Joseph Anton: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

who lived in a crumbling
haveli
in the famous old
muhallah
or neighborhood of Ballimaran, a warren of small winding lanes off Chandni Chowk that had been the home of the great Farsi and Urdu poet Ghalib. Muhammad Din Khaliqi died young, leaving his son a fortune (which he would squander) and a name that was too heavy to carry around in the modern world. Anis renamed himself “Rushdie” because of his admiration for Ibn Rushd, “Averroës” to the West, the twelfth-century Spanish-Arab philosopher of Córdoba who rose to become the
qadi
or judge of Seville, the translator of and acclaimed commentator upon the works of Aristotle. His son bore the name for two decades before he understood that his father,a true scholar of Islam who was also entirely lacking in religious belief, had chosen it because he respected Ibn Rushd for being at the forefront of the rationalist argument against Islamic literalism in his time; and twenty more years elapsed before the battle over
The Satanic Verses
provided a twentieth-century echo of that eight-hundred-year-old argument.
    “At least,” he told himself when the storm broke over his head, “I’m going into this battle bearing the right name.” From beyond the grave his father had given him the flag under which he was ready to fight, the flag of Ibn Rushd, which stood for intellect, argument, analysis and progress, for the freedom of philosophy and learning from the shackles of theology, for human reason and against blind faith, submission, acceptance and stagnation. Nobody ever wanted to go to war, but if a war came your way, it might as well be the right war, about the most important things in the world, and you might as well, if you were going to fight it, be called “Rushdie,” and stand where your father had placed you, in the tradition of the grand Aristotelian, Averroës, Abul Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd.
    They had the same voice, his father and he. When he answered the telephone at home Anis’s friends would begin to talk to him as if he were his father and he would have to stop them before they said anything embarrassing. They looked like each other, and when, during the smoother passages of their bumpy journey as father and son, they sat on a veranda in a warm evening with the scent of bougainvillea in their nostrils and argued passionately about the world, they both knew that although they disagreed on many topics they had the same cast of mind. And what they shared above all else was unbelief.
    Anis was a godless man—still a shocking statement to make in the United States, though an unexceptional one in Europe, and an incomprehensible idea in much of the rest of the world, where the thought of
not believing
is hard even to formulate. But that was what he was, a godless man who knew and thought a great deal about God. The birth of Islam fascinated him because it was the only one of the great world religions to be born within recorded history, whose prophet was not a legend described and glorified by “evangelists” writing a hundred years or more after the real man lived and died, or a dish recooked foreasy global consumption by the brilliant proselytizer Saint Paul, but rather a man whose life was largely on the record, whose social and economic circumstances were well known, a man living in a time of profound social change, an orphan who grew up to become a successful merchant with mystical tendencies, and who saw, one day on Mount Hira near Mecca, the Archangel Gabriel standing upon the horizon and filling the sky and instructing him to “recite” and thus, slowly, to create the book known as the Recitation:
al-Qur’an
.
    This passed from the father to the son: the belief that the story of the birth of Islam was fascinating because it was an event
inside history
, and that, as such, it was obviously influenced by the events and pressures and ideas of the time of its creation; that to historicize the story, to try to understand how a great idea was shaped