TONIGHT

• Home
• Video
• Podcasts/RSS 
• Local Showtimes
• Past Shows
• Blogs
• About the Show
• Tell Tavis
• Features
• Mobile

RELATED LINKS

• Article on Mr. Rushdie
• PEN American Center
• Mr. Rushdie's bio

E-mail a friend

Tavis: Pleased to welcome award-winning author Salman Rushdie to this program. The prolific writer has penned a number of notable books, including, of course, 'The Satantic Verses.' His 10th and latest novel is called 'Shalimar the Clown,' which is in stores now. Salman Rushdie joins us tonight from San Francisco. Nice to have you on the program, sir.

Salman Rushdie: Hello. Nice to be back.

Tavis: Glad to have you on again. Let me start by giving you a chance to explain what the book is about. 'Shalimar the Clown' might sound like something cute and fun, but what we're really dealing with here, though, is you going into the mind of a terrorist.

Rushdie: Well, you know, it's a love story that turns into a hate story that turns into a murder story. And actually, it begins at the end with the murder. It begins with the killing in LA of a retired American ambassador to India, also a retired American counter-terrorism chief. Max, Ambassador Max Ophuls, who is killed by the man who's got himself a job as his driver, a Kashmiri Indian man who calls himself Shalimar. And it turns out that this is all not exactly a political murder, but actually a crime of passion, because many years earlier, Max, when he was ambassador in India, had seduced away Shalimar the Clown's wife.

Shalimar the Clown, so called because he was a member of a village, a theater troupe, and he was a clown, a tightrope walker. And his wife, who was the troupe's dancer, she performs for the American ambassador, and he desires her and she runs off with him, thus beginning a path by which he, Shalimar the Clown, broken-hearted, emasculated, angry, begins to turn towards the path of violence. And eventually is trained as a terrorist, and much later gets his revenge on the man who - broke his heart.

Tavis: Is it just my read, or is Salman Rushdie getting softer in his older age? I mean, you were, by my read at least, a little soft on this guy who, again, at the beginning of the book, you mentioned earlier you start at the beginning at the end, the beginning starts really at the end. But you were a little soft on this terrorist guy, and I was a bit surprised, especially given what you had to go through in your own life, you'd be so soft on a guy like Shalimar.

Rushdie: You know, the thing is, it would be very easy, I think, to say, "Here's a bad guy. You should hate him." You know, which would actually teach you nothing. It would be not particularly interesting to write. What I thought would be more interesting, is to make the reader care about him, and if you care about him and then see him making these terrible choices in his life and going down this dark road, I think it increases the impact. I don't think it lets him off the hook at all. I think in a way it makes you feel more dramatically, you know, what he's done and what he's done wrong.

Tavis: Let me ask you, then, as a writer, this is inside Salman Rushdie's head, but as a writer, in your heart, for that matter, as a writer, how does one go about the process of getting the reader, getting me to care about the protagonist here when he is, in fact, a terrorist? Especially in a post 9/11 world.

Rushdie: Well, first of all, I have to care about him. So, you know, oddly, you end up as a writer caring about even the bad guys in your books, you know? And I - ended up being really fond of him, horrible as he becomes. And I think the answer is he begins very sweetly. He begins as a gentle boy about whom people say that he wouldn't hurt a fly. And I think it's a very interesting question, particularly in these times, to ask ourselves how can it be that an innocent young man, a man, you know, a really likeable young man, makes moral choices in a life which make him change so dramatically?

How can a person change that much in one lifetime? And I think when we're looking at things like the 9/11 bombers or the British July bombers, we have to, I think, ask ourselves questions about what it is in their psychology that makes them capable of such things. And that's a question which novels are unusually good at answering, 'cause that has always been the task of the novel, to take you inside the psychology, inside the reality of another human being, and get you to see it.

Tavis: Speaking of interesting times, one of the things that I appreciated about the book, appreciate about it, I should say, is that the issue, the theme of multiculturalism, if you will, comes up time and time again in any number of ways throughout the project. Clearly we live, as I've said many times, in the most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever. That's also true of the world. But you, thankfully, don't ignore that, and that whole issue of this global world that we live in comes up time and time again throughout the book.

Rushdie: Yeah, for good and ill. I mean, I've spent a lot of my life celebrating that multiculturalism, saying how we are all enriched by the fact that, you know, our surroundings are so mixed in their cultural background. But of course nowadays, there is some disturbance about that and I think as a writer one has to take into account that dark view of it as well as the optimistic view of it. But I do think that one of the big facts about the world we live in now is that our stories no longer sit in separate little boxes apart from each other. All the boxes open up into each other.

One of the things we understood on 9/11, I think, is that on that day the story of New York became the story of the Arab world as well. And I think, what I've been trying to do is to make books which show how different bits of the world connect up. So here's this murder that takes place in Los Angeles, takes place in West Hollywood.

And in order to understand the dead man, the ambassador, you have to understand a life which goes all the way back to Nazi-occupied France when he was a Resistance hero. In order to understand his killer, Shalimar, you have to go back even further across the world to Kashmir in India, and understand that reality and see how the truth of that comes home in LA.

Tavis: You mentioned that multiculturalism comes up in this book time and time again, to use your phrase, for good and for ill. I wonder, step away from the book for just a moment, and tell me how you think the world processes this new multiculturalism, - multiracialism, all these ethnicities. How do you think we're doing as a world community processing that journey?

