The Satanic Verses

"Now there was no demand for satires – the general fear of Mahound had destroyed the market for insults and wit." (pg. 362)

"Blasphemy, punishable by death." (pg. 102)

Given the context of The Satanic Verses – namely the savage and ignorant attempts to censor it, and the violent attempts to punish its creator, which have made headlines again this month in the latest semi-successful assault on Salman Rushdie's life – I dearly wanted, as a matter of principle, to love this book. Unfortunately, despite all my goodwill and my keen desire to wear its red butterfly cover as a badge of honour, I really struggled with this novel.

I'll try not to speak at length about the elephant in the room, about what's become known as "the Rushdie show more affair". Everyone should be of one mind in condemning the thoughtless, malicious mentality of those who have ruined this man's life over some obscure, minor criticism of a religion – and also in resisting the temptation to join the depressingly large number of their enablers and appeasers of every stripe. Even if The Satanic Verses was the disgusting cornucopia of apostasy that the killers want us to believe – it isn't, and I'd bet both bollocks that neither Ayatollah Khomeini or knifeman Hadi Matar have ever actually read it – it wouldn't mandate anything like the response it has received since its publication in 1988. A better man, one who lives right under God, would meet any offence taken here with only a shrug.

My own rather more moderate dislike of the novel came from something more mundane: I just didn't get it. I've always struggled with the genre of magical realism, which to me can be defined as banality made incomprehensible (and tangential), and the vast majority of The Satanic Verses confirmed me in this view. It's hard to hammer down a structure for the book, but it follows two modern-day characters, Gibreel and Saladin, who survive the explosion of a hijacked plane and tumble to earth. The story then dips in and out of a number of loosely connected dream sequences and metamorphoses, all delivered with the sort of verbosity and indulgence that, were it not for the Ayatollah, I'd be hellbent on avoiding. Somewhere in all this, I am informed, there is an acute exploration of the immigrant experience in Britain. Don't ask me where, though; my eyes too often became unfocused in the muddle.

And, of course, elsewhere in all this there is the dangerous stuff, the forbidden fruit that we really tramp through Eden for, the content the Ayatollah and his ilk wanted to nix, but which had the unintended effect of amplifying it. I had heard, not least in the current news commentary around Rushdie's attack, that the anti-Islamic content of the novel was such a small percentage that the fatwa was unfathomable, so it was something of a surprise when I read the book – having decided, as we all should, to determine the facts for myself – to find that Rushdie devotes significant ink from his pen to the matter.

The Satanic verses, for those who don't know the story, is when the Prophet Muhammad 'misheard' a divine revelation and decreed that the error had been caused by Satan. Muhammad supposedly received all his divine commands from God and his recitation of these was recorded in the Koran as immutable law. In the early days of Islam, when it was just one of many provincial religions and not the conquering monotheistic force it would soon become, Muhammad decreed, in one of his revelations, that three of the older (female) gods were to be accommodated alongside Allah. The cynic, of course, concludes that this was a nakedly political decision; the believer follows the tenuous logic which the Prophet himself later put forward: that Satan had put these words in his ear. It is one of the most sensitive aspects of Islamic theology, and for good reason. Not only does it hint at some cynical horse-trading with the local competition as the religion was established, but Muhammad's own explanation of it is out of sync with the theologically-essential assumption of the Prophet's perfection and infallibility.

Rushdie, in a decision which has had extreme ramifications for him ever since, is merciless on this point. At his most diplomatic, he describes the former businessman Muhammad as the "most pragmatic of prophets" (pg. 381). (Rushdie also makes the decision to use the name 'Mahound' rather than 'Muhammad' throughout the book, even though – or, more likely, because of – it is often seen as a slur.) Less diplomatically, he retells the whole story of Muhammad and the three female demi-gods as one where the prophet is calculating and self-serving. He is, as Rushdie tells it, a man making it up as he goes along, and claiming it was 'revealed' to him: "Salman the Persian got to wondering what manner of God this was that sounded so much like a businessman… Salman began to notice how useful and well timed the angel's revelations tended to be" (pg. 364). When Muhammad miscalculates – as in the case of accepting the three female demigods, which causes discontent among his followers – he takes it back and claims Satan misled him.

