Salman Rushdie
Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmad Salman Rushdie, FRSL, احمد سلمان رشدی; born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children, won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He combines magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 June 1947
CityMumbai, India
CountryIndia
From such defensive, separated worlds some youngsters have indefensibly stepped across a moral line and taken up their lethal rucksacks, ... The deeper alienations that lead to terrorism may have their roots in these young men's objections to events in Iraq or elsewhere, but the closed communities of some traditional Western Muslims are places in which young men's alienations can easily deepen.
One of the reasons my name is Rushdie is that my father was an admirer of Ibn Rush'd, the 12th century Arab philosopher known as Averroes in the West. In his time, he was making the non-literalist case for interpreting the Koran.
The West was involved in toppling the Mossadegh government. That ultimately led to the Iranian revolution.
The West sees Iran as an important force in the gulf.
Dissensions between Muslim nations run at least as deep, if not deeper, than those nations' resentment of the West.
In Iran, fundamentalism was fuelled to an extent by the regime of the Shah being supported by the West.
I've been gradually reclaiming all kinds of freedoms over these years..,
I used to say: ''there is a God-shaped hole in me.'' For a long time I stressed the absence, the hole. Now I find it is the shape which has become more important.
Both are responsible. But I know when I write a book it's my name on the book, so I stand or fall by what I sign. And so must she.
Many writers who have had to deal with the subject of atrocity can't face it head-on.
Meanwhile, it seems, the world is suffering from compassion fatigue,
One of the strange things that happens when you publish a book is that you begin ... to see what resonances it has for the readers, ... Sometimes you begin to understand your book a bit more.
Life is fury, he'd thought. Fury sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untramelled lord of creation.
The reason why books endure is because there are enough people who like them. It's the only reason why books last.