Salman Rushdie
Forum
YOU ARE AGAINST GOD, THIS KIND OF WRITING IS REALLY NONSENSE.
IF YOU DO NOT HAVE ANY RELIGION , SO TRY TO BE A MORAL MAN AND ALSO TRY MORE THAT YOUR WORKS HAVE A POSITIVE MORAL RESULT FOR ALL HUMAN.
TRY TO BE THANKFULL FOR ALL YOUR MERCIES AND BLESSING WHICH YOU HAVE BEEN GIVEN BY HIM. WHY DO YOU INSIST TO LIVE IN HELL IN TWO WORLDS. OPEN YOUR EYES BEFORE CLOSE THEM FOREVER.
>>By A HUMAN (Sunday, 13 Apr 2003 07:39)
I would like to thank Sanaz for her comments on my views, I appreciate it. Also I would like to add that I believe in what you said about the Iranian governments through out the history. Unfortunatly history is similar to an Endless Waltz and it keeps repeating itself. Through out the Persian history, perhaps the only decent government was that of the Cyrus the great's, after that anyone who gained political power just stole from people and the country, Qajars, Safavi's, Pahlavi's and the Islamic Regime all stole from the land of Pars'. However I do believe that people should still have hope and try to change their life themselves even if sacrifices has to be made. Because freedom is not something that someone gives others, it is what people get for themselves.
>>By Persian (Monday, 21 Apr 2003 01:27)
i would like every one to comment on my beliefs if they are willing to.
Thank you
>>By Persian (Monday, 21 Apr 2003 01:34)
mr. 'persian', yes iran never had true democracy, even before the islamic revolution the shah's regime resembled something like what the americans carry out as democracy in their country,,,you know they say: " you are free to talk BUT be carefull about what you say". as an iranian i am very upset about what is going on inside iran but when i leave iran i get upset about the frequent prejudices/ and judgements people in the West have about iranians,,,,,,,,,,,all in all, this islamic government is a disgrace for all iranians. Mr. 'persian' i like your views but who are these other iranians commenting on this discussion site trying to promote the islamic republic of iran,,,,,,they are also a disgrace!
>>By sanaz (Wednesday, 23 Apr 2003 18:41)
Dear sanaz, i like to thank you for your response. It is always good to find open minded people who think about other people's rights beside their own. I would love to continue this conversation further if you are interested. "Politics" is usually the main topic of discussion in this yahoo group : onchat_friends, I am also a member with the following yahoo id : Meraj_imani. hopefully we can develop this conversation further.
>>By Persian (Thursday, 24 Apr 2003 22:54)
I think it is time to get back to the major discussion; Mr. Salman Rushdie and his works. It is true, as Asha said that his earlier works are better than his later ones, however there is one of his latest novels, Shame, that is a fantastic book to read. I suggest reading it.
>>By Persian (Saturday, 26 Apr 2003 22:17)
mr.'persian' thanks for your response,,,,and yes the main discussion remains, but the only book i have read from rushdi is "satanic verses" and that i enjoyed very much. and i also admire rushdi because of the fact that he is from a muslim born family, and despite of that fact, he still felt strongly about islam,,,,,,i identify myself with him greatly!
does anyone know where i can go to download other works of salman rushdi?
>>By Sanaz (Sunday, 27 Apr 2003 03:48)
It seems my friend sanaz missed my 2nd previous comment, i would like her to focus her attention on it. And for your question, there are some libraries online that allow you to read some specific books online. I am not sure if any of Rushdie's books will be available or not, but i suppose it is worth a try.
>>By Persian (Monday, 28 Apr 2003 21:43)
I think it is about time someone comment on my reviews.
>>By Persian (Thursday, 15 May 2003 21:26)
Rushde is a frustrated person, doing anything to earn some money, he may be a homosexual by birth, Gaandu
>>By The Muslim (Saturday, 31 May 2003 10:42)
Every one has the right the express themselves freely. In order to have a clear view point on something, one must be aware of all sides of the issue, right or wrong. If one desires to understand Islam, he/she must be strudying all the aspects including "The Sanatic Verses", later it is up to him to decide what is right or what is wrong.
