![]() ![]() Still, purity is one thing, exclusion another. ![]() The religious and political controversies attached to his name seem to make a purely literary evaluation impossible, not that Rushdie himself believes that religion, politics, or literature are pure. I will begin this essay, then, with a very impious suspicion about the almost-martyred Rushdie that has been whispered since the fatwa was first handed down: that he was merely a flashy, fashionable postmodernist-postcolonialist author typical of the 1980s, a novelist of tiresomely playful-polemical white elephants, a man who has, in essence, the Ayatollah to thank for artificially inflating a literary reputation that would otherwise long ago have been punctured by serious critics and contemporaries. When considering a writer as irreverent-and as committed to free speech-as Rushdie is, false piety would be an insult. ![]() With the assassination attempt on Salman Rushdie earlier this month, his books have returned to public attention-above all the scandalous Satanic Verses, that fantastical novel of 1988 whose portrait of the Prophet Muhammad incited a death sentence for blasphemy by the Ayatollah Khomeini, an edict still in force and sadly almost fulfilled under a would-be killer’s blade. ![]()
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