SOURCE: Mufti, Aamir. “Reading the Rushdie Affair: ‘Islam,’ Cultural Politics, Form.” In The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, edited by Richard Burt, pp. 307-39. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Mufti explores the cultural, political, and aesthetic forces at work in the reception of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses.]

Gayatri Spivak has argued that, in the case of The Satanic Verses, “the praxis and politics of life” intercept the aesthetic object to such a degree that a “mere reading” of the novel has become impossible.¹ In this essay, I will examine the novel's “interception by” (and its intervention in) certain political contexts within the post-1979 Islamic world. The essay is not meant to provide an even partial “reading” of the text in traditional critical terms. Instead, it will focus on “the Rushdie affair” as a complex cultural (and political) event within the Islamic world, treating it as a constellation that brings together, highlights, and restructures some of the central elements of contemporary Muslim life. It is well known that Muslim South Asia, both “at home” and in diaspora, figured prominently in the crisis from the very beginning. Accordingly, it is the Indian context that provides the nucleus around which my argument will be built.

As has now become generally evident, the novel presents what is arguably the most serious literary challenge in recent years to the legitimacy of certain brands of contemporary “Islamic” politics. Some of the questions it confronts have been almost constantly present in the political discourse of much of the Islamic world for over a century, but have acquired their present form, as well as their current urgency, in the years since the Iranian Revolution of 1979: What kind of accommodation can Islam reach with “modernity” once “traditional” social structures have collapsed under the pressures of global capitalism? What is the place of women in a “modern” Islamic community? How is contemporary politics to be organized in accordance with Islamic tradition—and how is tradition to be interpreted? What place is there within Islam for claims—nationhood, citizenship, democracy, social and economic justice—that are identified with “secularism” and have their roots in the European Enlightenment? What is the role of Islam in the contemporary struggle against the economic, political, and cultural imperialism of the West? What, precisely, in this age of the globalization of economic, political, and cultural forms, does it mean to be a Muslim?

What has given the novel its transgressive force is that instead of merely thematizing these familiar issues, it also forces a changing of the terms of the discussion itself. Its multilayered engagement with the origin myth of Islamic orthodoxy, its “politics of offense” with respect to Islam,² have rightly been read as a forceful refusal to accept the cultural authority of the authoritarian political constellations and discourses, usually grouped under the label of “fundamentalism,” that have emerged across the Muslim world in the last decade and a half.³ The term fundamentalism is notoriously slippery. The history of its abuse in the Reagan-Bush era, for instance, by the media and “area studies” establishment alike, is well known. Furthermore, as Ervand Abrahamian has shown, the term has little utility as a description of the doctrinal content of even such a paradigmatic movement of “Islamic militancy” as Khomeinism.⁴ I therefore use the term, as will shortly become clear, in a very specific sense: as shorthand for the public and popular discourses of domestic and international militancy under the sign of “Islam” that have come to take remarkably similar shape across the Islamic world in recent years. The violence of the novel's reception in South Asia—and within the South Asian Muslim diaspora in Britain—is an accurate indicator of the anger generated by its insistence on a sweeping rearrangement and rethinking of the terms of Muslim public culture. It is the audacity of this insistence, enacted by an “insider,” and, as it were, “in full view” of the West, whose hostility to the world of Islam is both continuing and well known, that has been consistently glossed by the novel's Muslim detractors as “irreverence,” “apostasy,” and “blasphemy.”

It is my contention here that the “affair” surrounding The Satanic Verses forces us to reexamine notions of literary reception current in critical theory today. Conceptions of reception based on an almost Victorian image of the solitary bourgeois reader have allowed progressive commentators to more or less dismiss the novel as produced for (and “consumed” by) Western audiences alone.⁵ Working under similar assumptions, Western accounts of the worldwide demonstrations against the book's publication have often expressed amazement at the passion of crowds that have obviously not read the book.⁶ A reconceptualization of reception appropriate to the cultural realities of the present global conjuncture, I will argue, must account for forms of mass “consumption” other than “reading” in the narrower sense of that word. Extracts published in the print media, in English and in translation; commentary in print, on the airwaves, and from the pulpit; fantasticated representation in the popular cinema; rumors and hearsay—such are the means by which the novel has achieved circulation in the Islamic world.

