¶ … Shame" is a novel that is bursting with anger. And yet to call it a novel is not quite true; it is a satire in the way that Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" and Gulliver Twist's works were satires and in the way that Candide satirized his own society. Rushdie satirizes large swathes of the Muslim world today -- largely the parts in the Middle East -- and his anger burn the pages. Rushdie, victim of a death threat in the past, tries to steer himself clear from future threat by describing his book as an "a sort of modern fairy tale," which nobody need take seriously and which, since it is set in "not quite Pakistan,' (3) need not provoke the authorities to censor it or have it burned. However, the correspondence to contemporary Pakistan, and Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, amongst other places is visible and real.

Omar Khayyam Shakil is born to three sisters who keep him hidden in an attic during his formative years. Entrance to the sisters' abode is accessed only through a dumb waiter who ascends and descends the outside wall. Shakil, however, views the outside world through his telescope. It is thus that he sees the "incomprehensibly appealing figure" (14) of 14-year-old Farah Zoroaster. Once released to study in suffering.
This social cruelty and meaningless is duplicated on a wider scale where, again extremely representative of the chaotic Middle East, Rushdie portrays two different types of rulers: the one who is a famous warrior, Gen. Raza Hyder, who becomes president-dictator of his country. The other who is a rich landlord and playboy, becomes prime minister and is eventually hanged and replaced by Hyde in a rigged trial. This is no fictitious tale. These rulers are emblematic of contemporary Middle Eastern politics.

Islamic society devolves on shame. Women have to be protected to prevent men from sinning. Rushdie satirizes this with the scene of the harem where Bilquis, wife of Hyder, must sleep in a cavernous chamber with the other women from that huge family and where the husbands tiptoe "along the midnight avenues of the dormitory" to their respective…