Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.

Rushdie contrasts “apostles of purity”—ideologues who claim a single, complete explanation of the world—with “mixed-up” ordinary people whose lives are plural, contradictory, and unfinished. The line warns that projects of moral, religious, or political purification tend to become coercive: once a group believes it possesses total truth, dissent and ambiguity look like contamination to be eliminated. In Rushdie’s broader concerns as a novelist and public intellectual, the quote defends hybridity, skepticism, and freedom of imagination against absolutism. It suggests that human complexity is not a flaw to be corrected but a condition to be protected from those who would simplify it by force.