Joseph Anton Read online

  Jan Pilkington-Miksa, the very Platonic form of the English public schoolboy, looked exactly like all the creatures at Rugby who had made his life so unpleasant, but he was the sweetest natured of young men, and seemed to have been sent as a sign that things were going to be different this time around. And so they were; Cambridge largely healed the wounds that Rugby had inflicted, and showed him that there were other, more attractive Englands to inhabit, in which he could easily feel at home.

  So much for the first burden. As for economics, he was rescued by a second welcoming angel, the director of studies, Dr. John Broadbent, an Eng. lit. don so magnificently groovy that he could easily have been (though he was not) one of the models for the supercool and ultra-permissive Dr. Howard Kirk, hero of Malcolm Bradbury’s novel The History Man. Dr. Broadbent asked him, when he gloomily said that he was supposed to change subjects because his father insisted on it, “And what do you want to do?” Well, he didn’t want to read economics, obviously; he had a history exhibition and he wanted to read history. “Leave it to me,” Dr. Broadbent said, and wrote Anis Rushdie a gentle but fierce letter stating that in the opinion of the college Anis’s son Salman was not qualified to read economics and that if he continued to insist upon doing so it would be better to remove him from the university to make room for someone else. Anis Rushdie never mentioned economics again.

  The third burden, too, was soon lifted. The war in the subcontinent ended, and everyone he loved was safe. His university life began.

  He did the usual things: made friends, lost his virginity, learned how to play the mysterious matchstick game featured in L’année dernière à Marienbad, played a melancholy game of croquet with E. M. Forster on the day Evelyn Waugh died, slowly understood the meaning of the word “Vietnam,” became less conservative, and was elected to the Footlights, became a minor bulb in that dazzling group of illuminati—Clive James, Rob Buckman, Germaine Greer—and watched Germaine perform her Stripping Nun routine, bumping and grinding her way out of her sisterly habit to reveal a full frogman’s outfit beneath, on the tiny club stage in Petty Cury on the floor below the office of the Chinese Red Guards where Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book was on sale. He also inhaled, saw one friend die of bad acid in the room across the hall, saw another succumb to drug-induced brain damage, was introduced to Captain Beef heart and the Velvet Underground by a third friend who died soon after they graduated; enjoyed miniskirts and see-through blouses; wrote briefly for the student paper Varsity until it decided it didn’t need his services; acted in Brecht, Ionesco and Ben Jonson; and crashed Trinity May Ball with the future art critic of the London Times to listen to Françoise Hardy sing the anthem of young loveless anguish, “Tous les garçons et les filles.”

  In later life he often spoke of the happiness of his Cambridge years, and agreed with himself to forget the hours of howling loneliness when he sat alone in a room and wept, even if King’s Chapel was right outside his window blazing with beauty (this was in his final year, when he was living on the ground floor of S staircase in the college itself, in a room with a view, if ever there was one—chapel, lawn, river, punts—a cliché of gorgeousness). In that final year he had returned from the holidays in low spirits. That was at the end of the summer of 1967, the Summer of Love, when, if you were going to San Francisco, you had to be sure to wear some flowers in your hair. He, unfortunately, had been in London with nobody to love. By chance he had found himself at the very heart of “where,” in the parlance of those days, “it was at,” staying in a rented room above the coolest boutique of all, Granny Takes a Trip, at the World’s End end of the King’s Road. John Lennon’s wife, Cynthia, wore the frocks.

  Mick Jagger was rumored to wear the frocks. Here, too, there was an education to be had. He learned not to say “fab” or “groovy.” At Granny’s, you said “beautiful” to express mild approval, and, when you wanted to call something beautiful, you said “really nice.” He got used to nodding his head a lot, wisely. In the quest for cool, it helped that he was Indian. “India, man,” people said. “Far out.” “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “Yeah.” “The maharishi, man,” people said. “Beautiful.” “Ravi Shankar, man,” he replied. At this point people usually ran out of Indians to talk about and everyone all just went on nodding, beatifically. “Right, right,” everyone said. “Right.”

