This article is about the novel. For the verses known as "Satanic Verses", see
Satanic Verses.
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 used
magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters. The title refers to the so-called "
satanic verses", a group of alleged
Quranic 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 the 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] The Satanic Verses sparked a
major controversy when conservative Muslims accused it of blasphemy and mocking their faith. The outrage among some Muslims resulted in a
fatwā calling for Rushdie's death issued by
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the
Supreme Leader of Iran,
on 14 February 1989. Although Rushdie himself has never been attacked
as a result of the book's creation, Islamic extremists have attacked
several connected individuals such as translator
Hitoshi Igarashi (leading to, in Igarashi's case, death).
The Satanic Verses 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.
[3]) Chamcha is an emigrant who has broken with his Indian identity and works as a
voiceover artist in England.
At the beginning of the novel, both are trapped in a hijacked plane flying 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. Chamcha is arrested and passes through an
ordeal of police abuse as a suspected illegal immigrant. Farishta's
transformation can partly be read on a realistic level as the symptom of
the protagonist's developing schizophrenia.
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 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.
[edit] Dream sequences
Embedded in this story is a series of half-magic dream vision
narratives, ascribed to the 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 so-called
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
Quran 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 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," 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".
[edit] Literary criticism and analysis
Overall, the book received favourable reviews from literary critics.
In a 2003 volume of criticism of Rushdie's career, influential critic
Harold Bloom named
The Satanic Verses "Rushdie's largest aesthetic achievement".
[4]
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."
[5]
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 parallel in the literal value accorded the written word
in Islamic tradition to some degree. 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."
[5]
Rushdie's influences have long been a point of interest to scholars
examining his work. According to W. J. Weatherby, influences on
The Satanic Verses were listed as Joyce,
Italo Calvino, Kafka,
Frank Herbert, Pynchon,
Mervyn Peake,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Jean-Luc Godard,
J. G. Ballard, and
William Burroughs.
[6] Chandrabhanu Pattanayak notes the influence of
William Blake's
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and
Mikhail Bulgakov's
The Master and Margarita (influences Rushdie admitted to).
[5] M. Keith Booker likens the book to
James Joyce's
Finnegans Wake.
[5] Al-'Azm notes the influence of
François Rabelais' works.
[5] Others have noted an influence of Indian classics such as the
Mahabharata and the
Arabic Arabian Nights.
[5] Angela Carter
writes that the novel contains "inventions such as the city of Jahilia,
'built entirely of sand,' that gives a nod to Calvino and a wink to
Frank Herbert".
[7]
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."
[5] 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.
[5]
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."
[5] 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.
[5] Chapter VII was especially noted by for such usage.
[5]
[edit] Controversy
The novel caused great
controversy in the
Muslim community for what some Muslims believed were
blasphemous references. Rushdie was accused of mis-using freedom of speech.
[8] As the controversy spread, the import of the book was banned
[9] in
India and it was 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.
[10] Although the British Conservative government under
Margaret Thatcher gave Rushdie round-the-clock police protection, many politicians on both sides were hostile to the author. British
Labour MP
Keith Vaz led a march through
Leicester shortly after he was elected in 1989 calling for the book to be banned, while
Conservative MP
Norman Tebbit,
the party's former chairman, called Rushdie an "outstanding villain"
whose "public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of
his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality".
[11] Meanwhile the
Commission for Racial Equality and a liberal think tank, the
Policy Studies Institute held seminars on the Rushdie affair. They did not invite the author
Fay Weldon who spoke out against burning books, but did invite
Shabbir Akhtar,
a Cambridge philosophy graduate who called for "a negotiated
compromise" which "would protect Muslim sensibilities against gratuitous
provocation". The journalist and author
Andy McSmith
wrote at the time "We are witnessing, I fear, the birth of a new and
dangerously illiberal "liberal" orthodoxy designed to accommodate Dr
Akhtar and his fundamentalist friends."
[12]
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.
[13]
Rushdie has never been physically harmed for the book, but others associated with it have suffered violent attacks.
Hitoshi Igarashi, its
Japanese translator, was stabbed to death on 11 July 1991.
Ettore Capriolo, the
Italian translator, was seriously injured in a stabbing the same month.
[14] William Nygaard, the publisher in
Norway, was shot three times in an attempted
assassination in
Oslo in October 1993, but survived.
Aziz Nesin, the
Turkish 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.
[15]
Individual purchasers of the book have not been harmed. The only nation
with a predominantly Muslim population where the novel remains legal is
Turkey.
[citation needed]
In September 2012, Rushdie expressed doubt that
The Satanic Verses would be published today because of a climate of "fear and nervousness".
[16]