Appearing in Brooklyn, Rushdie illuminated the connections he sees between the ‘fairylands’ of Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights and real life

For all that Salman Rushdie insists his newest book is as “fictionally fictional” as possible, the novel’s flame-and-smoke genies and medieval philosophers draw a surprising amount of influence from his own life.

The plot of Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights – whose title works out to Scheherazade’s famed 1,001 nights – can be most succinctly described as “genies take Manhattan”, said Rushdie at the Brooklyn Public Library on Sunday, in conversation with writer and Guernica editor Joel Whitney.

Rushdie wanted to pull away from the trend of autobiographical writing in the vein of Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard, and so created a magical world with a plot that made Ursula K Le Guin “shriek and fall back fainting on my seraglio couch” at the prospect of summarising it. It’s all fairyland and jinn having sex for millennia – and yet, within that, some very personal philosophy and even a bit of Rushdie family history.



Rushdie said he has long been fascinated by these so-called “wonder tales” and their evolution across time and space. The original 1,001 stories were probably Indian folktales that later spread to Iran and were translated into Farsi. Later, they were adapted into Arabic before being translated into French by a man named Antoine Galland, who added some of the tales that western audiences know best, like those of Aladdin and Ali Baba and the 40 thieves.

“The thing that I really held on to while writing is that though these stories are full of ogres and genies and flying carpets and magic lamps, they’re completely realistic when it comes to human beings,” said Rushdie. “These stories show how ordinary people deal with extraordinary things,” and that seemed fitting because “we now actually do live in a very strange time”.

And so, despite himself, the characters – especially the human ones – draw from autobiography. One of the protagonists is the 12th-century Islamic philosopher Ibn R (also called Averroes), who has an affair with a jinnia, or a female genie. It’s easy enough to assume that Rushd was written in because of his name’s obvious similarity to Rushdie, but the opposite is closer to the truth. Rushdie’s father was a great admirer of Rushd’s philosophy and changed the family name to Rushdie years before Salman was born. He didn’t discover this until he was a teenager.

“I was interested in [Rushd] then, of course, but when The Satanic Verses came out and the attack on my work took place I realized, shockingly, that we shared that too – that in his time he had been persecuted by fanatics,” said Rushdie, who was placed under fatwa by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. “He had his books burned, and I know quite well about that.”

His father’s decision to change the family name became “alarmingly prescient”, because during the time when his work was under attack, the name Rushdie seemed to be “the right flag to be fighting over”, Rushdie said. Since then, he’d always hoped that Rushd would fall into one of his books.

Aside from having an affair with a jinnia, Rushd’s other main role is that of interlocutor. The faith-versus-reason debate between the rationalist Rushd and Ghazali of Iran, a devout theologian who lived around the same time, forms the crux of Two Years.

Though a “hardcore Hitchens-style atheist,” Rushdie acknowledged that it’s almost impossible not to fall prey to the feeling that one has a soul not bound to the flesh, which is a question he explores through the mouths of Rushd and Ghazali. He had originally intended for their feud to be merely a prologue to a modern-day story, then realised that the argument was too relevant to relegate to the past and and so ended up “reanimating their ghosts” to make them argue from beyond the grave.

Rushdie develops the idea of a mortal soul, or an inner essence that is “limited by the body and which is born with the body and dies with the body, but is not just flesh and bones”. This is, he said, his attempt to try to explain why we feel so strongly the sense of a soul when reason says that the mind and body cannot be separated.

Ultimately, Two Years is optimistic and has a “buoyancy” that Rushdie says differs from the bleak and quasi-dystopian themes that seems to permeate much of contemporary literature. This optimism, he added, may come from the joy of truly delving into a type of fiction where one can do anything.

“When I finished my last book, it made me want to go back to fiction and I really felt a lightening of spirit,” he said, “as if I had unexpectedly put down something I had been carrying around for a long time.”