Why Can Salman Rushdie Be Considered a Socrates of the Global Village?

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 drives Muslim extremists -- those same extremists who called for Rushdie's head a decade and a half ago. 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 slight advantage over him.

Socrates, in other words, was wise enough to know what he did not know, and so, in today's world, is Salman Rushdie.

Based on his bold questioning, within his novel The Satanic Verses, of the origins of Islam, and the possible human foibles of its founder, the prophet Mohammed, to whom Muslims believe the Koran was dictated, through the Angel Gabriel, by God, Salman Rushdie, like Socrates, was condemned to death. As Rushdie points out, however: "the prophet is not granted divine status, but the text is." That fact seems to have been forgotten, though, by (as Rushdie puts it):

. . . A powerful tribe of clerics has taken over Islam. These are the contemporary Thought Police. They have turned Mohammed into a perfect being, his life into a perfect life, his revelation into the unambiguous, clear event it originally was not. ("A Clash of Faiths")