It's spicy stuff, and (to a non-believer, at least) a welcome change from all the middling magical realism that is so overpowering, like a bad scent, in the rest of the story. Rushdie, remarkably, doesn't even stop there. The above 'satanic verses' affair is relatively tame in the novel, relying on the way in which Rushdie tells the story, on insinuation and on the disquiet of the characters, to communicate his doubt about the Prophet. Where Rushdie really throws petrol on the fire he has lit is when he brings sex into it.

You see, the follow-up punch from Rushdie comes in a long sequence when Islam has now established itself in the region. It has all its restrictions in place ("rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelation" (pg. 363)) and yet, in the picture Rushdie paints for us, the followers of this fledgling Islam are secretly covetous of their leader's multiple wives (or, as Rushdie brazenly phrases it, "God's own permission to fuck as many women as he liked" (pg. 386)). Consequently, when a whorehouse has each of its prostitutes imitate the wives of the Prophet, the place starts to do a roaring trade. I mean, a whore named after the Prophet's favourite wife – "if they heard you say that they'd boil your balls in butter" (pg. 380). As absurd and abominable as the fatwa is and what it represents, you do also have to wonder what Rushdie thought was going to happen. Because if he knew, and wrote it anyway, he's the bravest writer there's ever been. Swift, Nabokov, Voltaire, Bulgakov… none would hold a candle to picking this particular fight.

Certainly, Rushdie's initial response to the fatwa in 1989 was one of bravery: he said he wished he'd been more critical, not less. And though I found the book's criticisms tending towards the crude rather than the insightful, I wish he'd been more critical too, but for a rather different reason. You see, for me, these were the only parts of the novel which had any spice and which could retain my attention. When they ended and we returned to the wider frame story of Gibreel and Saladin in the present day, my struggles returned. Was there a connection, I tried to make myself think, between Mahound's regret about accepting the three demi-gods and the purported theme about immigration into Britain? Is it about trying to assimilate but recognising it as a mistake, too much of a compromise, once you are established? Is this why Rushdie made the fateful decision to colour his frame story with the episode of the Satanic verses? I don't know, and any time I tried to wrestle with the themes and purpose of the story it slipped away from me. In all the words spent on Salman Rushdie, there is a lot of sympathy for the writer's plight in the face of determined theocratic violence. But there is another facet which reveals itself to me, having struggled to find great value in The Satanic Verses. It's insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but alongside all the other trials, it must feel like a curse to be remembered only for your lesser work.

"Feelings of outrage… Baal was surrounded by angry men demanding to know the reasons for this oblique, this most byzantine of insults." (pg. 391) show less

Rushdie's subject is the immigrant experience, the feeling of being alien in a home you wish to make your own, or scornfully resist making yours. How you can make yourself at home, or think you have, only to have a single label make you other again. How you can believe you have left your old identity behind, only to have it recapture you without warning. As Rushdie wrote in his 2012 memoir, the experience "puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief. So if this is a novel about migration it must be that act of putting in question. It must perform the crisis it describes."

There's a frequent blurring of the line in these pages between reality and show more fantasy, not just for the characters but for the reader as well. 'Magical realism' doesn't strictly apply, with everyone trying to rationalize the unbelievable or declare it madness. But fantastical things do occur in this story, as the mysterious narrator assures us. A man becomes an angel, and another becomes a devil, after surviving an impossible explosion and tumble through the air. A man relives the ancient past in not-quite-dreams, speaks to a ghost riding a magic carpet and influences the weather. Another man infests the dreams of others. No sooner is an unusual element dismissed as make-believe or madness than evidence appears that proves otherwise. Or does it?