I am arguing that this piecemeal and fitful reception at the popular level is not simply accidental, and that in a sense the novel even requires it. First of all, the novel's political project vis-à-vis contemporary “Islam”—to intervene in the public political conversation within the Muslim world—required breaking out of the minuscule anglophone audience to which the English-language writer in South Asia is traditionally confined. And secondly, the almost obsessive attention given in Rushdie's novels to the dynamics of mass communication—the fantasylike distortions and fragmentation that events and objects go through in the process of entering the public sphere—the insistence in The Satanic Verses on the “impurity” of any situation in the contemporary world, and the novel's self-conscious use of pastiche and nonlinear narrative themselves point toward the filtered reception the novel has received. So the familiar and sinister-sounding charge, leveled by the likes of Roald Dahl and John Le Carré, that Rushdie “knew what he was doing,” must be stood on its head: by inserting itself in bits and pieces within the cultural politics of contemporary “Islam,” the novel has indeed achieved—if one may speak of “textual,” rather than authorial, intention—what was already inscribed in and suggested by its very form.⁷

Furthermore, this “reception by pastiche” forces us to think again about the meaning and function of pastiche within the text itself. Entirely assimilable neither to the national-allegorical function attributed by Jameson to “Third-World literature” nor to the purely stylistic connotations of “the postmodern” as it has been conceptualized in recent critical theory, pastiche—that is, hybridity of form, in this case the juxtaposition and overlapping of realist, “magical realist,” and “modernist” modes; the parodic rewriting of historical and religious narratives and of metropolitan texts, genres, and motifs; the use of the resources of literary as well as popular culture—takes on in Rushdie's text a deeply political and critical turn.⁸ It is precisely this ambivalence of form—is the book about “real” events in Islamic history or is it pure fiction and fantasy?—that constitutes the space within which the novel is able to function as critique. Pastiche, in this context, is neither a purely formal question nor merely the textual correlate of a hybrid “external reality.” Pastiche and formal ambivalence are here the very conditions that enable the literary text to enter the public sphere as political act.

Given the meticulous attention Rushdie has always directed toward the critical role of the postcolonial artist-intellectual, and toward the function of writing, it is perhaps ironic that his most politically interventionist work to date should have been read by so many progressive critics in the West only as an exercise in cosmopolitan irony and detachment, the work, as Brennan puts it, of a “court satirist.”⁹ No such piety clouds the discussion in India itself, where the novel has been discussed in explicitly political terms by antagonists and supporters alike, raising questions about secularism, class, citizenship, and the nature and role of the state—the most urgent and explosive constellation of issues facing Indian political life today.

The two earlier novels of Rushdie's trilogy, Midnight's Children and Shame, have most often been read as wide-ranging examinations and critiques of the modern nation-space designated by “India” and “Pakistan” respectively.¹⁰ They portrayed an essentially critical role for the artist-intellectual vis-à-vis the national project. While alluding in authorial asides to the substantive questions of intellectual “authenticity” in the postcolonial world, the earlier novels nevertheless approached the question of the intellectual in terms that were primarily negative: they were concerned with the failure of the imaginative work of nation building in two postcolonial countries.¹¹ In The Satanic Verses, a far more positive stand is taken in favor of the hybrid perspectives of postcolonial identity, a stand Rushdie had already elaborated at great length in essays and interviews.¹² Fredric Jameson has argued that the characteristic form of the “third world text” is “the national allegory.”¹³ Without ignoring the ubiquitous complicities and connections between literature and the national, it must nevertheless be pointed out that this formulation addresses only one moment in the “worldliness” of the texts it takes as its objects, that it is unable to account fully for the oppositional thrust of the first two novels of the trilogy, and that it falls far short of understanding the self-consciously supranational concerns of this third book. The role of the intellectual, as it appears in Rushdie's writings, involves, I will argue, going beyond a mere “telling of the experience of the collectivity itself” to a posing of specific challenges directed at historical fictions of community and representation.¹⁴

Before proceeding to the specific issues raised by the “Islamic” reception of the novel in India, I wish to take a brief detour and discuss the persistent theme of intellectual and critique in Rushdie's writing, and the change and expansion of focus it has undergone over the course of the trilogy. There is, I suggest, progressively greater foregrounding of the author's persona in each subsequent novel, and greater identification of the author himself with the critical thrust of the work. The passage from Midnight's Children to The Satanic Verses also marks a shift away from what I shall call a politics of constituency, toward what I have already spoken of as a politics of offense.

