Salman Rushdie and the World Picture of Islam

Abstract

This chapter analyzes Salman Rushdie's agonistic relationship with Islam as theology and as a geopolitical ideal. It explores Rushdie's lifelong engagement with Islam as a world‐making power, and the limits and possibilities of reading his works theologically. The chapter argues that the magic realist mode that Rushdie deploys in novels such as The Satanic Verses, Midnight's Children, The Moor's Last Sigh , Shalimar the Clown , and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty‐Eight Nights generates a novelistic vision of Islam that simultaneously aspires to a secularization of this embattled religious faith and a return to its philosophical and cultural riches in the late medieval era. It is generative, the chapter avers, to read the Satanic Verses controversy less as a clash between a medieval morality and an enlightened aesthetic than as a fissure between two modes of the aesthetic, one that has the theological as its horizon, and the other a modernist secularism.