The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses
First edition cover
Author	Salman Rushdie
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Genre(s)	Magic Realism, Novel
Publisher	Viking Press
Publication date	1988
Media type	Print (Hardback and paperback)
Pages	547 pp
ISBN	0670825379
OCLC Number	18558869
Preceded by	Shame
Followed by	Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Salman Rushdie, 2008

The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie's fourth novel, first published in 1988 and inspired in part by the life of Muhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie heavily used magical realism and relied heavily on contemporary events and people to create his characters. The title refers to the so-called "satanic verses", a group of alleged Qur'anic verses that allow intercessory prayers to be made to three Pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Uzza, and Manāt.^[1] The part of the story that deals with the "satanic verses" was based on accounts from historians al-Waqidi and al-Tabari.^[1]

In the United Kingdom, the book received positive reviews. It was a 1988 Booker Prize Finalist (losing to Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda) and won the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year.^[2]

In the Muslim community, however, the novel caused great controversy for what many Muslims believed were blasphemous references. The book was banned in India, was burned in demonstrations in the United Kingdom, and was the subject of a violent riot in Pakistan. In February 1989, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling on all good Muslims to kill or help kill Rushdie and his publishers.^[3] Following the fatwa, Rushdie was put under police protection by the British government. As of early 2010 Rushdie has not been physically harmed, but 38 others have been killed in violence against those connected with the book.^[4] Individual purchasers of the book have not been harmed.

Plot summary

The novel consists of a frame narrative, using elements of magical realism, interlaced with a series of sub-plots that are narrated as dream visions experienced by one of the protagonists. The frame narrative, like many other stories by Rushdie, involves Indian expatriates in contemporary England. The two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are both actors of Indian Muslim background. Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who specializes in playing Hindu deities. (The character is partly based on Indian film stars Amitabh Bachchan and Rama Rao.^[5]) Chamcha is an emigrant who has broken with his Indian identity and works as a voice over artist in England.

At the beginning of the novel, both are trapped in a hijacked plane during a flight from India to Britain. The plane explodes over the English Channel, but the two are magically saved. In a miraculous transformation, Farishta takes on the personality of the archangel Gibreel, and Chamcha that of a devil.

After being found on the beach, Chamcha is taken into custody by the police, who suspect him of being an illegal immigrant, while Farishta looks on without intervening.

Both characters struggle to piece their lives back together. Farishta seeks and finds his lost love, the English mountaineer Allie Cone, but their relationship is overshadowed by his mental illness. Chamcha, having miraculously regained his human shape, wants to take revenge on Farishta for having forsaken him after their common fall from the hijacked plane. He does so by fostering Farishta's pathological jealousy and thus destroying his relationship with Allie. In another moment of crisis, Farishta realizes what Chamcha has done, but forgives him and even saves his life.

Both return to India. Farishta, still suffering from his illness, kills Allie in another outbreak of jealousy and then commits suicide. Chamcha, who has found not only forgiveness from Farishta but also reconciliation with his estranged father and his own Indian identity, decides to remain in India.

Dream sequences

Embedded in this story is a series of half-magic dream vision narratives, ascribed to the disturbed mind of Gibreel Farishta. They are linked together by many thematic details as well as by the common motifs of divine revelation, religious faith and fanaticism, and doubt.

One of these sequences contains most of the elements that have been criticized as offensive to Muslims. It is a transformed re-narration of the life of Muhammad (called "Mahound" or "the Messenger" in the novel) in Mecca ("Jahilia"). At its centre is the episode of the Satanic Verses, in which the prophet first proclaims a revelation in favour of the old polytheistic deities, but later renounces this as an error induced by Shaitan. There are also two opponents of the "Messenger": a demonic heathen priestess, Hind, and an irreverent skeptic and satirical poet, Baal. When the prophet returns to the city in triumph, Baal goes into hiding in an underground brothel, where the prostitutes assume the identities of the prophet's wives. Also, one of the prophet's companions claims that he, doubting the "Messenger"'s authenticity, has subtly altered portions of the Qur'an as they were dictated to him.

The second sequence tells the story of Ayesha, an Indian peasant girl who claims to be receiving revelations from the Archangel Gibreel. She entices all her village community to embark on a foot pilgrimage to Mecca, claiming that they will be able to walk on foot across the Arabian Sea. The pilgrimage ends in a catastrophic climax as the believers all walk into the water and disappear, amid disturbingly conflicting testimonies from observers about whether they just drowned or were in fact miraculously able to cross the sea.

A third dream sequence presents the figure of a fanatic expatriate religious leader, the "Imam," set again in a late-20th-century setting. This figure is a transparent allusion to the life of Ayatollah Khomeini in his Parisian exile, but it is also linked through various recurrent narrative motifs to the figure of the "Messenger".

Literary criticism and analysis

Overall, the book received favourable reviews from literary critics.

