However, as Socrates also proved, long ago when accused, similarly, of blasphemy: repression of such questions only makes others clamor, more insistently than ever, for the truth. After all, "the unbending interpretation of Islam espoused by Khomeini and some other Shiites [as opposed to Sunni, the majority of Muslims] represents just a minority of the Moslem world" (Phillips)
Given the subject matter of the book, this aspect has garnered criticism from others. Rushdie's portrayal of India and Indian's might be seen as guilty of stereotyping in his use of magic realism and the implication that India can only be described in terms of disunity, fantasy and irrationality, precisely those terms used by the orientalists to 'keep the natives down' (Myers, 1996)
Rushdie, wearing the hat of a historian tells us, that the one thousand and the children born on or near the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, have miraculous talents, the magic element that has already been discussed. It was, according to the book, "As though history arriving at a point of the highest significance and promise had chosen to sow, in that instant, the seeds of a future which would genuinely differ from anything the world had seen up to that time" (Rushdie, 1981)
Authenticity, connected to the ideas of race, ethnicity, culture, religion, and nation thus predetermines the aesthetic and political validity. This limitless expansion of the ideal of authenticity dangerously hampers the growth of a culture in that it ionizes the concept of 'the authentic' and treats the alien cultural influences as something that hybridizes and thereby contaminates the pure indigenous culture (Su, 1999)