Saturday, August 25, 2007
Suzanne Pardington, The Oregonian Staff

Salem — Radical Islam is a "fascist political movement" that cannot be reconciled with Western democratic thought, controversial British author Salman Rushdie told new students and their parents Friday at Willamette University.

"You can't reconcile it, you have to defeat it," Rushdie said at the university's opening convocation. Classes start Tuesday.

Rushdie said he got "a close-up demonstration of how the human race behaves at its worst" and of "how human beings behave at their best" after he was targeted for death following the publication of his book "The Satanic Verses." The book was labeled sacrilegious by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, who called for his death in 1989.

Rushdie, born in Mumbai, India, in 1947, spent nearly a decade in hiding while continuing to write. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II this year, prompting new protests and threats. Iran said it would not follow through on the death sentence in 1998, but some hardliners still want him dead, according to the BBC.

He accepted an invitation from Willamette to speak on the value of a university education and the role of the writer in the 21st century. Being targeted taught him that there are "people who believe it's OK to kill someone because they wrote something you don't like," he said. But there also were people — from bookstore clerks to best-selling author Stephen King — who were willing to fight to keep his book on the shelves, he said.

"You don't survive such an experience unless you know what you're fighting for," Rushdie said. "I didn't pick the battle, but as it happens, it was the right battle."

It was a lesson he began to learn as a student in the 1960s at King's College, Cambridge University. He spoke of his reluctance to get out of bed on his first day because he was scared that he would be treated as he was at boarding school, where being clever, foreign and bad at games was a "triple whammy" of social mistakes he couldn't overcome.

Instead, the tolerance and openness of his fellow college students transformed him, he said. At Cambridge, he learned an intellectual tradition that was as challenging as possible toward ideas but as courteous as possible to people.

"We now live in much more cowardly days," he said. "People should not be discriminated against no matter what damn fool thing they might believe."

He urged Willamette students to use their time in college to experiment and find out who they are as they enter the adult world.

"Hopefully, you will find the doors you should go through to find the place you should be," Rushdie said.

But, he joked, "nobody has ever asked me what kind of degree I've got, or even if I've got a degree at all. And so I have to say, as far as I'm concerned, it's been useless."