In other words, this novel is 'performing the crisis' of the immigration experience, as promised. It isn't often that an author feels obliged to explain his novel after the fact; but then neither is it often that an author finds himself the victim of a death sentence issued by a foreign power, forcing him into hiding for a decade and having to remain vigilant thereafter, only to be wounded by a stabbing on stage at a live event in 2022. Reading this novel had zero negative impact on my outsider's view of Islam, for whatever that's worth. show less

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie is a sprawling kaleidoscope of a novel that defies simple description, weaving together as it does themes of identity, immigration, loyalty and betrayal, faith, and metamorphosis, all told in a magical realism style. The main plotline follows two Indian expatriates, Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood superstar, and Saladin Chamcha, a voiceover artist, as they miraculously survive a fall from an exploding plane over England. Transformed both physically and spiritually—Gibreel gains a halo and assumes the persona of an archangel, while Saladin morphs into a demonic figure—they wrestle with the fragmented identities and existential crises of immigrants moving from East to West. The novel’s structure is show more nonlinear, interspersing their surreal journeys with dreamlike, often satirical episodes involving the Prophet Mahound, a thinly veiled reimagining of the Prophet Muhammad, and the incendiary "Satanic verses" that cast doubt on divine revelation. The result is an audacious, richly textured mosaic that provides a moving examination into the nature of personal and cultural transformation.

It seems impossible to review this book without addressing the controversy it caused upon publication. The most divisive aspects of the tale lie in its depictions of religion and the treatment of sacred Islamic history. The passages involving Mahound, his followers, and the Satanic verses incident—a disputed episode suggesting that certain verses in the Quran might have been influenced by the Devil—provoked widespread outrage. To some readers, Rushdie’s irreverent portrayals of holy figures and his satirical tone were seen as blasphemous. Particularly inflammatory was the portrayal of Mahound’s followers as opportunistic or corrupt, as well as the suggestion that the divine message could be tainted by human ambition or error. This perceived sacrilege culminated in a fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini that called for Rushdie’s death. That incident catapulted both book and author into a global maelstrom and placed them squarely in that fraught intersection between free expression and religious devotion.

Ultimately, that controversy is a detraction because The Satanic Verses is more of a fierce exploration of the modern immigrant experience than anything else. Indeed, the novel is a masterpiece of literary craftsmanship, containing stunning and playful prose, philosophical depth, and moments of piercing humor. Rushdie’s command of the magical realism genre—which is very tricky to pull off properly—is nothing short of brilliant, as he fuses the mythic and the mundane into a narrative that is both disorienting and profoundly meaningful. On the other hand, it is worth noting that the book’s dense, nonlinear structure and the layers of allegory and symbolism can be challenging, demanding a lot of patience and close reading (and even rereading, at some points). For me, though, those challenges were amply rewarded by the author’s transcendent storytelling power; on that dimension, this effort falls just short of equaling his remarkable Midnight’s Children. It is a novel that aims to provoke and enlighten in equal measure, which it does with sufficient success to earn its place as both a literary triumph and a lightning rod for cultural debate. This is bold, boundary-pushing literature that is easy to recommend to anyone who is willing and able to tackle it with open eyes. show less

The satanic verses is a book whose reputation precedes it. I found it an exciting read, dazzling, even, if I’m allowed such an over-used blurb cliché, for the book is all over the place and will shower you with impatient joy and breathless erudition.

The main plot deals with two Indian expats in London, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, and how they explore their love-hate relationship with London (“Ellowen-Deeowen”) and Englishness through a series of semi-mythical sequences that may or may not be in-universe fictional echoes of each other. In one layer, Gibreel and Saladin miraculously survive a fall out of a terrorist-exploded airplane in mid-flight, drop into the sea, and swim ashore, where they each meet a series of odd show more characters. Each finds himself developing increasingly strange and magical powers that drive them towards extremes on the good-vs-evil spectrum. Saladin grows horns, goat legs and an epic case of sulphuric halitosis; Gibreel grows a halo and hallucinates giving Islamic revelations to the prophet Mahound.

