Several writers have been sentenced to death and reprieved: Dostoyevsky, for example, Arthur Koestler, and the greatest of all South African writers, Herman Charles Bosman. The first participated at a time of revolution in a circle that read subversive literature, the second was a political conspirator, and the third shot his stepbrother dead in a quarrel. But none lived under the shadow of the executioner for a fraction as long as Salman Rushdie—if the Ayatollah Khomeini’s thuggish fatwa can properly be called a death sentence rather than a Mafia-like contract.
Joseph Anton is a memoir of Rushdie’s post-fatwa existence.1 Its title is the false name that he took when he went into police-protected hiding, and consists of the first names of two authors whom Rushdie admires but does not in the least resemble, either in style or quality, Conrad and Chekhov.
The Rushdie affair, as it became known, was an important turning point in world history. In many countries, Islamism rushed in to fill the ideological vacuum left by a decomposing and self-evidently failed Marxism (mankind is always on a search for a theory of everything, when by “everything” is meant its discontents). The Ayatollah’s fatwa was one of the first gauntlets thrown down to the western liberal democracies; to change the metaphor rather drastically, it tested the waters, whether that was its original intention or not.
Apart from the somewhat reluctant British decision to protect Rushdie at all costs, the west responded in a
