Fairy Tale Politics: Free Speech and Multiculturalism in Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Abstract

Jacobites must speak in children's rhymes, As preachers do in Parables, sometimes. Pynchon (350) Late in his life, either in the latter decades of the twelfth century or the first decades of the thirteenth, there is evidence that Farid ud-Din Attar, the Sufi mystic and poet, fell afoul of the Persian authorities and was charged with heresy. He had, according to Edward G. Browne, aroused the anger and stirred up the persecuting spirit of an orthodox theologian who denounced him as heretic deserving death and caused his works to be burned, his property to be ransacked, and Attar himself to be sent from his homeland to hide (in Attar's own words) a ruby in Badakhstan (Browne 509). (1) As with much of Attar's biography, the exact nature of his offense is obscure, although it is reasonable to assume, on the basis of the vivid contempt Attar displays for temporal authorities in his poetry, that he did not exert himself to find favor with the political and religious powers of the land. It is also reasonable to assume that Attar was not unaware of the risks he was running by promoting his faith and ideas through his poetry; his masterpiece Manteq at-Tair (The Conference of the Birds) is replete with examples of Sufis who have been dubbed heretics for their unorthodox beliefs and either driven into banishment or murdered by jealous tyrants. Salman Rushdie first makes reference to The Conference of the Birds in his debut novel Grimus (1975), the story of a group of immortals who, shunned by (or shunning) conventional society, converge on Calf mountain, where they hope to find solace from their wandering. In this early novel, there is no evidence to suggest that Rushdie is aware of the fate of the poem's author or that he wishes that fate to form an allusive subtext for his narrative. Attar's ornithological myth seems useful to Rushdie to the extent that it provides thematic and structural support for his meditation on exile, but it is never overtly associated with pleas for freedom of speech or freedom from persecution. When Rushdie returns to The Conference of the Birds nearly 20 years later in Haroun and the Sea of Stories, it is again without allusion to the biography of its author. Attar and his fate are not mentioned in the text or, to my knowledge, in any commentary that Rushdie has made on the text. By this time, however, the similarities between Rushdie's own experience and Attar's have become striking. Rushdie too has aroused the anger and stirred up the persecuting spirit of an orthodox theologian, he has had his work burned by outraged believers, he has been denounced by the Islamic authorities as a heretic deserving death, and he has gone to hide himself like a ruby in North London. It is tempting to believe, on this basis, that Rushdie makes reference to Attar's work in Haroun either because he is aware of Attar's persecution and wishes to draw strength from the fact that he is not the first (or the last) to suffer for expressing opinions in a fictional form or because he is unaware of Attar's fate but recognizes in The Conference of the Birds the work of a man who is already intimate enough with the mechanisms of earthly oppression to compose the following lines: A [divine] king is not one of those common fools Who snatches at a crown and thinks he rules. The true king reigns in mild humility, Unrivalled in his firm fidelity. An earthly king acts righteously at times, But also stains the earth with hateful crimes, And then whoever hovers nearest him Will suffer most from his destructive whim. (45-46) The persecution experienced by Attar in the twelfth century and the persecution experienced by Salman Rushdie in the twentieth are, of course, of a different order. Attar was persecuted because, as a Sufi, he was expounding a doctrine thought to be heretical by the Islamic authorities; Rushdie is being persecuted because of his secular beliefs and because of his overt attack on Islamic fundamentalism. …