(This, incidentally, pushes this book beyond “magical realism” territory and firmly into the “fantasy” genre. But that is my opinion, and not a hill I’m willing to die on.)

Interspersed with their wanderings through London’s postcolonial underbelly are other stories with other protagonists. One is a Historical Fiction (-ish) retelling of the beginnings of Islam; another is a fairy tale (-ish) about the foot pilgrimage of an entire Indian village to Mecca, led by a magical, butterfly-covered girl, and who experience a series of maybe-miracles on the road. These stories (and others) are thematically related to the main event, but crossovers do happen. It is not entirely clear whether these are hallucinations, dreams, phantasms or in-universe movies, perhaps based on in-universe hallucinations, etc.. The book takes a very playful attitude to narrative -- at some point, the author himself appears in a cheeky cameo.

Rushdie’s writing style is equally ebullient, with stream-of-consciousness puns and rephrasings stacked on top of each other, ADHD-like, and it relies on cleverness and sheer force of agitation to propel things forward. Motifs, themes and narrative echoes do tie things together, though, especially past the halfway mark.

This was an electrifying read. The satanic verses transforms an immigrant’s belonging to a duality of cultures into a kaleidoscopic dazzle, or a funhouse, surrounded by weird copies and echoes of the self. I’m not sure if the contents quite match up to the sensational fireworks of the presentation, but style over content this is most definitely not. show less

“Fact is, religious faith, which encodes the highest aspirations of the human race, is now, in our country, the servant of lowest instincts, and God is the creature of evil.”

Fanatics swirl through Salman Rushdie’s surreal vision in [The Satanic Verses], heralded by an archangel and a devil falling from an exploding sky over the murky waters of the English Channel. Gibreel Fashita and Saladin Chamcha miraculously survive a terrorist bombing in the sky over London. As they fall, they go through a transformation, Gibreel in his mind and Saladin in his physical appearance. Deposited on a moor and taken in by an elderly widow, their transformations continue, Gibreel begins to lose touch with reality in spiritual dreams where he is an show more archangel and herald of an apocalypse, while Saladin undergoes a temporary physical metamorphosis into a goat-like demon.

If the psychedelic visions suffered by the two descending chrysalis aren’t enough to set the stage, Rushdie reveals his strategy in one of Gibreel’s early dreams. Washed up at Rosa Diamond’s home, convalescing through his transformation, he dreams of Rosa’s past in Argentina, where she and her husband met and were married. The dream, like many of Gibreel’s is an amalgamation of past and present and future, but it focuses on a gift from an amorous neighbor to Rosa: a copy of Amerigo Vespucci’s account of his voyages. The writer is described: “The man was a notorious fantasist, of course … but fantasy can be stronger than fact.” Rushdie announces his perspective with this description, announces that the fantasies he is about to weave will instruct, will uncover the truths of the world as he sees them.

The truth? Fanaticism, in all its many forms, whether religious or political or material or social, is a deadly distortion. And Rushdie gives no quarter to any platform. In one of Gibreel’s many dream lives, he consorts with Ayesha, a street urchin who convinces a village to walk a pilgrimage to Mecca through the Arabian Sea. Mizra Saeed, an unbeliever, refuses to walk with the pilgrims, following them in a Mercedes, heckling and cajoling them at every stop to abandon their suicide mission. Rushdie satirizes material fanaticism in the passage, “One day he got back to the station wagon to find that an empty coconut-shell thrown from the window of a passing bus had smashed his laminated windscreen, which looked, now, like a spider’s web full of diamond flies. He had to knock all the pieces out, and the glass diamonds seemed to be mocking him as they fell on to the road and into the car, they seemed to speak of the transience and worthlessness of earthly possession, but a secular man lives in the world of things and Mizra Saeed did not intend to be broken as easily as a windscreen.”

