Superbly written, Salman Rushdie's short story The Prophet's Strand is an anti-dogmatic short story. It is so fast and dynamic that by the end of the first paragraph the young boy with whom the story begins is almost dead from a violent attack. And all the subsequent events in this simultaneously realistic, magical-realistic, allegorical, cruel, satirical, playful, dark tale with poetic detail have the potential to take the attentive reader's breath away. The penetration of the characters from the rich family into the most dangerous part of the city, in which some of the inhabitants there remind of the terrible tales of childhood, is described in the tradition of "One Thousand and One Nights", while at the same time it is enhanced with mystery, psychological depth and indications of social questions.

In content, it is a story about falling into dogma. It is the story of Hashim, who after finding a relic, transforms into a fundamentalist torturer of his family, whose other members try to resist him through desperate moves. If that relic is understood only as a symbol of what it symbolizes on the surface, then there is a risk that the story will be interpreted only anti-religiously. But the story is essentially an analysis of the phenomenon of dogma, and so what the relic specifically represents is irrelevant here.
Dogma does not have to mean only forcefully imposing one's views on one's opponent. Dogma means refusing to offer an argument, a basis, an explanation for one's beliefs, and in doing so to appeal only to authority. Dogmatism is a textual act, an attempt to give validity to one's behavior and one's discourse by referring to a certain canonical text that provides the final guarantee of meaning.

In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, Portia manages to save Antonio from the legal possibility of Shylock cutting off a part (one pound) of his body by pointing out that the contract does not mention that, in cutting off the flesh, Shylock may he bled Antonio. True, the contract does not mention blood, but this explanation has always sounded absurd and wrong to me. Terry Eagleton in After Theory, referring to Portia's dogmatism, quips that the contract does not even mention whether "Shylock's hair is to be caught in a ponytail at the moment a part of his body is cut off." This is not an ironic statement just for effect, but has a more substantial background. Porsha's reading of the contract, Eagleton says, “is wrong because it is too literal: it is a fundamentalist reading that sticks meticulously to the text and flagrantly falsifies its meaning. Interpretation (…) must be based on an understanding of how life and language work” (Eagleton), which Portia refuses to do.

In Rushdi's story, the usurer Hashim, after finding the relic, decides to dogmatically follow all the rules of the text, which he considers a guide through life. Through the story of his relationship with his wife, son Ata and daughter Huma, and their attempts to save themselves from the emerging tyranny, every move, every word of these and all other secondary, but equally important and specific characters, acquires a darkly ironic dimension , pointing out how the literal meaning of their sentences is the reverse of the true meaning when you consider how life and language work. For example, Hashim claims that he charges high interest from the people he lends money to for noble reasons, to teach them the value of money and thereby heal them. The thief mutilates his children, as he himself is convinced, out of love for them, so that they get more money when they beg.

Among other things, The Prophet's Strand deconstructs the dogma that seriousness and pleasure are separate, asserting ("it is high time to introduce discipline" (Rushdi, 2859), Hashim exclaims at one point) that pleasure must be eliminated from their a house for the family to live in as befits serious and respectable people. In this sense, the story connects with another point of view of Eagleton, who, speaking unrelated to the story, says that this Puritan dogma of separating seriousness and pleasure is due to the belief that pleasure goes beyond the realm of knowledge and is therefore anarchic. This dogma fails to see, says Eagleton, "that pleasure and seriousness are related in this sense: that figuring out how to make life better [with more pleasure] for more people is serious business." (Eagleton 5)

It is difficult to extract from this story a quotation that would point to his deconstruction of the dogmas because there are no sentences that explicitly give the moral, the moral judgment, or the conclusion. And each sentence is significant to the story and indicates the attempt to deconstruct it as part of the whole. The motive for the attack on Rushdi on August 12 is still unknown. But given his history with The Satanic Verses, it seems likely that Rushdie's anti-dogmatic approach, as he uses it in the short story The Prophet's Strand (I haven't read The Satanic Verses and can't comment on it), it can encourage dogmatic actions.

The author is a writer.