(Jonathan Cape, £17.99)
The Lebanese proprietor of my local café shook his head when he saw me eating lunch with this book open on the table. When I visited my parents, my mother hid it from her guests. A bearded friend rang to check whether it was possible that I may not be enjoying it very much. It is thrilling and almost anachronistic for a book to be so potent. It is not only for me though, as a Muslim, that the publication of a new book by Rushdie is unusually important. Rushdie is a celebrity, a warrior-poet. Indeed, since The Satanic Verses, his work resonates less in Muslim communities than it does elsewhere. It isn't read, it isn't respected, though there is no sense of surprise that "the west" remains interested. Rushdie is regarded as a blasphemer; he went astray, and he has used his Muslim background to lend credence to his attacks on Islam.
Nevertheless, it is hard to place Rushdie entirely outside the fold. At his first reading from the new novel in London, Rushdie, in response to a question, noticeably referred to "the Prophet" rather than Muhammad, marking his respect as even some liberal Muslims may fail to do in mixed company. The episode of the satanic verses—in which Satan briefly poses as the Angel Gabriel and purports to reveal new verses of the Koran to the Prophet—appears in several early Islamic sources and theories about whether it occurred or what it signifies have been debated by many scholars. Especially for someone like me, a Muslim originating from the same subcontinent as Rushdie, the plain fact is that he knows a great deal about my culture. I was warned off bitter almonds by my grandmother when she lived with us in Pakistan. Rushdie reveals here that the bitterness is due to the presence of tiny quantities of cyanide. I had wondered before about why there were so many places with the prefix "Guj" in the region: Gujarat, Gujranwala, Gujargarh. I now know, from reading this novel, that the Gujars migrated from Gujria, or Georgia, 1,500 years ago and left settlements across Iran, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, before they got to Pakistan and India.
In addition, Rushdie's new novel is set mainly in Kashmir—third on the Muslim grievance list after Iraq and Palestine. It is dedicated to his Kashmiri Muslim grandparents, Ataullah and Amir un nissa Butt. Most notably, the book is harshest in describing the Indian military presence in the region—a force of 900,000 in a valley with 5m inhabitants—harsher than it is about the jihadis. Suddenly even Muslims may have to take Rushdie seriously.
The novel stretches back to before the beginning of the conflict in Kashmir, to a village of travelling players: Pachigam. Shalimar does his clowning on a tightrope; he is the son of the Muslim headman. Boonyi is a dancer and a Hindu, daughter of the "second-best dwelling" in the village. They meet in the woods and the usual things take place. Rushdie cross-references Romeo and Juliet, but the village council blesses this union, invoking the concept of Kashmiriyat, placing the shared bond of Kashmiriness above the terms Hindu and Muslim. In their wedding bed, Shalimar the skywalker tells his wife: "Don't you leave me now, or I'll never forgive you, and I'll have my revenge." When the philandering Max Ophuls, the US ambassador to India, visits Pachigam, Boonyi and her troupe dance for him and he relays to her a proposal. The ambitious Boonyi accepts, forms an unauthorised liaison, and the first cycle of violence in the novel begins. This being Rushdie, what appears political—the killing of the ex-US ambassador by a Kashmiri militant—is ultimately personal.
The second and broader cycle of violence isn't without its own intimate precursors. The Indian army is led by a general whose discontent is deepened by sexual frustration. The Islamist insurgency is spearheaded by the iron mullah, a cleric who is literally made of scrap metal.
The novel moves between these two cycles and the lives of those whom they embroil. As ever, Rushdie's prose is strewn with linguistic gags and allusions. Shalimar's offstage name is Noman. Noman is an ordinary Muslim name. How superb that it has another resonance in English. And, if you care to look, there's more. In the Greek myth, Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is "No One." Cyclops relates later that he was blinded by "No One." Max, if the dead could speak, would say something similar. As ever, some of Rushdie's writing is very funny. More than ever though, this book is suffused with feeling, Rushdie is mourning a Kashmir up-ended by military occupation and communal violence. Even Pachigam succumbs, first to fraction, then to the army. Rushdie flinches as he describes what they do to the village and to the villagers. He seems to be saying: Dear Reader, please spare me, please imagine it for yourself.
Throughout the novel, cultural identity asserts itself in dysfunctional ways. Max and Boonyi's daughter, India, lives in Los Angeles and the riots that followed the Rodney King verdict form the backdrop to her discovery of the truth about her origins and the capture of Shalimar the assassin. Max is from an older Europe destroyed by the Nazis: his Jewish parents vanished from their home in Strasbourg while he tried to arrange an escape for them all.
This, I think, is what Rushdie's Muslim critics miss, that his antipathy towards enclosed and enclosing forms of culture and tradition is universal; it is not reserved for Islam. He hopes that European or Christian or Malay intellectuals will spar with their traditions in the same way that he has with his own, not only in his novels but in his essays and, most recently, following the London bombings, in the op-ed pages of the New York Times. He has argued that mainstream Islam takes an unhistorical view of the Koran. This is the same thought that led to the furore over The Satanic Verses—that the Koran may not literally be the word of God. More practically, Rushdie has opposed the expansion of Muslim-only schools. Putting children in a single faith environment so early in their lives "locks in" their cultural identity, he argues, and this is detrimental. Many, if not most, Muslims in Britain will disagree with Rushdie on a range of issues. However, disagreement is different from exclusion. Especially at a time when Muslims are seeking to stem radicalism and restore tolerance in their communities, Rushdie has a stake and because of his stature it matters where he places it—it is, in any case, unpractical to ignore him.
There may though also be a snag in Rushdie's view of identity. For Rushdie's characters, culture is always bearably light; they act usually out of desire or ambition. It is essential to Rushdie's fiction, for example, that Boonyi does leave with the US ambassador, that Shalimar pursues them; neither stays for a sedentary life, neither passes on their folk-arts to the next generation as they received them from the generation before them. Insularity is problematic too, but is it possible that Rushdie's characters, each with their multiple identities, are merely parasitic, that their rich lives are predicated on the existence of more numerous others, who stay below and weave the cultural stuff that the Rushdeans then exploit? I suppose the viability of Rushdie's cosmopolitanism will be tested in 50 years' time: will writers then be able to play off the stories and characters from his novels?
Shalimar the Clown ends on a pessimistic note. Ophuls the Younger has by then lost everyone that she was related to: her father is dead, as are both her mothers, natural and adoptive. She is condemned to dating an underwear model whose name she can't remember. This may be Rushdie's "Fukuyama moment." Perhaps if the ideal of Kashmiriyat has been expelled from that valley, never to be restored, if even the City of Angels, as way out west as it's possible to go, is in flames, then history may as well end. Rushdie observes ruefully that there are no second chances. I hope that he is wrong and I wonder if other Muslims can prove this to him.
