Essay

Rushdie achieved recognition first for his humorous mock epic of Indian independence, Midnight's Children (1980), which won the Booker McConnell Prize in 1981. He consolidated this success with his next two novels, a satirical fairy tale of Pakistan, Shame (1983), and a phantasmagoric rendering of the plight of immigrants in England, The Satanic Verses (1988). On 14 February 1989, following a series of demonstrations against The Satanic Verses, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa decree—calling for Rushdie's death—declaring that the novel had defamed Islam. The scandal that followed made Rushdie a household name and placed him at the center of a series of debates over censorship, the nature of religious belief, and the social responsibility of authors. Living in hiding from 1989 until 1995 under the protection of the British secret service, Rushdie continued to produce journalism and fiction, publishing another two novels: Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and The Moor's Last Sigh (1995). While living in hiding, Rushdie made frequent, highly publicized appearances in a variety of media as a spokesman for free speech, religious tolerance, and the role of literature as society's moral conscience.

LIFE

A native of Bombay (“India's most cosmopolitan city”), Salman Rushdie was born on 19 June 1947, the son of a Cambridge-educated Muslim businessman. His father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, inherited substantial wealth that (according to Rushdie) he “spent the rest of his life losing.” A graduate of King's College, Cambridge, Anis was conversant in Persian, Arabic, and Western literature. He and his wife Negin (Rushdie's mother) had relocated their family to Bombay from the northern province of Kashmir before Rushdie's birth. Quintessential mohajirs (migrants), the Rushdie family enjoyed relative tolerance in Bombay and so decided not to move to officially Muslim Pakistan following the partition of India. Rushdie had three sisters—he was the only son—and the four children grew up speaking both Urdu and English at home. His relationship with his disapproving father was often stormy, although shortly before Anis' death in 1987 the two men healed the rifts between them—a rapprochement portrayed in the closing pages of The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie's upbringing was a decidedly secular one. In an essay from 1985, “In God We Trust”—collected in the volume Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (1991)—Rushdie explains: “While both my parents were believers neither was insistent or doctrinaire. Two or three times a year, at the big Eid festivals, I would wake up to find new clothes at the foot of my bed, dress and go with my father to the great prayer-maidan outside the Friday Mosque in Bombay. ... The rest of the year religion took a back seat” (pp. 376–379). According to the vivid recollections of his essays and interviews, Rushdie's childhood was also immersed in the colorful attractions of popular culture, fed equally by Bombay's thriving film industry (“Bollywood”) and by American cinema and comic books. Infatuated with Superman, Batman, and Flash Gordon, Rushdie found his chief literary influences in diverse places: The Arabian Nights, predictably, but also in the juvenile adventure stories of Enid Blyton who popularized the British empire for generations of colonial youth. Early on in what Rushdie described as a very “Anglocentric” youth, which in postwar terms meant simply the English-speaking West or Anglo-America, his father hired a painter to decorate the walls of his nursery with animal characters from Disney films. Rushdie's first story, written when he was ten years old, had the allusive title “Over the Rainbow”; it concerned a boy who climbs a multicolored staircase before meeting a talking pianola, whose personality, he later called “an improbable hybrid of Judy Garland, Elvis Presley and the ‘playback singers’ of the Hindi movies.” This youthful tribute to The Wizard of Oz would later find expression in his critical study of that Hollywood classic for the British Film Institute; in his book The Wizard of Oz (1992) Rushdie attributes his taste for the fantasies of Disney and Dell comics to the familiarity with the Hindi “cinema of the fantastic” that all Bombay children acquire. Apart from being a rich source of narrative material that plays a central role in all of Rushdie's later fiction, the wildly eclectic genre of Hindi film—a sprawling, vulgar mixture of revenge tragedy, romantic melodrama, musical comedy, and Kung Fu—is also the source of his first memories of censorship: because of the strict sexual mores of Indian society of the 1950s, screen kisses were systematically and ludicrously cut out.

Typically receiving books instead of games for birthdays, Rushdie was an unathletic, intellectual child, groomed for the elite schools he would later attend. The first of these was Cathedral School in Bombay (an institution established by the Anglo-Scottish Educational Society), which he entered in 1961. Inclined to push the secularity of his up-bringing into a playful irreverence, Rushdie experimented early with apostasy, living—as he would later write of The Satanic Verses' Gibreel Farishta—“a childhood of blasphemy,” eating the pork proscribed by the Muslim faith and mimicking the art of Arabic calligraphers by drawing the name “Allah” so that it resembled the figure of a naked woman. “God, Satan, Paradise and Hell all vanished one day in my fifteenth year,” he recalls. “No thunderbolt arrived to strike me down” (“In God We Trust,” p. 377). Although Bombay was no less religious than other Indian cities, the very proliferation of the faithful (among them, Parsis, Sikhs, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jains) gave this “highrise and hovel” metropolis on India's western coast the aura of secularity, which was furthered by the government's official avoidance of giving any one sect legal privileges.

Rushdie was sent to study at Rugby in England at the age of thirteen and thus began an unhappy stretch of his life. Shunned by his schoolmates as much for his lack of athletic prowess as for his ethnicity, he experienced both minor persecutions and racist abuse, the latter typically scrawled on the bathroom walls. Fair enough of complexion to pass for English, he was nevertheless perceived for the first time as “Indian,” a designation, he was quick to observe, that did not exist in India itself. He made no friends at Rugby and kept in touch with none of his classmates later on in life. After graduation, following his father, he enrolled at King's College, Cambridge, in the fall of 1964. Already eager to become a writer, and taking as his hero the great Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, he launched a course of study not in literature but in history—specifically the history of Arabic and Islamic civilization. (All such references in The Satanic Verses, in fact, were drawn from his college papers.) In many ways Rushdie's university profile did not fit that of an aspiring writer. Attracted by the art films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Akira Kurosawa, and Satyajit Ray, he declared that if someone had offered him an opportunity to direct a movie, he would happily have given up writing. Instead of contributing stories to university journals like Varsity or Granta, he opted for the stage, briefly acting in London's fringe theater at the Oval and Kennington in the play Viet Rock. In a late reminiscence, he recounts how, sporting long hair and a beard, he participated fully in London's counterculture, living his last college summer above a famous mod boutique on the King's Road. When he graduated in the spring of 1968, he declared, “I ceased to be a conservative under the influence of the Vietnam war and dope.”

The alienation he felt in England was still evident, for he soon purchased a one-way ticket home. His destination was not Bombay but Karachi, Pakistan, where his family had finally moved for good in 1964. He had actually visited them there once before during his first year at Cambridge, in time to witness the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965, the war which he so memorably portrayed in the pages of Midnight's Children. He had opposed his family's relocation, but all the same it was in Karachi that Rushdie first sought to make a professional start by drafting an adaptation of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story for the country's new government-operated television station. Rushdie ran afoul of the state censors for including the word “pork” in his television script; the magazine feature he then wrote on his first impressions of Pakistan was censored as well. In 1969 he returned to England in disgust. Apart from short visits abroad, he never left again.

By 1970 Rushdie at last turned seriously to professional writing. For ten years he made his living as a freelance advertising copywriter for Ogilvy & Mather and Charles Barker, while devoting his evenings and weekends to fiction. In a period in which he concocted slogans for Aero chocolate (“delectabubble” and “incredibubble”), he began a novel about a Muslim holy man that he later abandoned. He would abandon another, and have still another rejected, before finally publishing Grimus in 1975. Although poorly received (it had been written expressly as a bid for the science fiction prize offered by the publisher Victor Gollancz, which it did not win), this highly allusive and cerebral novel—a cross between Dante and Sufi poetry—secured his working relationship with Liz Calder, the publisher at Bard, who, despite the initial failure of Grimus, had the confidence to usher Midnight's Children into print. With a new position of authority at a more experimental publishing house, Calder could afford to take a chance on an untried author. Dramatic changes were on the horizon. Rushdie had met Calder while living with Clarissa Luard, a fashion and art consultant he was secretly involved with for two years before marrying her in 1976. Written in a modest flat in Islington, London, Midnight's Children was completed in 1979 and published a year later; it was the first work in which Rushdie drew heavily on his personal experiences in India. A huge critical and commercial success, the novel won Britain's coveted Booker McConnell Prize in 1981, giving the author (then thirty-four) immediate recognition and a check for the equivalent of $10,000. Rushdie dedicated the book to Zafar, the son he had had with Clarissa in 1980, the same year the novel appeared. “After ten years of blunders, incompetence and commercials for cream cakes, hair colourants and the Daily Mirror, I began to live by the pen.” His triumph was not unalloyed, however. In a fore-shadowing of problems to come, the prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi—angered by Rushdie's depiction of her as maniacal tyrant—brought the book up on libel charges, and both he and the publisher were forced to offer a public apology.

More than just a career-launching book, Midnight's Children seemed to many at the time a significant literary event. Its spacious historical sweep, its infectious humor, its ambitious focus on a third-world country, its confident modernist prose—all seemed to announce a new kind of novel in Britain, destined to unlock the untold tales of those, like Rushdie, living “in between.” Not only a representative author of such fiction, Rushdie became its tireless promoter. Now a name to be reckoned with, he spent the next years as a sought-after interviewee and celebrity, clarifying his views on the vitality of “English” literature in the former colonies and among ex-colonial authors in the European heartland. Staunchly anti-Tory in his politics in the very years of Margaret Thatcher's ascendancy, Rushdie turned resolutely to political themes in his journalism throughout the 1980s, attacking the Falkland Islands War, bitterly rejecting economic neoliberalism—with its breaking of the miners' union, its selling off of state industries, and its ravaging of England's enviable public welfare sector—ridiculing the new wave of Raj revival films with their nostalgia for the era of India under British colonial rule, and urging resistance to endless rounds of anti-immigration legislation. An essay to which his detractors would later indignantly return, “The New Empire Within Britain” (produced for the independent and alternative network programming of the BBC's Channel 4 in 1982 and later reprinted in Imaginary Homelands) portrayed the hardships of Caribbean and South Asian immigrants in London's poorer communities. Meanwhile Rushdie continued to write fiction. In 1983 Shame appeared—a deeply satirical “fairy tale” about Pakistan's ruling circles, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1984.

Although Rushdie did not divorce Clarissa until 1987, his marriage effectively ended in 1984, the year he began work on The Satanic Verses. The writing went slowly as he forged ahead in his usual manner: working at a manual typewriter with the goal of producing “700 good words a day.” Unhappy with the first draft, and clearly at an impasse, he chose to accept an invitation in 1986 to attend the seventh anniversary celebrations of the Nicaraguan revolution in Esteli, Nicaragua, the trip that would give him the material for his only travel narrative: The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987). Then, as if to consolidate the reputation of Midnight's Children, he set off for India again in 1987 to mark the country's (and his own) fortieth anniversary and to film the documentary The Riddle of Midnight, a series of interviews with forty-year-olds from divergent walks of Indian life. With his reputation secure, and with his next novel nearly finished, Rushdie became embroiled in an unusually acrimonious dissociation from his former publisher and friend Liz Calder as well as dismissal of his literary agent. Although the breaks probably helped him win a handsome $850,000 advance for The Satanic Verses, they may also have intensified the resentments in many circles toward his meteoric rise. If one could only admire Rushdie's quick wit and passion, there was also the widespread feeling that he was thin-skinned, impudent, and ambitious to a fault. He was described, on the one hand, as a born performer, a first-rate mimic in his public readings, gregarious and funny; on the other hand, he was also called “cocky and chippy, arrogant and resentful at once” (Wheatcroft, p. 26). Hugh Trevor-Roper went so far as to complain of his “brutal and vulgar manners” (p. 27). Germaine Greer called him simply a “megalomaniac” (p. 27). Professional jealousy certainly accounted for some of these negative judgments; they suggest something of the extent of the ill will that complicated Rushdie's position once the fatwa was issued. Inevitably race played a part in the gibes against him. Among those who considered him out of touch with the working-class Muslims and Hindus he loved to write about, he was referred to, with deliberate cruelty, as “Simon Rushton.”

