Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (born 19 June 1947) is a
British Indian novelist and essayist.
He achieved notability with his second novel,
Midnight's Children (1981), which
won the
Booker Prize in 1981. Much of
his early fiction is set on the
Indian subcontinent. His style is often
classified as
magical realism mixed
with historical fiction, and a dominant theme of his work is the
story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between
the Eastern and
Western world.
His fourth novel,
The Satanic
Verses (1988), was the center of
The Satanic Verses
controversy, with protests from
Muslims
in several countries. Some of the protests were violent, with
Rushdie facing death threats and a
fatwā issued by
Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, the
Supreme Leader
of Iran, in February 1989.
He was appointed a
Knight Bachelor
for "services to literature" in June 2007,. He holds the rank
Commandeur in the
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres
of France.
He began a five-year term as Distinguished
Writer in Residence at Emory University
in 2007. In May 2008 he was elected to the
American Academy of
Arts and Letters. His latest novel is
The Enchantress of
Florence, published in June 2008.
Personal life
The only
son of Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a University of Cambridge
-educated lawyer turned businessman, and Negin
Bhatt, a teacher, Rushdie was born in Mumbai
(also known
as Bombay), India. He was educated at Cathedral and John Connon
School in Mumbai, Rugby School
, and King's College, Cambridge
, where he studied history. He worked for two advertising
agencies (
Ogilvy & Mather
and Ayer Barker) before becoming a full-time writer.
Rushdie has been married four times. He was married to his first
wife Clarissa Luard from 1976 to 1987 and fathered a son, Zafar.
His second wife was the American novelist
Marianne Wiggins; they were married in 1988
and
divorced in 1993. His third wife, from
1997 to 2004, was Elizabeth West; they have a son, Milan. In 2004,
he married the Indian American actress and supermodel
Padma Lakshmi, the host of the American
reality-television show
Top Chef.
The marriage ended on 2 July 2007 with Lakshmi indicating that it
was her desire to end the marriage. In the Bollywood press, he was,
in 2008, romantically linked to the Indian model
Riya Sen, with whom he was otherwise a friend. In
response to the media speculation about their friendship, she
simply stated "I think when you are Salman Rushdie, you must get
bored with people who always want to talk to you about
literature."
In 1999, Rushdie had an operation to correct a "
tendon condition" that, according to him, was making
it increasingly difficult for him to open his eyes. "If I hadn't
had an operation, in a couple of years from now I wouldn't have
been able to open my eyes at all," he said.
Career
Major literary work
His first novel,
Grimus, a
part-
science fiction tale, was
generally ignored by the public and literary critics. His next
novel,
Midnight's
Children, catapulted him to literary notability. It
significantly shaped the course that
Indian writing in English would
follow over the next decade, and is regarded by many as one of the
great books of the last 100 years. This work won the 1981
Booker Prize and, in 1993 and 2008, was
awarded the Best of the Bookers as the best novel to have received
the prize during its first 25 and 40 years.
Midnight's
Children follows the life of a child, born at the stroke of
midnight as India gained its independence, who is endowed with
special powers and a connection to other children born at the dawn
of a new and tumultuous age in the history of the Indian
sub-continent and
the
birth of the modern nation of India. The character of Saleem
Sinai has been compared to Rushdie.
After
Midnight's Children, Rushdie wrote Shame (1983), in which he depicts the
political turmoil in Pakistan
, basing his
characters on Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto and General Muhammad
Zia-ul-Haq. Shame won France's
Prix du
Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book) and was a close
runner-up for the Booker Prize. Both these works of
postcolonial literature are
characterised by a style of
magic
realism and the
immigrant outlook of
which Rushdie is very conscious, as a member of the
Indian diaspora.
Rushdie
wrote a non-fiction book about Nicaragua
in the 1980s, The
Jaguar Smile (1987). The book has a political focus
and is based on his first hand experiences and research at the
scene of
Sandinista political
experiments.
His most controversial work,
The
Satanic Verses, was published in 1988 (see
section below). Rushdie
has published many short stories, including those collected in
East, West (1994).
