I think it was knowledge it was very difficult to find out if you were not part of those groupings but I know when we did the first two months after the fatwa a month and a half after the fatwa we held a conference at the ICA I invited all the Muslim leaders to come and to talk about what was going on and it was quite clear to me that there were the young hotheads that's fine but the actual stuff that was happening was not being directed from them and that this was bigger than you know the local demonstrations and indeed you know some of them later I mean you probably know them better than I do actually said well no it was a mistake we shouldn't have got involved in that but then it took on its own momentum and I think you know the fear in the foreign office and the reason that someone had police protection was that people there unlike writers and you know local communities did know that this was something very serious and part of big politics and what I do remember is when we put the book together of Rwst i Faill it was quite clear that the first reviews in Iran of the satanic verses thought the book was very good they didn't think it was as good as Midnight's Children but they thought it was a very interesting book and it was available I mean that you could get it until somebody told the Ayatollah this is a good thing for you to do so there we go but let's I'd like to go back to the actual reading experience of the satanic verses before we move on to what's changed in our world because of that going on when you read the book at the time you didn't think there was anything particularly blasphemous in it no but would I have even thought about anything as being blasphemous as you said in your introduction there wasn't that culture of people standing up and saying I'm offended and also even if you came even if you had a faith your faith wasn't so utterly sensitive that someone writing something that may criticise it would render you kind of apoplectic with rage and a book that you might not normally read in any case I mean you might but a lot of people didn't Melvin you were telling us when you first read the book I mean what was your impression as somebody who is a writer well I I agree with what you said I was blind to a lot of the I think the fact is and as I think I said it's the beginning I can't quite remember it was a different thing from the book to relate the fact that we are too closer to the book I think it's to get the long end of the stick the supreme ruler Ayatollah clearly hadn't read it he'd been advised by people who were very prejudiced to put it at the least and they wanted to use it to use him to do that for their political purposes that was the chain process and so the reading experience I didn't much into the fatwa when I read it I was entranced by the frame the magical realism frame that he put around it because he brought that in which I thought was very new and fresh for my reading in the gang of writers I knew in that generation I like the way I like the way he doubled this these two men landed in the English Channel and one of them turned into the angel Gabriel the other turned into the devil and we followed them through contemporary Britain and there's a lot of it it can be read as this is aerial immigrants and this is what happens and this is how they discovered this strange island and then there are the three great dream sequences one of which we've had there and Salman's spoken enough for that I don't need to add to that the changes came on examination later the basis for the really full pursuit because look what he'd done to the sacred text without knowing really what satire was and so on so you had this massive a book and I agree with the sentiment which used to be prevalent on this panel that I didn't enjoy as much as the two previous books I spoke about when my children and Shay were alluded to but he was a powerful piece of work and he's the work of somebody who is a very very powerful and significant writer and he was trying all sorts of things out trying different voices trying his old voice from his deep past trying his cultural voice from his past looking at the voices of contemporary Britain and that's right Britain in a way you could say it was a post-colonial revenge you could interpret it in all sorts of different ways he piled an immense amount into it perhaps it would be too much but I enjoyed it for what it was a galloping expansive inventive view of this strange event of two people landing in the English Channel immigrants he was only later of course I know but I was brought up in my own religion Christianity and I would have noticed I think changes then to words from the New Testament but I wasn't noticing that as much and I wasn't seeing the significance of that any reason to any of us to say any more than was said there these were significant changes and a sacred text is a sacred text and the reason I went back to 1626 1526 because it's exactly the same there the Bible in Latin was a sacred text it was God spoke Latin and that was that and if you he'd been there since 381 and a sacred text they're powerful things and I didn't get I didn't get that until later but the book I thought it was a joy but I didn't think it was as good as the other two I liked it as much but it was out there it was part of his work and this was a writer of immense immense I imagine more than telling a sort of genius was going on there something serious was going on there and then this other thing turned up called the fatwa which was another thing and you see these are two of the people who reacted briskly to it and got to move on and tried to stop it