Salman Rushdie: Contemporary Socrates of the 'Global Village' When the Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie's controversial novel The Satanic Verses was first published in 1989, the book ignited an international firestorm, replete with book burnings, massive public protests, and even the issuance of a fatwa, or a religious death sentence against Rushdie by Iran's hard-line religious leader, then-Ayatollah Khomeini. Since then, sixteen years have past, Rushdie is still alive, and writing. Since that time, also, many factions of the Muslim world have come to seem, to whole Western nations, like the United States and others, fully as intractable as they must have seemed to Rushdie back then. Within The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie dared to ask hard questions about such sparsely-discussed issues as the origins of Islam and the basis of the entire Islamic belief system. For many non-Muslims in 1989, the controversy over The Satanic Verses likely seemed both strange and irrelevant. However, in today's world, more and more non-Muslims, especially in the aftermath of the 911 terrorist attacks, would themselves now like answers to their own questions about what...
In 20-20 hindsight, Salman Rushdie is now recognizable as a sort of Socrates of the "global village" of 1898 (and today): originally ahead of his time in asking the right questions, and now, well within his element in continuing, as he does, to do so, even now.
Salman Rushdie is one of the most famous authors of the modern era. In the tradition of Gabriel Marquez, Rushdie sweeps the reader up in his novel, Midnights Children, like the book by Marquez that obviously had a great deal of influence on Rushdie, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnights Children is a postmodern look at the modern fairytale that Salman Rushdie weaves for those who wish to pick up
Meanwhile, the family became so poor that Grandmother had to sell the porcelain dishes, the silverware, and the linen napkins. But she kept out one set for him to eat from, because an aristocrat couldn't eat from ordinary dishes. One Saturday night he got an idea for an invention. The children took their baths on Saturday night in a washtub in the kitchen. By the last child, the water
In the story, he claims that a big title wave hinder him from doing what he wanted to do. However, when he accomplished his goal, he claimed the title wave was not there at all. The reader could take as the water/title wave to be a metaphor to represent the obstacles he had to go through in order to become a good storyteller again. Part fantasy, part allegory and always clever
Respect and the Thought Police'": Illustrating Socrates' "Gadfly Analogy" from Plato's Apology Webster's New American Dictionary defines "gadfly" as "a person who annoys, esp. By persistent criticism" (p. 213). By that definition, Socrates' critics certainly would have considered him one. (It is easier to decide someone is a mere "gadfly," rather than an astute social critic, or a rare perceiver of truth should one feel offended by the "gadfly." )
But Rushdie's relationship with English as a writer, even as a critic of the former British Empire, is far more complex. In Salman Rushdie's text "English is an Indian literary language," Rushdie states that the output of literature in English by Indian writers is more interesting and vital than those produced in India's native languages. Through creativity and dialogue with the oppressor, a great literature has been generated. India's
There is the feeling that Rushdie is toying with the concept of freedom of speech in this story as well as destroying the concept of the East as mysterious. Rushdie uses English to tell his story, but he incorporates the Indian oral tradition without any kind of chronological structure to the story. He deconstruct the binary opposition of East and West. He himself is between the Orient and the
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