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Salman Rushdie: Contemporary Socrates of the 'Global Village'
When the Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie's controversial novel The Satanic Verses was first published in 1989, the book ignited an international firestorm, replete with book burnings, massive public protests, and even the issuance of a fatwa, or a religious death sentence against Rushdie by Iran's hard-line religious leader, then-Ayatollah Khomeini. Since then, sixteen years have past, Rushdie is still alive, and writing. Since that time, also, many factions of the Muslim world have come to seem, to whole Western nations, like the United States and others, fully as intractable as they must have seemed to Rushdie back then. Within The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie dared to ask hard questions about such sparsely-discussed issues as the origins of Islam and the basis of the entire Islamic belief system. For many non-Muslims in 1989, the controversy over The Satanic Verses likely seemed both strange and irrelevant. However, in today's world, more and more non-Muslims, especially in the aftermath of the 911 terrorist attacks, would themselves now like answers to their own questions about what...
In 20-20 hindsight, Salman Rushdie is now recognizable as a sort of Socrates of the "global village" of 1898 (and today): originally ahead of his time in asking the right questions, and now, well within his element in continuing, as he does, to do so, even now.
In Ancient Athens, the accusers of Socrates (as Socrates himself mused aloud) might have said something like this: "Socrates is guilty of speculating about things far above and far below the earth, making the weaker argument appear the stronger and teaching these same ideas to others." When Socrates then went in search of someone wiser than he, among politicians, poets, and artisans, he found that, in the case of a politician known for wisdom, the politician actually had very little wisdom, but believed he had a great deal of it. Based on that, Socrates concluded:
Well, neither of us knows anything beautiful and good, but I am better off than he is. He knows nothing but thinks that he knows, while I neither know nor think that I know. For this reason I seem to have a…
Works Cited
Phillips, Andrew. "The Satanic Furor." Maclean's. 27 February 1989. [n.p.].
Rushdie, Salman. "A Clash of Faiths: The Author Fights Fire With Words."
Maclean's. 27 February 1989. 24.
'Socrates' Defense" From Apology by Plato. [n. d.] [n. p.].
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But Rushdie's relationship with English as a writer, even as a critic of the former British Empire, is far more complex. In Salman Rushdie's text "English is an Indian literary language," Rushdie states that the output of literature in English by Indian writers is more interesting and vital than those produced in India's native languages. Through creativity and dialogue with the oppressor, a great literature has been generated. India's
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