Still, Rushdie remained a well-connected man whose friends amounted to a who's who of the English literary scene: Harold Pinter, Julian Barnes, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Fay Weldon, and others. A prominent reviewer in high-profile magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, he had reason to assume that the publication of The Satanic Verses on 26 September 1988 would be met with acute interest, if not open admiration. Indeed the reception began that way, although there were early danger signs. Even before September, Khushwant Singh—Viking Penguin's editorial consultant in India—advised against publication, warning that the novel's blasphemous parodies of the Prophet Muhammad would cause trouble. In an unfortunate interview for India Today on 15 September Rushdie unwittingly alerted the Muslim community to the offensive contents of the book by declaring that its target was religious fanaticism. When the government of India banned the book on 5 October, the measure only brought into realization what had earlier been threatened, for right after publication Viking had been deluged with calls and letters demanding the withdrawal of the book, along with a petition signed by hundreds of thousands of people.

The first of many mass protests against the book took place in London on 10 December and was followed by demonstrations in every major British city with a sizable Muslim population—the most notorious demonstration took place on 14 January 1989 in Bradford, where The Satanic Verses was publicly burned. As the book proceeded to be banned by all of the officially Islamic countries, many other countries followed suit, including Bangladesh, Sudan, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, Singapore, Venezuela, and Poland. Meanwhile the demonstrations outside England had turned deadly. Ten were killed protesting outside the United States embassy in Islamabad; five in Kashmir; thirteen in Bombay; and hundreds more were injured in Dacca, Bangladesh. As legal and public relations maneuvers continued—with Rushdie writing an open letter of complaint to Rajiv Gandhi, and solicitors for the U.K. Action Committee on Islamic Affairs trying to quash the book by having England's antiquated blasphemy laws applied to Islam as well as to Christianity—events took a turn that rendered such actions moot. On 14 February 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa aired on Radio Tehran: it called on “zealous Muslims” to execute Rushdie—wherever he might be found—“as well as those publishers who were aware of [the] contents” of The Satanic Verses. A bounty of $1.5 million was placed on Rushdie's head. On 15 February Rushdie went into hiding.

Understandably shaken by events, Rushdie saw his life altered forever in a few short months. Life underground placed insufferable strains on his recent marriage to the American novelist Marianne Wiggins. In the first four months after the fatwa, they were forced to sleep in fifty-six different beds. In August of the first year of hiding Wiggins finally emerged and, with unkind words about her husband's lack of courage and his unwillingness to link his plight with that of other censured writers, divorced him soon afterward. In this sort of life there could be “no rhythm,” Rushdie would complain. Living under the protection of the British secret service, “you have to know beforehand exactly what it is you want for dinner three nights from now.” Nevertheless he continued to receive guests on a regular basis, mostly fellow writers and literary agents, and he attended dinner parties, although it had become impossible for him to see his son, Zafar, with whom he spoke daily by telephone. When the Ayatollah died in June 1989, the fatwa unfortunately remained in force (and was, in fact, officially reaffirmed each year thereafter). Rushdie had earlier attempted to address publicly the issue of his novel's purported blasphemy in the hope of assuaging the hurt and anger his novel had produced. On 18 February 1989 he made a public statement of regret for the distress the book had caused Muslims. But almost a year passed before he changed his strategy of appeasement to one of insistent clarification. On 4 February 1990, he published a seven-thousand-word statement in the Independent. Appealing to sincere Muslims, “In Good Faith” was a defense against the charge of “self-hating, deracinated uncle-Tomism,” and it systematically set out to explicate The Satanic Verses in order to demonstrate the difference between irony and the abuse of cherished beliefs. On 6 February Rushdie presented (in absentia) “Is Nothing Sacred?,” a Herbert Read Memorial Lecture delivered on BBC television by his friend Harold Pinter. (This lecture and “In Good Faith” were later reprinted in Imaginary Homelands.) “Is Nothing Sacred?” extolled literature as a place where one “can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way” (Imaginary Homelands, p. 429).

Nonetheless, on 25 December 1990, with little break in the animosity and with nowhere to turn, Rushdie converted to Islam in the presence of Egyptian officials. His cautiously worded short essay “Why I Have Embraced Islam” appeared in the Times four days later (it may also be found in Imaginary Homelands). On BBC Radio 4's Sunday Programme Rushdie pledged not to allow the paperback edition of The Satanic Verses to be published. Roughly one year later, on 11 December 1991, he appeared at Columbia University Law School in New York to reverse himself. In his speech “One Thousand Days in a Balloon” (excerpted the next day in the New York Times) Rushdie vigorously called for the paperback edition, proclaiming “these years will have no meaning” (p. B8) unless the novel is read and studied. Produced by an anonymous consortium, the paperback edition of The Satanic Verses finally came out on 22 March 1992. In the fall of 1993 Rushdie was awarded the Booker of Bookers—a prize given to the most distinguished recipient of the Booker in the previous decade.

Compared at once to Alfred Dreyfus and to Galileo, and with a fame (as one critic put it) “beyond Byron's,” Rushdie had also, and lamentably, become an “issue” rather than a person. As Martin Amis memorably put it, Rushdie had “vanished into the front page,” with an undreamed-of, but also unwanted, notoriety. According to polling organizations, The Satanic Verses had simply become the top news story of 1989. Past being a literary scandal, the affair had now reached the highest levels of state. Weighty pronouncements on the evening news by the British home minister, the withdrawal of European ambassadors from Iran and (in turn) Iranian ambassadors from Europe, the severing of diplomatic ties between Iran and several European nations—these were only some of the developments directly caused by the book prior to Rushdie's campaign to force Western heads of state to deal with his case as an international crisis, the way they had worked for release of hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s. After having been spurned by Margaret Thatcher and George Bush, Rushdie managed to meet with British prime minister John Major in May 1993 and with U.S. president Bill Clinton the following December.

The attention Rushdie received was nonetheless tempered by the violent realities of the fatwa. Bomb threats were made against the Riverdale Press in New York for refusing to follow the example of Waldenbooks and Barnes & Noble in pulling The Satanic Verses from its shelves. In July 1991 the novel's Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death; its Italian translator and its Norwegian and Turkish publishers were subjected to similar attacks but survived. Meanwhile, various wire reports stated that white English youth were chanting “Rushdie is our leader” while attacking Asians in Bradford, and a war against dissident Arabic intellectuals, inspired by The Satanic Verses, raged in the Islamic world. Against this background, the film International Guerrillas, depicting Rushdie as the head of an international criminal gang, was released in Pakistan in March 1990. Portrayed as a lecher and an alcoholic who kills Muslims for sport and whose brutish Israeli bodyguards are picked off by an Islamic hit squad in the action sequences, the character “Salman Rushdie” is in the end smitten by a lightning bolt from God. Although banned at first in Britain—a decision Rushdie opposed—the film was later released there as well.

Under trying circumstances, Rushdie continued to write fiction. Making good on an earlier promise to his son that his next novel after The Satanic Verses would be a children's tale, he published Haroun and the Sea of Stories in 1990. In 1995, with the appearance of his saga of the Christian and Jewish communities of Cochin, The Moor's Last Sigh—another novel short-listed for the Booker Prize—Rushdie began to test the limits of his de facto imprisonment, appearing at U2 concerts in London, PEN meetings at the Louvre, and, in the United States, on the Phil Donahue show, “Late Night with David Letterman,” “Good Morning America,” and National Public Radio. Once again, however, controversy stalked Rushdie: Hindus in India were incensed by his parody in The Moor's Last Sigh of Bal Thackeray, the leader of an ultraright Hindu revivalist party, Shiv Sena. Maharashtra State considered banning The Moor's Last Sigh, but the attempt was repelled by India's Supreme Court in February 1996. Busy at work on a feature-film screenplay based on his short story “The Courter,” about growing up in London in the 1960s, Rushdie finally decided to emerge from hiding for good on the seventh anniversary of the fatwa: 14 February 1996.

MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN AND EARLY NOVELS

Grimus

Despite the notoriety of the Rushdie affair, it was Midnight's Children, not The Satanic Verses, that first marked Rushdie's writerly authority. Although foreshadowed in early short stories, such as “The Prophet's Hair” and “The Free Radio” in East, West: Stories (1994), Midnight's Children might have been his inaugural work. He had already begun a version of it in the early 1970s, but its appearance had to wait for the uncertain step, and false start, of his poorly received first novel, Grimus (1975), a book that generated most of its critical interest only after the fatwa had established Rushdie's fame. Although in retrospect the novel seems almost a career mistake, the multilingual punning and cross-cultural jesting of Grimus clearly anticipate Rushdie's later novels—particularly Haroun and the Sea of Stories, whose dream-quest motif is taken directly from Grimus. Overclever perhaps, even austere in its allusions, the novel displays little of that historical sense so prominent in Rushdie's later fiction. Its Western and Eastern sources blend uneasily in a sustained, but uninterpretable, allegory about the quest of a foreign writer to assimilate himself into British society.

The hero of Grimus is Flapping Eagle, an American Indian shunned by his community for violating the holy laws of Axona, a god who desires of his worshipers only two things: that they “chant to him as often as possible” and that they “be a race apart and have no doings with the wicked world.” The victim of small-town bigotries, the hero is an outcast from the start. When his mother dies giving birth to him, he is branded with the name Born-From-Dead (which recalls another bird, the phoenix). His pacifism and sensitivity (in Axona culture, his “womanliness”) lead him to be shackled with a hermaphroditic nickname, Joe-Sue; his situation is made worse by the fact that (like Rushdie) he is inexplicably fair-skinned. Flapping Eagle's sister, Bird-Dog, who is just as much an outcast as he, flees the Axona after drinking an elixir of eternal life given her by the serpent-like character, Sispy. Fed up with tribal prejudices, Flapping Eagle finally goes off in search of Bird-Dog, setting out on a series of adventures that leave him shipwrecked and half-drowned on the shores of Calf Island, where he is received by a pedantic Englishman named Virgil Jones and his lapsed Catholic mate, Dolores O'Toole. It is Virgil who points the hero in the direction of the island's ruler, an expatriate European magician named Grimus, whose power emanates from a miraculous stone rose. From this point onward the quest unfolds as a rather straight-forward allegory of social climbing and literary apprenticeship, as Flapping Eagle ascends Calf Mountain (which juts up from the sea) in search of Grimus. Arrested precisely halfway through his life's journey, he gradually discovers his own identity as he reaches each new level of the mountain's many ledges, which are peopled by immortals “who can no longer bear living”—Russians, Irish, French, English, and Abyssinians with historically allusive middle names like Quasimodo and Napoleon, who debate with him the nature of language, myth, and cosmic order.

If the basic plot of ascending an island mountain in quest of a miraculous rose under the guidance of one named “Virgil” is precisely that of Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso (as is the encounter with famous personages from the past at each level of the ascent), the intellectual mood is not Dante's but Kafka's from The Castle. In Kafka, too, there is a mountain, but on its crest lives an authority whose dark and irrational power demands obeisance rather than understanding, a display of command that better evokes the England that an Indian middle-class immigrant confronts than does Dante's all-powerful, but benevolent, God. Nevertheless by conviction, and exactly because it is in multiple senses “bilingual,” Grimus is not even primarily based on prominent Western sources. The book derives its central myth from the Shahnameh, the tenth-century historical epic of the deeds of Persian heroes, among whose legendary characters is the Simurg—a bird that has witnessed the destruction of the world and possesses the wisdom of the ages. Although Rushdie strives for a sublime heterogeneity in Grimus by bringing together such a variety of figures—including the exiled “Indian” and the European magician—the quest in the novel is made manifest not (as in Midnight's Children, for example) by retracing the colonial historical encounter between Europe and India, but in the enclosed and static world of style, in a series of language games. The most important of the anagrams are “Grimus,” a reordering of the letters in Simurg, and “Gorfs,” a rearrangement of the letters in frogs. The Gorfs are godlike frogs who play a game—“the Divine Game of Order”—in which they “alter their very environment and indeed their own physical make-up.” The motif of mutation (which plays a central role in The Satanic Verses) in Grimus suggests the sorts of changes that immigrants typically undergo.

The almost showy eclecticism of Grimus is an approach that becomes one of Rushdie's most familiar fictional gestures, but there are even more explicit thematic foreshadowings here of Midnight's Children. Calf Mountain (Persian, Qur'anic, Dantean) is described at one point as being “like a giant lingam weltering in the yoni that is the Sea” (p. 66); lingam and yoni are respectively phallus and vulva, the customary Hindu iconography of agency and nature. The imagery recalls Flapping Eagle's hermaphroditic nature and is particularly appropriate given the sterility of the immortals on Calf. Rushdie alludes to Shiva (who is at once a fertility god and a destroyer) through the very name “Flapping Eagle.” As one character on Calf remarks, “The Eagle has an interesting significance in Amerindian mythology. Am I not right in saying that it is the symbol of the Destroyer?” Like the eagle, Shiva is an ambivalent force of fecundity and obliteration, a portrayal that will occupy the closing sections of Midnight's Children.

