Sir Salman Rushdie (1947- ) is a British writer famous for writing “Midnight’s Children” (1981), for which he won a Booker Prize, and “The Satanic Verses” (1988), for which he won a fatwa in 1989 and became world famous overnight. He was in hiding during the nine years of the fatwa. He said it was like living in a bad Rushdie story.
A fatwa is a ruling in Islamic law. Ayatollah Khomeini ruled that “The Satanic Verses” was blasphemous and that Rushdie should die for his crime.
That is because at one point in the “The Satanic Verses” Rushdie tells an old story about the Koran, that it once had Satanic verses. In these verses Muhammad allowed some to go on worshipping three goddesses as the daughters of God.
Some say Satan put the verses there, others that Muhammad himself did it in a moment of weakness, but most pious Muslims believe that the verses never existed, that the Koran has been pure from the very beginning.
But in “The Satanic Verses” it is the Pure that is the great evil! That is why Rushdie, a fallen-away Muslim, attacks the Koran and its purity. If he were a fallen-away Catholic it would have been the Virgin Mary instead.
Unlike Rushdie, many in the Muslim world fear the songs and dress and ways of the West, the Impure, and seek salvation in the Pure, in Islam. Rushdie, having experienced both sides, says that is a mistake.
Rushdie was brought up Muslim in Bombay, India. But when his parents sent him to England to get an education, he became one of those godless Western intellectuals.
After reading history at Cambridge Rushdie went to London. There he wrote ad copy by day and wrote his books by night.
His first book, “Grimus” (1975), was nothing great, but it gave him enough money to go back to India. He saw as much of the country as he could. Out of this grew “Midnight’s Children”, a history of India in the late 1900s as told through the wild and mixed-up lives of his Indian characters. It made his name as a writer. Most consider it his best book so far.
Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rushdie writes in the style of magic realism. He tells stories in a way that makes them seem real and yet impossible things keep happening – like two men falling out of the sky towards London and talking as if it were all perfectly natural.
His prose is wild and over the top and full of laughs, with Hindi words thrown in. When he heard stories as a boy he did not know all the words, yet that somehow made the stories better.
Rushdie loves the 1700s, especially Fielding, Swift and Sterne. Among writers of the 1900s he likes Joyce, Marquez and Gunther Grass. From Joyce he learned that you can do anything if you do it right.
That tall and beautiful woman you see him with sometimes is not his daughter but his fourth wife! Being a famous writer has its advantages.
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Abagond 
Midnight’s Children is a great novel. Perfect allegory for the birth of modern India, and an influence on Arundhati Roy’s classic novel.
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