NP - Rushdie in Salon.com

[David Morris]

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2002/10/01/rushdie/index.html
Oct. 1, 2002
Given the world's current conflagrations, anyone who has written about the 
dangers of Muslim fundamentalism now seems prescient. Still, there's 
something eerily prophetic in some of the newspaper columns reprinted in 
Salman Rushdie's new collection of nonfiction, "Step Across This Line." As a 
man with terrifyingly acute firsthand experience of what Christopher 
Hitchens, to whom this book is dedicated, calls "Islamo-fascism," Rushdie 
has spent years fighting through the issues currently being hashed out on a 
thousand Op-Ed pages. Though this scattershot book ranges, with varying 
degrees of success, over subjects including "The Wizard of Oz," Gandhi and 
Elián González, the most penetrating pieces here deal with Rushdie's 
refreshingly ecumenical abhorrence of religious fundamentalism.

Right now, when so many progressive paradigms -- respect for other cultures, 
solidarity with the oppressed and reverence for civil liberties -- seem 
flaccid in the face of a monumental threat, Rushdie offers a voice that's 
both resolutely moral and proudly, expansively liberal. He has, in the last 
few years, fallen from vogue, but the events of the world have conspired to 
prove his enduring relevance. He offers a model of a progressivism that's 
clear-eyed about the dangers of Third World tyrannies while vigilantly 
opposed to our own administration's authoritarian tendencies. Furthermore, 
he transcends the hectoring left's tendency to define itself by what it's 
against, offering a celebration of secular freedom whose ebullience belies 
the current notion that conservatives have more fun.

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2002/10/01/rushdie/index.html
A New York state of mind
Salman Rushdie talks about why he was banished by Bush I, the light and dark 
sides of Islam, and his new life in Manhattan.






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