Midnight's Children

Cloyed and precious, Grimus not only set the stage for Rushdie's emergence but announced his intentions for the future. In the pages of Grimus, we find the passage: “I have achieved ... the combination of the most profound thoughts of the race, tested by time, and the cadences that give those thoughts coherence and, even more important, popularity. I am taking the intellect back to the people” (p. 160). Midnight's Children (1980) set out to do just this: it was an ambitious effort to go beyond the modest, small-scale novels in the Anglo-Indian tradition by capturing the immensity of India and its multitudes.

In India the novel developed first not in English but in Bengali, Hindi, and Urdu; there was nevertheless a formidable domestic and expatriate tradition of writing in English. English has been a significant part of Indian identity at home and abroad from the time of early-nineteenth-century social reformers and educators like Ram Mohan Roy through the era of twentieth-century nationalists like Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas K. Gandhi. In this milieu a sizable pantheon of Indian writers producing minor classics in English had also arisen. In genres ranging from social realism to peasant melodrama, ironic human comedy, and urbane autobiography, novelists like Mulk Raj Anand, R. K. Narayan, Kamala Markandaya, Raja Rao, and Anita Desai set a mark by which other Indian writers could measure their own advance, often (like Anand) as celebrities on English soil. (Anand himself worked under George Orwell for the BBC Foreign Service during World War II.) Although the truly international reputations of India's literary masters belonged to those who had not written originally in English (the Bengali Nobel Prize winner, Rabindranath Tagore, for example, or the famous Urdu story writer of Partition, Saadat Hasan Manto), hundreds of Anglo-Indian novels were readily available in England and throughout the Commonwealth from the late nineteenth century onward. An outrageously popular fiction of the railway bookstall variety also existed, written by British authors about India. John Masters may be the most famous of this type.

The excitement surrounding Midnight's Children was nonetheless unique, not only because of its deliberate attempt to be neither Indian nor English—neither here nor there—but also because it appeared at a moment when the English-speaking public, perhaps for the first time, could hear what such a book was trying to say. Revolutions in Nicaragua, Grenada, El Salvador, and Iran had thrust the proximity of the third world into first-world consciousness. The commercial success in the 1970s of the Latin American “boom” novelists (among them, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Jorge Amado, and Mario Vargas Llosa) had popularized that literary phantasmagoria of politics in “exotic” locations known as “magical realism.” But at the very same time a similar kind of novel had entered European literature through the gateway of Central and Eastern Europe in the work of Milan Kundera, Heinrich Böll, and, above all, Günter Grass in The Tin Drum (1962), whose deformed and hunted narrator—an idiot witness to an unfolding national tragedy—is clearly a model for the narrator of Midnight's Children. Although acquainted vaguely with the fictional type to which Rushdie's new novel belonged, and primed by current-events stories of third-world revolts, never had American and British readers (much less Indian ones) seen the genre adapted so vigorously to India.

By far the most important colony in the British Empire—a country that had lived in symbiosis with England for more than two centuries, with resident intellectuals, businessmen, and laborers in every major British city—India carried for the British a torrent of associations; many of these were already etched into the imagination by the novels of Rudyard Kipling, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, and Paul Scott. With each of these forerunners firmly in mind, Rushdie consciously set out to copy, to parody, and ultimately to transcend the lot—and to do so from the position of a thoroughly modern and irreverent, but also native, Easterner. This kind of voice was an unfamiliar but welcome one to many readers. Staving off, on the one hand, clichés about the “inscrutable East” and, on the other, defensive declarations about dignity, Midnight's Children pleased its audience in part because it was simply funny. Its contagious interest in big events and real facts—about, for example, the belief systems of Islam, Sanskrit classicism, the glories of the Mughal dynasty, and the prehistory of Mohenjo Daro—shook up the British literary scene as well. The novel was an implicit reprimand to a British literature that seemed by comparison too staid and too distant from the world of real affairs. Like Shame, its successor, it was translated into twenty languages.

Midnight's Children is the story of Saleem Sinai, who is born with 1,001 other Indian children on the stroke of midnight, 15 August 1947—the exact moment that India is granted formal independence from England. (Rushdie himself was actually born in June 1947.) The fortunate time of birth gives each of the children a distinct magical power, which is greater the closer they were born to the stroke of twelve. Although the lives of many of these children weave their way through the picaresque structure of the book, the plot's central struggle takes place between just two of them: Saleem, whose overlarge nose gives him the power of “seeing into the hearts and minds of men,” and his rival Shiva, whose bulbous knees give him the power to crush his foes mercilessly. As India's new national leaders express hope in the new generation, proclaiming that the lives of India's children “will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own,” so too are events in the novel arranged so that Saleem's personal experiences metaphorically correspond to key events in India's postwar history. Very much like newspaper reports, or the “march of time” newsreels played at 1950s cinema houses (and Rushdie invokes both media throughout the text), the narrative moves chronologically from the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919 through Partition in 1947, Nehru's first five-year plan in 1956, Ayub Khan's coup in Pakistan in 1958, the India-China war of 1962, the India-Pakistan war of 1965, the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, and the infamous “Emergency” of 1975 when Indira Gandhi declared martial law and suspended all civil rights. The only major event left out (and it is arguably the most important of all) is Mahatma Gandhi's noncooperation movement, the movement that actually forced the British out of India. It is left out because Saleem, of course, did not experience it, only inherited its ambiguous effects. Masquerading as a bildungsroman the novel in this sense follows the development of a hero whose “choices” routinely follow the brittle, externally determined contours of current events. The cast of characters is spectacular, but we are never allowed to enter their minds or live with their emotions in any sustained way. They are only brilliant caricatures, playing their parts in an elaborate parodic tableau. Saleem, for example, contains within him “650 million bits of oblivious dust”—one for every soul in India's (1970s era) population. Saleem, as it were, embodies India, as if to suggest that writers like himself are complicit in the national fictions that lead to a frightening disintegration.

Saleem encounters the full range of social and religious types that India has to offer. Loyal to his encyclopedic ambitions, Rushdie packs in a universe of spectacle and event: the sage utterances of illiterate boatmen, language rioting in Maharashtra, sex scandals among the Bombay military elite, religious charlatans and gurus, the meddling of imperial British hangers-on, the peccadillos and frivolities of India's ruling classes, Romeo and Juliet-like liaisons between Hindu and Muslim lovers, and village sectarian strife. This sliding between classes and peoples begins in the person of Saleem himself, who is not what he seems. As the narrator of his own magical, larger-than-life story, Saleem begins with his ancestors, and the early chapters are dedicated to his grandfather Aadam Aziz, a secularized Muslim who frees his wife from purdah, studies abroad in Germany, and dedicates himself to Western humanism. It turns out, however, that Aadam's daughter, Amina, gives birth to Saleem at precisely the same moment that a neighbor named Vanita—the wife of a poor accordion-player named Wee Willie Winkie—gives birth to a baby she calls Shiva. In fact the father of Vanita's child is not Willie but an “Angrez sahib” (a British gentleman) named William Methwold, whom Vanita has been seeing on the sly. The reader soon discovers that a hospital midwife, tormented by unrequited love, has switched the babies. In other words, in spite of his upbringing, and contrary to everything he knows about himself, our hero's social status is a fraud. He is not of Muslim stock but of Hindu, is not wealthy but poor, is not secular but from a family of religious fanatics, and, indeed, he is the bastard child of an Englishman. As the two most potent of “midnight's children,” Shiva and Saleem play out a rivalry defined (respectively) by working-class resentment and amelioration of class conflict, nationalism and internationalism, “Businessism” and socialism, belligerence and pacifism; it is the conflict that holds this compendious plot together.

Midnight's Children, then, has built into it an argument about Indian character. As Rushdie explained in his film, The Riddle of Midnight, “Behind all my writings is the idea of crowd. ... India's turbulent multiplicity ... a throng not only of people but also of dreams, memories, fears, hopes, portents, fictions and gods.” The crowd enters Midnight's Children, though, not only in the form of the portrayed but also as the portrayer; that is, the narrator. In an elaborate subplot Saleem is seen wrestling with himself as he narrates (after the fact) the very novel we are reading. In these passages Rushdie reflects on the complicity of novelists with power—in his case, the distance between his own comfortable metropolitan training and that of the masses he depicts. Rushdie is frequently seen as a student of Latin American magical realism, but he reasonably resists that comparison on precisely these metropolitan grounds. “The essence of [García Márquez's] vision of the world is that of a village boy,” Rushdie explains, “... [whereas] I think of myself as someone who has spent almost his entire life in gigantic cities. ... They define me.” The larger metafictional designs of Midnight's Children are most apparent as Saleem writes, and as his domestic servant (and bed partner), Padma, counsels him with a disdainful tongue on style and historical truth. Allegorically speaking, it is from Padma, the working-class domestic and unfulfilled lover, that Saleem learns to compose accurately. In the next room, within smelling range of his writing table, Padma stirs her chutney pots while Saleem records Indian history for later generations, with each new chapter corresponding to one of the twenty-six pickle jars he methodically adds to the shelf beside his desk. The novel is, in that sense, what Rushdie calls “the chutnification of history.”

If Padma, with her plebeian good sense, succeeds in shaming the narrator for being too upscale and intellectual, she is also gullible and emotional—things that are likewise wrong with the character of postwar India, Rushdie implies. That is, gullibility and emotionalism are fed alike by Bollywood and religious legend, the twin poles of the popular mind; historical events can only be seen by Padma as episodes from the Mahabharata replayed outside her window. Hindi cinema, religious ritual, and secular legend are all for the people at any rate, “Bombay-talkie-melodramatic.” Because he represents a range of classes as well as ethnicities in Midnight's Children, Rushdie is forced to face head-on the problem of authorial responsibility. For how can one claim that one's novel is superior to the bluster of politicians, the demagoguery of clerics, and the silly illusions of the silver screen when it gets basic facts wrong? Midnight's Children certainly does, but it does so for a reason. As Rushdie explains in the essay “Errata”: “Imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect. ... This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration; his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory” (in Imaginary Homelands, p. 10). With complementary but distinct kinds of idealisms, the high and low characters Saleem and Padma frequently misremember the past. But there is no real remedy: at the other extreme is the absurdly “realist” filmmaker, Uncle Hanif, busy making an interminable documentary on the workings of a pickle factory (a rather different approach to chutnification, and hardly a match for the erotic dances of the megastar Hindi film actress, Sridevi!). Facts alone, it would appear, communicate nothing. Imaginative truth may be flawed, but it is all a writer has.

Throughout Midnight's Children Rushdie revels in the grand theme of politics, arguing that modern writers on both sides of the Atlantic seemed to be ignoring the one truth that best defined their time: the experience of empire and its aftermath. The case was made all the stronger by the fact that Rushdie was no armchair moralist but freely accepted his guilt for being a writer whose myth-making implicates him in the crimes of the nation whose myths he fostered. He had, after all, cast Saleem with his miraculous nose as someone who had been used by the Pakistani military as a human bloodhound to hunt down dissidents and who misused his telepathic powers for thought control once he became a one-man “All-India Radio” when by the power of mind alone he was able to communicate simultaneously with all the other midnight's children who could not, for all that, communicate with each other except through him. India, he meant to say, had to accept blame as well as credit for its acts after independence, without simply blaming colonialism. Obsessed with facing the responsibilities of writers, Rushdie demonstrates some of his characteristic pessimism: Saleem compares his writerly practices to the techniques of a Bombay talkie, pure entertainment composed of heavy-handed devices and cheap illusions. In a typical passage, the novel compares history writing to a film screen whose dancing lights feign reality only from afar; up close, the images disintegrate into grainy abstraction. Although considered postmodernist by some critics, his position should not be misunderstood. As he explained in a 1985 review of Terry Gilliam's movie Brazil, “The French, these days, would have us believe that this world, which they call ‘the text,’ is quite unconnected to the ‘real’ world.” But, he says, “I believe ... that the imagined world is, must be, connected to the observable one” (Imaginary Homelands, p. 118). In a similar vein in “Is Nothing Sacred?” he welcomes the insight of Michel Foucault that the author is a modern invention—part of his point in Midnight's Children collaborative composition with Padma—but complains of Foucault's “airiness,” that is, his tendency to neglect to root his claims in historical evidence.

