In Good Faith

by Salman Rushdie

Genres: Nonfiction

20 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1990

About the author

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British and American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.
After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. In total, 20 countries banned the book. Numerous killings and bombings have been carried out by extremists who cite the book as motivation, sparking a debate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. In 2022, Rushdie survived a stabbing at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York.
In 1983, Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was appointed a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in 1999. Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States. He was named Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University in 2015. Earlier, he taught at Emory University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the events following The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in April 2023.
Rushdie's personal life, including his five marriages and four divorces, has attracted notable media attention and controversies, particularly during his marriage to actress Padma Lakshmi.

Reviews

[Minäpäminä]

For a man sentenced to death, Rushdie is much too amicable for my tastes. But it was interesting to hear the point of view of a person who became the locus of possibly the greatest outrage over a work of fiction ever.

I think Rushdie goes wrong trying to explain and justify his work. Because - as he realizes - it was never about fiction. It was always about power.

Still, it's a lucid piece of writing with some very good observations about our ambivalent relationship towards freedom of speech.

[John]

It is a decent read, to show how little nuance there was in the reaction towards his book The Satanic Verses. I have not read the book, but a reaction to a controversy is always interesting - and now it is a long time ago, so it is good to take a look into the archive of intolerance and religious persecution.

[Faezeh]

واقعا نمیدونم چی باید فکر کنم درباره‌ی این مقاله. چه‌قدر دلم می‌خواد سلمان رشدی رو ببینم و باهاش حرف بزنم. دوست دارم بدونم بعد از این همه سال، هنوز هم انقدر ملو و مهربون و خوش‌بینه به مسلمون‌ها؟

[Chris Hall]

As always, Rushdie is intelligent and eloquent.

[Heidi]

Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses in the 1980's, a work of fiction depicting two characters with two different types of internal struggle. One struggles with faith and does not fair well by the end of the novel. He uses history as a launch for fiction and explores world concepts through this fiction. This small book is more so a letter written to all, of his shock on how the world, especially the Muslim world (which has banned the book) condemns him for doing so. The fundamentalist sector of that religion assigned him as an infidel and vowed to kill him. Rushdie mentions many of the concepts we are hearing today - Sharia, Apostasy, and so forth and talks about fundamentalist thought as a death to literature. Well written and at the same time an eye opener as to how sad it is that we are still struggling with the same soul stifling and life threatening mentalities.

[David]

An excellent defense that he didn't need to write.

[Marcus]

A desperate, craven attempt to appease his oppressors. Rushdie explains the thinking behind The Satanic Verses, its characters etc. Unlikely to appeal to his would-be murderers and their supporters.