Honorary Degree Citation
by James Diedrick
Mr. President, I have the honor of presenting Salman Rushdie for the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters. Salman Rushdie has delighted, provoked, and inspired readers worldwide for four decades. A native of Bombay and a citizen of the world, his eight novels embrace what he has called “hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs.” In his fiction, which has been translated into 37 languages, Mr. Rushdie transforms the migrant condition, characterized by disjuncture and metamorphosis, into a compelling metaphor for the human condition.
Midnight’s Children, Mr. Rushdie’s stunning epic of modern India, is one of the most important novels to come out of the English-speaking world in the last century; it is to modern India what Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum is to modern Germany or One Hundred Years of Solitude is to Colombia. Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize—a British award akin to the Pulitzer—in 1981, and the “Booker of Bookers” in 1993 for being the best novel in the twenty-five year history of the award. In Midnight’s Children, as in much of his fiction, Mr. Rushdie performs a near-miraculous juggling act, employing and celebrating European and Indian cultural forms and traditions even while critically examining the influence of European culture on colonized societies.
In 1988, Mr. Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses won the Whitbread Award and unleashed an international furor. In response to the novel’s criticism of fundamentalist Islam, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious edict, condemning Mr. Rushdie to death. Mr. Rushdie was forced into hiding for nearly 10 years, but nonetheless published two important novels, including The Moor’s Last Sigh in 1995. He also wrote a number of essays on intellectual freedom during this period, and has continued to articulate his strong views on the subject since then. The government of Iran lifted the fatwa in 1998.
In addition to Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses, Mr. Rushdie has published the novels Grimus, Shame, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and Fury. He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and four works of nonfictionThe Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey; Imaginary Homelands; The Wizard of Oz; and Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002. He is the co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing, and he filmed The Riddle of Midnight, a documentary recording the “shattered dreams of Independence” through the eyes of his generation.
A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Mr. Rushdie has also been awarded Germany's Author of the Year Prize, the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the Mantua Literary Award. He holds honorary doctorates at five European and two American universities and is an honorary professor in the humanities at M.I.T. He has been awarded the Freedom of the City Award in Mexico City, and holds the rank of Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters -- France's highest artistic honor. Mr. Rushdie has lectured at many prestigious educational institutions, including a March 2003 visit to the University of Michigan during the North American premiere of a Royal Shakespeare Company stage adaptation of his book, Midnight’s Children.
Mr. President, Salman Rushdie . . .
