A great storm has hit New York City, somehow reopening the “slits” that separated the jinn and human worlds, and beginning a period-1,001 nights, of course-of supernatural events referred to by the somewhat deflating term “the strangenesses.” A down-to-earth 60s-ish gardener by the name of Mr.

The bulk of Two Years takes place “eight hundred and more” years after Rushd and Dunia’s idyll in Moorish Spain. But it’s also possible that the comparison is a self-reflexive joke-Rushd’s book is called The Incoherence of the Incoherence, which might apply to this novel too. It’s possible that Rushdie is attempting to correct the record: While The Satanic Verses was read (or misread) as suggesting a correlation between religious fanaticism (or just plain religion) and fantasy-thereby giving the impression that it maligned the faithful-here there seems to be an argument suggesting that the fantastic can be productively yoked to reason instead.

It’s clear that Rushdie is thinking along autobiographical lines when he writes that Rushd, exiled because of his ideas, is “a sort of anti-Scheherazde” whose stories have “put his life in danger.” (The analogy is of course to the 1989 fatwa against Rushdie sparked by his novel The Satanic Verses, which some devout Muslims interpreted as insulting their faith.) Rushd’s “stories” concern his attempts to reconcile the rational and the sacred but, like Rushdie, he is persecuted as an unbeliever instead.

Haroun rushdie