The
Moor's Last Sigh, a family epic ranging over some 100
years of India's history was published in 1995.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
(1999) presents an
alternative
history of modern
rock music. The
song of the same
name by
U2 is one of many song lyrics
included in the book, hence Rushdie is credited as the
lyricist.
Rushdie has had a string of commercially successful and critically
acclaimed novels. His 2005 novel
Shalimar the Clown received, in
India, the prestigious Crossword Fiction Award, and was, in
Britain, a finalist for the
Whitbread Book Awards. It was
shortlisted for the 2007
International IMPAC
Dublin Literary Award.
In his 2002
nonfiction collection
Step Across This Line, he professes his admiration for the
Italian writer
Italo Calvino and the American writer
Thomas Pynchon, among others. His early
influences included
James Joyce,
Günter Grass,
Jorge Luis Borges,
Mikhail Bulgakov, and
Lewis Carroll. Rushdie was a personal friend
of
Angela Carter and praised her
highly in the foreword for her collection
Burning your
Boats.
Other activities
Rushdie has quietly mentored younger Indian (and ethnic-Indian)
writers, influenced an entire generation of
Indo-Anglian writers, and is an influential
writer in
postcolonial
literature in general. He has received many plaudits for his
writings, including the
European
Union's
Aristeion Prize for
Literature, the
Premio Grinzane
Cavour (Italy), and the Writer of the Year Award in Germany and
many of literature's highest honours. Rushdie was the President of
PEN American Center from 2004 to
2006.
He opposes the British government's introduction of the
Racial and Religious Hatred
Act, something he writes about in his contribution to
Free
Expression Is No Offence, a collection of essays by several
writers, published by
Penguin in
November 2005. Rushdie is a self-described
atheist , and a distinguished supporter of the
British Humanist
Association.
In 2006,
Rushdie joined the Emory University faculty as Distinguished Writer in Residence for
one month a year for the next five years. Though he enjoys
writing, Salman Rushdie says that he would have become an actor if
his writing career had not been successful. Even from early
childhood, he dreamed of appearing in Hollywood movies (which he
would later realize in his frequent cameo appearances).
Rushdie includes fictional television and movie characters in some
of his writings. He had a
cameo
appearance in the film
Bridget Jones's Diary
based on the
book of the same
name, which is itself full of literary in-jokes. On 12 May
2006, Rushdie was a guest host on
The Charlie Rose Show, where he
interviewed
Indo-Canadian filmmaker
Deepa Mehta, whose 2005 film,
Water, faced violent
protests. He appears in the role of
Helen
Hunt's
obstetrician-gynecologist in the
film adaptation (Hunt's directorial debut) of
Elinor Lipman's novel
Then She Found Me. In September 2008,
and again in March 2009, he appeared as a panelist on the HBO
program "Real Time With Bill Maher".
The Satanic Verses and the fatwā
The publication of
The Satanic
Verses in September 1988 caused immediate controversy in
the
Islamic world because of what was
perceived as an irreverent depiction of the prophet
Muhammad. The title refers to a disputed
Muslim tradition that is related in the book.
According
to this tradition, Muhammad (Mahound in the
book) added verses (sura) to the
Qur'an accepting three goddesses who used to
be worshipped in Mecca
as divine
beings. According to the legend, Muhammad later revoked the
verses, saying
the devil tempted him to
utter these lines to appease the Meccans (hence the "Satanic"
verses). However, the narrator reveals to the reader that these
disputed verses were actually from the mouth of the
Archangel Gibreel. The
book
was banned in many countries with large Muslim
communities.
On 14 February 1989, a
fatwā
requiring Rushdie's execution was proclaimed on Radio Tehran by
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the
spiritual leader of Iran at the time,
calling the book "
blasphemous against
Islam" (chapter IV of the book depicts the character of an
Imam in
exile who returns to
incite revolt from the people of his country with no regard for
their safety). A bounty was offered for Rushdie's death, and he was
thus forced to live under police protection for years afterward.