Rushdie: You know, I used to think we were doing pretty well. I mean, I think of - lately, you know, in this very disturbed recent world that we've lived in the last four or five years, I think we may not be doing so well. But I've always thought, you know, it's not going away anywhere. The world is not going to de-multiculturalize. It's not going to de-globalize. We are all going to live amongst each other now in ways that we never used to a couple hundred years ago.

And so the simple fact is we have to deal with it. You know, this is the reality we have. And in my life, I think my life has been enriched by it. I started out in India. I went to school and college in England. I've spent a lot of time in America. And I feel I've been really enriched by that multicultural heritage that I have as an individual. And I think the cities are enriched by it. I think London, New York, LA, these are all places enriched by that multiculturalism.

And now we're a bit scared of it. Now we think that it means, you know, fear, terror, danger comes from other parts of the world at us. And that may be true in occasional cases, but it should not obscure the fact that for much of the time this is still very enriching for us all.

Tavis: It is very enriching. I would agree, although there are things that continue to scare us, and one of those things is Islam. Or certainly people who we know who practice Islam who have done things, certainly in this country, that we don't take kindly to, those obvious things. That said, you wrote a - fascinating piece not long ago, I believe for the 'Washington Post,' where you talked about, you made this call for an Islamic reformation. Talk about what that piece was designed to do. It was a fascinating piece.

Rushdie: Really what I wanted was - what I believed to be the enormous majority of, you know, responsible, secularized, integrated Muslims in this country, in Britain, elsewhere, to speak up and to stop allowing the agenda to be set by the conservatives and the radicals. You know, in my novel, for instance, one of the things I really wanted to talk about was the way in which people in Kashmir, Muslims in Kashmir, were horribly oppressed by the arrival of radical Muslims. You know, terrorist Muslims, jihadist Muslims, coming across the border from Pakistan.

And one of the truths is that in many parts of the world, the people most oppressed by radical Muslims are other Muslims. You know, in Afghanistan, the Taliban were hated by the Afghans. In Iran today, the rule of the Ayatollahs terrorizes most ordinary Muslims. The same has been true in places like Algeria. And here, too, I think, most Muslims do not feel described by the versions of themselves being pushed out by the radicals and the conservatives. And so it's very important that those moderate voices really speak up and make themselves heard.

Tavis: All right, so that's your advice for the Muslim community. What advice does Salman Rushdie have for the folk who occupy the White House, given this US-lead war on terror?

Rushdie: Well, here's what I think - very simply. I think there is obviously a military war, which has to do with going to catch people who attacked the United States and who would do so again. But beyond that, if you're going to actually win this war, it has to be done with the collaboration of the Muslim world. It can't be done in isolation from it. The way in which the IRA was brought to the peace table was because its own constituency gave up on it.

The Catholics of Northern Ireland didn't want terrorism anymore. So what we have to do is to persuade the Muslims in the Muslim world that they need to stop this thing. They need to stop the radicals recruiting, fundraising, setting up offices, you know, in Muslim countries. And when we persuade Muslim countries - with whom we can make friends, that that is the right thing to do for themselves, then we can beat this thing.

Tavis: Given where we are right now and how the world views what we have done as Americans with this so-called 'war on terror,' is that possible, is that doable?

Rushdie: Well, you know, it's gonna take a big shift of politics and diplomacy, but everything's possible and doable. America is such a powerful country; it's such an important factor in the world, that in the end, people will deal with it if America approaches them in the right way.

Tavis: When you set out to write books these days, given this fascinating conversation we're having about the world we live in, is it your intent, even in a small way, in a subtle way or not so subtle way, to educate people, to enlighten people, to empower people beyond entertaining them?

Rushdie: Well, you know, I think the truth is, nobody goes to a book to be preached at, and I don't like books that preach. What you have to do is to, what a novel can do better than many things, is to create a world that people want to live in, even if it's a world very far away from their own. And through that, they can come out feeling that that world is a part of their world.

And, yeah, I think, you know, understanding is of great value right now and it may be one of the reasons why people are going back to books, you know, books like, I mean, I hope like 'Shalimar the Clown,' but books like 'Reading Lolita in Tehran,' books like 'The Kite Runner,' books which do take you into the reality of another part of the world, is that I think readers really want to know that. They want to be in those worlds and feel the truth of them. And that I think is helpful, yeah.

Tavis: All right, well, I saved the most important question for last. Here in Los Angeles, or in the greater LA area tonight, your beloved Yankees, having won their eighth consecutive pennant, are trying to hold their own against the LA Angels. Your predictions for what the Yankees will do in the post-season, sir?

Rushdie: Well, I'm sorry to say that the Angels don't have a prayer.

Tavis: (laughs) You heard it from Salman Rushdie. I'm sure there are a lot of folk in this immediate vicinity who feel otherwise, but nice to have you on. The new book by Salman Rushdie is 'Shalimar the Clown', in book stores as we speak. Mr. Rushdie, nice to have you on the program.

Rushdie: Thank you. Lovely to be here.

Tavis: Glad to have you. Up next on this program, Franco Dragone, the creative force behind Cirque Du Soleil, has a new show called 'Le Reve' now at Wynn in Las Vegas. We'll talk about it right now. Stay with us.