Saleem Sinai Saleem Sinai Saleem Sinai is the protagonist of the Booker Prize-winning novel "Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie. His life is closely intertwined with the events that take place in his homeland of pre- and post-colonial India, and newly created Pakistan and Bangladesh (East Bengal). He is born at the moment in time when India and Pakistan emerge from British rule and lives during the new tumultuous struggles that engulf the new nations following 15 August 1947. Sinai embodies these physical struggles and rifts during, and serves as a metaphor for, the spiritual, religious, political and intellectual traumas of the young
Salman Rushdie to Islam", and it was planning "a very precise response." Rushdie came from a liberal Muslim family although he now identifies as an atheist. In a 2006 interview with PBS, Rushdie called himself a "hardline atheist". In 1989, in an interview following the "fatwa", Rushdie said that he was in a sense a lapsed Muslim, though "shaped by Muslim culture more than any other", and a student of Islam. In another interview the same year, he said, "My point of view is that of a secular human being. I do not believe in supernatural entities, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim or