A Beacon of Sanity: Salman Rushdie

Given the world's current conflagrations, anyone who has written about the dangers of Muslim fundamentalism now seems prescient. Still, there's something eerily prophetic in some of the newspaper columns reprinted in Salman Rushdie's new collection of nonfiction, "Step Across This Line."

As a man with terrifyingly acute firsthand experience of what Christopher Hitchens, to whom this book is dedicated, calls "Islamo-fascism," Rushdie has spent years fighting through the issues currently being hashed out on a thousand Op-Ed pages. Though this scattershot book ranges, with varying degrees of success, over subjects including "The Wizard of Oz," Gandhi and Elián González, the most penetrating pieces here deal with Rushdie's refreshingly ecumenical abhorrence of religious fundamentalism.

Right now, when so many progressive paradigms -- respect for other cultures, solidarity with the oppressed and reverence for civil liberties -- seem flaccid in the face of a monumental threat, Rushdie offers a voice that's both resolutely moral and proudly, expansively liberal. He has, in the last few years, fallen from vogue, but the events of the world have conspired to prove his enduring relevance. He offers a model of a progressivism that's clear-eyed about the dangers of Third World tyrannies while vigilantly opposed to our own administration's authoritarian tendencies. Furthermore, he transcends the hectoring left's tendency to define itself by what it's against, offering a celebration of secular freedom whose ebullience belies the current notion that conservatives have more fun.

Religious and nationalist obsession have always informed Rushdie's most brilliant novels -- "Midnight's Children," a sweeping, careening story of India's birth; "Shame," an allegory of Pakistan's corrupt elite; "The Moor's Last Sigh," with its indictment of Hindu chauvinism; and, of course, "The Satanic Verses," a hallucinatory riff on the birth of Islam. It's in this frightening ferment that he does his best work.

During what he calls his "plague years," after the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued his 1989 fatwa, Rushdie could no longer go to India (nor freely travel anywhere else); cut off from the wellspring of his imagination, the incandescence of his art began to dim. Though he has professed annoyance at the colonial idea that writers from the Third World can't tackle the whole world, Rushdie just doesn't have the same visceral feel for America, his recent subject, as he does for the subcontinent -- especially for the multifarious megalopolis of Bombay.

"The Ground Beneath Her Feet," his 1999 rock 'n' roll take on the Orpheus myth, went slack as soon as it left India, and in "Fury," his 2001 New York novel, his take on boom-time Manhattan seemed somewhat secondhand. Rushdie writes amazingly close to events -- he was finishing "Midnight's Children" during Indira Gandhi's Emergency. With his best books, he elevated news into myth, but he lacked the intimate feel for New York needed to create a real-time vision of Gotham to match his revelatory panoramas of fecund, fantastical Bombay.

Yet if Rushdie has yet to develop a specific American aesthetic, his career has nevertheless given him a special understanding of the challenges this country currently faces. Sure, some of his essays about America, which originally ran as syndicated columns in the New York Times and elsewhere, suggest an uncharacteristic cluelessness -- for example, a piece about the debacle of the 2000 presidential election that makes the apparently earnest parliamentary suggestion that Bush and Gore take turns running the country, à la Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres in the 1980s. More often, though, he seems positively oracular, especially now that the subjects on which he's honed his craft consume the world's attention.