>>By Persian (Sunday, 1 Jun 2003 15:51)
so what that he may be a homosexual by birth? what does that have to do with anything? i think that you may be a frustrated person,,,frustrated and biased against homosexuals!
>>By Sanaz (Tuesday, 10 Jun 2003 00:22)
Even though this is off topic, I'd like to open a discussion about a comment a couple of paragraphs above about homosexuality. First I like to mention how surprised I am about how closed minded some of the people are. Homo and Hetero sexuality is an issue that has been solved in Canada, United States and Europe for over half a century. It is out in the public as we see them in "Gay Pride Parades". As well, I pity those who try to raise their self esteem by making a mockery of other people's characteristics. And more than any other thing I am disgusted by people who drag the name of a way of life, a religon, or a culture to dirt by trying to show that their views is shared by the whole colony. That is why I am One Persian now not Persian.
Salman Rushdie is a talented person whose books are used in top universities through out the world. Personally I am studying his book "Shame" at University of Toronto. I suggest that every one read this masterpiece.
>>By One Persian (Thursday, 12 Jun 2003 04:24)
Mr.Salman Rushdie, this is really very strange, before reading your book I had in my head and mind many negative opinion about that ( WHAT MUSLIM CALL ISAMIC RELIGION ), your book Satanic Verses just came and express every thing i want to say to those people.
please d'ont stop writing about that subject and good luck
>>By Anti Islam (Monday, 23 Jun 2003 12:36)
I would like to know what we muslims call islamic religion according to Anti Islam. I would also like to add that as someone who has read the respective book, I find the information spread bias.
>>By One Persian (Thursday, 26 Jun 2003 05:43)
the information spread by who is biased?
>>By Sanaz (Friday, 27 Jun 2003 05:55)
The information in the sanatic verses is bias
>>By One Persian (Sunday, 29 Jun 2003 06:34)
salman rushdie is a craisy man .And he dont know enything about Islam.Islam is the best religen and all of the people know this fact but they dont want tell this fact because if they tell true they cant do what ever they like. At last they trik themselves and they will regret in future and that tim rgret is not notron .
>>By F.Bidgol (Tuesday, 22 Jul 2003 13:17)
salman rushdie is a craisy man .And he dont know enything about Islam.Islam is the best religen and all of the people know this fact but they dont want tell this fact because if they tell a true they cant do what ever they like. At last they trik themselves and they will regret in future and that time rgret is not notron .
>>By F.Bidgol (Tuesday, 22 Jul 2003 13:21)
Could any kind hearted soul point me in the general of the gents please...I'm about to burst!
>>By Pimp Jimenez (Tuesday, 22 Jul 2003 15:36)
i have read most of your comments, and some of you took this opportunity to lash your attack - either on islam or on rushdie. i'm writing my MA dissertation on Rushdie's Midnight's Children and The Moor's Last Sigh. i know he's well known for The Satanic Verses, but i think it's unfair for some of you to attack him based on 1 novel. it is true, what he wrote in the novel can be pretty offensive, but bear in mind, his writing is mostly about his dilemma with islam itself, which affects some muslims in one way or another. i've read a few novels by Indian writers, and i must say i really enjoy reading Rushdie's novels. he combines cultural elements from the West, India, and Islam, and most of his novels celebrate this concept of hybridity. what really interests me is his linguistic skill - the ability to coin new words, in which he has written in Imaginary Homeland that English language has ceased to belong exclusively to the English. anyway, anyone out there a literature major as well? i need some discussion on Homi Bhabha's hybridity
>>By hershey73 (Monday, 4 Aug 2003 12:13)
what can i say...the discu8ssions here were scintillating and as someone has said to me in a private message a very sociologicall interesting phenomenon. To begin to talk of Rushdie's oeuvre is to open a whole can of assorted worms., And at the risk of incurring the wrath of the jullahs against me, let me just say, the blasphemous work the commentators here have been talking about is truly a work of art. But there are those who wouldn't agree with this. The whole wuestion of art will then have to be discussed. In a sense, it wopuld not be a totally irrelevant question. Not irrelevant because, the reason why Salman Rushdie 'blasphemes' is because of the MEDIUM he uses to reintepret the Koran. This is what constitutes the crime. The medium is the message, so to speak. I wonder if mcluhan couild have imagined his name right beside Rushdie, but I digress. According to yunus samad, poetry (in the islamic intellectual tradition) is the tradtional medium of censure. By casting his revissionary narrative in the form of a novel, Ol' salman violates the poetic licence granted to critics of the islamic establishment. This is what Yunus samad writes: "Salman Rushdie's real crime, in the eyes of the clerics, was that he touched on early Islamic history in a critical, imaginative and irreverent fashion with deep historicl insight."
