Midnight’s Children

Description

Many have not read Rushdie’s masterpiece, “Midnight’s Children,” published in the early 1980s and translated into Arabic in Damascus. His subsequent works, from “Haroun and the Sea of ​​Tales” to “Shammar the Clown,” have also not been translated into Arabic. Arabs stopped at “The Satanic Verses” in 1989 and have remained stuck there ever since. If this “cursed” novel has any merit, it is that it posed to the contemporary Arab conscience a question that has echoed throughout the ages: Who defines the boundaries of creativity? A handful of Arab intellectuals championed freedom of expression and declared their solidarity with the British author, regardless of their stance on his controversial novel. As Sadiq Jalal al-Azm reminded us, the novel is a work of literature, imaginative and innovative, establishing whatever connections it chooses with reality, but we cannot judge it as reality itself.