Salman Rushdie (1947-)

Salman Rushdie
taken from www.typeface.blogs.com

It's been a long time since I wanted to read some of Salman Rushdie's work. I remember hearing about all the [sad] fuss around the Satanic Verses a while back on CBC... It is unfortunate that I only heard of the author then. Tells you how well aware of the current events I am. Mind you, I was 17 at the time, and also interested in everything that had to do with Sex Pistols, Joy Division, Dead Kennedies and the like. So I put Salman Rushdie on my long list of "to read", and put my hearphones back on.

The other day the freelance copy writer at work came in wearing a pin that said "I support Salman Rushdie", telling me about the montreal reproter that had been tortured by Iranian autorities...I probably came across as an ignorant idiot in his eyes and that's just the way it is. For my defence, I'll say that I am only momentarely an ignorant idiot...

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Here is a little bit of info about him.
Salman Rushdie is an Anglo-Indian novelist, who uses in his works tales from various genres - fantasy, mythology, religion, oral tradition. Rushdie's narrative technique has connected his books to magic realism, which includes such English-language authors as Peter Carey, Angela Carter, E.L. Doctorow, John Fowles, Mark Helprin or Emma Tennant. Salman Rushdie was condemned to death by the former Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on February 14,1989, after publishing SATANIC VERSES. Naguib Mahfouz, the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, criticized Khomeini for 'intellectual terrorism' but changed his view later and said that Rushdie did not have 'the right to insult anything, especially a prophet or anything considered holy.' The Nobel writer V.S. Naipaul described Khomeini's fatwa as "an extreme form of literary criticism."

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, to a middle-class Moslem family. His paternal grandfather was an Urdu poet, and his father a Cambridge-educated businessman. At the age of fourteen Rushdie was sent to Rugby School in England.[...]

Rushdie won in 1988 the Whitbread Award with his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. The story opens spectacularly. Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, two Indian actors, fall to earth after an Air India jumbo jet explodes 30,000 feet above the English Channel. This refers to a real act of terrorism, when an Air India Boeing 747 was blown up in 1985 - supposedly by Sikh terrorist. Gibreel Farishta in Urdu, means Gabriel Angel, which makes him the archangel whom Islamic tradition regards as "bringing down" the Qur'an from God to Muhammad. [...] Gibreel Farishta and Saladin are miraculously saved, and chosen as protagonist in the fight between Good and Evil. In the following cycle of bizarre adventures, dreams, and tales of past and future, the reader meets Mahound, the Prophet of Jahilia, the recipient of a revelation in which satanic verses mingle with divine. [...] The character modelled on the Prophet Muhammad and his transcription of the Quran is portrayed in an unconventional light. The quotations from the Quran are composites of the English version of N.J. Dawood and of Maulana Muhammad Ali, with a few touches of Rushdie's own.

The novel was banned in India and South Africa and burned on the streets of Bradford, Yorkshire. When Ayatollah Khomeini called on all zealous Muslims to execute the writer and the publishers of the book, Rushdie was forced into hiding. Also an aide to Khomeini offered a million-dollar reward for Rushdie's death. In 1993 Rushdie's Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was wounded in an attack outside his house. In 1997 the reward was doubled, and the next year the highest Iranian state prosecutor Morteza Moqtadale renewed the death sentence. but it seems the fatwa was lifted in 1998. During this period of fatwa violent protest in India, Pakistan, and Egypt caused several deaths. In 1990 Rushdie published an essay In Good Faith to appease his critics and issued an apology in which he reaffirmed his respect for Islam. However, Iranian clerics did not repudiate their death threat.


Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-89)

Since the religious decree, Rushdie has shunned publicity, hiding from assassins, but he has continued to write and publish books. THE MOORS LAST SIGHT (1995) focused on contemporary India, and explored those activities, directed at Indian Muslims and lower castes, of right-wing Hindu terrorists. THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET (1999) was set in the world of hedonistic rock stars, a mixture of mythology and elements from the repertoire of science fiction. In FURY (2001) Malik Solanka, a former Cambridge professor, tries to find a new life in New York City. He has left his wife and son and created an animated philosophising doll, Little Brain, which has its own successful TV series. In New York he has blackouts and violent rages and becomes involved with two women, Mila, who looks like Little Brain, and a beautiful freedom fighter named Neela Mahendra. "Though Mr. Rushdie weaves his favorite themes - of exile, metamorphosis and rootlessness - around Solanka's story, though he tries hard to lend his hero's experiences an allegorical weight, Fury lacks the fierce, visionary magic of The Moor's Last Sigh and Midnight's Children." (Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, August 31, 2001) In Newsweek (September 17, 2001) STEP ACROSS THIS LINE (2003) was a collection of non-fiction from 1992-2002. Most of its articles were written while the fatwa was in place. [...]

For further reading: Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. by M. Keith Booker (1999); An Attempt to Understand the Muslim Reaction to the Satanic Verses by Victoria Laporte (1999); Salman Rushdie by D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke (1998); The Salman Rushdie Bibliography by Joel Kuortti (1997); Unending Metamorphoses: Myth, Satire and Religion in Salman Rushdie's Novels by Margareta Petersson (1996); Salman Rushdie by Catherine Cundy (1996); Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie by Leonard W. Levy (1995); A Satanic Affair by Malise Ruthven (1990); The Rushdie File, ed. by L. Appignanesi and S. Maitland (1990); The Rushdie Affair by D. Pipes (1990); Salman Rushdie, Sentenced to Death by W.J. Weatherby (1990); The Perforated Sheet by Uma Parameswaran (1988) - Note: The Irish rock-group U2 has recorded Rushdie's poem from his book The Ground Beneath Her Feet

More on the Author:
www.subir.com: Links, bibliographies, criticism, etc.
Online study of the Satanic Verses