Salman Rushdie at the Boston Book Festival

There was a time, prior to Valentine’s Day 1989, when British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie was just that: a novelist and an essayist. Though highly esteemed and widely lauded even in those days, it was not until Iran’s late Ayatollah Khomeini issued a now infamous fatwa, or death order, against him that his public recognition really expanded.  Over the course of the next 11 years, a period he spent ducking and hiding from religious extremists, the world assigned him a plethora of new roles, including a symbol of free speech, critic of censorship, and pillar of secular humanistic thought. These days Rushdie is a literary and cultural superstar, an embodiment of one side of the post-9/11 struggle between extreme religious ideology and Western freedoms. It was this Salman Rushdie who gave the keynote address on the second day of the Boston Book Festival on Friday. The hour-long talk took the form of an interview, with questions fielded by Homi Bhabha, a professor of English and American literature and languages at Harvard and director of Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. While the discussion was framed around Rushdie’s newest work, “Joseph Anton: A Memoir,” it also touched on his time in hiding, his continuing evolution as a writer, and his thoughts on the religious extremism that almost claimed his life.

Rushdie’s significance was not lost on the Boston community, as evidenced by the full crowd that filled the pews of the historic Old South Church to hear him speak. Rushdie, now in his 60s, acknowledged them with a small gesture and a smile as he took his seat in the front with unaffected nonchalance. His temperament remained constant throughout the night as he recounted some of the most difficult events in his life with humor and self-deprecation. Such was the case when Bhabha asked the first question of the night, wondering if Rushdie had any inkling of the storm that would follow in the wake of the publishing of his controversial book “The Satanic Verses.” “I knew they wouldn’t like it,” Rushdie said, speaking of his orthodox critics. “But they hadn’t liked anything I had done before. That’s the great thing about books: if you don’t like them, you close them, you don’t kill the author.” Despite this good humor, Rushdie went on to describe the harrowing experience of living as a man marked for death, even expressing that for a time he lost his faith in writing. It was during this period that he assumed his 11-year alias, Joseph Anton, a reference to two of his favorite authors: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. In fact, it was a variant on a line from Conrad’s “A Tale of the Sea” that he repeated to himself during his time in hiding: “Salman, you must live until you are dead.”

Early in the discussion, Bhabha referred to Rushdie’s memoir “Joseph Anton” as a bildungsroman. Rushdie agreed with this assessment, citing its definition as a story that chronicles growing up and gaining wisdom. His ordeal in hiding, he said, taught him to be wary of the “security view of the world.” For 11 years, he was limited in what he could and could not do in the name of safely, effectively robbing him of his personal agency.

Rushdie also expressed skepticism of religion, speculating on the existence of a “God-shaped black hole in the world” that some mistakenly try to fill with extremist conjectures of a mythical omnipotent. The atheist novelist explained how his disillusionment grew with religion in general, due in part to the responses that religious leaders of all creeds had to his fatwa. His detractors at the time included the Pope and the Chief Rabbi of England. At times, his sentiments felt somewhat out of touch with the overarching advocacy of tolerance that marked the rest of his address. “This is almost a good reason to come to church,” he said from his seat, perched below a hanging golden cross.

Although he ultimately survived the experience, Rushdie did express some regrets from his time in hiding. Namely, he voiced his concerns over whether running and leaving his home was the right thing to do. He also expressed frustration for how the controversy surrounding a few minor parts of “The Satanic Verses” obscured the rest of the book—now regarded as a masterpiece in the genre of magic realism. “People read these small dream sequences and let that speak for the entire book!” he said, continuing that there is much more to the book. “It’s funny! No one says it’s funny!” Despite these reservations, Rushdie insisted that his time in hiding was a formative one for him as a writer and as a person. In the last minutes of the address he read an excerpt from “Joseph Anton.” In the passage, Rushdie bemoans a narrowing of human identity, warning against the modern phenomena of perceived mutual exclusiveness in character. It stresses recognizing commonality even among the many inherent differences between people. The excerpt was an eloquent and generous ending to a tale saturated with fear and defiance. It portrayed Rushdie wearing his many new hats well, willing to share what his encounter with violent censorship taught him through rhetoric and through writing.