Enchanted Realms, Sceptical Perspectives — Salman Rushdie after 9/11

Abstract

Rushdie’s two post-9/11 novels: the transnational thriller Shalimar the Clown (2005c) and the continent-connecting historical romance The Enchantress of Florence (2008a), are two ostensibly very different works in which the author endeavours to provide his readers with reasons for contemporary Islamic terror, and to excavate earlier histories of cosmopolitan Muslim civilisation in India. These fictions feature a range of idiosyncratic affinities felt by Muslim protagonists for individuals from Islamic and other religious backgrounds, which are dramatised in scenes of both harmonious multicultural coexistence and robust inter-faith debate. In this sense, they continue in part to reflect the ‘mosaic of diverse cultural identifications’ (Nasta 2002: 147) experienced by Rushdie as a privileged, cosmopolitan intellectual, and cultivated by the hybrid and migrant characters featured in many of his more diasporic fictions.