The New Yorker has shared a story by Salman Rushdie entitled “The Duniazát”; taken from his forthcoming novel, “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights“, which will be published in September.
“The Duniazát” is the story of a love affair between 12th-century philosopher Ibn Rushd and Dunia, a jinni posing as a young woman.
In an interview with The New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman, Rushdie say he has always been fascinated by Rushd, who is considered one of the first secular thinkers in Western Europe. Rushdie’s father derived the family name from him, as the author explains: “My father admired Ibn Rushd for his attempt to reconcile reason with religion, though he himself was not religious; and he bequeathed that admiration to me.”
Rushdie’s most recent book is his 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton, and he says it was the urge to do something completely different that led to his new novel’s futuristic fantasy.
Read the interview:
“The Duniazát” is taken from your forthcoming novel, “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights,” which envisions a future in which armies of the jinn cross over from Fairyland to our world (for a thousand and one nights) and wreak havoc here. Where did the idea come from?
I wanted to write a modern “wonder tale,” like the “Hamzanama” or “Arabian Nights,” so that was one starting place. I also thought about my two books for younger readers, “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” and “Luka and the Fire of Life,” and wondered what it might be like to write in that vein, but for adults. Also, after spending a long time trying to be scrupulously truthful in my memoir, “Joseph Anton,” I felt a strong urge to swing to the other end of the literary spectrum and make up something wildly surreal.
Rushdie, who recently passed one million followers on Twitter, shared a bit more about the novel on the social network:
An extract from near beginning of new novel.After this the action leaps 800+ years to New York City, sort-of-now… https://t.co/kgqqSNciON
— Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) May 30, 2015
Read the excerpt:
In the year 1195, the great philosopher Ibn Rushd, once the qadi, or judge, of Seville and most recently the personal physician to the Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub in his home town of Córdoba, was formally discredited and disgraced on account of his liberal ideas, which were unacceptable to the increasingly powerful Berber fanatics who were spreading like a pestilence across Arab Spain, and was sent to live in internal exile in the small village of Lucena, a village full of Jews who could no longer say they were Jews because they had been forced to convert to Islam. Ibn Rushd, a philosopher who was no longer permitted to expound his philosophy, all of whose writing had been banned and burned, felt instantly at home among the Jews who could not say they were Jews. He had been a favorite of the Caliph of the present ruling dynasty, the Almohads, but favorites go out of fashion, and Abu Yusuf Yaqub had allowed the fanatics to push the great commentator on Aristotle out of town.
Book details
- Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie
EAN: 9781910702048
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- Joseph Anton by Salman Rushdie
EAN: 9780099563440
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- The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
EAN: 9780099593942
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- Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
EAN: 9780099421887
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- Fury by Salman Rushdie
EAN: 9780679783503
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Images courtesy of Truth Revolt and The New Yorker