Thus, if in “Is Nothing Sacred?” Rushdie recalls that the “surrealism and modernism and Marx” of his upbringing in the end complemented rather nicely the change and flux inherent in Hinduism's theology, with its multiple gods, it was another way of saying that the critics' free use of the label “postmodern” in regard to his fiction was the result of their poverty of references. To the Western critic, tropes of decentralizing or the supernatural may seem like an avant-garde experimentalism when actually they are time-tested allusions to secular or religious traditions of which the critics are ignorant. Rushdie's metafictional games had their source less in French theory than in the experimental prose of the 1940s British Indian novelist, G. V. Desani, whose writing is itself a disjointed combination of the Indian secular epics and Kipling's Kim; or in the spiraling digressions of the Storyteller of Baroda, whose capacious public performances before crowds numbering in the thousands have been known to last several hours; or, indeed, in Bollywood itself. The novel's active use of the Indian popular culture of film, billboards, sex scandals, newspaper ads, and songs, he suggests, is about freely celebrating a remembered (or misremembered) Bombay childhood rather than a special point about how we have reached the “end of literature.” His first bout with the problem of the authorless text came, he would later say, in watching The Wizard of Oz—a movie that merged in his boyish head with Hindi film, and one whose wicked witch provided the model for Indira Gandhi in the novel. It was also a film whose heroes were all women, as is the case in Shame, and it provided the occasion for a brilliant short story that actually was postmodern, “The Auction of the Ruby Slippers” (in East, West: Stories), in which Rushdie offers a take on commercialization that makes light of the “moral decay of post-millennial culture” by emphasizing the triumph of fiction—the device that provides us with everything we crave.

Just as the Hindu god Brahma is said to dream the universe, so Rushdie's hero Saleem can claim to be the universal receptacle, “the sum total of everything ... everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine” (p. 457). Cracks on Saleem's skin represent the fissurings of sectarian disunity on a national level, and the deliberate yoking of the authorial “I” with the “we” of the Indian populace here points to a central strategy of embodiment: an image of the totalizing novel Rushdie sought to create. Midnight's Children was to be to India what Moby-Dick, Gravity's Rainbow, or Invisible Man was to the United States: “the sum total of everything,” an epic encyclopedia. Once again—and it is deeply characteristic of Rushdie's method—his intention is not so much inferrable from the novel's immense range or sweep as it is stated, in so many words, in a series of clever allusions and puns. The novel's use of Indian myth relies above all on a single episode—the marriage of Parvati (the incarnation of Durga, a destroyer goddess and a mother goddess) and Shiva and the birth of their elephant-headed child, Ganesh, typically thought of as a god of good fortune. Saleem's nose and Shiva's swollen knees, of course, suggest the elephantine. And both characters are the progenitors of Aadam Aziz—Saleem as the cuckolded husband of Aadam's mother, Parvati, and Shiva as the natural father. Thus Aadam is the character who stands for Ganesh, and he is significant for what he tells us of the generation following the Indian “Emergency.” His meaning is ambiguous, however. He seems to stand not for good fortune but for the other side of what Hindu myth tells us Shiva wrought: the not human (Ganesh is a monster), the end of the chain of rebirth. A war hero who returns a major, the character Shiva is a seducer and cuckolder of the rich; his children are strewn across the map of India, but he is also the one who makes possible the mass sterilization of the midnight's children when he turns informer and betrays them to the authorities: Shiva, like the god for whom he is named, is both creator and destroyer. These dualities—while perfectly faithful to Hindu mythology (whose gods, like Flapping Eagle in Grimus, are essentially hermaphroditic)—are designed also as a commentary on the type of novel Rushdie is writing.

Parvati, Shiva, and Ganesh each stand for a distinct aspect of Midnight's Children's national style—the style of English appropriate to post-Independence India. Parvati emerges from the “magician's ghetto” (Rushdie's send-up of the Communist parties); her powers of “conjuration and sorcery” are the powers of making appear real what is not, “the art that required no artifice” (p. 239). Shiva, on the other hand, lends the narrator assistance of another kind: “matter of fact descriptions of the outre and the bizarre, and their reverse, namely heightened, stylized versions of the everyday—these techniques, which are also attitudes of mind, I have lifted—or perhaps absorbed—from Shiva-of-the-knees” (p. 261). Ganesh, finally, is more the interlocutor through which the entire story is filtered, for in addition to his other qualities, he is the scribe to whom Vyasa dictates the Mahabharata. Ganesh represents the mammoth that the novel is and had to be, fleshing out the “Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality” (p. 84). The novel is brimming with vignettes that assert its elephantine dimensions; for example, there is the figure of Lifafa Das, the peepshow man, who displays his vast collection of picture postcards, crying, “See the whole word, come see everything!” (p. 83); there are the oversize paintings of the friend of Nadir Khan, the ill-fated lover of Saleem's mother who becomes a communist and changes his name to Qasim the Red (a motif Rushdie uses again in the canvases of Moraes Zogoiby's mother in The Moor's Last Sigh); there is the spittoon of the Rani of Cooch Naheen (“the Queen of Absolutely Nothing”), where the juices of all castes and classes mix without prejudice; best of all, there is Saleem's growing collection of casaundy jars. Along with Saleem's chutney, Padma cooks with casaundy—hot Indian mustards. The jars contain them just as his chapters contain the “hot” business of Indian history.

Shame

Rushdie's next novel, Shame (1983), concerns some of the same themes as Midnight's Children but departs sharply in its form. Written with a muchthumbed copy of Herman Melville's The Confidence Man by his side “as a kind of touchstone,” Shame is more modestly scaled and is by some accounts Rushdie's most successful novel. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize in a competition that many (including Rushdie) thought he would win. The much more condensed and poetic novel, Shame, is at the same time less effusive, less energetic, and (in spite of everything) less optimistic than Midnight's Children. It relates the story of a bitter feud between two families in Pakistan's ruling circles—that of Iskander Harappa (based on the historical Zulfikar Ali Bhutto) and his successor and executioner, Raza Hyder (based on Zia ul-Haq). An anger tinged with morbidity infuses the prose, but Rushdie attempts to dilute the venom by adopting the light touch of a fairy tale: the novel opens, “In the remote border town of Q ... there once lived three lovely, and loving, sisters.” Once again plying the motif of uncertain (or English) parentage in the figure of Omar Khayyam Shakil, Rushdie delicately slips in and out of the language of oral storytelling, a mode that intentionally confuses the various kinds of orality in play. At times the novel mimics the comfortable pastime of telling fables at a family gathering (to this effect it employs the matriarchal storyteller, Bariamma); at other points the novel employs the quite different oral form of the narrative aside typical of the contemporary Western author. (The narrator of Shame punctuates his story with autobiographical accounts of how his sister was assaulted on a London subway.) Shame also invokes the “literary” orality of the Qur'an, the holy book of the official religion of Pakistan and, by tradition, understood to be a “recitation” to Muhammad from God.

Imitating, in other words, the “turbid peregrinations” of the oral tale, Shame unfolds as a kind of court satire, a story it tells with forced mirth and a colloquial tang that is never stronger than when a character is in the act of swearing. When a vengeful Mir Harappa sacks Iskander's home, he does so uttering oaths that make the usual profanities of English seem almost pallid and inexpressive by comparison: “Sisterfucking bastard spawn of corpse-eating vultures. Does he think he can insult me in public and get away with it? ... that sucker of shit from the rectums of diseased donkeys.” For all its attractive earthiness, Shame leaves the sprawling gestures of Midnight's Children far behind. Here is a smaller and more elite cast of characters. True, the novel deals with the Pakistani drug trade and the CIA war in Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution, the Baluchi guerrilla movement, the overthrow of Zulfikar by his toadying general Zia, and the subsequent rise to power of Bhutto's daughter, Benazir—but none of these events is historicized. They are depicted rather like the woodcuts in a children's book or the textured images of a tapestry. Rushdie confines the action of the novel to the home and fully exploits the themes of storytelling and repression by dealing more openly than ever before with the plight of women.

Shame is an explicitly feminist novel. With few positive characters in the narrative, the only admirable ones are women. They may be rebels like “the Virgin Ironpants” (modeled on Benazir Bhutto) or like Iskander's wife, Rani Humayun, who patiently embroiders the history of her husband's crimes in elaborate visual patterns on a series of eighteen shawls. They may be victims like Pinkie Aurangzeb, a mistress grown old before her time, or Naveed “Good News” Hyder, who hangs herself after being made perpetually pregnant by her husband. Or—as in the central figure of Sufiya Zinobia, the rape victim who stalks the land “castrating” men by beheading them—they may be rebels and victims at once. As Rushdie explains in one of the narrator's asides, “A society which is authoritarian in its social and sexual codes, which crushes its women beneath the intolerable burdens of honour and propriety, breeds repressions of other kinds as well. Contrariwise: dictators are always—or at least in public, on other people's behalf—puritanical” (p. 189).

However well-meant, the portraits of women in Shame were seen by many critics (male and female) as patronizing—a criticism that would hound Rushdie through his next three novels, and not only in regard to women. His admirable courage to make his voice heard and to do so with unambiguous commitment had its costs. Must one be one to know one? Such a question went to the heart of Rushdie's views on the catholicity of influence and freestyle empathy. It would soon bring his work to a crisis, as the charge muttered by Shame's narrator became the actual words of his living detractors: “Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject! ... We know you, with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies?” (p. 23).

THE SATANIC VERSES

On 8 November 1988 The Satanic Verses won the Whitbread Prize for the best novel in England that year. Rushdie had conceived of the book as the third part of a de facto trilogy, moving from India to Pakistan to what he would playfully call “Babylondon” (a joining of “London” with the Rastafarian pejorative “Babylon,” used to refer to white civilization). Rushdie's was far from the first attempt to capture in fiction the life of colonial immigrants now living in the former center of empire. West Indian novels of the 1940s and 1950s like Samuel Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956), E. R. Braithwaite's To Sir with Love (1959), George Lamming's The Emigrants (1954), and others had preceded it, as had the British-based Indian G. V. Desani's All About Mr. Hatterr (1948), an explicit source for Midnight's Children. But The Satanic Verses was certainly the most ambitious of the type. Rushdie's journalistic apprenticeship for writing it had been formidable. Following “The New Empire within Britain” in 1982, Rushdie wrote a passionate introduction to Home Front (1984), a collection of photos with text by John Bishton and Derek Reardon, on the private lives of Indians, Vietnamese, Africans, Turks, Afro-Caribbeans, and other “invisibles” then living in England. (The introduction is reprinted in Imaginary Homelands.) Having raised the ire of the Tories for lashing out at their anti-immigrant legislation and race-baiting at election time, Rushdie slammed the local labor authority of Camden in “An Unimportant Fire” (1984, also in Imaginary Homelands), angrily denouncing the efforts of the labor authority to deny responsibility for the overcrowded, unsafe housing given new (black) arrivals on the dole. He created a similar stir in 1987 when he gave a bad review to the documentary Handsworth Songs by the Black Audio Film Collective, complaining that its politics of struggle were canned and that it was simply repeating the mainstream media's view of the black communities as being involved in a perpetual riot with police. The film, he complained, was blind to the unexpected stories waiting to be told—the “bright illuminations and fireworks during the Hindu Festival of Lights, Divali. ... the Muslim call to prayer, ‘Allahu Akbar,’ wafting down from the minaret of a Birmingham mosque” (Imaginary Homelands (p. 117).

The Satanic Verses was almost a belated, and inevitable, project by the time of its composition between 1984 and 1988. The burden of its prehistory was weighty, and its creation carefully prepared. In a number of earlier short stories—above all, “The Harmony of the Spheres” and the spy story “Chekhov and Zulu” (the latter reminiscent of John Le Carré)—Rushdie had written about day-to-day British life in ways that looked forward to The Satanic Verses but also placed him as a British contemporary of, say, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes. The Satanic Verses is, at any rate, the place Rushdie finally made good on his implicit promises in articles and interviews that the culture-straddling migrant is “almost the normative condition of the twentieth century. ... That's how life is. ... We've all moved.” The novel is, in that sense, not simply a matter of slumming, or of digging around in exotic locales in London's poorer barrios like an ethnographer, but rather of placing his condition, and the condition of those like him, at the center of late-twentieth-century experience. Rushdie was saying, we will constitute the norm now; white Europe and America will have to look to us to see what the future will be like:

Most of the time, people will ask me—will ask anyone like
me—are you Indian? Pakistani? English? ... What is being expressed is a discomfort with a plural identity. And what I am saying ... in the novel is that we have got to come to terms with this. We are increasingly become a world of migrants, made up of bits and fragments
from here, there. We are here. And we have never really left anywhere we have been.