and far from merely misintepreting the Koran, S.R.'s sin lies in opening up a space of discursive contestation that places the authority of the Koran within a perspective of historical and cultural relativism. That is, he does not really attack the contents of the Koran. He has merely relocated the context of READING the Koran in a system of transmigrational cultures. He has, in plainspeak, allowed for a hybrid reading, and perspective of a mythical (i mean here, a text that is not only islamic but universal in this globalised system) text.
This is where hybridity comes in, hershey. By transp[osing the life of mohammed into the melodramatic world of a bombay movie called, The Message, he creatyes a hybridised form. The blasphemy here is in the form of the slippage that occurs in between the intended moral fable and its displacement into the dark world of cinematic fantasy.
and so we come back to the question of art. Rushdie himself said that the Verses was just a work of art, of fiction. and what does art do? Essentially (and here I speak of writing in particiular), it allows or makes able an alternative, cultural rereading, for the sake of the game of reading. But it does not undermine the original artefact. It merely casts it in a different time and space.
>>By dionysus (Friday, 7 Nov 2003 07:15)
having said that, i must also say that people around here seem to think that Rushdie has really only written two books...Midnight's children and the Satanic Verses. Shame was a magic realist tour de force comparable to midnight's children, Prince haroun and the sea of stories was one of the first modernists novels to turn in on itself, a metafictional exuberance. The Moor's last sigh, surppassed Midnight's children in narrative technique and reach and scope.
Ah! A reading public! My KIngdom for a reading public!
>>By dionysus (Friday, 7 Nov 2003 11:44)
Dio
Thanks for getting this forum back to the issue of books and art. Obvioulsy the social implications and effects of art are important, and I am open to hearing that this or that author is to be condemned (so to speak). But we see here has been an homage to Lewis Carol's Red Queen, viz "Sentence first, trial later." For those who wish to condemn Rushdie, tell us precisely what the problem is - quote or refer to things Rushdie actually said and wrote.
> Ah! A reading public! My KIngdom for a reading public!
Why do I think the kingdom comes with a huge deficit and a restless peasantry? Didn't the last guy who said this wind up with his head on a pike?
>>By greenfyre (Friday, 7 Nov 2003 14:42)
My intent was to say something more substantive, but I've been wasting time on lesser writers. In the meantime I do have a couple of questions.
1) His relatively new "Fury" - any comments on it? Great? good? sucks?
2) "The Ground Beneath Her Feet".
I read it some years ago and wasn't all that impressed, but I was pulling myself out of a severe 16 month depression and my thinking has been clearer than it was then. So now I wonder if I was just too messed up to enjoy an excellent book, or whether it wasn't one of his better ones (for me "Moor's Last Sigh" was staggeringly great).
If anything, I found it reminiscent of Emily Praeger's "Clea & Zeus Divorce ", but not as good.
>>By greenfyre (Wednesday, 12 Nov 2003 00:28)
Fury was interesting in that it was written in New York, about New York, and put out in bookstores in New York and painted an apocalyptic picture of modernity and terrorism right before the Fury of September 11th. As a piece of work, I felt it was disappointing, but only because it did not have the same verve and power as his other tour de forces. yet, I won't complain. Rushdie did save it from total collapse by virtue of his powerful narrative technique. I was just confused about what he was trying to do..Can you imagine Rushide in the internet age?
