How Ian McEwan hid Rushdie after fatwa

It is well-known that Ian McEwan is a close friend of Salman Rushdie, but in the March issue of the New Yorker he shows the extent of this friendship, revealing that it was to his house in the Cotswolds that the author fled the day the fatwa was pronounced upon him 20 years ago by the Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini for his book The Satanic Verses.

"I'll never forget - the next morning we got up early," McEwan tells the magazine. "He had to move on. Terrible time for him. We stood at the kitchen counter making toast and coffee, listening to the eight o'clock BBC news. He was standing right by my side and he was the lead item on the news. Hezbollah had put its sagacity and weight behind the project to kill him."

The detail is contained in a long profile of McEwan written by an editor at the magazine, Daniel Zalewski. It explores McEwan's decision to align himself with his fellow author and friend Martin Amis over Islamic fundamentalism, a stance that has led them to being dubbed the "clash-of-civilisations literary brigade".

Until the dispute over The Satanic Verses erupted, McEwan had been regarded by several of his friends as leaning towards a more spiritual view of the world, seeing worth in all religions. The writer Christopher Hitchens tells the magazine: "He was teasable as someone who had this slightly mystical view of things."

And Amis recalls a trip that he made with McEwan in 1972 along the hippy trail through the Khyber Pass. "Ian was more of a hippy than I was," Amis admits. "I was an opportunistic hippy - more velvet suits and flowered shirts. He was more ... 'Afghanistan, yeah'. He had several kaftans, you know. And beads, I think."

McEwan, however, disputes this version of events, denying he owned any kaftans. "I explored mysticism as much as I could, but it never added up for me," he says.

Certainly his view on religion has hardened, specifically after the outrages committed in the name of Islam. "Faith is at best morally neutral and at worst a vile mental distortion," he tells Zalewski. "The powers of sweet reason look a lot more attractive post-9/11 [than] the beckonings of faith, and I no longer put them on equal scales."

Fans of McEwan's novels will be interested to learn that before he finishes any book he shows it to three friends, but not Amis. "I don't want a novelist reading my work, thank you very much!" he says.

The three are the Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash, the poet Craig Raine, and the philosopher Galen Strawson. Garton Ash persuaded him to change the title of his novel Atonement from An Atonement. But the criticism is not always so constructive. When McEwan met Raine met to discuss The Comfort of Strangers, the poet told him: "Listen, love. It's complete crap, and you should put it in a drawer and forget it." McEwan refused to speak to him for almost two years.

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