And that “we” for Rushdie was not Indian Muslim, or even Indian, but primarily colonial—and then secondarily, and more metaphorically, universal. For—like the images on a cinema screen—the closer one examines any of these identities, the more they fly apart. England's Indian writers are themselves divergent; some are Pakistani, some Bangladeshi, others from western, eastern, or southern Africa, still others from the Caribbean. In the diaspora, as at home, India is a “scattered concept.”

Rushdie's statement that The Satanic Verses “was the least political novel I had ever written, a novel whose engine was not public affairs but other kinds of more personal and cultural crises” is surprising, given the furor the novel caused, but quite accurate. The cartoonish characterizations that deliberately marked his “current events” novels were not altogether missing here, but they were tempered by efforts at personal intimacy and psychological depth—qualities he would further develop in The Moor's Last Sigh. He spoke of The Satanic Verses' being for him an “emotional risk,” for apart from the painful creations of Gibreel Farishta's tortured mental life, or of Saladin Chamcha's disastrous affairs of the heart, the novel ends with Rushdie's “most naturalistic piece of writing”: a description of his father's death, which took place a year before the novel's publication. If thematically about “hybrid identities,” the book is also a formal hybrid in the sense that it journeys from “very pyrotechnic, high fabulation” at the very beginning to naked intimacy in the closing pages.

The Satanic Verses is about two Muslim professionals from India who emigrate to England. One of them, Gibreel Farishta, is a famous Hindi film actor who before leaving India specializes in a popular film genre known as “theologicals,” in which famous gods from the Hindu pantheon are typically portrayed in opulent costume dramas—a pop-culture form of veneration. Upon arriving in England, however, Gibreel suffers a nervous breakdown. Battered by racism and the foreigner's sense of loss, he slowly goes mad under the impact of a lapse of religious faith that had begun while he was still in India. Obsessed with the nature of good and evil, and uncertain whether his namesake (the Angel Gabriel) portends God (Allah) or the Devil (Shaitan), he hallucinates (or dreams) himself living in the days of the prophet Muhammad: the seventh century C.E. The parody of Islam that made the book so notorious is therefore in Gibreel's ravings, the ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic, riven with doubt, who eventually kills himself. The novel's other major character is Saladin Chamcha, a more Westernized immigrant who wears a bowler hat and has mastered “proper” speech (“chamcha” colloquially means a toady or flatterer), but who finds, despite the pains he takes to be English, that he is unwelcome in England. He makes his living doing voice-overs for radio and television kid's shows about “aliens,” using his masterful ability to mimic others' voices in advertisements.

Built around these two men's rough acclimations, the plot takes us through vividly intertwined stories of immigration and religious faith: tales of day-to-day life in the Afro-Caribbean and South Asian neighborhoods of Brick Lane and Brixton (the “Shaandaar Café” and “Pinkwallah” episodes); the story of Ayesha, a young girl in Titlipur, India, considered a prophet, who leads the faithful on a cross-country march to the Indian Ocean, convinced that the seas will part to allow them to make their pilgrimage to Mecca (the “Ayesha” episodes); a digressive romance in which a heartbroken English widow living on the cold Dover coast pines for her lost Argentine lover, in a satire of the Falklands war (the “Rosa Diamond” episode); and Gibreel's lunatic dreams of a place Rushdie calls Jahilia (Illusion), an imaginary desert country of nomads and merchants not unlike the seventh-century Arabian peninsula where Islam was born. Rushdie attempts allegorically to capture the essence of the immigrant experience. He is comparing the historical conversion to Islam of the pagan nomadic peoples of the Arabian peninsula to the security—the social moorings—that religious faith provides immigrants abroad. For Rushdie himself, and for many of the Indian immigrants in England, that faith has been, at least culturally, Muslim. Questioning the necessity of such a mooring is the main theme of The Satanic Verses.

A “migrant's-eye view of the world” and a “love song to our mongrel selves,” The Satanic Verses was also a bid to see art as substitute religion, part of that “strange job” that writers do, defending the human spirit in an effort “to fill the place left by faith.” If the faithful despised such a move, many secular readers in England recoiled from Rushdie's critique of British society, which was, after all, as much a part of The Satanic Verses as his critique of religion. In spite of the novel's reputation, the literary wrath of The Satanic Verses is aimed not only at a top-heavy Islam but at the pretensions of a Western democracy filled with police ruffians in Black Marias; imperialist longings for the exotic; the mendacious commercial jingles of Thatcherite yuppies; and the philistine horrors of an American-inspired Christian fundamentalism. The novel sets forth a cast of characters continually exchanging their identities, merging with their Others like the shifting sands of Jahilia, where only religious faith and lucrative trading are permanent, and therefore the perfect image of the modern immigrant's plight. Rushdie employs a syncretic evenhandedness when looking for metaphorical strategies to depict “migrant consciousness.” Gibreel, for instance, works in Hindu (not Muslim) religious films; Chamcha as an actor is compared to “much-metamorphosed Vishnu.” The theme of metamorphosis is everywhere but expressed through radically disparate national traditions. If the Hindu version of metamorphosis is, predictably, reincarnation, the concept appears more threateningly in the thinking of the born-again Christian, Eugene Dumsday, whose name Rushdie intends to suggest “eugenics,” “doomsday,” and simply “dumb.” With its overtones of racial selective breeding and genetic engineering, Dumsday's eugenics is a particularly frightening variant of the “mutations” (that is, cultural adaptations) that immigrants, especially nonwhite ones, undergo in a place like Britain under the pressures of forced assimilation or, worse, outright consignment to an expendable species by Christian fanatics like Dumsday. His traditionally Christian hatred of evolution moves him to a cheery embrace of a new creationism: one in which eugenic scientists create superior humans, weeding out the weak on a march to Armageddon. Against such creationism Rushdie pits the immigrants themselves, who as characters in the novel describe, in Rushdie's words, their own “natural selection,” a bitter and unequal struggle to survive in a hostile environment. In perhaps the most urbane variant of the metamorphosis theme, and developing the motif of evolution, the immigrants are said to embody a neo-Lamarckianism (that is, a belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics). If the novel's title and chapter headings seem to prioritize Islam, that is only because the book's protagonists (and its author) are Muslim immigrants. The satirizations of arrogant certainty and sectarianism are for that reason typically given an Islamic cast.

There are several reasons why Islam, from Rushdie's point of view, was well-poised to suggest the wavering identities of the immigrant. The Qur'an is believed by the faithful literally to be the word of God, recited directly to Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel (al-qur'an means “recital”). Unlike the role of Jesus in Christianity, however, Muhammad is not considered to be divine. He is the one prophet about whom we know important biographical details, a prophet wholly inside history. Drawing on his Cambridge training, Rushdie observed:

The ethic of revelation [Muhammad] received when at the
age of forty, having married a wealthy older woman and made his fortune, he climbed Mount Hira and found there the Archangel Gabriel ... has often been seen, at least in part, as a plan for a return to the code of the nomadic Bedouin. ... The people on whom Muhammad's word made the strongest impression were the poor, the people of the
bazaar, the lower classes of Meccan society—precisely those people who know that they would have been better off under the old nomadic system.

Islam was in part “a subversive, radical movement.” Immigrant characters throughout the novel are depicted sprouting horns and tails miraculously to dramatize how the British see them—as devils—and to suggest that they are “turning curses into strengths”: that is, willingly accepting the role of devil to turn that meaning on its head.

The Satanic Verses is not only about transformation but doubt. Any prophet, Rushdie says, must at some time question the authenticity of the voices he hears. Rushdie's “satanic verses,” in fact, have an actual historical basis: “satanic verses” are first referred to by the chronicler al-Tabari, who wrote that initially Muhammad allowed new converts to Islam to worship three female pagan deities: these deities were so loved that proscribing their worship would have impeded proselytization. Since the verses permitting this pagan worship were later rejected by Muhammad as inspired by evil (there seemed to be some opportunism in permitting them to begin with), they raised the issue of doubt for Rushdie with redoubled force. They seemed to provide the perfect occasion for making it plausible that the doubting Gibreel would cast himself in Muhammad's skin. When the visions first came to him, Muhammad was accused of insanity and even doubted himself; Gibreel actually goes insane. Metaphorically, the God of the Ayatollah Khomeini (whom Rushdie makes a character in the book since Khomeini, too, was an immigrant to England: exiled in London during the last days of the Shah) or the God, say, of Margaret Thatcher, is Rushdie's Devil, and he is happy to have it that way. But then again—like Saleem and Shiva or Iskander and Raza in the earlier novels—Gibreel and Saladin are the two that make one in The Satanic Verses, together creating the dialogue that, in a moment of fictional revelation, becomes Rushdie's Qur'anic “recital.” Rushdie saw the duality again in the meekness and bravado of Dorothy and the Wizard in The Wizard of Oz.

The Satanic Verses sets itself up as a mock Qur'an, now narrated by Allah and Shaitan. It is a holy book of doubt and secularity, a renegade work in precisely the sense that Muhammad was a renegade to the pagan Meccans and the Jews of Medina. Since there are strict prohibitions in Islam against depicting the Prophet (he wanted the message, not the messenger, to matter), the novel is certainly a blasphemous work, even an attempt to unravel the religion from within, but it is a perfectly sincere secular rereading of Islamic tradition. Rushdie was appealing to the honorable literature of revisionism, Western and Eastern—on the one hand, to William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita; on the other, to the writings of Al-Ghazali, a thirteenth-century Persian theologian, and those of Muhammad Iqbal, an early-twentieth-century Urdu poet, both of whom cherished doubt and strove for religious reform. As in Grimus, Rushdie here embraces Sufism—an aesthetic, mystical, and tolerant trend within Islam whose adherents had for many centuries explored theological doubt (often in exquisite, experimental poetry) and who insisted on the believer's personal and individual relationship to God rather than on his or her submission to rules and rituals as defined by the clerisy. Like Saleem Sinai, the “author” of Midnight's Children, the actual author of The Satanic Verses is part Ibn Sina (a tenth-century Arabic philosopher and Sufi adept) and part Khalid Ibn Sinan (a failed prophet and rival of Muhammad). The “Sinai” of the Mosaic covenant—although it serves in Midnight's Children as little more than another sign of Saleem's impossibly complicated and multiple “parentage”—gestures toward the third great religion of the “Book” (Judaism), which must eventually be exposed to satire just as Islam and Christianity are so mercilessly satirized in The Satanic Verses. As readers would see, that satire eventually came full force in Rushdie's elaborate treatment of the Jews of Cochin in The Moor's Last Sigh.

The hatred The Satanic Verses inspired among Muslims surprised Rushdie at first, if only because his earlier fiction arguably had been just as irreverent: in the later chapters of Midnight's Children there are the images of Muhammad as Buddha sitting glassy-eyed and stupid under a tree in Gaya; in Shame the Qur'an is compared to the public rantings of the Pakistani military. Still, the fame of The Satanic Verses was prodigious. There had simply never been a case when the publication of a novel produced a more significant reaction on a global scale, at all levels of public and private commentary. Clearly, the uproar was more than a literary controversy. Lower-class Muslims in places like Bradford, England, and Detroit, Michigan, had been protesting for weeks before the Ayatollah came on the scene to steal the headlines and place the whole affair in the framework of a convenient demonology. Because Rushdie was a highly decorated media star, protesters repeatedly made the point that what they were really objecting to was the vilification of Islam in the Western press, what Syed Shahabuddin had called the “new Crusades.” For many British Muslims the novel raised a quality-of-life question, a matter of their very social standing and dignity as immigrants living in Britain. Paradoxically Rushdie had alienated the very “aliens” on whose behalf he had written the novel.