In Midnight's Children, the intellectual appears in the form of the narrator himself. Saleem Sinai, born at the moment of India's emergence from colonial rule, is “mysteriously handcuffed” to the fate of the nation and endowed with mysterious powers of “seeing into the hearts and minds of men.”¹⁵ In order to fully grasp the relation of Saleem to the nation itself, we may begin by recalling that it is under the prophecy of Jawaharlal Nehru, framed and hanging on the wall, that the boy Saleem grows up: “You are the newest bearer of that ancient face of India,” the prime minister's letter to the infant reads, “which is also eternally young. We shall be watching over your life with the closest attention; it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own” (122). The shadow of Nehru, the totemic intellectual of Indian nationalism, hangs heavy over Saleem's life, and his attempts to discover and impose a “third principle” (248-49) beyond “the endless duality of masses-and-classes, capital-and-labour, them-and-us” on the other one thousand mysteriously gifted “midnight's children” are deeply informed by the pedagogic and mediating role that the intellectual-politician is meant to play within the narrative of Indian nationalism.¹⁶

Saleem's disintegrating body and unfulfilled life highlight not so much the failure as the impossibility of the national (liberal-democratic) project of turning colonial subjects into democratic citizens while simultaneously insisting on the directing and guiding role of the anglicized elite. Saleem's anguished search in the Midnight Children's Conference for a “third principle” is thwarted as each child becomes “distracted by his or her own life” and is swayed by the counterarguments of Shiva, “midnight's darkest child,” that “the world is not ideas, rich boy; the world is no place for dreamers or their dreams.” And the adult Saleem, the artist-intellectual literally narrating the nation's history, is forced to conclude that “if there is a third principle, its name is childhood. But it dies; or rather, it is murdered.”

It is the impossibility and fraud of this mediation or “third principle,” so brutally revealed by the repression and tyranny of Indira Gandhi's Emergency Rule, that Midnight's Children confronts. It records the historical failure of the elite to “represent” the entire nation—in both the semiotic and the delegational senses of the word. This record does have its allegorical moments: Saleem, raised in privilege, is actually the illegitimate son of the departing Englishman Methwold, and he conceals this colonial patrimony from the Midnight Children's Conference, whose leadership he claims on the basis of superior ability and higher principles; Shiva, who is brought up in the street, and whose “birth-right” is denied him by Saleem, becomes his nemesis both within and outside the conference and is ultimately his undoing; Padma, the earthy “dung goddess” at once fascinated by the urbane Saleem and frustrated by his inability to fulfill her desires, becomes his protector and collaborator in the composition of the autobiography that is also a history of the nation. But the allegory remains incomplete in the resistance of the novel to the very idea of the nation as produced within the “grand narrative” of India's liberation and modernization.¹⁷ And to dislodge the authority of this narrative from within, to voice its blind spots, absences, and exclusions, becomes the primary task of that special child of midnight, the postcolonial intellectual.

Hence the series of inversions enacted in the novel. If “national time,” as Benedict Anderson suggests, is linear, calendrical time, the time of Midnight's Children is cyclical, ritual, or, as Rushdie puts it, “pickled” time;¹⁸ if the typical nationalist narrative proceeds from interior to exterior time and space, giving “hypnotic confirmation of the solidarity of a single community, embracing characters, author and readers,”¹⁹Midnight's Children, like the oral tale, “goes in great loops and circles back on itself, repeats earlier things, digresses,”²⁰ in order precisely to suggest a multiplicity of voices, interests, communities; and if the solitary nationalist hero moves “through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside,”²¹ Saleem, this ironic and restless consciousness, his body wracked by the “rip tear crunch” of the nation's history, himself puts the veracity of his narrative in doubt and raises questions about the authority of his class—the anglicized middle class—as an interpretive community.