happening and it inflamed the world because partly because it was such a it's interesting what takes the world's fancy and you say I don't fancy nothing fancy is right with it in terms of what they pay attention to sometimes it can be a little boy stuck deep in the rubble of somewhere in some war zone something and that is the world's attention is about it can this four year old child be rescued and all the other news is put behind it and it's the world thing meanwhile tens of thousands of people in jeopardy hundreds of being killed right left and centre this little boy and similarly with sometimes it happens and it happened with this book this one book had an author who was being threatened with death for reasons which were puzzling to most people yet he caught the world because I think the little boy is a sense of profound fear that childhood is being needlessly mercilessly destroyed and we can't have that and this is a chance to show that we can't have it and this is expression is being free expression is being needlessly stupidly, ignorantly and with terrible consequences being checked and stopped we don't want that and we come together because it's an instant which you can gather around it's small enough but it's strong enough and that's what happened there and that it took off as has been mentioned two or three times on this round form it was an attempt to impose a single truth by brutal means but I think what's interesting is that having written Midnight's Children and Shame both very political books huge political one against India and the Gandhi and the other against Pakistan I think Salman felt that Stannock versus was his least political book it was a personal story it was his own journey he had no intention that it would be in any way sort of contentious it was a personal story so I think that he was as surprised as anyone when there was this few or I think he was very surprised he thought the most terrible thing in the book apart from Britain thatcher and Thatcher's England was the figure in the midst of it of this Imam sitting there dreaming wild dreams and that was the point of the satire not these Stannock verses themselves but there you go Yasmin come back to the book and what you thought and then we'll move on to the present and what all this legacy is of it I think one of the saddest things is that the people who were protesting hadn't read the book one of the biggest shocks I had was how can you be so agitated and so angry about something you know nothing about and you've not connected with at least if they had read the book there would have been an opportunity for some sort of debate on an intellectual level but it was so the reaction across the Muslim world directed from Britain as I said earlier was absolutely playing two things one was that emotion of anger but the other for me was it was a pivotal point in the driving home of that victim narrative of Muslims which is still so prevalent today I think that's one of the saddest things I know so many Muslims who've read the book and have had to read it with a different cover on it even to this day 30 years later there is still a resonance that hasn't gone away from the fatwa even though the fatwa doesn't stand anymore so let's try and tease out some of the things that were embedded in the Rushdie affair in the fatwa and what went on around it and how things have been shaped in a sense by it because I think not only was this a kind of a tomatemic moment for literature and free expression but it actually shaped what then came after Yasmin how do you think it shaped things I mean did it in your I think it absolutely did I think we moved into an era of moving from multiculturalism with all of the difficulties that people have put forward around that to a really terrible policy of multi-faithism which has carried on and identity politics which just divides and sub divides and continues to divide all of us and I think that remains the legacy of for me certainly and particularly within minority communities of the whole Rushdie affair and there was there were warnings and we talked about we've all talked about the various warnings I mean this is a book written by Gita Segg on the new U of Al Davies it was written in 1995 it warns of what's happening in faith schools in Muslim schools in this country and Jewish schools it talks about the segregation of women and the imposition of religious dress codes it talks about the role of community leaders how imams have been catapulted to a status that they would never have in a Muslim majority context where any interaction with minority communities is through that that prism of faith and it played to communism you talked about the communism in India at the time and it absolutely replicated here and we're living with the consequences we've had five terror attacks on this soil this year alone the place that my parents held from has lost tens of thousands of people to terrorism I've lost a very very dear friend in a suicide attack where he was the target of the attack this was in Pakistan this was a very close friend who was a police inspector in the north west frontier province and on Eid morning the suicide bomber walked up to him excuse me shook his hand and detonated the bomb and killed my friend Saad and took 150 of the people who were celebrating Eid that day he leaves behind a widow and three young children and a mother who to this day hasn't got over that we still live with the legacy of the rise of Islamist ideology and now we have the far right in other faiths standing up saying that they're challenging Islamist ideologies when actually it's all about power control