Shame" is a novel that is bursting with anger. And yet to call it a novel is not quite true; it is a satire in the way that Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" and Gulliver Twist's works were satires and in the way that Candide satirized his own society. Rushdie satirizes large swathes of the Muslim world today -- largely the parts in the Middle East -- and his anger burn the pages.

Rushdie, victim of a death threat in the past, tries to steer himself clear from future threat by describing his book as an "a sort of modern fairy tale," which nobody need take seriously and which, since it is set in "not quite Pakistan,' (3) need not provoke the authorities to censor it or have it burned. However, the correspondence to contemporary Pakistan, and Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, amongst other places is visible and real.

Omar Khayyam Shakil is...
[ View Full Essay]