  He learned an even more profound lesson from the girl who ran the shop, an ethereal presence sitting in that fashionably darkened, patchouli-oil-scented space heavy with sitar music, in which, after a time, he became aware of a low purple glow, in which he could make out a few motionless shapes. These were probably clothes, probably for sale. He didn’t like to ask. Granny’s was frightening. But one day he plucked up his courage and went downstairs to introduce himself, Hi, I’m living upstairs, I’m Salman. The girl in the shop came close, so that he could see the contempt on her face. Then slowly, fashionably, she shrugged.

  “Conversation’s dead, man,” she said.

  Up and down the King’s Road walked the most beautiful girls in the world, ridiculously underdressed, laughing, accompanied by peacocking men who were equally ridiculously overdressed, in high-collared frock coats and frilly shirts and flared crushed velvet trousers and fake-snakeskin boots, also laughing. He seemed to be the only one who didn’t know what it was to be happy.

  He returned to Cambridge feeling, at the ripe old age of twenty, that life was passing him by. (Others had the final-year blues, too. Even the invariably cheerful Jan Pilkington-Miksa was deeply depressed; though happily he did recover to declare that he had decided to be a film director, and intended to head for the south of France as soon as he was done with Cambridge, “because,” he said airily, “they probably need film directors down there.”) He took refuge in work, just as he had at Rugby. The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life or of the work, Yeats said, and since the perfect life was plainly beyond him he had better look to the work instead.

  That was the year he found out about the satanic verses. In Part Two of the History Tripos he was expected to choose three “special subjects” from a wide selection on offer, and concentrate on those. He chose to work on Indian history during the period of the independence struggle against the British, from the 1857 uprising to Independence Day in August 1947; and the extraordinary first century or so of the history of the United States, 1776–1877, from the Declaration of Independence to the end of the post–Civil War period known as Reconstruction; and a third subject, offered, that year, for the first time, titled “Muhammad, the Rise of Islam and the Early Caliphate.” In 1967 few history students at Cambridge were interested in the Prophet of Islam—so few, in fact, that the course’s designated lecturer canceled his proposed lectures and declined to supervise the few students who had chosen the course. This was a way of saying that the subject was no longer available, and another choice should be made. All the other students did indeed abandon the Muhammad paper and go elsewhere. He, however, felt an old stubbornness rise in him. If the subject was offered, it could not be canceled as long as there was a single student who wished to study it; that was the rule. Well, he did want to study it. He was his father’s son, godless, but fascinated by gods and prophets. He was also a product, at least in part, of the deep-rooted Muslim culture of South Asia, the inheritor of the artistic, literary and architectural riches of the Mughals and their predecessors. He was determined to study this subject. All he needed was a historian who was willing to supervise him.

  Of the three great historians who were Fellows of King’s at that time, Christopher Morris was the most published, with the most established reputation, historian of Tudor political thought, ecclesiastical history, and the Enlightenment, while John Saltmarsh was one of the grand eccentrics of the university with his wild white hair, mutton-chop side-whiskers, long-john underwear poking out at his trouser cuffs above his sockless, sandaled feet, the unrivaled expert in the history of the college and chapel, and, more broadly, in the local history of the
region, often seen tramping the country lanes around Cambridge with a rucksack on his back. Both Morris and Saltmarsh were disciples of Sir John Clapham, the scholar who established economic history as a serious field of study, and both conceded that the third member of the King’s history trinity, Arthur Hibbert, a medievalist, was the most brilliant of them all, a genius who, according to college legend, had answered the questions he knew least about in his own history finals exams, so that he could complete the answers in the time allotted. Hibbert, it was decided, was the most appropriate person to deal with the matter in hand; and he agreed to do so without a moment’s fuss. “I’m not a specialist in this field,” he said, modestly, “but I know a little about it, so if you will accept me as your supervisor, I am willing to supervise you.”

  This offer was gratefully accepted by the stubborn young undergraduate standing in his study sipping a glass of sherry. So came about a strange state of affairs. The special subject about Muhammad, the rise of Islam and the early caliphate had not been offered before; and in that academic year, 1967–68, only this one, obdurate student took it; and the following year, owing to lack of interest, it was not offered again. For that single student, the course was his father’s vision made real. It studied the life of the Prophet and the birth of the religion as events inside history, analytically, judiciously, properly. It might have been designed especially for him.

