Salman Rushdie In Good Faith Summary

Jean Ellen Petrolle describes the postmodern as being ‘associated with the depthless, the insubstantial, the spiritually exhausted’ . Highlighting the exhaustion of belief, this brings forward the evident theme of religion in the titles of The Satanic Verses and Hey Nostradamus!. The ‘Satanic Verses’ is related the occasion where the Islamic prophet Muhammad is blamed to have mistaken the words of satanic suggestion for divine revelation. Nostradamus made prophecies that require some extent of misinterpretation or mistranslation in order to make them to come true. Both titles stress on words and interpretation, or rather, misinterpretation, illustrating the engagement of language in religion and the secular. Madawi Al-Rasheed and Marat Shterin point out that ‘dying for faith is undergoing a revival in the contemporary world’. The power struggle of religion is ongoing, shifting, and with examples such as the Bible and the Quran, one may argue that language is privileged in religions.

may not establish a privileged language for a religion, but through words and ideas linked to both religion and the secular, space is provided for one to analyse and rethink the struggle within religion. In Salman Rushdie’s In Good Faith, he stresses on ‘questioning and re-imagining’ in the novel. This leads to a reading that does not decide what is right or wrong. Texts that may be filled with questions and notions of ‘maybe’, which readers will have to figure out by themselves. When the purity of the sacred is challenged, one may take notes of the use of the description of violence, doubt and hypocrisy in Hey Nostradamus! and The Satanic Verses, and question how these eventually led to religion or