access to resources in all places we've had the playing out of the bands in terms of Beishdi and the Sikh community a play that was banned sorry the bombing of Sufi shrines people got the imposition of one way of being a Muslim the denial of cultural rights to millions of Muslims across the world that was extraordinary I've just to interrupt you for a minute one of the things at the time I remember I had a lot of friends from Pakistan or wherever and of course they were Muslim at home perhaps just as people are all kinds of things but never have this become an issue of contention and I remember going around the country doing events discussing this and with Muslim friends people I now call Muslim friends I've never called them Muslim friends before and they went around explaining to audiences like this and others that there are many many forms Muslim and of course nobody had bothered to think about that before and the kind of Islamophobia that we have now I think is a direct I don't know legity of life of what came out at that time because it was clear that people were afraid of the radical brands of Islam but there were many others and it was very hard for the many others to speak because those were so noisy because they spoke in violence a very persuasive language it's a very scary language Caroline? I think one of the things immediately afterwards after the 10 years later when the ban, the fatwa was lifted and Salman could actually begin to come out and begin to be a writer and do what writers do and go and promote their books and I worked at Grantho when Harun came out when he couldn't do anything except Melvin's extraordinary program which was amazing but then after that I was at Random House and we put the satanic verses into back into Random House so it joined the rest of his books but with no imprimata so that there wouldn't be a retaliation against Random House but then the books that came afterwards what I used to like about it because I used to travel with Salman because I was his publicist then for a couple of the books and then his publisher was that we would go to universities we would go to shopping centres we would go to anywhere and people from all races and all nationalities and all ages would come to shake his hand and I think there's I think it is we do live in terrible, terrible times but what I loved about our country at that moment was they would always be one or two who would scream hate and rage but was this absolute coming together that this should not have happened and whatever they thought about his writing and many people were not there to buy his books but they were there to support him and I remember being always very moved and Salman has always said he gets terrible reviews here and I would say yes but actually when we we go out and we do these tours he's on a massive tour in America at the moment with a new book which is absolutely unput downable they are everybody is there to support and I think that that I am out here this is what I've been through and we must move forward together and and acknowledge what went but not be cowed by it is incredibly important yes it is very important and especially now because I absolutely agree with you it is unimaginable what's happened to the world when we were there 30 years ago and that balance between violence, incitement and so-called offence offence hadn't existed before as we know it just wasn't there nobody was offended nobody was that frail nobody was that offendable I mean it just didn't happen if we consider that incitement is something which is determined by the context we know from a crowded theatre would it be the case that now any hate speech is necessarily insightful simply because the context has become so charged and that's really really dangerous so Francis tell us how do you think the parameter is I mean the actual dividing lines between free speech in its most liberal and it's never been absolute we have civility, we have courtesy we have all kinds of things we have forms of books we have genres which is something that wasn't recognised when books are read in different cultural context but things have shifted I mean if you look at America now the possibility of free speech is much more contested it's much more violent I think that there is certainly a blurring between offensive speech hate speech and incitement and I think that people know what the distinction are or indeed if we can make those distinctions one of the things that really shocked me very recently last week or so is a colleague of mine who is an absolute staunch human rights person defending all kinds of individual human rights who actually wrote to the government asking what they were going to do in order to stop a sort of hate speech about other countries on the public airways as it were now to me what was extraordinary about that is that this person who shall remain nameless clearly believed that we now live in a context where life is so dangerous and there is so much threat to all kinds that any hate speech is necessarily incitement and I think that we have to fight that and when you ask me how would you define free speech and offence it's very difficult because these things are determined by the context and even though there may be people who will object hugely to something that is said I mean maybe if I said something here and you all objected it shouldn't matter that's what public discourse is about but I think we've lost that Melvin would you say we've lost that It's very difficult particularly in universities and institutions Well you know this is sort of no standing in all the rest of it this idea that the academic