  At the beginning of their work together Arthur Hibbert gave him a piece of advice he never forgot. “You must never write history,” Hibbert said, “until you can hear the people speak.” He thought about that for years, and in the end it came to feel like a valuable guiding principle for fiction as well. If you didn’t have a sense of how people spoke, you didn’t know them well enough, and so you couldn’t—you shouldn’t—tell their story. The way people spoke, in short, clipped phrases, or long, flowing rambles, revealed so much about them: their place of origin, their social class, their temperament, whether calm or angry, warmhearted or cold-blooded, foulmouthed or clean-spoken, polite or rude; and beneath their temperament, their true nature, intellectual or earthy, plainspoken or devious, and, yes, good or bad. If that had been all he learned at Arthur’s feet, it would have been enough. But he gained much more than that. He learned a world. And in that world one of the world’s great religions was being born.

  They were nomads who had just begun to settle down. Their cities were new. Mecca was only a few generations old. Yathrib, later renamed Medina, was a group of encampments around an oasis without so much as a serious city wall. They were still uneasy in their new urbanized lives, and the changes made many of them unhappy.

  A nomadic society was conservative, full of rules, valuing the well-being of the group more highly than individual liberty, but it was also inclusive. The nomadic world had been a matriarchy. Under the umbrella of its extended families even orphaned children could find protection, and a sense of identity and belonging. All that was changing now. The city was a patriarchy and its preferred family unit was nuclear. The crowd of the disenfranchised grew larger and more restive every day. But Mecca was prosperous, and its ruling elders liked it that way. Inheritance now followed the male line. This, too, the governing families preferred.

  At the gates to the city stood temples to three goddesses, Al-Lat, Al-Manat, and Al-Uzza. Winged goddesses, like exalted birds. Or angels. Each time the trading caravans from which the city gained its wealth left the city gates, or came back through them, they paused at one of the temples and made an offering. Or, to use modern language: paid a tax. The wealthiest families in Mecca controlled the temples and much of their wealth came from these “offerings.” The winged goddesses were at the heart of the economy of the new city, of the urban civilization that was coming into being.

  In the building known as the Cube or Kaaba in the center of town there were idols of hundreds of gods. One of these statues, by no means the most popular, represented a deity called al-Lah, meaning the god, just as al-Lat was the goddess. Al-Lah was unusual in that he didn’t specialize, he wasn’t a rain god or a wealth god or a war god or a love god, he was just, vaguely, an everything god. It may be that this failure to specialize explained his relative unpopularity. People making offerings to gods usually did so for specific reasons, the health of a child, the future of a business enterprise, a drought, a quarrel, a romance. They preferred gods who were experts in their field to this nonspecific all-rounder of a deity. However, al-Lah was about to become more popular than any pagan deity had ever been.

  The man who would pluck al-Lah from near obscurity and become his Prophet, transforming him into the equal, or at least equivalent, of the Old Testament God I Am and the New Testament’s Three-in-One, was Muhammad ibn Abdullah of the Banu Hashim family (which had fallen, in his childhood, upon hard times), an orphan living in his uncle’s house. As a teenager he began to journey with that uncle, Abu Talib, on his trading journeys to Syria. On those journeys he almost certainly encountered his first Christians, adherents of the Nestorian sect, and heard their stories, many of which adapted Old and New Testament stories to fit in with local conditions. According to the Nestorians, for example, Jesus Christ was born in an oasis, under a palm tree. Later, in the Qur’an, the Archangel Gabriel revealed to Muhammad the sura known as “Maryam,” Mary, in which Jesus is born under a palm tree, in an oasis.

  Muhammad ibn Abdullah grew up with a reputation as a skilled merchant and honest man and at the age of twenty-five this brought him a marriage proposal from an older, wealthier woman, Khadijah, and in the next fifteen years he was successful in business and happy in his marriage. However, he was clearly a man with a need for solitude, and for many years he would spend weeks at a time living like a hermit in a cave on Mount Hira. When he was forty years old, the Angel Gabriel disturbed his solitude there and ordered him to recite. Naturally, he immediately believed he had lost his mind, and fled. He only returned to hear what the Angel had to say when his wife and close friends persuaded him that it might be worth a return trip up the mountain, just in case; that it was probably a good idea to check if God was really trying to get in touch.