The critical consciousness that emerges in Midnight's Children, then, is double-edged: it is directed at both colonial culture and the myth of cultural authenticity and authority that replaced it. Frantz Fanon argued in “On National Culture” that “the native intellectual who wishes to create an authentic work of art” must overcome assimilation in the culture of the colonizers as well as the temptation to articulate the immemorial “truth” of the nation (“we have the right to ask if this truth is in fact a reality”). He must come to inhabit, Fanon wrote, that “zone of occult instability” where the culture of a people is forged.²² Deeply aware of its colonial and local-elite affiliations, Midnight's Children is at one level an account of the struggle to represent that instability.

While I have so far emphasized the negative moments of the novel's attitude toward the nation, it should be pointed out that this attitude is in the end quite ambivalent. Rushdie's frequent assertions to the effect that Midnight's Children was motivated by the desire to reclaim “that part of my life that was in danger of being lost” must not be read at the level of autobiographical memory alone.²³ For the account of the failure of the anglicized elite to “dream up” the nation in its own image is accompanied by a lingering nostalgia for the social order envisioned in that dream, an order reflected in the graceful life of Methwold Estate.²⁴ This nostalgia has played no small part in creating for the novel an enthusiastic constituency within the very same social class whose self-proclaimed place in society it set out to criticize.

In Shame, while the critical relationship of the artist to the false certainties of (in this case, Pakistani) national culture is maintained, there is a formal change that has the effect of increasing the stakes and intensifying the critique. The narrator, no longer a Saleem-like “character” in the novel, is repeatedly identified with the author himself. At various junctures, the “story” is interrupted by passages of varying length in which the author inserts himself into the narrative with commentary and with biographical information that even the relatively uninformed reader recognizes as referring to the author himself. And once again the question of critical authority is raised. By what authority, he imagines his Pakistani readers objecting, can the voluntarily exiled writer speak of Third World realities?:

Outsider! Trespasser! You have no right to this subject! … I know: nobody ever arrested me. Nor are they ever likely to. Poacher! Pirate! We reject your authority. We know you, with your foreign language wrapped around you like a flag: speaking about us in your forked tongue, what can you tell but lies!

(23)²⁵

To which the author-narrator at once replies:

Is history to be considered the property of the participants solely? In what courts are such claims staked, what boundary commissions map out the territories? Can only the dead speak?

(23)

This sudden appearance of the author between the reader and the plot of the novel, aside from insisting on the right to critique, personalizes the novel's critical intention, adding a confrontational tone that was not present in Midnight's Children. It also marks a shift away from the residual nostalgia for the nation that was still present in the earlier novel. The combined effect is a weaker sense of identification with a constituency within the “community” (Pakistan) that is the object of the novel's representation.

In The Satanic Verses this personalization is given a new turn, for one of the forms in which the author now “appears” is that of Salman the Persian, a minor character with respect to the novel as a whole, but pivotal in the Jahilia sequences that are at the center of the Islamic controversy.²⁶ This “identification” of the author with the Prophet Mahound's scribe, responsible for secretly emending and polluting the word of God, is carried out in a number of ways. Aside from the common name Salman—“Persian” in early Islamic culture was simply synonymous with “non-Arab Muslim”—and the common writer's vocation, a number of textual markers facilitate this identification. Salman's account to Baal of his loss of faith and fall from Mahound's grace, for instance, shifts suddenly from the third person to the first, from “Salman complained to Baal,” to “I began to get a bad smell in my nose” (365).²⁷ The effect of course is to associate Salman the author with the doubt, apostasy, and treachery of Salman the scribe. It is this insistence on personalizing the novel's intervention, reinforced by the tone and substance of Rushdie's reactions early in the controversy, that placed him outside the pale of discussion and disputation as far as his critics are concerned. It also made it nearly impossible for the novel to be publicly identified with in the context of contemporary political and cultural life in the Muslim world. The shift away from a politics of constituency, in other words, is complete.

