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The University of Peshawar has set aside the Academic Council’s decision to include controversial ‘Satanic Verses’ writer Salman Rushdie’s books in MPhil and PhD courses offered by the English Literature department. University authorities decided to drop Rushdie’s ‘Shame’ and ‘Midnight’s Children’ from the list of suggested books, following protests inside and outside the campus. “No book of Salman Rushdie is or will be included in MPhil and PhD courses of English Literature at the University of Peshawar ,” sources told The Dawn. Department Professor Mojeebur Rehman, however, insisted that the matter was based on a misunderstanding. “Neither of these books are on our list of suggested reading nor do we have a single book of Salman Rushdie in our library,” he said. Sources said the two books were part of a list presented to the academic council as suggested reading for MPhil and PhD courses and since the council was ‘overloaded’ with the items on the agenda, it approved the list without thorough examination. Other books suggested for reading includes Arundhati Roy’s ‘The god of small things’, Kamila Shamsi’s ‘Broken verse’ and Daniyal Moheenuddin’s ‘In other Rooms, Other Wounds’, which is about women in Pakistan.

Inclusion of Rushdie books in curriculum raises furore in Peshawar University