John Le Carre and Salman Rushdie (Reuters)

[Ali Bakhshandeh]

By Paul Majendie

LONDON, Nov 21 (Reuters) - British authors John Le Carre and Salman
Rushdie have taken to the letters page of a liberal newspaper to maul
each other over freedom of speech.

The roars of outrage from the literary lions have been getting louder by
the day in The Guardian with each accusing the other of being pompous and
preposterous.

The row centres on Rushdie's 1988 novel ``The Satanic Verses.'' A death
edict or fatwa was proclaimed against Rushdie by Iran's Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini who deemed it blasphemous to Islam.

The threat has never been lifted despite intense lobbying and occasional
signs of a softening in Tehran's stance.

Rushdie, who has lived under 24-hour protection by the British police and
switches from safe house to safe house, accused spy thriller writer le
Carre of ``eagerly and rather pompously joining forces with my
assailants.''

``Shame on you Mr Rushdie,'' retorted le Carre, whose best-selling spy
novels tell bleak tales of scheming and deceit among duelling British and
Soviet agents at the height of the Cold War.

Le Carre, himself an ex-secret agent, argued: ``There is no law in life
that says that great religions may be insulted with impunity.''

``I was more concerned about the girl in Penguin Books (the British
publisher) who might get her hands blown off in the mailroom than I was
about Rushdie's royalties,'' he wrote to the newspaper.

Rushdie came out fighting in round three of their literary spat, accusing
his fellow author of muddled bombast.

Pulling no punches, he wrote: ``I am grateful to John le Carre for
refreshing all our memories about exactly how pompous an ass he can be.''

Friday brought round four in the clash of the literary heavyweights.

Le Carre wrote: ``Rushdie, so far as I can make out, does not deny that
he insulted a great religion.

``Instead he accuses me -- note his preposterous language for a change --
of taking the Philistine reductionist radical Islamist line. I didn't
know I was so clever.''

The saga shows no sign of running out of steam.

``It has been great fun as every day we had a new letter coming in. We
are waiting to see if Rushdie will respond to the latest one,'' said one
editor at the paper.

``It gets more and more acrimonious every day. The bitterness was clearly
long festering between them. It could end up in book form as the Le
Carre-Rushdie saga.''
^REUTERS@

07:22 11-21-97

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a...@more.net Ali Bakhshandeh