Each of the two novels that have followed Midnight's Children represents, then, an intensification of political engagement at the same time that it marks a shift away from what might be called a politics of constituency: Shame in comparison with Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses in comparison with Shame, seem less and less concerned with addressing actual audiences in South Asia with whom they might be able to declare a commonality of purpose and position. This is not to say that such constituencies do not exist. If anything, the (traditionally conceived) audience for these novels within the Islamic world is larger than most outsiders suspect. I am simply arguing that the novels go beyond these possibilities, in order to enact what I have called a politics of displacement and offense, transgressing universally enforced norms of literary representation and public discussion—from state-enforced censorship in Pakistan to the political and cultural taboos of contemporary “Islamic” culture—with such force and to such an extent that some aspects at least of the official culture are thrown into question. In the transgressive politics of The Satanic Verses vis-à-vis “Islam,” this process has reached its climax.

It is worth recalling at this juncture that the offending passages are contained mostly within two chapters—“Jahilia” and “Return to Jahilia”—that add up to less than seventy-five pages in this rather large book. There are, broadly speaking, three areas that, in terms of content, constitute the novel's most transgressive moments. The first, suggested by the title itself, is the incident of the verses that were revealed to Mahound in response to the Jahilian grandee's offer of peace if three of the Jahilian goddesses were accepted as minor deities by the new religion; the verses sanctioning this arrangement were renounced by Mahound as the work of Satan once the grandee's wife Hind had withdrawn her husband's offer of peace (123). The second is the incident involving Salman, already discussed above, in which the scribe, beginning to lose faith in the prophet, tests the prophet by altering the verses as they are dictated to him; Mahound fails to notice the emendations when the verses are read back to him for confirmation (367-68). The third concerns the Jahilian whorehouse named The Curtain, or Hijab—the Arabic word is now used widely in the Islamic world for the shoulder-length scarf that has come to be equated, in varying cultural contexts, with the required Islamic headdress for women—whose prostitutes take on the names of Mahound's wives (which happen to be the names of the historical Muhammad's wives as well) in order to heighten the excitement and pleasure of their customers (376-92).

While the first two sequences call into question the infallibility of the revelation—in the first case by problematizing the mode of transmission of the word of God, and in the second by suggesting the addition and emendation of passages by a human—the last personalizes the offense by playing irreverently with figures held in deep reverence by believers. It is these three moments that have most often been extracted from the novel for quotation and transmission and have acquired a sort of iconic value in the mass politics in which it has become embroiled.²⁸ Syed Shahabuddin, the Indian opposition member of Parliament who led the successful campaign for the banning of the book in India, castigated Rushdie's novel on precisely these points, in an open letter than deserves a closer look, and to which I will shortly return:

The very title of your book is suggestively derogatory. In the eyes of the believer the Koran is the word of God, and you plead innocence of the possible Muslim reaction. You depict the Prophet whose name the practising Muslim recites five times a day, whom he loves, whom he considers the model for mankind, as an imposter and you expect us to applaud you? You have had the nerve to situate the wives of the Prophet, whom we Muslims regard as the mothers of the community, in a brothel, and you expect the Muslims to praise the power of your imagination?²⁹

Similarly, Shabbir Akhtar, the animus behind the Bradford-based campaign for a banning of the book in Britain, characterized the novel as “a calculated attempt to vilify and slander the Prophet of Islam.”³⁰ It portrays Muhammad, he argued, as “an unscrupulous politician. … The book he claims to bring from God is really just a confused catalogue of trivial rules about sexual activity and excretion. … His household is portrayed in pornographic scenes in a brothel incongruously called ‘The Veil’—the symbol of female modesty and chastity in the Islamic ethical outlook.”³¹ And beyond the mere content of the offending passages, Akhtar pointed to the tone, “the idiom and the temper” of the novel, which are “uniformly supercilious and dismissive,” and seem “calculated to shock and humiliate Muslim sensibilities.”³²

