Twenty years after: Reading The Moor’s Last Sigh in 2015

Abstract

This article is a reading of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995) via Joseph Anton (2012), his memoir of his post-fatwa years when he was in hiding (1989–2002). The last of four books he published between 1990 and 1995, all of them about political and religious extremism and the censoring of free speech, The Moor’s Last Sigh looks at fundamentalism-driven violence from the Christian Reconquista of Spain in 1492 to communal riots in India in the late 1990s. Its narrative vehicle is the fortunes of descendants of Jewish, Moorish and Catholic spice trader-settlers of Malabar, representative of India’s multiculturalism. Weaving together art, literature, politics and more, Rushdie charts changes in modern India, especially the eclipse of its hybridity by religious extremists. The article considers The Moor’s Last Sigh in relation to the memoir, and in relation to Andalusia.

Keywords:

• Salman Rushdie
• Reconquista
• Mumbai
• Joseph Anton
• hybridity
• fatwa
• censorship

Notes

1. Flory Zogoiby in The Moor’s Last Sigh is a fine example of this extremism.

2. Rushdie was wrong about this. India had traded with ancient Greece and Rome; Alexander had tried to conquer it; Semiramis and Bacchus were believed to have actually conquered it.

3. The nickname of Raman Fielding. “Mainduck” means “frog” in Hindustani.

4. The meaning of “Moor” is uncertain, but, in this novel, Rushdie seems to have used it ironically in the Spanish sense of moreno (dark-skinned).

5. See Hopps (2015) for the coining of this term.

6. The same insult is hurled at Moor by Vasco at the end of the book, when Moor fails to save Aoi. In a gendered reading of The Moor’s Last Sigh, Gonzalez (2005) argues that just as Boabdil is renowned for his lack of courage and “womanish” failure to defend his kingdom, the Moor’s narrative “will represent a whole project of deconstruction of male ways of seeing” (121).