Saleem Sinai a nation's history. His life and his experiences in the novel are inseparable from the events taking place around him and so he truly becomes a child of history. A "Times of India" review calls Saleem the most loved of Rushdie's many characters despite, or perhaps because of, his being "the snot-nosed, cucumber-nosed know-all narrator of "Midnight’s Children", whose life swings between exultation and suffering, for he has been 'handcuffed to history', a coupling determined by his time of birth, midnight on August 15, 1947, when 'clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting'". India's national newspaper "The Hindu" noted the success
Salman Rushdie Hindu." In 1990, in the "hope that it would reduce the threat of Muslims acting on the fatwa to kill him," he issued a statement claiming he had renewed his Muslim faith, had repudiated the attacks on Islam made by characters in his novel and was committed to working for better understanding of the religion across the world. However, Rushdie later said that he was only "pretending". His books often focus on the role of religion in society and conflicts between faiths and between the religious and those of no faith. Rushdie advocates the application of higher criticism, pioneered during