On 7 March
1989, the United Kingdom and Iran
broke
diplomatic
relations over the Rushdie controversy.
The publication of the book and the
fatwā sparked violence
around the world, with bookstores being
firebombed. Muslim communities in several
nations in the West held public rallies in which copies of the book
were
burned. Several people associated
with translating or publishing the book were attacked, seriously
injured, and even killed. Many more people died in riots in
Third World countries.
On 24 September 1998, as a precondition to the restoration of
diplomatic relations with
Britain, the
Iranian government,
then headed by
Mohammad Khatami,
gave a public commitment that it would "neither support nor hinder
assassination operations on
Rushdie."
Hardliners in Iran have continued to reaffirm the
death sentence.
In early 2005,
Khomeini's fatwā was reaffirmed by Iran's spiritual
leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, in a message to Muslim pilgrims making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
Additionally, the
Revolutionary Guards have
declared that the death sentence on him is still valid. Iran has
rejected requests to withdraw the
fatwā on the basis that
only the person who issued it may withdraw it, and the person who
issued it - Ayatollah Khomeini - has been dead since 1989.
Rushdie has reported that he still receives a "sort of
Valentine's card" from Iran each year on 14
February letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to
kill him. He said, "It's reached the point where it's a piece of
rhetoric rather than a real threat."
Despite the threats
on Rushdie, he has publicly said that his family has never been
threatened and that his mother (who lived in Pakistan during the later years of her life) even received
outpourings of support.
A former bodyguard to Rushdie, Ron Evans, planned to publish a book
recounting the behaviour of the author during the time he was in
hiding. Evans claimed that Rushdie tried to profit financially from
the
fatwa and was suicidal, but Rushdie dismissed the book
as a "bunch of lies" and took legal action against Ron Evans, his
co-author and their publisher. On 26 August 2008 Rushdie received
an apology at the High Court in London from all three
parties.
Failed assassination attempt and Hezbollah's comments
On 3
August 1989, while Mustafa Mahmoud
Mazeh was priming a book bomb loaded with RDX explosives in a hotel in Paddington
, Central London, the
bomb exploded prematurely, taking out two floors of the hotel and
killing Mazeh. A previously unknown Lebanese
group, the Organization of the Mujahidin of Islam,
said he died preparing an attack "on the apostate Rushdie". There is a shrine in
Tehran
's Behesht-e
Zahra
cemetery for Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh that says he was
"Martyred in London, 3 August 1989. The first martyr to die
on a mission to kill Salman Rushdie." Mazeh's mother was invited to
relocate to Iran, and the Islamic World Movement of Martyrs'
Commemoration built his shrine in the cemetery that holds thousands
of Iranian soldiers slain in the
Iran–Iraq War. During the 2006
Jyllands-Posten
Muhammad cartoons controversy, Hezbollah leader
Hassan Nasrallah declared that "If there
had been a Muslim to carry out Imam Khomeini's
fatwā
against the renegade Salman Rushdie, this rabble who insult our
Prophet Mohammed in Denmark, Norway and France would not have dared
to do so. I am sure there are millions of Muslims who are ready to
give their lives to defend our prophet's honour and we have to be
ready to do anything for that." James Phillips of the
Heritage Foundation testified before the
United States Congress that a
"March 1989" (sic) explosion in Britain was a
Hezbollah attempt to assassinate Rushdie which
failed when a bomb exploded prematurely, killing a Hezbollah
activist in London.
International Gorillay
In 1990,
soon after the publication of The Satanic Verses, a
Pakistani film was released in
which Rushdie was depicted plotting to cause the downfall of
Pakistan by opening a chain of casinos and discos in the
country. The film was popular with Pakistani audiences, and
it "presents Rushdie as a
Rambo-like
figure pursued by four Pakistani
guerrillas". The
British Board of Film
Classification refused to allow it a certificate, as "it was
felt that the portrayal of Rushdie might qualify as criminal
libel, causing a breach of the peace as
opposed to merely tarnishing his reputation." This move effectively
banned the film in Britain outright. However, two months later,
Rushdie himself wrote to the board, saying that while he thought
the film "a distorted, incompetent piece of trash", he would not
sue if it were released. He later said, "If that film had been
banned, it would have become the hottest video in town: everyone
would have seen it". While the film was a massive hit in Pakistan,
it went virtually unnoticed in the West. He has said that there was
one legitimately funny part of the movie, his character torturing a
Pakistani fighter by reading from his book
The Satanic
Verses.
