Salman Rushdie: Death fatwa issued by Iran for ‘disgusting’ the Prophet – BBC News BBC Homepage

,satanic verses, and the mystery of Iran

Midnight’s Children, the dark tale of modern Indian history, had already been released, but I had the opportunity to return it seven years later, in 1988, only after a fatwa had been issued. on Satanic Verses. This fatwabaazi was also very strange. Strange as that, it spread like wildfire from Iran and spread to a total of thirteen countries in Asia and Africa including India.

The eight-year war of attrition between Iran and Iraq ended in 1988. In this apocalyptic war and the Islamic revolution that preceded it, one or two people were killed in almost every household. Iran. People’s misery quadrupled day by day with the financial crisis.

Ayatollah Khomeini has found a good excuse in the form of “satanic verses” to create a wave of enthusiasm in his weary nation. Before that, the Persian translation of Rushdie’s novel “Shem”, woven around Pakistan, had sold well. Iran has always had a culture of reading good books, good films. There was also a good vibe regarding the Satanic Versus, but the match went down in the middle.

It is not a novel with religious discourse. Superstar Jibril Farishta, who plays Hindu religious characters in Mumbai films, and Saladin Chamcha, a voice-over artist who escapes his native identity, are on their way from Mumbai to London. In the meantime, the ship explodes. Both survive but their lives change.

Certain episodes linked to the life of Muhammad intervene in Jibril’s dreams going towards madness. But Muslim clerics created an atmosphere as if Rushdie was a Western agent employed to destroy Islam.

Looking back, The Satanic Verses is wonderful fiction. The cultural conflict between East and West is at its peak in the works of Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, but his stories date back to a time when the gap between technology and prosperity was not so great.

Against this, Salman Rushdie wrote today’s stories. When a person from the East is forced to flee to the West. Like the monkeys, by imitating there in everything, there is an insult and if there remains a little sensation, then the spirit creates its own counter-world. Rushdie apparently did nothing after Khomeini placed a bounty of millions on his head, but his semi-subterranean life at this time severed the threads of his spiritual connection to the Orient.

Whenever a reader from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh reads his masterpiece “The Midnight Children”, he will feel that because of Khomeini’s kindness, we have lost a great treasure of our culture and our date.

The game of cockfighting is played a lot among foreign writers in the literary Gapchauth of Hindi. I had the opportunity to work for a few days in a newspaper, in the atmosphere of which the end of literature was too mixed. One day, I don’t know how the mention of Salman Rushdie came into the conversation.

The anger in the Indian languages ​​was probably due to the inclusion of all English writers, except Premchand and Manto, in the “Indian Fiction Special Issue” of “New Yorker”, which came out under his editorship. One of my elders, who was an internationally renowned poet himself, went into a trance and said – there must be some reason Rushdie didn’t become a great writer.

I said in Turshy, “Let’s think about reason, when I doubt Rushdie is a great writer.” Controversy and debate have erupted as Salman Rushdie may be a big name in current fiction writing, but where does he stand against Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Dickens or Kafka?

There was nothing more to say beyond that. Rushdie may not be equal to these greats, but to call him small you also have to say that of the people writing the stories across the world right now, how many are worthy to stand before these greats?

Getting a Nobel is another matter. Is anyone still able to write something worth selling for centuries and centuries, even outside of their own language?

However, the name of the Salman Rushdie I read never went away in the twenty-six years before I studied English. Over time, its brightness has steadily increased. But no one knew, and its magic was lost in a haze unknown to its most devoted readers. A writer lives from his land, not from his language, not even from his understanding. The land where his stories breathe.

He should settle somewhere else, but he should always have the right to stay connected to his roots, to come back to them again and again, to get feedback from them. Salman Rushdie is the Displacement Storyteller. But neither the hypnosis of his missing branch binds him, nor the urge to continue to mourn his grief in writing.

How many tales are there in the world who have been lucky enough to spend their lives in prolonged exile in more than four countries. An aristocratic Muslim family from Kashmir of the British Raj. The birth of Mumbai in 1947, the year of independence and partition. There is schooling, then higher education in Brittany. Meanwhile, the family members moved to Pakistan, so after completing their education they stay in Karachi. Business and marriage are back in the UK. Literary identity also from there.

After Khomeini’s fatwa in 1989, spending ten years in Britain as “Joseph Anton”, he spent all the years of the 21st century in America. Similar CVs will only be found among managers of multinational companies. But managers write less in words, more in numbers, and they don’t have to write a new one every time.

Finally a little discussion on Salman Rushdie’s long essay ‘Gandhi Now’ written about Gandhi. I came across this essay about 20 years ago, when we were probably putting out a special issue of a magazine for his 130th birthday. Englishization of ‘Bapu’ In this essay, Rushdie did ‘The Little Father’.

A father who is not heavy, powerful and angry like the traditional father. Who can be called by saying “Bapu, come, eat roti”. Standing here, Rushdie took the good news from Richard Attenborough’s ‘Gandhi’ movie apart from the image of Gandhi in the Apple logo. Remember, this period was Gandhi’s global brand image for the rise of so-called ‘Indian history’.

Rushdie, in his profoundly human work, states that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was not an interesting, futuristic tall man to be turned into a modern myth. Those who do this have their own motives.

Even at the risk of being isolated, it was his specialty to fight for justice against the world’s greatest power, which you might have to change your glasses to see.

Moreover, Gandhi’s heirs have represented themselves in more countries than India in the last half century, such as the United States and South Africa, and their claim to the “Gandhi brand” is stronger. than that of Indian politicians.

Salman Rushdie, who wrote such truthful and truthful words and took with him a bundle of controversies, turned 75.

(These are the personal opinions of the author)