• Born: 19 June 1947
• Birthplace: Bombay, India
• Best Known As: Author of The Satanic Verses

Name at birth:

Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born English novelist and critic, famous for fantastical novels about the post-colonial relationship between cultures of the East and West. Raised in India and Pakistan, he was educated in England and emigrated there in 1965. A graduate of Cambridge University (1968), Rushdie worked as an actor and in advertising until the success of his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981, Booker Prize), allowed him to work as a writer full-time. That novel cemented Rushdie's literary fame, but he became even more famous for the controversy stirred by his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie's depiction of Muhammad and other Islamic figures in the book offended some members of Islam, and the novel was banned in India soon after its publication. Iran's political and religious leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa on 14 February 1989, declaring that Muslims should kill Rushdie for defaming Muhammad and insulting Islam. The order was not rescinded by Iran until 1998, and Rushdie for many years avoided the public and had police protection when he travelled. After the publication of his novel, The Moor's Last Sigh (1995, Whitbread Prize), he became a public figure once again, and has since published novels, story collections and essays that challenge cultural conventions of both the East and the West. Despite decades of sharp criticism of the British government, Rushdie was made a Knight Bachelor in June of 2007 and is now referred to as Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie. The announcement of his knighthood rekindled the ire of strident Islamic groups in Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia. His other novels include Shame (1983), The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) and Shalimar the Clown (2005).

The Indian/British author Ahmed Salman Rushdie (born 1947) was a political parablist whose work often focused on outrages of history and particularly of religions. His book "The Satanic Verses" earned him a death sentence from the Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Although he was called a writer to watch after the appearance of his first novel and was awarded one of the most prestigious literary prizes in Europe for his second, Salman Rushdie became a household word because of the enemies his fiction made rather than the admirers. The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, earned him a death sentence from Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then religious sovereign of Iran and spiritual leader to millions of fundamentalist Moslems worldwide.

Born Ahmed Salman Rushdie on June 19, 1947, to a middle-class family in Bombay, India, Rushdie was educated in England and eventually received his M.A. from King's College, Cambridge. After a brief career as an actor he made a living as a freelance advertising copywriter in England from 1970 to 1980. The experience of expatriation, which he shared with many writers of his generation who were born in the Third World, is an important theme in his work.

However, Rushdie's opus in particular expanded the meaning of the word "expatriate" to possibly its total linguistic limits. For instance, Midnight's Children (1981) is in part the story of a baby who was not only the result of an extramarital affair, but who was then switched at birth with a second illicit child. The hero of the novel is doubly removed from his true patrimony: His mother's husband is not his father, and the Englishman with whom his Indian mother slept - who his mother thinks is his father - is not his real father either. In addition, the hero is caught between the two great religions of Indian, Islam and Hinduism, neither of which he can claim as his own. Finally, he spends his life being shunted back and forth by circumstance between the Indian republic and its antithesis, Pakistan.

Rushdie unfailingly took the stance of a lifelong member of the diaspora, which may be the most consistently autobiographical aspect of his work. Long before his hurried exile from the public eye, in an interview published after Midnight's Children received the Booker McConnell Prize, Rushdie presciently said: "I have a fear that it may, at some point, become necessary to make choices among [India, England, and America], and that it will be very painful."

Another characteristic of Rushdie's work is its reliance on the fantastic. In fact, Rushdie's first book, Grimus (1979), was classified as science fiction by many critics. It is the story of Flapping Eagle, an American Indian who is given the gift of immortality and goes on an odyssey to find the meaning of life. Shame (1983) has a Pakistani heroine, Sufiya Zinobia, who blushes so hotly with embarrassment at her nation's history her body boils her bath water and burns the lips of men who attempt to kiss her. The title Midnight's Children refers to the 1,001 infants born in the first hour of India's independence, all of whom have para-human powers. And The Satanic Verses opens with the miraculous survival and transfiguration of two Indian men who fall out of the sky after their jumbo jet to England is blown up in midair by Sikh terrorists.

Rushdie always used the element of the fabulous to make painfully incisive political commentary (among other varieties of observation). Shame is so thinly disguised a parody of recent Pakistani history as to be transparent, and the hero of Midnight's Children was described as a man "handcuffed to history" by the political journal Commonweal. Rushdie is often compared with Lawrence Sterne as well as Jonathan Swift as a political parablist, but according to The New York Times Book Review, "It would be a disservice to Salman Rushdie's very original genius to dwell on literary analogues and ancestors."