Knighthood
Rushdie was awarded a
knighthood for
services to literature in the
Queen's Birthday Honours on 16 June
2007. He remarked, "I am thrilled and humbled to receive this great
honour, and am very grateful that my work has been recognized in
this way." In response to his knighthood, many nations with Muslim
majorities protested.
Parliamentarians of
several of these countries condemned the action, and Iran and
Pakistan called in their British envoys to protest formally.
Controversial condemnation issued by Pakistan's Religious Affairs
Minister
Muhammad Ijaz-ul-Haq
was in turn rebuffed by former
Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Ironically, their respective
fathers
Zia-ul-Haq and
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had been earlier
portrayed in Rushdie's novel
Shame.
Mass demonstrations
against Rushdie's knighthood took place in Pakistan and Malaysia
. Several called publicly for his death. Some
non-Muslims were disappointed by Rushdie's knighthood, believing
that the writer did not merit such an honour.
Al-Qaeda has condemned the Rushdie honour.
The Al-Qaeda deputy
Ayman
al-Zawahiri is quoted as saying in an audio recording that
Britain's award for Indian-born Rushdie was "an insult to Islam",
and it was planning "a very precise response."
Religious and political beliefs
Rushdie came from a
Shi'ite Muslim family
but says that he was never really religious. In 1990, in the "hope
that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to
kill him," he issued a statement in which he claimed "he had
renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam in
his novel and was committed to working for better understanding of
the religion across the world." But later said that he was only
"pretending".
His books often focus on the role of religion in society and
conflicts between faiths and between the religious and those of no
faith.
Rushdie advocates the application of
higher criticism, pioneered during the late
19th century. Rushdie calls for a reform in Islam in a guest
opinion piece printed in
The
Washington Post and
The
Times in mid-August 2005. Excerpts from his speech:
Rushdie supported the
1999
NATO bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, leading the
leftist Tariq Ali
to label Rushdie and other "warrior writers" as "the belligerati'".
He was
supportive of the US-led campaign to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan
which began in 2001, but was a vocal critic of the
2003 war in Iraq. He has stated
that while there was a "case to be made for the removal of
Saddam Hussein", US
unilateral military intervention was
unjustifiable.
In the wake of the
'Danish Cartoons
Affair' in March 2006 - which many considered to be an echo of
the death threats and
fatwā which had followed the
publication of
The Satanic Verses in 1989 - Rushdie signed
the manifesto
'Together
Facing the New Totalitarianism', a statement warning of the
dangers of
religious extremism.
The Manifesto was published in the left-leaning French weekly
Charlie Hebdo in March
2006.
In 2006, Rushdie stated that he supported comments by the
then-
Leader of the House
of Commons Jack Straw, who
criticised the wearing of
the
niqab (a veil that covers all of the face
except the eyes). Rushdie stated that his three sisters would never
wear the veil. He said, "I think the battle against the veil has
been a long and continuing battle against the limitation of women,
so in that sense I'm completely on [Straw's] side."
Rushdie continues to come under fire from much of the British
academic establishment for his political views.
The Marxist critic Terry
Eagleton, a former admirer of Rushdie's work, attacked him for
his positions, saying he "cheered on the Pentagon
's criminal ventures in Iraq and
Afghanistan". However, he subsequently apologized for having
misrepresented Rushdie's views.
At an appearance at
92nd Street Y,
Rushdie expressed his view on copyright when answering a question
whether he had considered copyright law a barrier (or impediment)
to free speech.
Bibliography
Books
Essays
Awards
See also
References
External links
Interviews
Honorary Professorship
(Italy)
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