Timothy Brennan called the work "the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain" that captures the immigrants dream-like disorientation and their process of "union-by-hybridization". The book is seen as "fundamentally a study in alienation."^[2]

Muhammd Mashuq ibn Ally wrote that "The Satanic Verses is about identity, alienation, rootlessness, brutality, compromise, and conformity. These concepts confront all migrants, disillusioned with both cultures: the one they are in and the one they join. Yet knowing they cannot live a life of anonymity, they mediate between them both. The Satanic Verses is a reflection of the author’s dilemmas." The work is an "albeit surreal, record of its own author's continuing identity crisis."^[2] Ally said that the book reveals the author ultimately as "the victim of nineteenth-century British colonialism."^[2] Rushdie himself spoke confirming this interpretation of his book, saying that it was not about Islam, "but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay."^[2] He has also said "It’s a novel which happened to contain a castigation of Western materialism. The tone is comic."^[2]

After the Satanic Verses controversy developed some scholars familiar with the book and the whole of Rushdie's work like M. D. Fletcher saw the reaction as ironic. Fletcher wrote "It is perhaps a relevant irony that some of the major expressions of hostility toward Rushdie came from those about whom and (in some sense) for whom he wrote."^[6] He said the manifestations of the controversy in Britain "embodied an anger arising in part from the frustrations of the migrant experience and generally reflected failures of multicultural integration, both significant Rushdie themes. Clearly, Rushdie's interests centrally include explorations of how migration heightens one's awareness that perceptions of reality are relative and fragile, and of the nature of religious faith and revelation, not to mention the political manipulation of religion. Rushdie's own assumptions about the importance of literature, which parallel in some sense the literal value accorded the written word in Islamic tradition. But Rushdie seems to have assumed that diverse communities and cultures share some degree of common moral ground on the basis of which dialogue can be pieced together, and it is perhaps for this reason that he underestimated the implacable nature of the hostility evoked by The Satanic Verses, even though a major theme of that novel is the dangerous nature of closed, absolutist belief systems."^[6]

Rushdie's influences have long been a point of interest to scholars examining his work and for The Satanic Verses Chandrabhanu Pattanayak noted the influence of William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (influences Rushdie admitted to).^[6] M. Keith Booker likened the book to James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.^[6] Al-'Azm noted the influence of François Rabelais' works on Rushdie and on The Satanic Verses in particular.^[6] Others have noted an influence of Indian classics such as the Mahabharata and the Arabic Arabian Nights.^[6]

Srinivas Aravamudan’s analysis of The Satanic Verses was perceived by other scholars as hailing the book as a proof "demonstrating the compatibility of postmodernism and post-colonialism in the one novel."^[6] Aravamudan himself stressed the satiric nature of the work and held that while it and Midnight's Children may appear to be more "comic epic", "clearly those works are highly satirical" in a similar vein of postmodern satire pioneered by Joseph Heller in Catch-22.^[6]

The Satanic Verses continued to exhibit Rushdie's penchant for organizing his work in terms of parallel stories. Within the book "there are major parallel stories, alternating dream and reality sequences, tied together by the recurring names of the characters in each; this provides intertexts within each novel which comment on the other stories."^[6] The Satanic Verses also exhibits Rushdie's common practice of using allusions in order to invoke connotative links. Within the book he referenced everything from mythology to "one-liners invoking recent popular culture" sometimes using several per page.^[6] Chapter VII was especially noted by for such usage.^[6]

Controversy

In the Muslim community the novel caused great controversy for what many Muslims believed were blasphemous references. As the controversy spread, the book was banned in India and burned in demonstrations in the United Kingdom. In mid-February 1989, following a violent riot against the book in Pakistan, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran and a Shi'a Muslim scholar, issued a fatwa calling on all good Muslims to kill Rushdie and his publishers, or to point him out to those who can kill him if they cannot themselves.^[7]

Following the fatwa, Rushdie was put under police protection by the British government. Despite a conciliatory statement by Iran in 1998, and Rushdie's declaration that he would stop living in hiding, the Iranian state news agency reported in 2006 that the fatwa would remain in place permanently since fatwas can only be rescinded by the person who first issued them, and Khomeini had since died.^[8]

As of early 2010 Rushdie has not been physically harmed, but others connected with the book have suffered violent attacks. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese language translator of the book, was stabbed to death on 11 July 1991; Ettore Capriolo, the Italian language translator, was seriously injured in a stabbing the same month; William Nygaard, the publisher in Norway, barely survived an attempted assassination in Oslo in October 1993, and Aziz Nesin, the Turkish language translator, was the intended target in the events that led to the Sivas massacre on 2 July 1993 in Sivas, Turkey, which resulted in the deaths of 37 people.^[4]

See also

• Censorship in South Asia
• Censorship in India
• Censorship by religion
• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of speech versus blasphemy

References

Further reading

• 100 Banned Books: Censorship Histories of World Literature', Nicholas J. Karolides, Margaret Bald & Dawn B. Sova, Checkmark Books, New York, 1999. ISBN 0-8160-4059-1
• Daniel Pipes: The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West (1990), Transaction Publishers, (2003), with a postscript by Koenraad Elst. ISBN 0-7658-0996-6
• Elst, Koenraad: The Rushdie Rules Middle East Quarterly, June 1998

External links

• ISBN 0-312-27082-8
• Notes on Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses
• The Rusdhie's Affair Legacy by Koenraad Elst
• Swords to sell a god by Ram Swarup
• Healthy Blasphemy: Dissenting Discourses in Rushdie and Bulgakov - discusses the role of the artist in Rushdie's and Bulgakov's works