From the start the issue demanded attention it never received from the “specialists” on Middle East terrorism. Though Rushdie strove to point out that “novels are not trivial things” and that the fatwa was an attack on novels as such, few people looked at the literary issues raised by the affair—at, for example, the way that book markets structure international taste and create celebrities, the different status that the written word enjoys in different societies, or the actual traditions of secular literature within Islam. Rather, a more brutal rhetoric that expressed no interest in Rushdie as a writer tended to hold sway. Roald Dahl simply called Rushdie “a dangerous opportunist”; Tory Party chairman Norman Tebbit, “an outstanding villain ... who has insulted the country that protects him and betrayed and reviled those to whom he owes his wealth, his culture, his religion and now his very life.” John Le Carré declared that “absolute free speech is not a God-given right. ... Nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion.” Alexander Cockburn, by contrast, took up Rushdie's defense but complained that Rushdie managed no outcry on behalf of other victims of censorship and intimidation. Edward Said called The Satanic Verses “the Intifada of the imagination,” while the great Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih called it “tedious,” a cause célèbre only because Iran had made it so. Despite the violence of the much-publicized rhetoric against Rushdie from a variety of Islamic quarters, many commentators observed that those quarters did, after all, have a point. Gobind Kumar, for example, reminded readers of the “tendency for the Western media to propagate derogatory images of minority and foreign cultures.” Conor Cruise O'Brien was there to oblige him, stating baldly that “Muslim society looks repulsive ... because it is repulsive” and Anthony Burgess weighed in with the claim that “the Koran is no literary masterpiece. The Bible is.” Apparently, in the eyes of certain critics, those who decried Rushdie's blasphemy against Islam were guilty of blasphemy against the sacred doctrine of Western cultural superiority.

Many of the responses to The Satanic Verses were addressed in advance within the pages of the novel itself. The same uneasiness Rushdie expressed in both Shame and Midnight's Children about his own role in depicting the “masses” manifests in The Satanic Verses in an allegorical retelling of Islam's early appeal to commoners: The character Baal is a court hireling contracted by the Jahilian Grandee to satirize the village poor. His job is to practice on behalf of the state the “art of metrical slander,” which amounts to another self-critical allusion to Rushdie's own art. Rushdie's vicious send-up of the black communities of Britain through the characters Uhuru Simba, Pinkwallah, and Orphia Phillips—small-time poseurs, hucksters, or naive mechanicals who mouth an unconvincing patwah speech—is not unlike Baal's portrait of the lower-class types who become Muhammad's first converts: Khalid the water carrier, Bilal the former slave, and Salman al-Farisi the scribe. Rushdie's view of the common people is ambivalent. The people in power, as he would put it in Shame, “distrust fun.” A self-styled socialist in the context of Thatcher's Britain, Rushdie instead espoused a traditional and cautious liberalism when assessing the undeniably popular regime of post-revolutionary Iran or, indeed, of post-independence India. What he contends in Shame is that popular revolutionary governments, whether religious or not, tend to be humorless, puritanical, and allergic to criticism. For that reason, his parodies in The Satanic Verses of Islam, on the one hand, and of the working-class black communities of Britain, on the other, waver. While portraying ordinary people as heroically adept at survival, and by doing so with a Rabelaisian love for the masses, which is without parallel in contemporary fiction, he also fears popular power and has no confidence in people's ability to choose wisely. More than anything, his parodies are fatally incomplete; they attempt to be jocular about a faith whose absence would, for embattled immigrants without Rushdie's resources or class connections, be too grim to fathom. And although Rushdie (as in Shame) recognizes his own ambivalence and brings it to the surface for discussion in the characters Baal and Salman al-Farisi in The Satanic Verses (one a hack in the pay of the wealthy, the other a scribe who pokes holes irreverently in the Prophet's authority), still he is culpably out of touch with his subject. He was unable fully to imagine the actual response his parodies would elicit. For in the closing moments of the Jahilia dream sections the townspeople are shown to laugh along with Baal's irreverent satire of the Prophet, and they are described as giving vent to an accumulated resentment against the oppressive religion of “Subservience.” For much of the crowd, how far this was from what really happened!

AFTER THE FATWA

Haroun and the Sea of Stories

The imaginative landscape of Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) had been stirring in Rushdie's mind since childhood. In a public lecture in 1992, he reflected on the impure—imprecise and untamable—nature of creativity, exclaiming, “I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.” Almost all of Rushdie's early inspirations can be found in Haroun: Flash Gordon's rockets to the moon; Alice in Wonderland; the voyages of Sinbad; the heroic double lives of Clark Kent/Superman and Bruce Wayne/Batman; the riches of Ali Baba; and the colorful substitute home, the Emerald City. Many of the professional influences of Rushdie's maturer years are also woven into the fabric of Haroun: there are explicit allusions to James Bond's Dr. No; to the medievally tinged science fictions of Italo Calvino; to the bwana adventure films of Steven Spielberg; and to Satyajit Ray's spectacularly popular children's film about the adventures of Goopy and Bagha, two bumbling bumpkins whose names are actually given to the story's two talking fish. In his 1990 essay on Satyajit Ray (collected in Imaginary Homelands), Rushdie notes, “[Ray's] fairy-tale movie Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne ... is, in Bengal, as well-loved as The Wizard of Oz is here” (p. 111). Rushdie's first children's tale, and his first novel written after the fatwa, Haroun is dedicated to his son, Zafar, in an acrostic poem that opens the manuscript. The book was written to fulfill the promise Rushdie made to Zafar that his next book after The Satanic Verses would be a children's story. “It was not so much a bedtime story but a bath-time story, something I'd tell him when he was in the tub, or while I wrapped him in towels. I would have these basic motifs, like the Sea of Stories, but each time I would improvise—not only to please him but to test myself, to see if I could just say something and take it elsewhere.” Sharing early versions of the book with his son, Rushdie (who was then living in his various safehouses) got the child's feedback over the phone. The first judgments were, in fact, negative; the story did not have enough “jump,” said Zafar, and kids would be bored. Rushdie subsequently revised it by giving it more physical movement—traveling in buses, sailing in ferries, flying to a hidden moon.

Dragging himself out of the funk of underground life, and (given the campaigns of hate against him) wracked with anxieties about having failed as a writer and as a human being, Rushdie would probably not have written Haroun had it not been for his fatherly pact. Sentenced to death by the Ayatollah, Rushdie felt, as he explained in “In Good Faith,” as though he had been “plunged, like Alice, into the world beyond the looking-glass” (p. 22). Haroun seeks to address what Rushdie in his study of The Wizard of Oz argued that L. Frank Baum's story was all about: the inadequacy of parents. Haroun recalls Grimus insofar as it is structured as a quest; it has a less static story line, but it also labors under its own cleverness, displaying the same virtuosity and source-hunting. Although it clearly declares itself a children's tale, Haroun is not really the kind of tale that children read. There is adventure, clear villainy, superhuman exploits, child heroics, and moral instruction, but all the elements come together in unmistakably adult fashion. Then again, Haroun had what none of Rushdie's other novels did: “I wanted to write a happy ending. I've never written a happy ending.”

Haroun opens in a glorious land of hills named Alifbay (“alphabet”). As James Fenton remarks, the land bears an “initial resemblance to Kashmir” but soon appears properly unreal as “something between a Persian miniature and an animated cartoon.” In this magical country, Haroun's father is a professional storyteller famous throughout the land for his skill at weaving yarns of exceptional beauty and vividness. Drawing on his gift for gab, with an endless repertoire of fables for all occasions and a surefire delivery that holds entire villages in mouth-gaping awe, Rashid Khalifa (nicknamed the Shah of Blah by his detractors and the Ocean of Notions by his admirers) soon catches the eye of the local bigwigs of various political parties who coerce him into dulling the minds of voters at election time by exaggerating the politicians' merits. However, Rashid is stricken with grief when his wife, Soraya, leaves him for the no-nonsense Mr. Sengupta, a clerk, whose line, “what's the use of stories that aren't even true?” marks him as Rashid's virtual opposite. Grieving, and feeling guilty for wasting his talents on behalf of wealthy dunderheads, Rashid suddenly dries up. All at once his inexhaustible capacity for spinning once-upon-a-times leaves him; standing embarrassed before a crowd, he can offer it nothing but meaningless sounds (“Ark! Ark!”) as the politicos glower from the wings. Haroun fears for his father's safety on account of threats from the bigwigs' henchmen, so he looks for a way to recover his father's gifts.

On the eve of his father's next important speech, with an ultimatum hanging over their heads, Haroun falls asleep aboard a houseboat named The Arabian Nights Plus One, which is owned by the slimy Top Man of the ruling party of K, Snooty Buttoo. The valley of K had been, appropriately, renamed Kosh-Mar, which in Rushdie's bilingual punning suggests either kache-mer (Urdu for “a place that hides a sea”) or cauchemar (French for “nightmare”). Haroun wakes to find Iff—a skyblue, bewhiskered water genie—in the bathroom. Like a temperamental plumber Iff is busy turning off Rashid's connection to the Great Story Sea by orders of the Grand Comptroller in a “process too complicated to explain”—or “P2C2E,” the frustrating (parent-like) response Haroun gets to many of his most eager questions. Haroun grabs the multicolored Disconnector and, promising to return it later, is able to persuade the unwilling sprite to aid him in recovering his father's powers. Guided by Iff and a mechanical hoopoe bird named Butt, Haroun discovers that the earth possesses a second moon, Kahani (Urdu for “story”), invisible to the eye because of its rapid revolutions; on Kahani rests a vast multicolored sea of stories and the magical Gup City. Haroun learns that the usual flow of stories to the earth has been interrupted by a nefarious scheme of the shadow kingdom of Chup, located on Kahani's dark side, whose legions exist solely in realms of black and white, and the leader of Chup, Khattam-Shud (Urdu for “the end!” or “all finished”), has conspired to poison the sea and to kill storytelling for good with the sludge of orthodoxy, ill-humor, and one-sidedness. Flying to Kahani with Iff and Butt, Haroun battles and connives his way past the evil kingdom's warriors and traps, picking up important allies along the way until, like Flash Gordon before Emperor Ming, he and his friends engage the enemy's troops in a final showdown, which includes freeing Princess Batcheat (“chitchat”) Chattergy from her imprisonment in the tower of Chup. When Khattam-Shud has been vanquished, Rashid is restored, and on the day of his awaited performance he holds forth like never before, delighting his audience and, at the same time, exposing the local political bosses for the scoundrels they are. When the politicians flee, Rashid is crowned a hero, and, with reputation intact, he and Haroun return home to find that Soraya has come back, disgusted with the tedious Mr. Sengupta. She is eagerly forgiven, and they all live happily ever after.

Greeted indulgently by a sympathetic public, Haroun suffers from a derivative story line and a painfully transparent biographical message. But it signaled the author's resilience and publicly declared his determination not to be silenced. With character names like Mr. Butts and Snooty Buttoo, and jokes about farting, the book actually gives kids the sort of humor they really like (and rarely find in, say, Maurice Sendak). At the same time the novel is jam-packed with in-jokes for an adult community of literary critics, offering a virtual festival of solecism, pun, and bowdlerization: “The Guppee Army—or ‘Library’—had completed the process of ‘Pagination and Collation’—that is to say, arranging itself in an orderly fashion” (p. 115). In its personification of words, plots, and tropes (usually in two or three languages at once), Haroun develops further (and itself exemplifies) Rushdie's familiar celebration of the idea that mass-cultural “trash” and high literature may form part of a common project. More than anything, it gives moving witness to a comment Rushdie made in the depressing times just after the death sentence: “the art of literature matters to me more than just about anything else.”

The Moor's Last Sigh

If Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a cartoon, The Moor's Last Sigh (1995) is a brooding saga unlike anything Rushdie had written before, save the closing chapter of The Satanic Verses. Its superficial similarities to Rushdie's early work—the deformed narrator, the drama of doubtful parentage, the satirical “equal time” that targets (here) Hindu revivalists and Sephardic Jews (accorded their turn like the Muslims, Parsis, and Christians targeted before)—conceal the effort to face emotion in the act of characterization, to write not about ideas so much as about people, and to do so for no other end than that they (we) are. In a revealing interview, Rushdie alluded to his models for the book: “It's funny how books, the classics, order you to reread them when you are preparing for a novel. I've been rereading Wuthering Heights. Before that, Jane Eyre ... [t]hese characters possessed by personal feeling.” Having surprised himself by the power of the scene of his father's death in The Satanic Verses, he pushed himself to try to create more of the same and to sustain it: “I've got to write about sex. ... There is very little sex in my novels, very little stuff at all about the deep emotions. I've always been embarrassed by it, I suppose. But I've come to see that one of the things I have failed to do ... is write about strong feeling, cathartic emotion, obsession.”