Rushdie turns his eye to social and political fanaticism as well, describing one character’s strength as a “perfect control of the languages that mattered: sociological, socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic, oratorical, sermonic: the languages of power.” And the story follows Saladin through a Kafkaesque ordeal at the hands of the police who charge him for his attempt to enter the country illegally with his fall from the exploding plane, and then later through a race riot sparked by the police murder of a racial activist. As with his other stories, Rushdie carefully examines the difficulty of racial identity in a modern world where borders and associations are constantly shifting. Saladin himself is deeply conflicted about his own identity. Though an Indian Muslim, he struggles to leave Bombay and Islam behind, aching to be affiliated with London, to be a Brit. But as the book closes, Saladin returns to his childhood home and reconciles with his father and his family, achieving a measure of contentment.

But Rushdie reserves the better part of his energy for religious fanaticism. As the leading quote above demonstrates, there is a hair’s breadth between heartfelt spiritual fervor and selfish, corruptive misuse. Of the most controversial passages from [Satanic Verses] are Gibreel’s dreams of Mahound, a thinly veiled re-telling of Muhammad’s life. Rushdie’s most striking image in these accounts is a battle between Gibreel and a Pagan goddess. During the battle in the skies, the villagers below run toward the Imam’s palace for shelter. As he fights at the Imam’s will, Gibreel observes the Imam below lying in the palace court, his mouth yawning open at the gates, as the fleeing people march into his mouth and he swallows them whole. In another dream, Baal, a poet, serves as Mahound’s scribe. As the Prophet speaks, Baal begins to alter the words. Surprised at first with his own boldness, he becomes frightened that the Prophet didn’t catch on, that his doubts about the divinity of the Prophet and the message had been right all along. And in Gibreel’s dreams about Ayesha’s pilgrimage, she grows ever more strict and fanatical. When she is challenged, she disassociates herself, claiming only to be a Messenger and promising, vaguely, that the pilgrim’s sacrifices will be richly rewarded. Eventually, one of the pilgrims finally challenges her directly, “Then tell me why your God is so anxious to destroy the innocent? What’s he afraid of? Is he so unconfident that he needs us to die to prove our love?”

Sadly, the question that the pilgrim, and Rushdie, seem to avoid is a deeper one about whether the sacrifice and devotion is required by God for fulfillment of his own need or rather as a way to transmute the pilgrim’s own heart. In other words, while Ayesha may be driven by her own selfish desires, the pilgrim’s premise is faulty – that God requires something because he needs it. A perfectly reasonable alternative is that God requires sacrifice and devotion because the pilgrim needs it, and that Ayesha and Mahound and other religious fanatics, have corrupted the divine. Rushdie almost gets to this perspective – during one of the Imam’s rants, he says, “We long for the eternal, and I am eternity.” This is essentially a reshaping of Solomon’s proclamation in Ecclesiastes 3:11: “He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.”

While Rushdie laments the consequences of fanaticism, he also revels in the beautiful, messy contradictions of the world. Alleluia Cone, Gibreel’s real life lover, but also the mold for Al-Lat, the Pagan goddess, in Gibreel’s dream world, is told by her father, a Polish émigré and survivor of a wartime prison camp, about “the most dangerous of all the lies we are fed in our lives. … Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogeneous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up, you get on the phone to the straightjacket tailor. … The world is incompatible, just never forget it, gaga. Ghosts, Nazis, saints, all alive at the same time; in one spot, blissful happiness, while down the road, the inferno. You can’t ask for a wilder place.” Much of this sentiment is reduced into Gibreel and Saladin’s own minds, hyper-focusing the wild diversity of thought and emotion into the mind of one man alone, its larger manifestation projected onto the face of the earth in a Felliniesque muddle.

