Perspectives on Religion in the Works of Salman Rushdie (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'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.

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.

What Rushdie wrote and wrought

International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 1991

That Salman Rushdie still* remains in hiding and occasional bombs continue to shatter window displays of his "Satanic Verses" seem no longer to intrigue the media nor interest the public. The PEN people who, to vicariously defend their stake in freedom of expression, had taken to public recitations of the book, appear to have rested their case. Even Iran and England have decided to resume diplomatic relationships, the former, apparently having stayed but not repealed Mr. Rushdie's "sentence" of execution. To be forgotten is not what Rushdie wishes for. A resolution of the crisis which now seems to be within reach presupposes the continued interest of a section of the educated public. The most likely members of such a group are those scholars who have a professional interest in intercultural exchanges as well as the many emigre intellectuals and cultural hybrids whose very intellectual existence is set in terms of cultural cross-currents.

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.

ART VERSUS POWER IN THE SATANIC VERSES OF SALMAN RUSHDIE

This paper attempts a cursory look into magic realism evident in the novel and a sampling of the counts of blasphemy committed against the Prophet, the Quran, and the Islamic God, and Rushdie‘s response. The novel has questioned what has been accepted through the ages in established religions. Rushdie however, in so doing, has blasphemed the prophet (PBUM), the Quran, and the God of Islam, thus, it invited a great controversy that resulted in its being banned in India and Islamic states. The language is also foregrounded. A stylistic or linguistic analysis of the novel to look into fused words (justlikethat, getoutofitsillyoldmoo, itsthesoddingbeach, etc.) will be productive. A postcolonial reading of the novel will also reap new insights on the diasporic experience of South Asians (Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis) and other migrant workers.