The Moor's Last Sigh opens in the present-day city of Cochin on India's southwestern coast—the only part of India with a significant Jewish population. That population (today mostly relocated to Israel) had originally consisted of so-called Black Jews who had fled Jerusalem to escape Nebuchadnezzar's armies in 580 B.C.E. In the late fifth century, these exiles were joined by Jews from Babylon and Persia and finally by refugees from southern Spain, expelled with the Moors in the fifteenth century just before the time of Columbus. The initial peculiarity of the novel, then, is that it recasts the problem of immigration by grafting it onto the supposedly irreducible and originary East. Typically seen by the English as a place that people emigrate from, India here is represented as a place that people immigrate to; the immigrants are not only Jews but also the descendants of the Portuguese Christians who were the first Europeans to colonize the Malabar Coast. Invoking this historical past, The Moor's Last Sigh recounts the life of Moraes Zogoiby, the child of an unscrupulous Jewish merchant named Abraham and a brilliant painter named Aurora. He is born with a clubbed right hand (a mere stump in place of five fingers) and suffers from a disease that causes him to age at twice the normal rate. Although the “Moor” of the title is a family nickname based on “Moraes” (many of the names, including this one, are Portuguese), it is more apt than even the hero at first understands. Through a number of dropped hints, discovered heirlooms, and clever deductions, the Moor gradually lets on to the reader the secret at the heart of the novel. “Zogoiby” means “the unfortunate one” and was the surname given to Sultan Boabdil, the last Muslim ruler of Granada. “El último suspiro del Moro” (literally, “the moor's last sigh”) designates Boabdil's submission as he bids farewell to his lost kingdom. (A dry run for this exploration of life in the Spanish court, and a foretaste of how Rushdie will associate it with “a certain cosmopolitan tone,” is found in his story, “Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate Their Relationship [Santa Fe, A.D. 1492],” in East, West: Stories.)

In what has now become a familiar sort of development in Rushdie's work, Moraes discovers that his father is descended from a union between Boabdil (a Muslim) and a Jewish concubine, which makes him (the Moor) not only a bastard but also a living civil war. This is only one of the many dirty secrets lurking beneath this family romance, and the story, in that sense, can be characterized best as a meditation on scandal. The logic of the narrative is to expose the incarnations of Boabdil through the generations; each of his descendants embodies the paradigm of the life-weary coward who abandons his native land without a fight. The exposition is provided by Moraes as narrator, but the exposure is brought about even more vividly by Aurora, his mother, who as a national celebrity of enormous stature, has painted an allegorical “Moor” cycle in which this entire perfidious lineage from Renaissance Spain to contemporary Bombay is recorded. Although the nominal hero of the novel is the Moor, the story really belongs to Aurora. As in Shame, women are the powerful ones here—by far the most numerous, positive, and effectual characters in the novel. Thus Aurora at one point explains (with the likes of Boabdil on her mind): “Here's a tautology ... ‘Weak man’” (p. 169). Later she taunts Nehru himself for fawning after (and possibly bedding) Lady Mountbatten.

The action of The Moor's Last Sigh describes the unwelcome metamorphosis, over three generations, of the hopeful India that Rushdie had known as a child. This is arguably his most anxious and despairing novel. From the more or less patrician hierarchies of colonialism, through the democratic bid of the national movement, India in The Moor's Last Sigh is consumed by a struggle between two kinds of mafia: the “criminal-entrepreneurial” and the “political-criminal.” These positions are taken up, respectively, by the Moor's father, Abraham, and by Raman Fielding, a right-wing fundamentalist Hindu who leads a revivalist party called Mumbai's Axis. (Fielding is based on the real-life leader of Shiv Sena, Bal Thackeray.) With the conquistador name “da Gama,” Moraes' ancestors had made a fortune in the spice trade, but now, after much thuggery and terrorism, the spice trade has become the drug trade, and it involves a conspiracy to commandeer nuclear weapons for the purpose of high-stakes corporate extortion. Meanwhile, Raman “Mainduck” Fielding's legions profit well from the business scam known as religion. The idealism of the da Gamas' past that is treated in the earlier chapters—Francisco's involvement in the Home Rule League, for example, or Camoens' active support for communism—disintegrates mid-way through the novel. Moraes (who shames himself by working as a torturer and strikebreaker for Fielding) is forced finally to admit that the only thing that can prevent Hindu fascism in India is corruption and bribery; the choices are religious extremism (the past's idealism gone haywire), on the one hand, or some financial racket, on the other, choices which hardly differ in nature or effects. Both alternatives represent the “‘Indian variation’ upon the theme of Einstein's General Theory: Everything is for relative. Not only light bends, but everything. For relative we can bend a point, bend the truth, bend employment criteria, bend the law. ...” (p. 272). Bombay is seen, then, like the Granada of old: as the warring of unscrupulous entrepreneurs and political strongmen reaches a cataclysmic fury by the end of the novel, for Bombay as for Granada, the barbarians are at the gates.

The exception in this general condition of decline is Aurora—“the great beauty at the heart of the nationalist movement” (p. 116)—who draws around her the cream of the political and artistic intelligentsia and whose extraordinary paintings—including her masterpiece, The Moor's Last Sigh—line the walls of the world's great museums. The “torrential reality of India” had “awakened her soul.” She thrives until her evil counterpart, Uma (whose name, like her own, means “dawn”) begins an affair with Moraes. Knowing Uma to be a liar and a traitor, Aurora disapproves, while Uma herself eggs on Moraes with sexual fantasies that include pretending to commit incest with his own mother. The novel, in fact, comprises a long string of sexual encounters—as though Rushdie's point was that the da Gama family made love to kill its pain: there are Abraham and Aurora's trysts in the sarcophagus of a local church; Isabelle (Aurora's mother and the wife of Camoens), with her countless liaisons while her husband is in prison; middle-aged Abraham's procurements of teenage girls, and Moraes' own sexual coming-of-age with Uma. Indeed, the indecent sensuality appears at times to be an antidote to religion, as one character confuses “secular socialist” with “circular sexualist.”

When Aurora is murdered, Moraes seeks revenge and murders the obvious suspect, Fielding, in turn. Sick of the cynicism and violence in India, and appalled by his own role in the thuggery, the Moor flees Bombay when it is destroyed in a fiery cataclysm of gangland wars sparked by the murder of Fielding. As if to undo the past of shame begun by Boabdil centuries before, and with continued residence in Bombay impossible, Moraes finds comfort in the idea of “returning” to the Europe of his ancestors—Moorish, Jewish, and Christian: the Iberian peninsula, specifically Granada (in present-day Spain) where Boabdil had uttered his parting sigh.

The Jewish subtheme throughout the novel, evident in its early setting in Cochin and in the character Abraham, now becomes prominent. For Moraes here enacts a type of Zionism, except that his “Zion” (that is, his people's lost fatherland, their place of return from foreign bondage) is not—as for most Jews—Palestine, but Spain. Spain is where the Muslim, the Jewish, and the Christian once created a common culture and thus once coalesced in him; that is, all three contributed to making him. Hence, in a typically Rushdian pun, Moraes calls Granada his “Palimpstine” (suggesting both Palestine and palimpsest) and his “Moorusalem” (suggesting both Moor and Jerusalem), alluding to the locales of traditional Zionist longing while intimating a cultural and religious mixing and a geographical arbitrariness. It is an arbitrariness, moreover, that he welcomes, doing so quite out of step with the uncompromising, messianic exclusivism of Zionism itself. For it is not the real Granada but an invented one to which he returns—a Spanish town with the very Indian-sounding name “Benegeli,” lying between La Mancha and Andalusia, and thereby evoking what he calls “the fabulous multiple culture of Ancient al-Andalus” (p. 398).

Such acts of historical—rather than merely personal—“return” also mean that one brings to the new place much of the cultural baggage of the country left behind. Thus, when Moraes arrives in Benegeli, he is imprisoned by his mother's former lover, the sentimentalist painter Vasco Miranda, who cannot forgive Moraes for his criminal past and who seeks revenge on the woman who spurned him in the only way he can—through her son. And the prison tower Miranda has built, a replica of the famous Alhambra (a castle and Moorish architectural masterpiece) can only remind Moraes of the Red Fort in Delhi (a famous castle from India's Mughal—that is, Muslim—era). We learn at the end that the entire novel has been narrated by Moraes from this prison.

The vengeful acts of Vasco turn out, then, to be productive. In a fit of jealousy toward Aurora because of her superior talents and fame (as well as her romantic indifference to him), Vasco had earlier stolen many of Aurora's most famous paintings, including The Moor's Last Sigh, which is revealed to be a palimpsest—its hidden picture betrays her true murderer. She was killed not by Fielding at all, but by Abraham, her husband and the Moor's father. India, too, is a palimpsest, obviously, and the return to “Zion” is something everyone (not only Jews) can claim, although what one finds there may not be pretty, although a people's origins as the “chosen” may not be pure.

POLITICAL AND LITERARY JOURNALISM

Without being journalistic in the bad sense, Rushdie's fiction has always demonstrated the ease and confrontational wit of his best journalism. Consistently provocative and honorably dissident, his magazine writing has helped secure his place in British and American letters. His prolific reviewing, moreover, has provided a map of his contemporary influences, influences that together form a consensus: on the late-twentieth-century globe, literary creativity cannot be pried away from politics and history. The rise of the Internet, the decline of storytelling, even the wasteland of television—none of these can destroy the novel, which is rescued by new genres that “blur fact and fiction” (Ryszard Kapuscinski), that partake of Tom Wolfe's New Journalism, or that explore new departures in so-called travel writing. In a number of places Rushdie reiterates his belief that the novel will win out, or at least survive in good health, precisely because it is a low-tech form: “Means of artistic expression that require large quantities of finance and sophisticated technology—films, plays, records—become, by virtue of that dependence, easy to censor and to control. But what one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.”

Rushdie had, of course, tried his own hand at travel writing when he accepted an invitation in 1986 to attend the seventh-anniversary celebrations of the Nicaraguan revolution in Esteli, Nicaragua. The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (1987), although adopting at times the ambiguous language of parable, was a work of partisan support for the revolutionary government. Active throughout the early 1980s in the London-based Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, Rushdie had taken on the task of intervening in a heated public debate. The book contains admiring portraits of every Sandinista leader except the minister of culture, Ernesto Cardenal—whom Rushdie found to be too uncritical of Cuba, and who directed an office that, according to Rushdie, is appropriately named “Minicult.” The trip to Nicaragua allowed Rushdie his first personal look at Latin America as “the home of anti-realism”—an appellation, he argues (in one of the book's anecdotes about Rabindranath Tagore), that applies as well to India. In Matagalpa, “[García Márquez's] Macondo did not seem very far away.”

Rushdie refrains from—and objects to—any cross-cultural comparisons that are reductive. In “‘Commonwealth Literature’ Does Not Exist” (collected in Imaginary Homelands) Rushdie warns against thinking about world fiction in terms of national “essences”—as so many do who have been trained in “English” or “French” departments. The many English literatures being written in the post-colonial era cannot be chained down by categories cooked up to describe the earlier political alliances of the British Empire. Rushdie asserts that, as a category, “Commonwealth literature” is not even coherent: while the term is used to include writing from South Africa and Pakistan, neither country was ever a part of the Commonwealth. And if Commonwealth literature includes writing by South Africans and Pakistanis, why not writing by black Americans and the Irish, or why not work by writers from, the actual Commonwealth who write in Hindi or Gikuyu? “Not only was [Commonwealth literature] a ghetto, but it was actually an exclusive ghetto,” Rushdie writes (p. 63). “The existence—or putative existence—of the beast distracts attention from what is actually worth looking at, what is actually going on” (p. 64). Rushdie concludes with the impatience of a schoolmaster: “Those peoples who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it ... assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers” (p. 64).