Rushdie also made a career out of poking fun at religious fanatics of every stripe. One technique of Rushdie's in furtherance of this aim was to infuse common objects with enormous symbolic significance. In Midnight's Children, for instance, pickled chutney is one of the main images for India's cultural and social maelstrom; in The Satanic Verses, bad breath plays a vital role in telling good from evil. Few other writers dare to found entire symbolic structures on items as replaceable as a sheet with a hole in the middle, but to Rushdie it undoubtedly seems a worse exercise in illogic to kill people over the contents of a so-called "holy" book.

Rushdie's habit of using the outrages of history - especially religious outrages and religious history - made The Satanic Verses (1988) a book of frightening precognition. In the novel, Rushdie has a writer sentenced to death by a religious leader. The writer in the book is a scribe meant to chronicle the life of a prophet who - as the writer of the book enjoys riddling - both "is and is not" Mohammed. Creating this character, who exists within a psychotic dream of one of the two men who fell from the airplane, was a natural extension of Rushdie's personal horror at fundamentalist Islamic rule. It is this dream sequence which ignited fatal riots in India and garnered Rushdie the Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence.

The title of the novel refers to verses from the Koran, which were struck out by later Islamic historians, describing an episode in which Mohammed briefly wavered in his adherence to belief in a single god and allowed mention to be made of three local goddesses. The dream section in the book details, from the point of view of a schizophrenic Indian actor who fancies himself an archangel, how the holy prophet yielded to temptation and then reversed himself. There are other "satanic" verses in the book, notably those a modern-day husband anonymously sings over the phone to drive his wife's lover insane with jealousy. But the contemporary aspect of the novel has been almost completely overlooked by the controversy surrounding it.

Khomeini's death threat extended not only to Rushdie himself, but to the publishers of The Satanic Verses, any bookseller who carried it, and any Moslem who publicly condoned its release. Several major bookstores in England and America had bomb scares, and the novel was temporarily removed from the shelves of America's largest book selling chains. Two Islamic clerics in London were murdered, ostensibly for questioning the correctness of Rushdie's death sentence on a talk show. Numerous book-burnings were held throughout the world.

Rushdie himself, and his possible disguises in hiding, became an established figure of black humor. During the 1990 Academy Awards presentation, which was seen worldwide by an estimated one billion viewers, comedian Billy Crystal joked that "the lovely young woman" who usually hands Oscar statuettes to their recipients "is, of course, Salman Rushdie."

Rushdie's wife of 13 months, author Marianne Wiggins, went into hiding with him when the death threat was announced. She soon emerged and indicated that their marriage was over.

In 1990 Rushdie released the fantasy novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, written for his son (by a first marriage), Zafar. That same year Rushdie publicly embraced Islam and apologized to those offended by the The Satanic Verses. He made several appearances in London book-stores to autograph his newest work. But even after the Ayatollah's death, his successor, Iran's President Hashemi Rafsanzani, refused to lift the death edict. Rushdie continued to appear in public only occasionally, and then under heavy security.

Although the severity of the Ayatollah's sentence was at least partially a political gambit to aid his regime in its final days, it carried the force of gospel for many terrorists who regard America - and the freedom of speech espoused in the American Constitution - as the "Great Satan." Rushdie will live in danger until the last Khomeini loyalist has passed away. As if in a scene from one of his novels, the innocent speaker of a personal truth is surrealistically threatened with slaughter by his opposite, who claims a patent on universal truth. Rushdie has already been acclaimed as a supreme artist; one can only hope, for his sake as well as ours, that his life will no longer imitate his art.

Rushdie continues to live an isolated life. He has re-married, however, and become a father for the second time. Occasionally he makes radio appearances, but, they are usually unannounced. Rushdie's novel entitled The Moor's Last Sigh was published in 1995. This book drew hostile and negative reactions from Hindu militants in India.

Further Reading

Contemporary Authors, volume 111 (1984), edited by Hal May, contains selected reviews of Grimus, Midnight's Children, and Shame, as well as a comprehensive selection of reviews and news stories surrounding The Satanic Verses. A lengthy interview by Gerald Marzorati appeared in The New York Times Magazine (November 4, 1990). In 1991 Rushdie published Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991, a kind of intellectual autobiography. Rushdie was mentioned in "People" Time (Septmeber 18, 1995)

For more information on Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, visit Britannica.com.

