Salman Rushdie Biography and List of Works

Anglo-Indian novelist, who utilises tales from various genres - fantasy, mythology, religion, and oral tradition in his work. Rushdie's narrative technique connects his work to that of magic realism, whose proponents includes such English-language authors as Peter Carey, Angela Carter, E.L. Doctorow, John Fowles, Mark Helprin or Emma Tennant. Rushdie was condemned to death by the former Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on February 14,1989, after publishing the SATANIC VERSES. Naguib Mahfouz, the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, criticized Khomeini for 'intellectual terrorism' but later changed his view although he still believed that Rushdie did not have 'the right to insult anything, especially a prophet or anything considered holy.'

"Insults are mysteries. What seems to the bystander to be the cruellest, most destructive sledgehammer of an assault, whore! Slut! Tart!, can leave its target undamaged, while an apparently lesser gibe, thank god you're not my child, can fatally penetrate the finest suits of armour, you're nothing to me, you're less than the dirt on the soles of my shoes, and strike directly at the heart."
(from The Ground Beneath Her Feet, 1999)

Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, to a middle-class Moslem family. His paternal grandfather was an Urdu poet, and his father a Cambridge-educated businessman. At the age of fourteen Rushdie was sent to Rugby School in England. In 1964 Rushdie's parents moved to Karachi, Pakistan, reluctantly joining the Muslim exodus - during these years the war between India and Pakistan, the choosing of sides and the inevitable divided loyalties burdened Rushdie heavily.

Rushdie continued his studies at King's College, Cambridge, where he read history. After graduating in 1968 he worked for a time in television in Pakistan. He was an actor at a theatre group in Oval House in Kennington and from 1971 to 1981 Rushdie worked intermittently as a freelance advertising copywriter for Ogilvy, Mather, and Charles Barker.

As a novelist Rushdie made his debut with GRIMUS in 1975, an exercise in fantastical science fiction, which draws on the 12th-century Sufi poem The Conference of Birds. The title of the novel is an anagram of the name 'Simurg', the immense, all wise, fabled bird of pre-Islamic Persian mythology. Rushdie's next novel, MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN (1981), won the Booker Prize and brought him international fame. It is a comic allegory of Indian history and revolves around the lives of the narrator Saleem Sinai and the 1 000 children born after the Declaration of Independence. Sinai, dying in a pickle factory near Bombay, tells his tragic story with special emphasis on its comical sides. The novel caused much controversy in India because of its unflattering portrait of Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay, who was involved in a controversial sterilization campaign. Midnight's Children took its title from Nehru's speech delivered at the stroke of midnight, 14 August 1947, as India gained its independence from England.

SHAME (1983) centred on a well-to-do Pakistani family, using the family's history as a metaphor for the country. The story includes two thinly veiled historical characters - Iskander Harappa, a playboy turned politician, modelled on former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and General Raza Hyder, Iskander's associate and later his executioner. HAROUN AND THE SEA OF STORIES (1990) was written for children, and weaves in the story an affable robot, genies, talking fish, dark villains, and an Arabian princess in need of saving.

In 1988 Rushdie won the Whitebread Award with his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. The novel was banned in India and South Africa and burned on the streets of Bradford, Yorkshire. When Ayatollah Khomeini called on all zealous Muslims to execute the writer and the publishers of the book, Rushdie was forced into hiding. An aide to Khomeini offered a million-dollar reward for Rushdie's death. In 1993 Rushdie's Norwegian publisher William Nygaard was wounded in an attack outside his house. In 1997 the prize was doubled, and the following year the highest Iranian state prosecutor Morteza Moqtadale renewed the death sentence. During this period of fatwa, violent protest in India, Pakistan, and Egypt resulted in several deaths. In 1990 Rushdie published an essay In Good Faith to appease his critics and issued an apology in which he reaffirmed his respect for Islam. However, Iranian clerics did not repudiate their death threat.

Since the religious decree, Rushdie has eschewed publicity, hiding from assassins, but he has continued to write and publish books. THE MOORS LAST SIGHT (1995) focuses on contemporary India, and explores the activities of right-wing Hindu terrorist, directed at Indian Muslims and the lower castes. THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET (1999) is set in the world of hedonistic rock stars, mixing in the story mythology and elements from the repertoire of science fiction.

Rushdie has been married twice, in 1976 to Clarissa Luard and in 1988 to the American writer Marianne Wiggins. The marriage broke up during their enforced underground life. However, on September 1998 the Iranian government announced that the state is not going to put into effect the fatwa or encourage anybody to do so. According to interviews, Rushdie has decided to end his hiding. On February 1999 Ayatollah Hassan Sanei promised 2,8 million dollar reward for killing the author. In the beginning of 2000 Rushdie left his third wife after falling in love with an actress and moved from London to New York.

"I must cling with all my might to my soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown instincts, no matter how great the storm."

The Satanic Verses begins when a hijacked jumbo-jet blows apart above the English Channel. Gibreel Farishta, a movie star, and Saladin Chamcha, a Londoner, (the man of a thousand voices), are miraculously saved, but chosen as protagonist in fight between Good and Evil. In the following cycle of bizarre adventures, dreams, and tales of past and future, reader meets Mahound, the Prophet of Jahilia, the recipient of a revelation in which satanic verses mingle with divine. The character modelled on the Prophet Muhammad and his transcription of the Quran is portrayed in an unconventional light. The quotations from the Quran are composites of the English version of N.J. Dawood and of Maulana Muhammad Ali, with a few touches of Rushdie's own.

For further reading: Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. by M. Keith Booker (1999); An Attempt to Understand the Muslim Reaction to the Satanic Verses by Victoria Laporte (1999); Salman Rushdie by D. C. R. A. Goonetilleke (1998); The Salman Rushdie Bibliography by Joel Kuortti (1997); Unending Metamorphoses: Myth, Satire and Religion in Salman Rushdie's Novels by Margareta Petersson (1996); Salman Rushdie by Catherine Cundy (1996); Blasphemy: Verbal Offense Against the Sacred, from Moses to Salman Rushdie by Leonard W. Levy (1995); A Satanic Affair by Malise Ruthven (1990); The Rushdie File, ed. by L. Appignanesi and S. Maitland (1990); The Rushdie Affair by D. Pipes (1990); Salman Rushdie, Sentenced to Death by W.J. Weatherby (1990); The Perforated Sheet by Uma Parameswaran (1988) - Note: The Irish rock-group U2 has recorded Rushdie's poem from his book The Ground Beneath Her Feet

GRIMUS, (1975)
THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET, (1999)