Christopher Merrill writes:
Sir Salman Rushdie is not only a prodigiously talented novelist and essayist but also a lightning rod for religious, political, and cultural dogmatists everywhere.

In his novels he blends history and magical realism, changing subjects and settings with bewildering ease. Whether he is exploring the history of India, the clash between the East and West, or the world of pop music, he brings to life the full spectrum of human experience, in Bombay and London, in New York and California, in Kashmir and a country "not quite Pakistan."

What distinguishes his work is its playfulness, in the service of serious ideas. He understands that a novel raises more questions than it answers, and so he keeps asking the big question, What if? What if a child is born at the precise moment that India acquires its independence and discovers that everything he does is magnified through the prism of his country's fraught history? What if a plane blows up over the English Channel and two of the passengers plummet to safety? What sorts of dreams and revelations would they have? What would happen next?

Rushdie's answers, which are by turns magical and searing, are as spellbinding as the tales that Shaherazade told night after night, hoping to stave off the inevitable. Readers of Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Ground Beneath Her Feet know that he keeps telling stories there is hope for the human race.

"If religion is an answer, if political ideology is an answer," he writes, "then literature is an inquiry; great literature, by asking extraordinary questions, opens new doors in our minds."

Notwithstanding the fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini, and the current remonstrations of Iran and Pakistan, Rushdie opens doors in our minds, and what we find in those elaborately furnished rooms is - the world.