As it turns out, this piece, published in the New Yorker, is actually an excerpt from the first chapter of Rushdie's novel, "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights."

(My review here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1307182114)

Is it any coincidence that the 12th-century philosopher we meet here, whose (we are told) "bastard brood spread out, leaving his forbidden name behind them, to populate the earth" is called Ibn Rushd, which bears a remarkable similarity to Rushdie? ;-) He is an historical figure: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averroes), and Rushdie gives him credit for being a father of secular thought. "it is a strange fate for a believer to become the inspiration of ideas that have no need of belief, and a stranger fate still for a man’s philosophy to be victorious beyond the frontiers of his own world but vanquished within those borders."

last line: "to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy." ( )