Voids Shaped Like God and the Shaping of Political Space: Religion and Contact Among Cultures in the Work 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 Haroun and the Sea of Stories: Epitomising the Use of Stories that Aren’t Even True

After having published novels for an adult audience, in 1990 Sir Salman Rushdie published his first children’s book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. This colourful, humoristic and alliterating written tale uses a metanarrative to describe the adventure of its twelve-year old protagonist, Haroun Khalifa in his quest in a transcendental realm. It bears many literary gifts that might, perhaps, remain unseen by a younger audience yet are noticeable and therefore increase its integrity, for adult readers when read on a deeper level. Critics and reviewers of Haroun and the Sea of Stories tend to agree that this novel has been Rushdie’s response to his personal situation as it was the first work he published after he had been forced into hiding due to a fatwa announced by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran whom hereby sentenced him to death. While to a certain extent this novel can irrefutably be read as such an allegory, there is a level of ambiguity in assessing the novel to merely be a reading of the tribulations Rushdie hereby encountered. The novel offers food for thought relating to deeper moral issues than the interpretation of solemnly relating to freedom of speech and literature, as deeper allegorical surfaces relating to borders and languages, as well as political and cultural conflicts afloat, when read on a deeper level. This essay will discuss how Rushdie juxtaposes literary sources and traditions from both Eastern and Western cultures as well as various era’s, and makes its moral internationally relatable in providing an answer to the question our protagonist ruminates on: ‘What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?’. Followed by discussing the assumed allegory whilst simultaneously deconstructing, this to finalize by expatiating on colonial issues that can be interpreted from this tale’s abundant level of allusion.

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.

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.

The Transnationalism of Salman Rushdie: From a Contrapuntal to a Metamorphic Reading of History

2017

One of the possible ways to conceptualize transnationalism is to analyze the special kind of consciousness it has given birth to, marked by dual or multiple identifications. A post-colonial writer concerned with what it means to be a migrant or diasporic subject, Salman Rushdie starts from what Said has called a ‘contrapuntal’ reading of history, the setting against one another of home and host country in The Satanic Verses, where the fall from the sky of both Gibreel and Saleem embody “the unhealable rift . . . between the self and its true home” (Said). However, in his subsequent novels, the contrapuntal reading makes way for a plural and metamorphic reading of history. The initial awareness of the split self changes into an awareness of the irreducible plurality of the self’s identifications with the multiple histories of the spaces and times it inhabits. Thus in his following novels Rushdie gravitates towards a new understanding of the migrant’s identity as metamorphic, constant...