![]() ![]() Rushdie took this sea of stories with him to Rugby, an elite boarding school in England, where he was teased mercilessly and learned to keep his head down, and then, how to stand up for himself. The elder Rushdie, Anis, borrowed the name from Ibn Rushd, a 12th-century Spanish-Arab philosopher who had been “at the forefront of the rationalist argument against Islamic literalism.” The son would live out this name’s embedded promise. Rushdie’s early years in Bombay are lovingly described, as the bookish boy drinks from the sea of stories that lived within his father, an alcoholic, secular, would-be Koran scholar who squandered a textile fortune. This is a big book, and all periods are covered. To read “Joseph Anton” is to understand just how much this identity vertigo has defined Rushdie’s life, before, during, and after the Islamic judgment, or fatwa. Of these four roots, place, community, culture, and language, he had lost three.” The rooted self flourished in a place it knew well, among people who knew it well, following customs. “Migration tore up all the traditional roots of the self. “He was a migrant,” Rushdie writes, describing his early years in London. ![]()
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