It is difficult to convey the transgressive force of the offending passages in the contemporary political atmosphere of much of the Islamic world, but especially in Muslim South Asia. The decade after the Iranian Revolution saw the rise to political center stage of political groupings that had previously been of marginal significance at best. The various fundamentalist guerrilla organizations in Afghanistan that fought the Soviets and the Afghan communists,³³ the Hizbollah among the Shi'i of Lebanon and Hamas in the occupied Palestinian territories, the Jama'at-i-Islami in Pakistan under the army's patronage,³⁴ such figures as Shahabuddin and the Imam Bukhari of Delhi's Jaama Mosque in India,³⁵ and organizations such as the Bradford Council of Mosques in Britain³⁶ have been able to command influence and attention far beyond the numerical strength of their followings. (And as recent experience in Algeria has shown, this influence is capable of turning itself into electoral strength, with devastating results.) The centerpiece of this new political culture is of course “Islam,” the sign at once of a return to an authentic past and of passage out of the neocolonial structures of domination toward a more empowering future.

The change even from the 1970s has been so marked and so sudden that Eqbal Ahmed has spoken of an ongoing “crisis” of Islamic society:

Thus, as in all religious communities, there is a repository of millennial traditions in Islam that tend to surface most forcefully in times of crisis, collective stress, and anomie. Times have rarely been as bad or as stressful for the Muslim peoples as they are now. Hence, all the contrasting symptoms associated with deep crises of politics and society—rise of religious fundamentalism, radical and revolutionary mobilization, spontaneous uprisings and disoriented quietism—characterise Muslim politics today.³⁷

First the traumas of colonial rule and then economic “modernization” under postcolonial regimes have caused, Ahmed argues, “the erosion of economic, social, and political relationships which had been the bases of traditional Muslim order for more than a thousand years.”³⁸ Secular politics of various hues—Kemalist modernization, Nasserite pan-Arabism, Bhutto's awami populism—failed, in the decades since decolonization, either to generate sustained political and economic independence from the West or to acquire hegemonic force within civil society, producing an atmosphere, beginning in the 1970s, that has proven favorable to the rise of fundamentalist, neototalitarian movements across the Islamic world.³⁹

Very broadly speaking, the public discourse of Islamic fundamentalism has produced two distinct but related critiques of the contemporary state of affairs in Islamic societies. And while the two typically occur as moments of the same argument against the status quo, they need to be separated for the purpose of analysis. We may speak of the first of these as an essentially cultural critique, directed at cultural forms and practices that come to be marked within the discourse as “modern,” “Western,” “foreign”; in short, as un-Islamic. The range of such practices is, of course, enormous, from habits of eating and dressing to the operation of educational and juridical institutions; but the one area of social life where the cultural critique has come to rest with particular force, and with particularly disastrous consequences, is that of gender and sexuality. The fundamentalist obsession with female “chastity”—the segregation of the sexes, the veiling of women, the minimizing (if not elimination) of women's presence in public life—is well known. These concerns find room, as Fatima Mernissi has pointed out, in the radical split within the individual “between what one does, confronted by rapid, totally uncontrolled changes in daily life, and the discourse about an unchangeable religious tradition that one feels psychologically compelled to elaborate in order to keep a minimal sense of identity.”⁴⁰ Claims about the literal truth of the Koran therefore become the means of insisting upon the possibility of an unmediated reconstruction, in modern times, of the original, “righteous” community. And the “chastity” of women, in the overcoded form outlined here, comes to signify the minimal condition for the desired return to a state of cultural purity and authenticity.⁴¹

The other, directly political moment in fundamentalism's critique of society is directed at neocolonial structures of domination and exploitation, and the (“secular”) national elites that function as comprador classes within those structures. It is able, for this purpose, to draw upon collective memories and traditions of resistance to colonialism, which are framed very often in terms of a historical struggle between Islam and the Christian West. (The truth value of these political claims is not the primary concern here. But it should of course be noted that there is a history of conversation and collaboration between fundamentalist groupings and imperialist interests, as witnessed by the CIA's decade-long sponsoring of the Afghan fundamentalist guerrillas and Iran's “contragate” dealings with Israel and the United States.) As I have already noted, these two assertions—claims about cultural and political authenticity, respectively—typically occur in conflated form in fundamentalist argumentation. Hence secular and “modernizing” tendencies in society—from the securing of legal rights for women to demands for the protection and strengthening of democratic rights, including freedom of expression—are represented as signs of Westernization, and hence of neocolonial bondage. Furthermore, the protracted history of struggle and out-and-out conflict between the secular left and the machinery of the postcolonial state is either erased entirely or at best seen as being of minimal importance. In speaking of Rushdie as an apostate from Islam, for instance, Akhtar is able to make the following astonishing equation:

