Why Salman Rushdie Is Still One Of Literature’s Most Important Figures
Born in Mumbai in 1947, Salman Rushdie moved to the UK aged 13 to attend Rugby School, with his family joining him in 1962. He went on to study history at the University of Cambridge and after a short career in advertising, Rushdie won the 1981 Booker Prize for his second novel, Midnight’s Children.
The tale of an Indian child born on the stroke of midnight and blessed with the ability to communicate with midnight-born others across the world, Midnight’s Children set out Rushdie’s distinctive voice. Here was a writer who married the magic of traditional storytelling with historically potent real-time events. Midnight’s Children unfolds during the 1947 Partition of India, and his next novel, 1983’s Shame, took place amid political turmoil in 1970s Pakistan.
But it was Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) that made his name worldwide. Built around the author’s magical realist structures, the novel attracted criticism for its allusions to the Qur’an. In 1989, Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, proclaimed the book as blasphemous and issued a fatwā calling for Rushdie’s execution.
Muslim communities around the world held protests against the book and The Satanic Verses was banned in countries including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Bangladesh, on grounds of blasphemy. Rushdie went into hiding and his safety remains an issue today.
The 2022 physical attack – in which he lost sight in one eye, the use of one hand and very nearly lost his life – inspired his latest release Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, a memoir about the assault. The book details Rushdie’s response to the moment as he confronts the reality of his near-death experience and his determination to continue his work thereafter. It’s unclear whether Rushdie’s assailant, Hadi Matar, was motivated by the fatwā.
Rushdie’s fearless confrontation of injustice is woven into his work. He supports women in Iran, was president of the free speech platform PEN America and, in 2023, won the first Lifetime Disturbing The Peace Award for his championing of human rights.
His importance as a writer can be measured in reach (his work has been translated into more than 40 languages) and literary awards (Midnight’s Children won 2008’s Best of the Booker, the prize awarded to the best Booker-winning novel of the previous four decades). Rushdie understands the zeitgeist, using Substack to publish short stories and musings, appearing in US sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm to approve his meta-fictional musical biography Fatwa! and posting his admiration of other writers on X.
In an article about Günter Grass’s 1959 novel, The Tin Drum, for his 1991 essay collection Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie wondered what Grass’s book had taught him. “Dispense with safety nets,” he concluded. “Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world.” Salman Rushdie, then: a crucial, bloody-minded writer for our times.
Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder is out 16 April 2024
Simon Coates is a London-based writer and artist whose work has appeared in publications including The New European and Scottish newspaper The National
