Chapter 19 - Scheherazade and Her Cousins

Summary

Scheherazade is the central trope that governs Salman Rushdie’s depictions of women. For Rushdie, who was raised on The Arabian Nights, she was the strong woman figure whom he admired the most. Most of his women characters are made in her image and are strong, wily survivors. They are storytellers who, by their wit and wisdom, manage to save themselves, their cultures, and countries through extremely difficult times. Rushdie’s women are drawn admiringly as strong women: Padma the writer’s muse, Amina Sinai the matriarch, and Indira Gandhi the politician in Midnight’s Children; Omar Khayyam’s fawning mothers in Shame; and all the strong women in The Satanic Verses – the Prophet’s wife, Khadija, and the Sufayan sisters, Aurora Zogoiby, and Qara Köz. For Rushdie, Scheherazade herself is the strongest, most admired woman, as we can see in his most recent collection of essays.