world can decide that they don't want to hear from people you know I mean one of the sort of great lessons and it's one that Salman himself used to say but we as at article 19 if you don't like something don't go to it if you don't want the book don't read it if you don't like it then turn it off it's terribly easy just turn the switch but you don't actually have to engage in a sort of fact where like a response simply because something is out there in the world that you don't like offence is an absolutely necessary part of the democratic society in which we live Absolutely all right I think we should ask the questions now yes and have your views so could we have the lights up slightly yes just here wait for the mics because this is being recorded and then there's one back there Thank you very much as one who does remember it as well being over 55 and one who doesn't have a collection of authors as my friends my little protest was and I had at that time I had a very long commute every day so I bought the book and read it quite openly on the train and actually was very disappointed that only one person ever said to me don't you think it's a bit dangerous and also one other comment on Harun I think is wrongly described as a children's book it's a book that's accessible to children but it's a wonderful book Caroline a question if I may directly to you you say that Salman is now on a tour in the States an incident which has been ringing in my mind that has happened since then of course was the Charlie Hebdo but people were actually murdered how does he feel yes the fact may have been lifted but there are people and as Yasmin was saying very movingly there are people who have been offended surely he must be looking over his shoulder or is he really just saying what the hell no I think we'd all say because we all know him very well that when he came out when he went to live in America the British were much tougher on security and he just was desperate for freedom so he made his home in New York where he could walk the streets and be completely normal and live a normal life and we think I think we fear more than he does wouldn't you say Antonia that he about his safety because there is still every time you look into anything on the web about Salman who have money against his name so of course any lunatic could knock him off at any minute but Salman will never live under fear he is incredibly courageous and he is a writer and he wants to get about his business and do what writers do and he stood up for this Charlie Hebdo magazine himself and spoke against a very passionate spoke against American Pen which was having internal controversy about whether the people of Charlie Hebdo who are still there should be given a prize by Pen and a lot of writers said no and Salman was very much in favour of this prize going to Charlie Hebdo because he said this is a magazine that had satirized everybody but when it satirized Mohammed or used the image of Mohammed people were gunned down it's a very strange thing because he is quite clear that he would take his chances as an individual, as a writer maybe he would have offended people but the difference was we were dealing with state sponsored state sponsored terrorism and with all the resources that a state has that was really different I'm going to take the question back there because the mic is right with you Yes you Thanks very much panel I must apologise but now that the panel has thankfully established that the fatwa and the burning really had political and censorship if you like, aims very clearly and given the fact that what Salman had said in 1988 which I actually said by Philip Hitti the Arab historian back in 1960 in fact he elaborated far more than what Salman did in his and there was no riots no riots, nothing back in 1960 is the lesson and this is my question is the lesson for the future that we should do three things first we should have an open debate about Islam talking about Islam seems now as well once you open your mouth you're stopped should we not have a public debate about Islam to understand it better really secondly should we not have an open debate about women's position in Islam Yasmin very eloquently alluded to that but I think we need to have more than that because that goes back beyond Islam it goes back to the Ur of Caldy that's where the culture comes from about suppressing women thirdly and finally should we not have a public debate about the value or otherwise of faith schools as Yasmin alluded to these could be very difficult places for children to learn and not to learn critical thinking which is what we are about today well I would answer yes to all of that but I'm the chair so Melvin and then you Yasmin I couldn't agree more about a big debate I think we've allowed ourselves to accede thinking quite rightly in some ways that we're an extremely tolerant nation and that compared to other nations that's the only way you can talk about yourself in this respect, in this regard is to compare I think most other nations we are still a very tolerant nation that tolerance will out and I'm not sure it will anymore I'm sure that action has to be taken and the sort you're proposing is exactly the sort that I think should be taken and it isn't political action I don't think, it's cultural action and the idea of having a big debated examination of contemporary Islam in this country now with people who know about it from inside and have left it or whatever having it widely exposed and widely debated would be a very big step forward the ignorance about it is enormous and one of the reasons why the riots got underway I think in