One Thousand and One Nights as Narrated by Salman Rushdie

"Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights" is the title given by the famous Indian-British author Salman Rushdie to his latest novel. In this book, which spans over six hundred pages and was released by Random House this month, the main theme is the battle between religious fanaticism and reason and rationality. However, Mr. Rushdie employs his familiar 'magical realism' to narrate this repetitive story and chooses a surprising method. He writes that in the twentieth century, a rift has occurred in the world of reality—as we know it—through which 'evil jinn' exploit to create chaos and conflict. In Mr. Rushdie's story, the weakening wall between our world and 'Fairyland', the land of 'jinn', allows some jinn, who find their life of pleasure and indulgence boring, to emerge into our world and intervene in worldly affairs with their supernatural powers. Not only is the title of the story a play on the name of the book "One Thousand and One Nights", but the novel is also filled with sub-narratives that are interwoven in the manner of the stories from One Thousand and One Nights. The main character of the story, 'Dunya', is a princess from the land of jinn who falls in love with Ibn Rushd in the 12th century in 'Andalusia'. This Muslim philosopher, who is considered one of the most important commentators on Aristotle's philosophy, is best known for his efforts to reconcile religious faith with philosophy and reason. The result of Dunya and Ibn Rushd's love is countless children spread across the world, inheritors of their parents and advocates of rationality, logic, and tolerance. The author places the Iranian Muslim cleric Ghazali in opposition to Ibn Rushd; the author of the famous book "Tahafut al-Falasifa" and a staunch opponent of philosophy, who accused philosophers of placing reason and logic above religious faith, thus falling into the realm of disbelief. Ibn Rushd wrote "Tahafut al-Tahafut" in response to Ghazali's disputes and in defense of the compatibility of Islamic faith with philosophy and rationality. Opposing him, at the head of the army of evil, is an evil jinn named 'Zamurd', who follows Ghazali's 'radical' ideas and has gathered his earthly army from the land of 'A'. The behavior of these soldiers quickly brings the name Afghanistan to the reader's mind, as it is referred to in the book as the central base of the 'evil' force on earth. It is difficult not to praise Rushdie's powerful prose and rich imagination; however, such direct references and binary divisions have led the British newspaper "Independent" to describe this book as a reproducer of the Islamic fundamentalism-enlightenment stereotype, stating that Rushdie oversimplifies the philosophical struggle between Ibn Rushd and Ghazali for the sake of his story. According to Hassan Mohammad-Ali, this author portrays Ibn Rushd as a 'rationalist' who was rejected due to his 'progressive views' in his time, forgetting that Ibn Rushd never stepped outside the circle of Islamic beliefs and was respected and held official positions for most of his life. However, one critic from the English-language newspaper "Guardian" finds such simplifications justifiable in Mr. Rushdie's narrative style and instead focuses on the characterization of the protagonist, 'Dunya'. Ursula K. Le Guin, pointing to the astonishing reproductive power of the female protagonist ('Dunya' gives birth to between seven and nineteen children in each delivery), questions why the story does not provide much information about her motherhood and how she manages her countless children. Ms. Le Guin states that Mr. Rushdie uses this miraculous ability to reproduce as a strategy to complement the army of good, yet ultimately his hero 'Dunya' thinks and decides more like a man. "Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights" is Mr. Rushdie's twelfth novel and the first he has published in the last seven years. In September 2012, he published a memoir titled "Joseph Anton", which covered events following the publication of "The Satanic Verses". Joseph Anton—a combination of the names of two famous authors, Anton Chekhov and Joseph Conrad—was a pseudonym he chose after the fatwa for his death was issued by Ayatollah Khomeini at the insistence of British police, under which he lived for about a decade. In this book, the author describes how the chaos and violence that occurred simultaneously with the publication of his book and the fatwa from the Iranian leader turned his life upside down overnight and forced him to live in hiding for years. On February 8, 1989, the Iranian leader, in a fatwa condemning Rushdie and others involved in the publication of this book, called on Muslims worldwide to 'execute them wherever they find them so that no one dares to insult the sanctities of Muslims again.' Following this fatwa, attacks occurred in various countries, resulting in the deaths and injuries of several publishers of the book. Although Mr. Rushdie has overcome that imposed isolation in recent years, this does not mean that his life has returned to its original state. For example, three years ago, Canada Airlines announced that Mr. Rushdie was not allowed to board its planes because security concerns regarding this author would cause delays in flights. This 68-year-old author, born into a Muslim family, has taken a stance against Islamic radicalism on various occasions over the years and emphasized secular values. For instance, in 2005, after the suicide bombings on the London subway, he wrote an article for the Washington Post blaming the Muslim community in the West for the second generation of immigrants turning to violent religious ideologies and called on them to take responsibility for what their children do instead of blaming 'U.S. foreign policies' or 'Islamophobia'. Mr. Rushdie does not deny in this article that millions of Muslims around the world live tolerantly alongside non-Muslims, but he emphasizes that many adherents of traditional Islam, just like followers of militant Islam, hold 'medieval' views about women, are 'anti-Semitic', consider homosexuality a 'sin', oppose 'freedom of expression', and are not compatible with followers of other religions.