Rushdie, Salman (1947– ), Indian‐born novelist. Born in Bombay to a Muslim family, Rushdie was sent to school in England in 1961. After reading history at Cambridge, he spent some time as an advertising copywriter. His first novel, the allegorical Grimus (1975), already demonstrates two distinctive elements: the use of a fantastical narrative idiom—notably less restrained in Grimus than elsewhere—and the exploration, in both form and content, of the meeting of the cultures of East and West (he has since published a collection of stories entitled East, West, 1994).

However, it is in Midnight's Children (1981) that Rushdie's mode of storytelling appears fully formed. A dense, discursive epic of post‐Independence India, it fuses baroque realism and a Shandean narratorial voice with a spirit of storytelling deeply informed by oral and folk traditions. It draws heavily on The Arabian Nights, both as a model for fantastical, expansive tale‐spinning against a background of personal and national disorder, and, in the form of the one‐thousand‐and‐one children born in the first hour of independence, as an expression of manifold possibility, of new, untold, and retold stories: ‘1001, the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities’.

Rushdie's third novel, Shame (1983), another fictionalized history, experiments further with a form of written orality, conjuring a host of fairy‐tale characters and motifs from both European and Arabic/Indian traditions, and using the ingredients and techniques of traditional storytelling, notably the juxtaposition of comedy and violence, to tell a story of ‘Peccavistan’, the narrator's ‘looking‐glass Pakistan’.

Rushdie's use of folk‐ and fairy‐tale material is always integral to the work as a whole: the use of non‐Western traditions and modes of storytelling in novels dealing with the legacies of colonial rule, and the use of genuinely popular culture to tell the unofficial stories lying beneath orthodox histories. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), the children's novel Rushdie wrote in the wake of the fatwa issued against him for what was seen as blasphemy against Islam in The Satanic Verses (1988). Haroun takes its basic conceit from Somadeva's enormous Sanskrit story cycle, Kathasaritsagara (The Ocean of the Sea of Story, c.1070), the title of which is literalized in the form of the ocean visited by the eponymous young hero, in his quest for the solution to his storyteller father's mysterious narrative sterility. An Arabian night in its own right, it is an argument against the silence that follows when storytelling ends, and a reminder of the continued relevance of the wellsprings of narrative tradition.

Bibliography

• Batty, Nancy E., ‘The Art of Suspense: Rushdie's 1001 (Mid‐) Nights’, Ariel, 18 (1987).
• Brennan, Timothy, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (1989).
• Cundy, Catherine, “‘Through Childhood's Window: Haroun and the Sea of Stories’”, in D. M. Fletcher (ed.), Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie (1994).
• Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (1991).

— Stephen Benson

(sälmän' rūsh'dē) , 1947–, British novelist, b. Bombay (now Mumbai, India). He is known for the allusive richness of his language and the wide variety of Eastern and Western characters and cultures he explores. His first novels, including Midnight's Children (1981; Booker Prize; adapted for the stage by Rushdie, 2003) and Shame (1983), incorporate the technique of magic realism; elements of this approach can also be found in his later fiction. Parts of his allegorical novel The Satanic Verses (1988) were deemed sacrilegious and enraged many Muslims, including Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, who in 1989 issued a fatwa sentencing Rushdie to death. Violence occurred in some cities where the book was sold, and Rushdie went into hiding. From his seclusion he wrote Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a novelistic allegory against censorship; East, West (1995), a book of short stories; and The Moor's Last Sigh (1995), a novel that examines India's recent history through the life of a Jewish-Christian family. The Iranian government ended its support for the fatwa in 1998, but in 2004 an Iranian group offered a bounty for Rushdie's murder. Rushdie's next novel, The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999), mingles myth and reality in a surreal world of rock-and-roll celebrity. He has also written the novels Fury (2001) and Shalimar the Clown (2005) and numerous essays, many of them included in Step across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002 (2002). Rushdie was knighted in 2007, provoking condemnation from some Muslims.

Quotes:

"One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable."

"Such is the miraculous nature of the future of exiles: what is first uttered in the impotence of an overheated apartment becomes the fate of nations."

"Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings."

"The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges."

"The acceptance that all that is solid has melted into the air, that reality and morality are not givens but imperfect human constructs, is the point from which fiction begins."

"Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself."

See more famous quotes by Salman Rushdie

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)