There are therefore countless Rushdies in the House of Islam. The Shah of Iran and his supporters were, to a man, atheists blindly imitating Western patterns of conduct.⁴²

And of course, as is well known, the accusation of gharbzadegi or “West contamination” was the broad brush with which the pro-Khomeini, “populist” segment of the Iranian Shi'i clergy painted the whole range of its opponents, including liberals, communists, and Islamic radicals who especially had played a leading role in the movement against the monarchy, as it sought to eliminate them and consolidate its own hold over the course of the revolution within months of the fall of the shah.⁴³

Despite this relative discursive stability, fundamentalism has proven notoriously difficult for the secular left to identify and critically engage. Apart from a recurrent failure of will on the part of the left, too often unable to see its position in Muslim society as anything but anomalous, this has resulted from the very nature of fundamentalist discourse itself. With its universalizing language of “Islamic” authenticity, fundamentalism has been able to make alliances with, appropriate, and mobilize sectors of society whose religious life and traditions have themselves been the object of vigorous critique in fundamentalist theology. Thus, the contemporary sense of social crisis and the erosion of popular cultural traditions and social practices under the impact of uneven urbanization, industrialization, and consumerization are easily construed as threats to “Islamic” culture and polity, and the desire for the recovery of that disappearing life is displaced onto the fundamentalist slogan for the reconstruction of the original, “righteous” community of seventh-century Islam.

It should be made explicitly clear that in no sense am I portraying fundamentalism as a return to premodern social, cultural, and political forms. On the whole it would be accurate to say that fundamentalism in fact critiques and rejects most of these “traditional” forms, seeing them as violations of the principles of the “righteous” community inaugurated by Muhammad and his early followers at Medina. (Khomeini, of course, went so far as to claim that revolutionary Iran had surpassed even the Prophet's society in the implementation of true Islam “in all spheres of life, particularly in the material and the spiritual spheres.”)⁴⁴ Not to see this is also to miss the crucial point that what fundamentalism represents is precisely a struggle over the cultural artifacts of modernity—nationhood, citizenship, representative government, the forms of anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggle, the terms and institutions of the public sphere—and who gets to define them, and in what terms. The first two years of the Iranian Revolution—which saw a protracted struggle between the “populist” mullahs on the one hand, and liberals, Marxists, and the Islamic radical Mojahedin on the other—are an object lesson in this process of gaining control of, and redefining, the institutions of modern public life.⁴⁵ It is in this context that “the West” (and the taint of association with it) becomes a site for negative contestation, as both the historical source of these cultural artifacts and the chief impediment to their acquisition and development.

My purpose in outlining the salient features of the public discourse of fundamentalism—and it will be clear that my concern is with its popular constructions of “Islam,” and not with fundamentalist theological discourse—is not to suggest the existence of a monolithic religio-political movement around the Islamic world. The aim here is to sketch out the discursive unity that allows similar fundamentalist arguments to be formulated in very different political and cultural contexts. The self-representation of fundamentalism in terms of “Islamic” cultural authenticity and anti-imperialist political purity is such a constant. So is the insistence on a rationalist-literalist reading of the Koran as a basis for the transformation of society. (Hence the opposition of fundamentalism to the enormous range of forms—including saint worship, the disciplines of the Sufis, the numerous traditions of mystical union with the divine around the Islamic world—in which “Islam” has been lived and practiced by the great majority of Muslims over the centuries.)⁴⁶ The diversity of actual fundamentalist groups around the world—as indexed by the kinds of alliances (and enemies) they make in particular historical situations, the political strategies they employ, and even the theological systems to which they adhere—is actually quite staggering. More importantly, the range of political contexts in which one or more elements of this discourse of “Islam” have in recent years been mobilized, by fringe groups and state structures alike, is also enormous.