His reviews make it clear, though, that the political and magical writing of the era was coming not only from third-world locales but also from minority pockets within Europe itself, particularly Eastern Europe. In the essay “On Adventure” (1985, collected in Imaginary Homelands), Rushdie lingers over the central literary trope bequeathed by the imperial conquest: “[I]n our increasingly vicarious culture, the adventurers are the people who perform marvels on our behalf” (p. 224). That lineage of adventurers encompasses figures as different as “the Prodigal Son and Indiana Jones,” the Pilgrim Fathers and Peter Pan, even Francis Crick and James Watson, who discovered the double helix of DNA (p. 222). In his reviewing Rushdie moves from Western masters of “adventure” like Kipling and Orwell to Eastern ones (Rian Malan and Nuruddin Farah) to non-English Europeans—Günter Grass, Andrei Sakharov, Siegfried Lenz, and Michel Tournier. With a special zest for film criticism, Rushdie's panning of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi and his cautionary doubts about the paralyzing pessimism of Terry Gilliam's dystopian film Brazil are especially memorable. What strikes one in both reviews, again, is not merely their masterfully dismissive rhetoric but their return to the question: What, then, is the actual case on which the art is based? Rushdie links aesthetic judgment to historical accuracy (or more properly, inaccuracy). Gandhi was a bad film because it was horrible history. It was dishonest. This sort of argument turned out to be welcome, and influential, among a generation of younger journalists and literary critics in an age when media spin and plausible deniability seemed to rule. Journalists repeatedly cited Rushdie's elaboration of these arguments in another essay collected in Imaginary Homelands, “Outside the Whale” (1984)—a reproachful look at a spate of 1980s films and television programs that portrayed the British Raj in an appealing light. Rushdie's piece ends with a rejection of Orwell's celebrated essays “Inside the Whale” and “Politics and the English Language.” Upset with Orwell's quietism in those pieces, Rushdie counters it with an empirical finality: “The truth is that there is no whale. We live in a world without hiding places” (p. 99), and the writer is therefore “obliged to accept that he (or she) is part of the crowd, part of the ocean, part of the storm ... radioactive with history and politics” (p. 100).

As Rushdie would demonstrate in his close textual analysis of song lyrics in The Wizard of Oz, he is not just a critic of ideas. Poking fun at incompetent style is a key weapon in his critical arsenal—clear, for example, in his memorable demolition of Benazir Bhutto's memoir Daughter of the East, where he speaks of the book's “staccato ghostvoice that hates verbs and is much enamoured of sound effects” (in Imaginary Homelands, p. 56). Throughout his critical writing Rushdie repeatedly comes back to problems of form, with particular interest in the generic particularity of the novel. Calling novelists “comicbook action heroes,” and the novel “the most freakish, hybrid and metamorphic of forms,” he sees the novels as ways of “dreaming the world.” “In Defense of the Novel, Yet Again” (first published in the New Yorker, 24 June—1 July 1996) takes on George Steiner, who had argued (yet again) at a British Publishers' Association meeting that the novel was dead. Rushdie dubbed such a view “culturally endemic golden-ageism: that recurring, bilious nostalgia for a literary past that at the time didn't seem much better than the present does now” (p. 49). Steiner had conceded that great novels are still coming out of India, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and Rushdie zeros in on the mere Eurocentrism of Steiner's lament: “What is this flat earth on which the good Professor lives, with jaded Romans at the center and frightfully gifted Hottentots and anthropophagi lurking at the edges? ... Might it not be simply that a new novel is emerging—a postcolonial novel, a decentered, transnational, interlingual, cross-cultural novel—and that in this new world order, or disorder, we find a better explanation of the contemporary novel's health ... ?” (p. 50).

Redefining America's place in the world—or rather, dramatizing its false innocence—is a major theme of Rushdie's political journalism. In “Goodness—the American Neurosis” (Nation, 22 March 1986), he contrasts the British Empire's urge for “greatness” with that of the United States: “The American madness seems to be located not in the idea of being great, but in that of being good.” But even the case of India shows that this American self-concept is a form of denial. The memory of Bhopal lingers as “the invasion of U.S. corporations gathers force”; each of a given region's dictators—the Shah, Ferdinand Marcos, Zia ul-Haq—is “a bit of a Yank.” Giving the United States a mixed review—for he feels a great affinity for the America “composed of dissident cultures: black, gay, feminist, even, I dare say, socialist”—Rushdie finds his harshest words for America's “revival of religious fundamentalism,” then competing in ferocity for the much more vilified Islamic revival. He gives both types of fundamentalism a sensitive (and lengthy) analysis in “In God We Trust” (1985).

Daring to enter debates that few of his stature had, and with much to lose, Rushdie did not stop short of publicly siding with the Palestinian cause in the Middle East (“On Palestinian Identity: A Conversation with Edward Said,” 1986, collected in Imaginary Homelands). Nor did he recoil from positions even closer to home, identifying himself with the Charter 88 group founded by Harold Pinter, which had set out to give England a legal constitution, limit the arbitrary powers of government, and bequeath British citizens a bill of rights. Just as he had described India's postwar democracy as a “dynasty” of the Nehru family (Jawaharlal, Indira, Sanjay, Rajiv), he took the Thatcher government head-on in an election postmortem of 1988 (“A General Election,” reprinted in Imaginary Homelands) in language that demonstrates both the bite of his humor and his notorious capacity to offend: “A Tory Prime Minister, Maggie May ... add[s] almost two million people to the dole queues,” raises taxes, leaves manufacturing “in ruins,” “robs Britons of their 900-year-old right to citizenship” by birth, squanders North Sea oil revenue, and lets inflation run wild (p. 159). The “fictional” Prime Minister May does “come across as unusually cruel, incompetent, unscrupulous and violent” but “instead of being hounded into the outer darkness, or at least Tasmania, like her namesake, it seems that she is to receive a vote of confidence; that five more years of cruelty, incompetence, etc., is what the electorate wants” (p. 160).

It is in passages like these that one sees in full display the ethical energy and political hunger of Rushdie's work as a whole. If Midnight's Children had been composed—as one of its metafictional asides had it—as though from newspaper clippings scattered by the wind, the truth is that all of his fiction is made up of current events. The political is not merely allowed into the fabulous but lies at its core. And if Rushdie, moreover, can be said to have had to struggle with typical novelistic skills such as plotting and characterization (The Satanic Verses and The Moor's Last Sigh are both more mature in these respects than the early novels), the wit and bite of the individual sentence, the satirical jab, the uncanny flavor of a particular accent—all of those tools, in other words, of the feature journalist—were his from the start, and with such assurance that they seemed at times his unique possession. Whatever his accomplishments as a novelist, Rushdie is completely at home in the genres of news feature and editorial, and they are arguably the most confident and crafted side of his work.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. FICTION. Grimus (London, 1975); Midnight's Children (London and New York, 1980); “The Golden Bough,” in Granta 7 (1982); Shame (London and New York, 1983); The Satanic Verses (London, 1988; New York, 1989); “Untime of the Imam,” in Harper's (December 1988); Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London and New York, 1990); East, West: Stories (London, 1994); The Moor's Last Sigh (London and New York, 1995).

II. NONFICTION. The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey (London, 1987); Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London and New York, 1991); The Wizard of Oz (London, 1992).

III. ARTICLES. “The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance,” in Times (3 July 1982); “I Borrowed My Expressions from the East,” in Muslim Magazine (18 November 1983); “Casualties of Censorship,” in George Theiner, ed., They Shoot Writers, Don't They? (New York, 1984); “A Dangerous Art Form,” in Third World Book Review 1 (1984); “Dynasty and Democracy,” in New Republic (26 November 1984); “Midnight's Children and Shame,” in Kunapipi 7 no. 1 (1985); “The Press: International Viewpoint,” in Times Literary Supplement (21 February 1986); “Goodness—The American Neurosis,” in Nation (22 March 1986); “After Midnight,” in Vanity Fair (September 1987); “My Book Speaks for Itself,” in New York Times (17 February 1989); “A Clash of Faiths,” in Maclean's (27 February 1989); “The Book Burning,” in New York Review of Books (2 March 1989); “Fact, Faith, and Fiction,” in Far Eastern Economic Review (2 March 1989); “Clandestine in Chile,” in Times Literary Supplement (6 October 1989); “In Good Faith,” in Independent (4 February 1990); “One Thousand Days in a Balloon” (excerpt), in New York Times (12 December 1991), repr., with “Reply,” in Mac-Donogh, ed., The Rushdie Letters (1993; see “Critical Studies: On The Satanic Verses Affair”); “Angela Carter, 1940–92: A Very Good Wizard, a Very Dear Friend,” in New York Times Book Review (8 March 1992); “Heavy Threads,” in New Yorker (7 November 1994); “Defeating the Fatwa, in Nation (11 March 1996); “How News Becomes Opinion, and Opinion Becomes Off-Limits,” in Nation (24 June 1996); “In Defense of the Novel, Yet Again,” in New Yorker (24 June—1 July 1996).

IV. FILM. The Riddle of Midnight. London, 1987. Aired on Channel 4, March 1988. Shown at Retrospective of Indian Cinema, the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, 12 December—11 February 1995.

V. INTERVIEWS. Sarah Crichton and Laura Shapiro, “An Exclusive Talk with Salman Rushdie,” in Newsweek (12 February 1990); Gerald Marzorati, “Rushdie in Hiding: An Interview,” in New York Times Magazine (4 November 1990); Karsten Prager, “Free Speech Is Life Itself,” in Time (23 December 1991); Geraldine Brooks, “Salman Rushdie: My Lunch with a Condemned Man,” in New Republic (27 July 1992); John Banville, “An Interview with Salman Rushdie,” in New York Review of Books (4 March 1993); Sybil Steinberg, “A Talk with Salman Rushdie: Six Years into the Fatwa,” in Publishers Weekly (30 January 1995).

VI. CRITICAL STUDIES: GENERAL. Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (London, 1989); James Harrison, Salman Rushdie (New York, 1992); M. Madhusudhana Rao, Salman Rushdie's Fiction: A Study, Satanic Verses Excluded (New Delhi, 1992); G. R. Taneja and R. K. Dhawan, eds., The Novels of Salman Rushdie (New Delhi, 1992); Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in R. K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, and Salman Rushdie (University Park, Pa., 1993); M. D. Fletcher, ed., Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie (Amsterdam, 1994).

VII. CRITICAL STUDIES: ON THE SATANIC VERSES AFFAIR. Shabbir Akhtar, Be Careful with Muhammad: The Salman Rushdie Affair (London, 1989); Munawar Ahmad Anees, The Kiss of Judas: Affairs of a Brown Sahib (Kuala Lampur, Malaysia, 1989); Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland, eds., The Rushdie File (Syracuse, N.Y., 1989); Bernard E. Dold, Salman Rushdie's Britannic Verses: A Bad Case of Culture Shock (Messina, Italy, 1989); Mohammad T. Mehdi, Islam and Intolerance—A Reply to Salman Rushdie (Herts, 1989); Muhammad Mustapha, An Islamic Overview of The Satanic Verses (Trinidad and Tobago, 1989); Mutaharunnisa Omer, The Holy Prophet and the Satanic Slander (Madras, India, 1989); Fay Weldon, Sacred Cows (London, 1989); Dan Cohn-Sherbok, ed., The Salman Rushdie Controversy in Interreligious Perspective (Lewiston, 1990); Simon Lee, The Cost of Free Speech (London, 1990); Daniel Pipes, The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West (New York, 1990); Malise Ruthven, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Rage of Islam (London, 1990); Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, Distorted Imagination: Lessons from the Rushdie Affair (London, 1990); William J. Weatherby, Salman Rushdie: Sentenced to Death (New York, 1990); Richard Webster, A Brief History of Blasphemy: Liberalism, Censorship and The Satanic Verses (Southwold, England, 1990)

M. M. Ahsan and A. R. Kidwai, eds., Sacrilege Versus Civility: Muslim Perspectives on the Satanic Verses Affair (Leicester, England, 1991); Daniel Easterman, New Jerusalems: Reflections on Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Rushdie Affair (London, 1992); Anouar Abdallah et al., Pour Rushdie: Cent intellectuels arabes et musulmans pour la liberté d'expression (Paris, 1993), trans. as For Rushdie: Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in Defense of Free Speech (New York, 1994); Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, 1993); Leonard Williams Levy, Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred from Moses to Salman Rushdie (New York, 1993); Steve MacDonogh, in association with Article 19, ed., The Rushdie Letters: Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Write (Dingle, Ireland, 1993).

VIII. SPECIAL ISSUES OF JOURNALS. Impact International 18, no. 20 (October/November 1988); Commonwealth Review 1, no. 2 (1990); Index on Censorship 19, no. 4 (April 1990); Third Text 11 (summer 1990); Profession (1994).

Citation
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Timothy Brennan
British Writers Supp. 4
Pages 433–457
Copyright 1997
Charles Scribner's Sons

© 2001 by Gale Group. All rights reserved.
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The Scribner Writers Series
© 1999 Charles Scribner's Sons
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