The story of [The Satanic Verses] sadly escaped the pages of the book, allowing Rushdie an even wider arena for his message. Islamic fundamentalists viewed the work as blasphemous and the Ayatollah Khomeini called for a fatwa against Rushdie. The book was reviled and burned by these fundamentalists. Politicians, including high-ranking British parliament members, called for the book to be banned, fearing religious and racial violence. Attempts were made on Rushdie’s life. When he went into hiding and received protective police assistance, the fatwa was shifted to include publishers and translators. A Japanese translator was stabbed to death; an Italian translator survived a stabbing; a Norwegian publisher survived a shooting; and 37 people were killed in Turkey when a Turkish translator was targeted. The fanatical reaction to the publication of the book could’ve easily been an epilogue to the book itself.

Ultimately, [The Satanic Verses] is a solid, if extremely subtle book. Though it doesn’t seem subtle from the subject matter, so much religious and racial material underpins the book that many of the connections can be missed. Thankfully, the Rushdie’s skillfully provides an evocative and thought provoking story that can be read on multiple levels. Nothing about the book on its face should’ve caused the fanatical reaction, but that’s just Rushdie winking at us all.

Bottom Line: Another epic of magical realism; the irony of the book is rooted in the fanatical reaction the book engendered, mirroring Rushdie’s own themes.
4 bones!!!!! show less

http://nhw.livejournal.com/940647.html

This book starts well, but gets a bit heavy; still, I found it not too difficult to make it to the end. There were two themes that I found particularly attractive. First off, the whole story explores the way in which we change and adapt our personalities to new circumstances, new people: the two main characters find themselves magically transformed into an angel and a devil, and then back again, but each has also changed names and other things about themselves in presenting themselves to different countries, to family vs outsiders, to different women. It is not always subtle, but I found it very entertaining.

The second is the experience of London. I think there must be a common experience of both show more familiarity and alienation for all of us who encounter London as non-English but citizens of the former Empire. I've found this in a couple of other places but I found Rushdie's portrayal of the immigrant experience of the Big Smoke gripping and familiar.

For the rest, I really enjoyed the effervescent use of language in the very first chapter, difficult to excerpt, and kept hoping it would come back again later in the book (and once or twice it did). There are lots of neat allusions - one of the main characters acquires the surname Chamcha, which must be a reference to Kafka's Gregor Samsa. Rushdie shows also a welcome sensitivity to classic sf, though his treatment of Doctor Who is less thorough.

Younger readers may need to be reminded that this book was somewhat controversial when first published. It's pretty clear who Rushdie is "really" writing about in the two extended passages set in Mecca/Jahilia and Medina/Yathrib. To say that this is not meant to be "about" Muhammad is unconvincing. (I bought the two Rogerson books partly in anticipation of tackling this one.) However, I find it fairly mild stuff; perhaps my sensitivities have been blunted by reading too much of what other people write about Catholicism. show less

Një mëngjes dimri, pak para se të zbardhte, një avion i marrë peng shpërthen mbi Kanalin e La Manshit. Mes mbetjeve të gjymtyrëve, karrocave të pijeve, kujtimeve, mbulesave dhe maskave të oksigjenit, dy njerëz bien në det: Xhibril Farishta, ylli legjendar i kinematografisë indiane dhe Saladin Çamça, njeriu i një mijë zërave. Mbërthyer pas njëri-tjetrit, duke kënduar këngë të ndryshme, ata bien tatëpjetë dhe ngecin më në fund gjallë mbi rërat e mbuluara me dëborë të një plazhi anglez.
Shpëtimi i tyre është një mrekulli e dyshimtë. Xhibrili fiton një aureolë, ndërsa Saladinit, për tmerrin e vet, këmbët i bëhen leshatore dhe i shndërrohen në thundra, ndërsa në tëmtha i shfaqen zgjatime në show more formë brirësh. Xhibrili dhe Saladini janë zgjedhur (nga kush?) si kundërshtarë në ndeshjen e përjetshme mes së Mirës dhe së Ligës. Po kush është kush? Ndërsa dy burrat gremisen në kohë dhe në hapësirë drejt përballjes së tyre vendimtare, ne bëhemi dëshmitarë të një cikli rrëfenjash dashurie dhe pasioni, tradhtie dhe besimi. show less