Salman Rushdie’s 'Joseph Anton' and the Question of Intolerance (original) (raw)

Salman Rushdie's the Satanic Verses: the Sense of Futility in Religion

The Satanic Verses is a controversial and ambitious effort of Salman Rushdie. This novel brings controversy and fatwa for Rushdie. The government of India had also banned this novel and soon this novel was also banned in other countries. Rushdie present a series of events related to the religion, Islamic history, migration and the human approach of good and evil. In the novel Rushdie deals with a dangerous subject regarding the Islam and Prophet. Because of his iconoclastic attitude, he dared to speak against Prophet and Islam. Rushdie suggests that the words of Quran were not created by God through the mouth of the Prophet. Rushdie visualize' that the values of Islam are worthless for human being and these laws doesn't secure any position in ordinary life of a human being. The Muslim community claims Rushdie a blasphemer because he makes statements, about Mahound's sexual activities and the women of Yathrib. Rushdie portrays the human characters with their own good and ...

Salman Rushdie: The Accidental Intellectual in the Mediascape

Postcolonial Intellectuals in Europe: Academics, Artists, Activists and their Publics, 2018

After Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued an edict against the author of The Satanic Verses in 1989, calling for the execution of the Indianborn British citizen Salman Rushdie, the novel soon became politicized and its reception polarized. Rushdie’s text admits no supernatural quality to revelation and refers to Muhammad as “a false prophet,” and was thus considered a blasphemy. Eighteen years after the fatwa, the announcement of Rushdie’s knighthood in 2007 for his contribution to literature in the Queen’s birthday honours revived the earlier explosions of indignation. The acrimony that emerged primarily from British and South Asian Muslims, both in the late 1980s and 2000s, was perhaps intensified by the fact that Rushdie was born into a Muslim family in Bombay, then British India, a mere couple of months before the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947. While the question of freedom of speech has been central to Rushdie’s engagement with the media and his role as a public intellectual, he has been openly (and ambivalently) downplaying the relevance of politics to his literary writings. It is probably in Joseph Anton that Rushdie provides the most straightforward answer to the apparent paradox of the conflicted relationship between his literary writing and politics. In fact, a reflection on the apparent inner dialectic between Rushdie’s creative and political sensibilities has persisted throughout his texts, including those that will be mentioned in this chapter besides The Satanic Verses and Joseph Anton, such as the novels Midnight’s Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories, as well as the essays and critical pieces included in the collection Imaginary Homelands.

Salman Rushdie's Satanic Narration

The Iowa Review, 1990

A year ago in Pakistan, six people were killed in riots over The Satanic Verses, an allegedly blasphemous book. Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini called on the faithful to execute the author, Salman Rusdie, promising that any Muslim who lost his life while trying would go straight to heaven; and a reward worth 5.4 million dollars provided additional incentive. By their own admission, virtually none of the Muslim protestors had read The Satanic Verses. The book is banned in both India, where Rushdie was born, and Pakistan, where his family now lives, as well as in Iran, Bangladesh, South Africa, and Egypt. The Sunni Muslim theologians of Al Azhar Mosque in Cairo, who issued the ban, based their decision on a reading of only selected excerpts of the novel. Iran alone among the Is lamic countries called for the death of the author. Iran is a fundamentalist Shi'ite theocracy, whereas the majority of Egyptians are Sunni Muslims. Al Azhar banned the book, but stopped there. Salman Rushdie is not the only noted author to be banned by the Great Mosque in Cairo. In 1959 Al Azhar prevented the Egyptian publication in book form of a novel by Naguib Mahfouz. Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, concurred with the decision. At the time of its banning, few Westerners had read the novel, either. Its official American publication date was 22 February 1989. Although ad vance copies had been available for several weeks before that, the death sentence issued by Khomeini against Rushdie and his publishers in Febru ary, coupled with bomb threats to bookstores, led Waldenbooks, B. Dal ton, and Barnes and Noble to temporarily remove the book from their shelves. A year later, the book is easy to procure, at least in the United States, but many people hardly get past the title, which polarizes the book's potential audience. On one hand, non-Muslim readers are unlikely * The four essays presented here are extensions and revisions of talks given at The University of Iowa, March 10, 1989. A year later, as we go to press, the threats against Rushdie have only been renewed.

History and Politics Revisited: A Critical Study of Salman Rushdie’s Shame

Ars Artium, Vol. 1, 2013

Indian born British novelist Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is popularly known as Salman Rushdie. He has thronged among few Indian English novelists such as Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth and V S Naipaul to produce classical fictions and thus has promoted and contributed enormously to give Indian literature a world class stature. Salman Rushdie started his literary journey from Grimus (1975) which is a fantastic tale-cum-science fiction. Then after it he wrote several novels at regular interval. His works include Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999), Fury (2001), Shalimar the Clown (2005), The Enchantress of Florence (2008) and Luka and the Fire of Life (2010). All his works are unique and they deal with the different social, political and religious milieu of east and west. The locale of these novels is generally set in Indian Subcontinent and framed artistically in Indian Diaspora mode.

Salman Rushdie and Islamophobia

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 2017

Like his protean characters, Rushdie has changed dramatically over the course of his career. His shifting discussion of Islam's internal diversity is exemplified by the brief possibility of a pluralist Islam in The Satanic Verses, by the idyllic past of anti-communitarian Kashmir in Shalimar the Clown, and by the catastrophic results when outsiders conflate these Islams with those of the fundamentalist Imam in The Satanic Verses or the Iron Mullah in Shalimar the Clown. But the shift from the novels to the memoir seems greater than the shifts within the novels, as Rushdie appears to reject the novels' attempts at sympathy with his opponents. His treatment of Islam in Joseph Anton simplifies his own investigations of how religion, race, and cultural identity interpenetrate for moderate Muslims and atheists of Muslim descent, and the role of racism and xenophobia in solidifying "Islam" as an object of fear. This article tracks how Rushdie's treatment of Islam as variously practised by individuals, Islam the global religion, and extremist terrorism are increasingly collapsed in The Satanic Verses, Shalimar the Clown, and Joseph Anton. The memoir suggests deep changes in Rushdie's attitude.

Salman Rushdie as a Progressive Writer: A Study of Midnight's Children

Midnight " s Children is a turning point for Indian English novel writing. This novel brought Indian English novel a world recognition in an unprecedented way. No other novel by an Indian novelist has had such an impact as this novel. It also made Rushdie, at the very young age, into a major literary figure. His exuberant humor, brilliant wit, imaginative boldness, enormous talent and prodigious powers of storytelling became a part of the vocabulary of critical acclaim that greeted Midnight " s Children. The success of this novel led to a flood of novels by Indian English novelists and, like this novel, they too won numerous national and international awards. This novel has all the characteristics of " defamiliarization ". It conveys familiar through the unfamiliar. It defies comprehension. It has innovated daringly. Its highly imaginative quality, its unconventional word-play, the disarranged syntax and spirited metaphors, its stunning fusion of oral narrative, fiction and non-fiction, history, journalism, realism, Hindi film songs, fantasy, and the stream-of-conscious narrative style make it, certainly, not an easy book to read.