A star-studded literary lecture—featuring Sir Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, and discussions about the limits of tolerance—drew long lines and parallels to the presidential election results.
The Thursday event was a celebration of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life’s launch. The institute serves as a hub of resources intended to foster an interdisciplinary approach to studying religion’s role in society.
According to its mission statement, it hopes to use the fields of social psychology, cultural anthropology, political science, economics, and religion to address “religious and cultural intolerance and conflict,” based on the belief that a wide-ranging view of religion can shed new light on old issues.
University President Lee Bollinger moderated the event with panelists Rushdie and professor Gauri Viswanathan, while Nobel Prize-winning author Pamuk delivered the evening’s opening remarks.
For Bollinger, Tuesday’s election marked an end to a certain period of bigotry in the United States. “Right now in our country, we have a sense of emerging from a period of deep intolerance,” he said.
But Rushdie didn’t regard recent events with as much optimism. “I don’t want to be singing some happy song while people are slitting each other’s throats and throwing bombs at each other,” Rushdie said. He later added, “I hope something happened on Tuesday that can change that, but it’s difficult to live in this world as an optimist.”
Rushdie’s fourth novel,The Satanic Verses, inspired Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran to issue a fatwa in 1989 calling for Rushdie’s death due to the book’s comments about Islamic Prophet Muhammad. The author subsequently went into hiding in Britain for almost two years.
In light of Rushdie’s battles with Muslim extremists, Viswanathan asked Rushdie how he reconciled religion with secular values, but Rushdie rejected the distinction. “All literature began as sacred literature,” he said. The two impulses, he explained, must engage in constant discussion rather than remain distinct.
Rather than searching for a solution in one president-elect, Rushdie exalted deliberation as an end in and of itself. “I don’t want answers to come from some priest,” he said. “I want it to come from debate.”
Rushdie denigrated intolerance of all forms and questioned Barack Obama’s calls for a return to idealism, but he still expressed his hopefulness in unifying people. Religion and deliberation can be united, he said, and the East and West can share common goals of peace. “The desire of human beings to get along is not culturally specific,” he said.
Some audience members who attended the talk were more drawn to Rushdie’s past reputation than to his current writing. “His most recent work is not as compelling, but he’s a celebrity,” Susan Doubilet, Architecture ’81, said. “He was very courageous to put his view out there.”
Rushdie’s fame in decades past also inspired many current students to attend the lecture. Although she enjoyed his novel Midnight’s Children, Liz Ayre, BC ’12, said she wanted to see Rushdie speak because her father “is a big fan.”
The panel was part of the institute’s “Literature and Terror” series, which will continue into the spring with events featuring authors Jonathan Safran Foer, Paul Auster, David Ignatius, Uzodinma Iweala, and Dalia Sofer.
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