The ground beneath her feet was excellent. I loved how he tried to marry the Bollywoody feel with pop culture in the western world. And you sense that with Ground beneath her feet and Fury he was moving into postmodern , pop cultural themese in a big way. The Ground beneath her feet was a very noble exceution I thought, Again in Ground , his syntax gymnastics was astounding..he creates words. As an indian, I can see how these words truly capturte the Indian way of speaking english as well as Indian mannerisms and modes of cognitive recognition and expression. English language can't do that as it stands. Rushdie has managed to innovate in order to comp-el it to express certain inticacies that would other wise be lost to english speaKIng readers. Read it again, Greenfyre.
>>By dionysus (Wednesday, 12 Nov 2003 00:53)
i read the comments and to my surprise people tend to critisize not the aesthetic or literary quality of Rushdie's word but his political and personal stance and i dont think this is the way we should be discussing in a literature forum
in my opinion rushdie is a sound writer i especially like "the magical reality" quality in "midnight's children" and i think it can be compared to marquez' "one hundred years of solitude"
also, it can be useful to read jameson's "third world literature in the era of multinational capitalism"
>>By papatya (Wednesday, 12 Nov 2003 09:27)
you are right papatya...while his political concerns may or may not be important to hiswriting, it would be better to talk about his aestehticism. Have you read last Moor's sigh? I believe he has surpassed Midnight's children with that novel. Of course, Midnight's children was brilliant and its one of my favourites...but Shame was equal to Midnight's children..
an interesting comparison you make with marquez. I suppose in relation to the aestehtics of both books, you are right. I have never liked Frederick Jameson. He seems to me be very much like a new age Francis Fukuyama. Does he include Rushdie in that third world literature? I think that is epistemologically wrong. He props up capitalist categories of 'first world' and 'third world' and fits books into a very solipsistic ramshackle model.
If anything, Rushdie's work has shown us through books like Midnight's children, Shame, the Moor's Last Sigh that the human condition transcends categorisation and that man made systems like capitalism have failed to understand the truth of human existence.
>>By dionysus (Wednesday, 12 Nov 2003 22:34)
jameson as far as i remember does not talk about a specific writer or a novel in the article that i have mentioned.
well epistemologically, yes rushdie may not be a third world writer, he may be classified as postcolonial -if any classification is needed - however, i still think that his style of writing is of an oriental who is exposed to western mode of understanding the universe. (i think so probably because i sometimes feel the same for myself :))
i will read the moor's last sigh (hopefully in a near future, when i have time to spare for extracurricular reading)
take care
>>By papatya (Wednesday, 12 Nov 2003 23:07)
I am uncomfortable with the idea of post-coloniality. It is as bad or the same as saying Rushdie is a third-world writer. He is classified post-colonial by many only because, as you say, he is an oriental exposed to a western way of understanding the universe. There are two problems here (well, not really problems. Issues perhaps).
The first is this. By labelling him post-colonial, one takes a poltical position, placing the West in a central position. Rushdie, then, can only be post-colonial seen from the West's point of view. Granted, such a view (the post-colonial one) serves as a heuristic device to frame the text in a theoretical genre. But it is this precise theoretical standpoint that belittles the work of art, any work of art, not just Rushdie's. It is a political position I am uncomfortable to take, since, to take Rushdie's work as an example, it is this ambiguity of identity (exemplified by his "East,West") the difficulty, indeed, the hesitation to put oneself in a category, the unwillingness to be defined coupled with the Desire to understand one self - the french have a word for this.."au-dela": here and there, hither and thither - that characterises his work.
Secondly, Yet, this confusion of identity, of who we are, is symptomatic of much of the writing we find today. That is not the result of post-coloniality, but of modernity. Indonesian writer Pramoedhya Ananta Toer, the "nelson Mandela" of the East, as he is affectionately called is a product of a colonial past. Indonesia's Dutch History accounts for that. But because he writes in Indonesian, no one thinks about his work as post-colonial. In fact, most people don't know about him(Gnooks doesn't even have a discussion group about him.Not available yet, apparently). and yet he was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in 1998, which Jose saramago, the portuguese writer eventually won. My point is that the label post-coloniality is an arbitrary, politically loaded category which only serves to prop up the idea of a Superior West, and by doing so shapes the way we read these works.
>>By dionysus (Thursday, 13 Nov 2003 02:35)
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