For this episode of #VelshiBannedBookClub, Citizen Board Member and MSNBC host Ali Velshi was supposed to speak with Salman Rushdie about his “most famous book you’ve never read.” However, in the wake of the assassination attempt on the author, Ali speaks with Rushdie’s friend and colleague, Homi K. Bhabha, humanities professor at Harvard University.
Bhabha says the point of The Satanic Verses is often mistaken for the issue it awoke: freedom of speech. Instead, he says, “Fundamentally, the novel is about the right to change — for migrants to have the right to change, to transform their lives.”
“What [Rushdie] was trying to do was to place a religious text in the context of migrants who had moved from their own faith and were trying to recreate a sense of what it was like to live with their beliefs in a very different moment, in a very different cultural milieu.”
Listen to the interview below:
Velshi and Bhabha Discuss The Satanic Verses:
Velshi on banned books on MSNBC:
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