Bradford about the book is that people were so enraged there about being thought of as terrible second race that they wanted something to protest about and to say we are people we have voices where they use that those Italian verses were used again and again for other means and that was there using it for a voice we have a voice here we in Bradford have a voice we want to express the voice and mistakenly they did it that way I think an enlightenment policy to inform as many people as much as possible would be wonderful that there are great difficulties in the way but it's not impossible and I think the BBC would have a big responsibility here and I think that some of the newspaper could take it far more seriously because they are leading us down dangerous paths by allowing prejudices to go unchallenged by allowing ignorance to go to leave it as ignorance and not enlighten people that is very, very important and your point about faith schools is something that's extremely deep in this country as in other countries but let's just talk about these countries to uproot them would be something that I don't think it would be possible to do in the sense of using that word like get hold of a root and pull it out to talk about them to discuss them to see what's happening there to find out what is happening there is dangerous is essential because these produce later alienations that simply can't be mended we know that we've just seen in Northern Ireland to take a milder example that was built quite recently four years ago to have Catholics and Protestants together sort of a Milton Keynes of Northern Ireland in its own small way breaking up the Catholics are moving out because as they see it the Northern Ireland Protestants are persecuting them too much and they are moving away it's very deep and where it is that's cool give them to the boy until he is seven or the girl all they didn't talk about girls in those days and they made up these statements give the person to the boy and I will give you the man and you're right, that's the way to go general education is massively lacking and what we get are fundamentalist slogans and attacks on fundamentalist slogans fundamentalist slogans fundamentally now there are any good and face calls must be brought into the light and talked about and so they are there and they are there maybe that's okay but not hidden away as sort of these long fuses which will blurb in our faces when these children are going to men and women Yasmin would you like to have a girl in it commenting on that gosh so I campaign against face calls I sometimes wonder I say it's apartheid because I wonder on what other basis we would divide our children and on one level we've got a government policy that talks about the need for better integration more cohesive communities and yet in the same at the very same time the same token that they're funding face calls and segregating communities along those lines as they are doing across other services Tolerance I think is a really interesting thing Melvin because I think my god I'll just use the Lord's first name I think I think Britain is a wonderful place it's my home I can't imagine living anywhere else when my father came here in the 50s he said to my mother don't ever dream about going back to Pakistan because there's nothing there for us where this is home and this is what as a family we've our roots are here but the tolerance that I think appears to be tolerance at one level is actually political expediency at another we'd had the Oldham Riots before the book came out the candle report talks about segregated communities and I think some of the government's cow-towing to those religious leaders has been and I've written about this and it's in refusing holy orders as well of saying to community leaders if you can control your angry young men and stop them right on our streets we will fund the things that you want you can have your face schools you can put your women into hijabs you can have your sharia courts but just keep control of your angry young men and that seems to be a policy that continues up until now with the whole counter extremism agenda Do you agree that it started back then because I always thought that it became stronger then because people wanted to talk to Muslim leaders and the only leaders that seemed to be visible were faith leaders I think this has it these were weirded old men I think this has it Riotson colonialism I think if you look at British rule in India in Africa and East Africa other parts of the world it's been a policy position that's been adopted for hundreds of years and it saves you talking to all the other people if you've got a community leader you can access and exert power through in terms of the debate about Islam Islam has been debating for as long as Islam has been around the thing that's different now is that there was space for debate in centuries past as a Muslim if I stand up and I challenge the hijab I think it's cultural I don't think it's religious faith schools dress codes demands by Muslims for changing the exam timetable doing Ramadan a whole host of things that some of our community leaders have been demanding I would stand up against but one of the things I find really disappointing is there is no support from the non-Muslim community when those of us are within our community stand up and say enough What kind of support would you want? Well, not to be labelled an Islamophobe would be a start and that's been something that's happened certainly from the political left but much more so from the political right and it is a very difficult line to raise issues within communities forced