In 1992, Salman Rushdie made a secret visit to Canada. Writers & Company looks back, 30 years later
Writers & Company's Eleanor Wachtel interviewed The Satanic Verses author in 1992 and 2015
Thirty years ago, PEN Canada hosted a fundraising gala that was fairly routine, until at the end of the event, a surprise guest was announced — Salman Rushdie.
At the time, the Indian-British novelist was still in hiding because of the fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran for his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses. A multi-million-dollar bounty was placed on his head.
Getting Rushdie to Toronto was an enormous undertaking. He was living in England at the time, and moved around clandestinely, always with bodyguards. Writers & Company was one of the few Canadian media outlets granted access to Rushdie before the event.
As Rushdie continues his recovery from injuries sustained in an attack earlier this year in New York, Writers & Company's Eleanor Watchel revisits her 1992 and 2015 conversations with Rushdie in a special tribute episode.
On Feb. 14, 1989, writer Salman Rushdie was condemned to death.
The first supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, calling for the death of anyone involved in the publication of Rushdie's 1988 satirical novel, The Satanic Verses.
A fatwa is an official ruling on a point of Islamic law made by an authority figure. The supreme leader claimed the novel was blasphemous. An Iranian organization, 15 Khordad Foundation, was one of multiple groups to place a multi-million-dollar bounty on Rushdie's head.
India, where Rushdie was born, had already banned the book five months earlier. A string of countries quickly followed suit.
Bookstores were fire-bombed. People around the world wrote death threats and took to the streets calling for his murder — some carrying effigies of Rushdie with the eyes gouged out.
"In February 1989, Salman Rushdie became the most famous writer in the world," Writers & Company host Eleanor Wachtel told CBC Books in a phone interview.
Almost immediately, Rushdie went into hiding in England.
"It's quite clear to me that in order for this to end, there's two ways. One is that I get killed, which I would wish not to happen," Rushdie told Wachtel in 1992.
In February 1989, Salman Rushdie became the most famous writer in the world.- Eleanor Wachtel
"But the other way is that the government of Iran has to stop doing what it's doing. It will only do that when it understands that its own interests are being damaged, and so the problem is to get enough governments, enough of the international community — the United Nations, the International Court — to demonstrate to Iran that it is in Iran's interest, and not just my interest, to solve the problem."
The situation was dire. In 1991, the year before Wachtel's interview, the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death in Tokyo. Ten days earlier, the Italian translator Ettore Capriolo survived a stabbing in his apartment in Milan.
In 1993, his Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, would narrowly survive three gunshot wounds after being left for dead in an Oslo suburb. That same year, at least 35 people were killed when a mob burned down a hotel in Turkey that was hosting Aziz Nesin, the Turkish translator of Rushdie's novel.
Rushdie was forced to reflect on life like never before.
"Every day has 100 tiny humiliations in it, which is simply to do with the fact that I don't have control of my life," he told Wachtel in the 1992 interview. "To be a man of 45 and not be able to walk out the door without asking permission feels awful."
At the time, Rushdie received protection from U.K. police, but the need for further government support was imperative.
That's when PEN Canada — an arm of the international organization that fights for freedom of expression and acts in support of writers who are harrassed, imprisoned or killed for their views — stepped in.
Spearheaded by Louise Dennys, the president of PEN Canada at the time, a small group of the organization's members secretly arranged to bring Rushdie to Canada for a surprise appearance at their December 1992 gala.
If Rushdie could make it to the stage unharmed, they thought his appearance might garner enough international attention to mobilize political support from the Canadian government.
"Our intervention was meant to be a game-changer, which is to say: to do for Salman what his own government would not do," said writer John Ralston Saul in an interview for Code Name: Sally, a documentary chronicling the group's efforts.
This is how a handful of Canadian literary publishers and writers found themselves making covert calls from pay phones and coordinating with intelligence agencies to secure safe travel for the writer-in-hiding.
Wachtel interviewed Rushdie for Writers & Company in secret, the day before the event.
Despite his circumstances, Wachtel told CBC Books, Rushdie was in "high spirits."
The gala was Rushdie's chance to change the tide. Thirty years later, the event remains an example of international solidarity against violent repression.
Rushdie visits Canada
Rushdie's name was everywhere, and yet, in 1992, a small group of Canadians knew the writer as "Harry." Others could have sworn his name was "Sally."
These were the code names members of PEN Canada said they used somewhat interchangeably for Rushdie and his then-wife, Elizabeth, as they arranged for Rushdie to fly to Canada to make his first public appearance at their annual fundraiser.
The theme of the 1992 benefit was "The Sentence is Silence." Salman Rushdie was the perfect guest.
"One of the hardest things about leading this kind of life is that it actually is necessary not to share quite a lot of it," he told Wachtel in 1992.
"Keeping out of the way of [contract killers] requires them not to know where I live and not to know in advance where I'm going to be. Those are very big restrictions, because, of course, what it means is that nobody can know."
