Religion and the imagination

Relativism is the death of liberalism, says acclaimed novelist Salman Rushdie. It is possible to argue for the universality of certain rights, like the right to language, to dream, to imagine, he says, in an interview with Professor Gauri Viswanathan of Columbia University. We carry below excerpts, edited from a longer conversation...

To defend the freedom of language as a universal human right is justifiable not by appeal to this or that cultural tradition but simply to the biology of the beast.

Introduced by Lee Bollinger, President of Columbia University, and Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Laureate.

Gauri Viswanathan: In The Ground Beneath Her Feet you depict contrasting characters, such as the ultra rationalist Sir Darius and his miracles-chasing wife, Lady Spenta. For Sir Darius, every intellectual effort begins with the death of the gods, whereas his wife searches for enchantment. And in The Enchantress of Florence, your most recent novel, you have Akbar as a modern man who questions the existence of God and presides over spirited debates of the Tent of the New Worship between competing philosophical schools. And yet the same rationalist skeptic has created his imaginary Queen Jodha, and he lives in a world that is steeped in magic and miracles. How do you reconcile these two images, which co-habit the same world in your novels?

Salman Rushdie: I don't reconcile them. I just allow them to go on arguing inside me as well as outside. It's true, I think, that if you are involved in the making of imaginative writing, what you're doing is against pure rationalism. I would argue, not unconventionally, that religion comes after reason and that actually religious texts were invented — and gods indeed were invented — to answer the two great questions of life: “Where did we come from?” and “How shall we live?” It seems to me that every religion is based on an attempt to answer those questions: the question of origins and the question of ethics.

Religion has nothing to say on the question of origins. And on the question of ethics, whenever religion has got into the driving seat on that question, what happens is inquisition and oppression. So it seems to me not just uninteresting, but not valuable to turn to religion. I don't want the answers to come from some priest. I would prefer them to come from the process of argument and debate. And the first thing you accept in that situation is that there are no answers, only the debate. The debate itself is the thing from which flows the ethical life.

But when I'm writing books, something weird happens. And the result is that these books clearly do contain a large amount of what you would call supernaturalism. And I find that as a writer, I need that in order to explain the world I'm writing about. As a person, I don't need it, but as a writer I do need it. So that tension is just there, I can't reconcile it. It's just so.

Full report here Hindu