marriage on a base violence female gender mutilation and not to feed that anti-Muslim narrative but to silence all forms of descent as Islamophobic is deeply, deeply dangerous and we have to be much more grown up about this we have to have those conversations about racism and structural inequality but equally we have to have a conversation about human rights what is it that we collectively from all our different positions as a nation what are the fundamentals where are those red lines where will we say this is what it means to be a citizen of the world these are these universal rights that we will stand by and we will fight for and we seem to have got lost I mean the human rights act itself is under threat at the moment and that worries me but the silencing of descent is dangerous I've mentioned Geetha a couple of times Geetha Segol who made a film about that called The Hullaballu of the Satanic Versus which documents the women's march Geetha lost her job at Amnesty because she spoke out spoke out against Moisein Baig the group the women against fundamentalism disbanded because of the tensions within the group because of this we've all gone off and formed different things we've got a coalition that's fighting Sharia courts the Home Affairs Select Committee would not take evidence from us they would not hear from us eventually when two were allowed to speak one was an ex-Muslim from Geneva we were outnumbered 10 to 2 and repeatedly called Islamophobes the enquiry that's headed up by Mona Siddiqui when we challenged that we put an open letter out into I think the Times published it we were dismissed as arrogant women were women who were standing up saying that Muslim women and women of faith deserve the same justice that women of no faith or are white sisters in this country deserve that needs to be supported stand with us I think there was a question here sorry the mic's gone elsewhere could you come here afterwards that's alright do that one and then straight to you thank you very much for sharing the type of archive that we're gathering it's so valuable I haven't read Salman Rushdie's autobiography Joseph Anton maybe perhaps you have just a couple of things I think one of his biggest legacies is clearly and Caroline probably knows about this is just the incredible encouragement that it gave to Indian writing in English and right now even the talented generation of Pakistani writers in terms of actually critically evaluating Salman Rushdie's novels and I read quite a few I don't think it creates memorable characters I just somehow think this lovely language large sort of canvases but it doesn't sometimes get into the psychological sort of interiority of the characters so you know even if I were to ask you what do you think of Mahun as a character or Salman what were his motives the one that's there and that may be part of what I think because these were you're right they were just accepted out and just passed around and people read were these caricatured very sort of very contrived ways in almost being an attempt to provoke and I think that what was very interesting about Salman like I'm going to be very quick is you know he wanted to represent the Muslim community in a certain way so he had a reformist agenda of sorts because what happened immediately after the book and with Dame Antonia and Harold Pinter's speech so I'm just wondering did you ever get a sense that he got into reflecting what was he it was a personal book but he also wanted a certain statement to be made and it came out in ways I think this is correct and I think I'm going to have to stop because it's a very long question I don't think that's correct either in literary terms or in extra literary terms the book is in many respects a satire and satire always works along these kinds of two dimensions in one respect but let me take one more question and then we'll answer both together because time is running out if you could pass it there thank you I was on the board of article 19 at the time and I remember thinking then and a few years later when Sikh extremists were able to close down a theatre with threats of violence that the government was extremely weak and perhaps we wouldn't be in the situation we're in today if there had been more strength at the time because of a softness towards tolerance, multiculturalism the new ideology of not laying down a bottom line we don't burn books in this country we don't let threats of violence stop plays and it didn't happen and I wonder if the panel agrees Francis, we'll come to you first on that what can I say, yes absolutely but I mean again it goes back to the one of the outcomes it seems to me is called the Rushdie Affair is that it actually gave a kind of blueprint to a number of groups thereafter in the last 20 years who wished to intimidate they saw that it worked and it did work for a while I mean it didn't work in the sense that it stopped someone writing but it did work in that it became headline news and I think that that was very very dangerous and the shillishaling, the wobble of the government at the time because believe you me, well I mean you know that very well but it was a really really hard job to keep the government from reneging completely on this issue and it wasn't that we were there saying you know you've got to love Salman we were talking about a principle a principle which actually governs or not governs but I mean runs as a thread through the society for many centuries and I do think that the government did shillishali about it and you know because it became such a political issue and because you know the risk of sounding terribly naive politics