Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
(Jonathan Cape, £17.99)
The Lebanese proprietor of my local café shook his head when he saw me eating lunch with this book open on the table. When I visited my parents, my mother hid it from her guests. A bearded friend rang to check whether it was possible that I may not be enjoying it very much. It is thrilling and almost anachronistic for a book to be so potent. It is not only for me though, as a Muslim, that the publication of a new book by Rushdie is unusually important. Rushdie is a celebrity, a warrior-poet. Indeed, since The Satanic Verses, his work resonates less in Muslim communities than it does elsewhere. It isn’t read, it isn’t respected, though there is no sense of surprise that “the west” remains interested. Rushdie is regarded as a blasphemer; he went astray, and he has used his Muslim background to lend credence to his attacks on Islam.
Nevertheless, it is hard to place Rushdie entirely outside the fold. At his first reading from the new novel in London, Rushdie, in response to a question, noticeably referred to “the Prophet” rather than Muhammad, marking his respect as even some liberal Muslims may fail to do in mixed company. The episode of the satanic verses—in which Satan briefly poses as the Angel Gabriel and purports to reveal new verses of the Koran to the Prophet—appears in several early Islamic sources and theories about whether it occurred or what it signifies have been debated by many scholars. Especially for someone like me, a Muslim originating from the same subcontinent as Rushdie, the plain fact is that he knows a great deal about my culture. I was warned off bitter almonds by my grandmother when she lived with us in Pakistan. Rushdie reveals here that the bitterness is due to the presence of tiny quantities of cyanide. I had wondered before about why there were so many places with the prefix “Guj” in the region: Gujarat, Gujranwala, Gujargarh. I now know, from reading this novel, that the Gujars migrated from Gujria, or Georgia, 1,500 years ago and left settlements across Iran, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, before they got to Pakistan and India.
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