Directions: Read the passage given below and answer the questions that follow by choosing the correct/most appropriate options:

The Indian-born master of literature, the 75-year-old Salman Rushdie, was severely wounded in a knife attack on August 12 at the Chautauqua Institution (western New York State). His attacker was a 24-year-old Shiite Lebanese living in America, Hadi Matar. The young man is said to be sympathetic to the Iranian state and its fatwa declared against Rushdie 33 years ago, after the publication of The Satanic Verses.

We do not know if Matar has any interest in literature, but we know he has an interest in religion. For a devout man, religion surely matters over literature. Secular literature — a term we can safely use for a lot of writing since the advent of western modernity — has no responsibility towards divine injunctions. It is literature born in and nurtured by, human will and imagination. In other words, secular literature is an idea of writing that is free from the stranglehold of religious sentiments. It thrives not just by questioning religion, but also modernist values: literature is ideally a form of free expression where all forms of dogma, including dogmas of modern ideologies and values, are under question. The modern task of literature is to raise questions against everything we are comfortable with: be it the idea of god, life, politics, or morality. To write is to seek, to seek is to question, to question is to contradict, and to contradict is to establish the fundamental otherness that exists in the human world. Modern literature is not just other to religion, but also to the non-religious world. We may not live in real conditions of freedom, even though we may aspire for it. Only in literature, in the art of writing, do we find the freedom we always seek, and are denied.