is about short short term you know the electorate it's not to do with I remember once for instance not John Major it was Hugh Douglas Hugh who sort of said no we can't do that he said because it wouldn't be right and I was terribly terribly struck by that I mean it was many years ago when he was before after he was a prime minister and I don't know now whether you would get senior politicians to stand up and say no we can't do that because it wouldn't be right I think that they say no we can't do that because our electorate wouldn't buy it or whatever and so in a way I absolutely obviously agree with that Okay I'm afraid we're running to the close of time but did you had your hand up before did you I'll take one last question if it's quick Thank you forgive me for not standing up I need a operation Question to the whole panel I understand the sensitivities of the time with Terry Waite and the hostages so the government sort of had one hand tied behind its back but if this was to happen today would the government be as supportive and robust in doing the right thing Question to everyone if I may No I don't think there's any discussion here I mean things have got much worse I suspect Sorry I'm talking from the chair but Would anybody like to have I'm not too sure I think we're all I think we've got to be you're not going to like this we've got to be careful about our own pessimism there's quite a few things wrong but there's an awful lot that's right there's an awful lot of people like the gentleman back there and particularly this lady on my left who are working to change things in a better way than they've done for decades that's going on other things are happening which are catching our attention more because it's become an inflammatory headline situation something happens and it's in the papers if it had happened 15-20 years ago it would not have been in the papers it's now a running story that was one of the views it's one of the views that set that off I think that there may be I'm in a very difficult position because to say anything favourable about the bunch of people around this country at the moment is extremely difficult nevertheless I think that they would be persuaded by a substantial force of public opinion to behave well and one of the things that would enable them to behave well and encourage them to behave well was precisely what we've been talking about tonight because we could say look what happened when you did it look what happened when the fatwaters have gone look what happened there's an example so I don't despair at all I'm not Mary Poppins you may have noticed but I don't despair and I think that despair is giving in despair is a form of surrender and once we start doing that we really are finished there's a lot of spunk in this country there's a lot of prejudice there's a lot of ill feeling by feeling but there's a great deal of good feeling that has to be tapped too and what we've failed to tap across the board I think governments and leaders is to tap into good feeling by bad policies and mediocre leadership and other things but I don't think it's gone on the low level where somebody's book to be burned on the same principle is wrong and I think that the ground is being laid for a better place by the work being done by has been on my left here on the left is a pretty good place to be thank you for that note I just wanted to to add one other thing and actually it was to your point because I think the great positivism is the writers in the world that we live in like Salman, like Alif like many writers who are writing novels and non-fiction to just open our eyes and help us and encourage us to take a stand and I completely disagree with you about Salman's stories I think he's the greatest storyteller one of the greatest and his characters live forever and read the new one, Nero Golden is one of the best characters in literature today I think thank you for that Caroline and thank you Melvin for giving us hope thank you all for taking part in this event I think it was an important moment and I think we're thinking about the legacy oh Yasmin, no yes please I'm not sure if I'm as optimistic as Melvin but there is huge descent there are incredibly brave people fighting not just Islamist ideology but Nazi ideology in this country as well and I think I just wanted to leave with the slogan from the women of the march our tradition struggle not submission Ladies and gentlemen I'm Tim Robertson I'm the director of the Royal Society of Literature I just have 30 seconds of thank yous and I do want to say that you heard it here first that Melvin Bragg is not Mary Poppins and at the Royal Society of Literature we're very proud to be part of Band Books Week and alongside our partners in that Islington Libraries Index on Censorship and the Free Word Centre and of course the British Library here and special thanks to Zoe Wilcox and Jonathan Pledge for their work on tonight's event thank you very much to all of you and to great questions and to our audience is in Exeterpool, Sheffield and Huddersfield good night to you as well and there are the bar is open please join us for a drink there's also a bookstore including selling Salman's new book can I say that at the Royal Society of and can I just say as well from the Royal Society of Literature that we're very proud that Salman Rushdie is one of our fellows and then above all could we say a very big thank you to the chair of the Royal Society of Literature and tonight's chair Lisa Pinyonaisi and thank you very much Lisa and to our panel Frances de Souza, Melvin Bragg Caroline Michelle and Yasmine Raymond thank you very much