Islam By Salman Rushdie Analysis

In his novels as well as essays and interviews, Salman Rushdie tackles the issue of nation from a new perspective. According to him a holistic India cannot exist: “After all, in all the thousands of years of Indian history, there never was such a creature as a united India. Nobody ever managed to rule the whole place, not the Mughals, not the British. And then, that midnight, the thing that had never existed was suddenly ‘free’. But what on earth was it? On what common ground (if any) did it, does it, stand” (Imaginary Homelands 27).
It is true that India was declared independent on the nineteenth of August 1947; yet, it was also divided into India and Pakistan in the same year. Accordingly, the independence year itself was a twilight moment that oscillated between optimism and pessimism, victory and

Although he defines himself as atheist Rushdie permeates his text with many allusions to Islam and Islamic practices. According to Rushdie, Islam would have been a constructive discourse if it fell in the right political hands. “My point is that”, he clarifies in Shame,
Islam might well have proved an effective unifying force in post-Bangladesh Pakistan, if people hadn’t tried to make it into such an almighty big deal…The so-called Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ does not spring, in Pakistan, from the people. It is imposed on them from above… This how religion shores up dictators; by encircling them with words of power, words which the people are reluctant to see discredited, disenfranchised, mocked. (251)
Rushdie believes that the fate of Pakistan would have been less somber if it was not based on a God-centered, monotheistic reading of state. Hyder’s version of Islam is totally inimical to the ideals of moderation and tolerance promoted by this religion. As Rushdie argued in an article published immediately after Zia’s