Salman Rushdie Played Videogames While Hiding from Hashashin

He may think they're garbage, but videogames were good enough for Salman Rushdie and his lion-sized ego while they were lamming it from Muslim fundamentalists during the 1990s.

In an interview Saturday with the Times UK, Rushdie dispells some myths about his time spent in hiding. The author of The Satanic Verses was under a fatwa issued by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini from 1988 until 1998.

During that period, it was rumored that Rushdie was constantly on the move, sleeping in as many as 56 different beds in one three-month stretch. Not true. Nor was it true that the British government was footing the bill for safe houses and security details. Instead, Rushdie tells the Times, he lived in (and paid for) the same house for seven of the nine years he was in hiding.

So what did the British intellectual giant do to pass the time while fundamentalists and bounty hunters around the world were questing for his head?

Like everybody else I played a computer game or two . . . Martin [Amis] had these poker nights."

Too strange for fiction, except perhaps a certain Bergman movie, or maybe Woody Allen. All the funnier, since Rushdie is not exactly an advocate of the interactive arts. Last summer Stephen Colbert asked him what the West could do to foment change among the next generation of Muslims. "Should we send them videogames?" Colbert wondered. Rushdie's backhanded response:

I think video games, YouTube, you know, these are the things that will change the world. Because when people see what garbage everybody else is consuming, they want it too.

Apparently, even the great Sir Salman — who told the Times the fatwa on his head should have been recognized by the West as the beginning of a terrifying new era of violent extremism — has an appetite for trash.