I had to sign a paper saying I didn't know where I was — that was easy because I didn't know where I was.- Eleanor Wachtel
Wachtel interviewed Rushdie in a Toronto safe house she refers to as "house Y." It was the second of two unknown locations she was taken to that morning before interviewing the author in person.
"I had to sign a paper saying I didn't know where I was — that was easy because I didn't know where I was — and that I wouldn't tell anyone who I had seen until after the PEN benefit," Wachtel told CBC Books.
The trip to Canada almost didn't happen. According to the Code Name: Sally documentary, PEN Canada received word four days before the gala that Air Canada would not bring Rushdie to Canada.
"I [told Rushdie], 'keep your bags packed and we'll either call you to say it's off or we'll call you to say it's on,'" Dennys recalls in the documentary.
It's wonderful to be amongst writers, again, for a moment.- Salman Rushdie
The day before Rushdie was scheduled to travel, Saul secured a private plane. It was on.
On Dec. 7, 1992, gasps rang through the audience of the Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto when, standing at the podium, Margaret Atwood announced Rushdie's name.
The documentary shows the crowd immediately stand for the author. Rushdie, wearing his signature glasses and a jovial grin, walked out from behind the dark stage curtains — and finally, after three long years, into the light.
"It's wonderful to be amongst writers, again, for a moment," Rushdie said from behind the podium.
During the ceremony, Bob Rae, the premier of Ontario at the time, embraced the author on stage and later, posing for a photo, gave Rushdie a kiss.
In the documentary, members of PEN Canada refer to that moment as the "kiss heard around the world." It was the first time a political leader was willing to be seen with Rushdie, let alone show affection toward him.
Soon after, Rushdie met with Canada's then-minister of foreign affairs, Barbara McDougall. McDougall said in the documentary that when Rushdie left, she made a call to Douglas Hurd, who was the U.K. foreign secretary of state at the time, indicating her support. Finally, the tide had turned.
A violent attack in 2022
Rushdie spent nearly a decade in hiding. In a 2015 interview onstage at the Banff Centre, Wachtel asked Rushdie what he had learned about himself during that period.
"I would not have bet on myself to have the resilience to survive that decade," Rushdie said. "That's something about human beings: we are incredibly resilient beings with a very strong survival instinct, but we don't know that until the danger comes. Until the question is asked, we don't know how we are going to answer it.
"It turned out that I was tougher than I thought."
On Aug. 12, 2022, at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York state, Rushdie was stabbed multiple times in the neck and torso as he went on stage to give a talk on artistic freedom.
He survived, but he lost the sight in one eye and a hand is incapacitated. He is still recovering.
In October of 2022, the U.S. imposed sanctions on the 15 Khordad Foundation. According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, as recently as 2012, the 15 Khordad Foundation increased its bounty for Rushdie's murder from $2.7 million U.S. ($3.64 million Cdn) to $3.3 million U.S. ($4.45 million Cdn).
According to Reuters, Iranian state-run media organizations are also among the groups that have added to the total bounty in recent years.
Rushdie's enduring legacy
While what happened to Rushdie in 1989 threatened his life, it only amplified his belief in human rights and freedom of expression. "Sometimes you have to defend various principles because they need to be defended," Rushdie told Wachtel in 2015. "Free expression is a Yes or No question.
"You're in favour of it or you're not."
Salman Rushdie's pre-The Satanic Verses reputation was based on two novels: Midnight's Children, an allegory of post-Independence India which won the 1981 Booker Prize and was made into a movie by Canadian filmmaker Deepa Mehta; and the 1983 novel Shame, a mix of history, politics and myth written in Rushdie's signature magic realist style.
Rushdie served as president of PEN America from 2004 to 2006 and founded their annual World Voices Festival. In 2007, he was knighted for services to literature. And all along, Rushdie never stopped writing and publishing. Some of his latest books include the 2017 novel, The Golden House, and 2021 collection of essays, Languages of Truth.
In 2012, he produced a memoir focusing on those years spent underground. Joseph Anton — a name he took during the fatwa, Joseph from Conrad, and Anton from Chekhov — chronicles his nightmare but also reveals what made and makes him a writer.
When Wachtel asked Rushdie in 1992 if he regretted writing The Satanic Verses, Rushdie responded resolutely: "No."
The only way to not be defeated by a terrorist campaign is not to be terrorized.- Salman Rushdie
Towards the end of their conversation in the office of that Toronto safe house, she asked if he was afraid.
"I would have hoped that very few people would be ever obliged to go through this process, but you do discover that it's possible actually not to be afraid of it," Rushdie said. "Since the fatwa, several of my friends, including very close friends, have died for prosaic reasons, like cancer and age. You don't have to have killers coming after you in order to die.
"The only way to not be defeated by a terrorist campaign is not to be terrorized. There's a point at which you just have to say: the hell with you. I am not scared of you," he told Wachtel.
"You have to do it. Otherwise, they win."
Salman Rushdie's and Eleanor Wachtel's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
Episode produced by Sandra Rabinovitch, Mary Stinson, Ann Gibson, Eleanor Wachtel and Melissa Gismondi.
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