  It was easy to admire much of what followed as the merchant transformed himself into the Messenger of God; easy to sympathize with his persecution and eventual flight to Medina, and to respect his rapid evolution at the oasis community of Yathrib into respected lawgiver, able ruler and skilled military leader. It was also easy to see how the world into which the Qur’an was revealed, and the events in the life of the Messenger, directly influenced the revelation. When Muslim men were killed in battle, the Angel was prompt to encourage their brothers to marry their widows, in order that the bereaved women might not be lost to the faith by remarrying outside it. When the Prophet’s beloved Aisha was rumored to have behaved inappropriately while lost in the desert with a certain Safwan ibn Marwan, the Angel of the Lord came down in some haste to point out that no, in God’s opinion, the virtuous lady had not fooled around. And, more generally, it was evident that the ethos of the Qur’an, the value system it endorsed, was, in essence, the vanishing code of nomadic Arabs, the matriarchal, more caring society that did not leave orphans out in the cold; orphans like, for example, Muhammad himself, whose success as a merchant, he believed, entitled him to a place on the city’s ruling body, and who had been denied such preferment because he didn’t have a powerful family to fight for him.

  Here was a fascinating paradox: that an essentially conservative theology, looking backward with affection toward a vanishing culture, became a revolutionary idea, because the people whom it attracted most strongly were those who had been marginalized by urbanization—the disaffected poor, the street mob. This, perhaps, was why Islam, the new idea, felt so threatening to the Meccan elite; why it was persecuted so viciously; and why its founder may—just may—have been offered an attractive deal, designed to buy him off.

  The historical record was incomplete, but most of the major collections of hadith or traditions about the life of the P
rophet—those compiled by Ibn Ishaq, Waqidi, Ibn Sád, Bukhari, and Tabari—told the story of an incident that afterward became known as the incident of the satanic verses. The Prophet came down from the mountain one day and recited the sura (number 53) called an-Najm, the Star. It contained these words: “Have you heard of al-Lat and al-Uzza, and al-Manat, the third, the other one? They are the exalted birds, and their intercession is greatly to be desired.” At a later point—Was it days later? Or weeks, or months?—he returned to the mountain and came down, abashed, to state that he had been deceived on his previous visit; the Devil had appeared to him in the guise of the Archangel, and the verses he had been given were therefore not divine, but Satanic, and should be expunged from the Qur’an at once. The Angel had, on this occasion, brought new verses from God, which were to replace the Satanic verses in the great book: “Have you heard of al-Lat and al-Uzza, and al-Manat, the third, the other one? They are but names that your forefathers invented, and there is no truth in them. Shall God have daughters while you have sons? That would be an unjust division.” And in this way the Recitation was purified of the Devil’s work. But the questions remained: Why did Muhammad initially accept the first, “false” revelation as true? And what happened in Mecca in the period between the two revelations, Satanic and angelic?

  This much was known: Muhammad wanted to be accepted by the people of Mecca. “He longed,” Ibn Ishaq wrote, “for a way to attract them.” And when the people heard that he had accepted the three winged goddesses, the news was popular. “They were delighted and greatly pleased at the way in which he spoke of their gods,” Ibn Ishaq wrote, “saying, ‘Muhammad has spoken of our gods in splendid fashion.’ ” And Bukhari reported, “The Prophet … prostrated while reciting An-Najm, and with him prostrated the Muslims, the pagans, the jinns, and all human beings.”

  Why, then, did the Prophet afterward recant? Western historians (the Scottish scholar of Islam W. Montgomery Watt, the French Marxist Maxime Rodinson) proposed a politically motived reading of the episode. The temples of the three winged goddesses were economically important to the city’s ruling elite, an elite from which Muhammad was excluded, unfairly, in his opinion. So perhaps the “deal” that was offered ran something like this: If Muhammad, or the Archangel Gabriel, or Allah could agree that the bird-goddesses could be worshipped by followers of Islam—not as the equals of Allah, obviously, but as secondary, lesser beings, like, for example, angels—and there already were angels in Islam, so what harm could there be in adding three more, who just happened already to be popular and lucrative figures in Mecca?—then the persecution of Muslims would cease, and Muhammad himself would be granted a seat on the city’s ruling council. And it was perhaps to this temptation that the Prophet briefly succumbed.