In Pakistan during the 1980s, for instance, “Islamization” became the means of consolidation of the army's hold on power, a process carried out with the active participation of, among others, sections of the land-owning class, the bureaucracy, industrial and commercial bourgeoisies, and the small but influential Jama'at-i-Islami.⁴⁷ The term refers in principle to reform of public institutions such as the judicial and financial systems in accordance with the requirements of traditional Islamic law or shari'a. However, the full range of its discursive functions reaches far beyond that institutional focus and rests on an identification of the interests of “Islam” with the state, and until his death in 1988, with the person of Zia in particular.

Despite its self-proclaimed role of citadel of South Asian Islam, however, Pakistan was slow to react to the publication of the novel. The first country to ban it, within weeks of its publication in Britain in the early fall of 1988, was Rushdie's native India. There the book fell victim to an ongoing and bloody struggle between Hindu fundamentalist and Muslim groups over a sixteenth-century mosque in Ayodhya in northern India, claimed by the Hindu groups to have been built by the first Mughal emperor, Babar, on the site of the temple marking the birthplace of the Lord God Rama. The Babri Masjid-Rama Janamabhoomi conflict, which had already taken scores of lives, was threatening to explode out of control:⁴⁸ the Babri Masjid Coordinating Committee, consisting of notable Muslim politicians and clerics, with Shahabuddin as one of its leading figures, had promised a huge march to Ayodhya to underline Muslim claims to the site. Hindu groups had promised an equal show of force, and widespread bloodshed was expected. The Congress government of Rajiv Gandhi was having discussions with the Muslim leaders, negotiating to have them cancel their proposed march. On October 5 the government announced its ban; on October 12 Shahabuddin announced that the march had been indefinitely postponed. Despite official denials from both sides, it is difficult not to see a connection.⁴⁹

Rushdie at once denounced the decision in somewhat breathless and vituperative terms, suggesting that Rajiv Gandhi had come out “looking not only philistine and antidemocratic but opportunistic” as well.⁵⁰ The reply to Rushdie's harangue came from Shahabuddin, in the open letter published in the Times of India of October 13, which I quoted from earlier. The thrust of Shahabuddin's critique is that the novel is in fact an act of cultural imperialism—“literary colonialism,” he calls it—coming as it does from the West, “which has not yet laid the ghost of the crusades [sic] to rest, but given it a new cultural wrapping.” It is Rushdie's willingness to “vend his Islam wares in the West,” Shahabuddin argues, that “explains why writers like [him] are so wanted and pampered” there. India would stand up against this act of cultural violation, and not cringe in the face of accusations of loss of expressive freedoms from Rushdie's “British champions and advisors.”⁵¹

But despite the fact that it is actually addressed to Rushdie, much of Shahabuddin's response is an engagement with what he identifies as the “Anglicized elite” and “liberal establishment” of the country. He excoriates them for not having thrown off the psychological fetters of colonialism, as witnessed by their undignified and unconcealed pleasure at the fact that “a book by a writer of Indian origin [has been] nominated, sorry, shortlisted for the highest literary award in the Vilayat [that is, Britain] by the sahibs themselves.” But what is interesting here is that Shahabuddin defines the Muslims of India as distinct from, and in opposition to, the national intelligentsia:

Even more shocking and saddening at the same time is the communication gap between the Muslim community and the so-called intelligentsia. There is no mental rapport, no instantaneous recognition of pain, no spontaneous sharing of anguish. … It's unbelievable that what pains one section gives pleasure to the other.⁵²

This strange distinction is due in part, of course, to the majority/minority dynamics of the Indian nation-state and the marginal, though “protected,” place of the Muslims within it. But it also articulates with the wider discursive formation I have been attempting to describe. For “Muslim” and “Islam” here are semantic spaces that exclude the experience of secular intellectual life, and Shahabuddin's statement is of one with Akhtar's declaration that

given that the Koran is the book which defines the authentically Muslim outlook, there is no choice in the matter. Anyone who fails to be offended by Rushdie's book ipso facto ceases to be a Muslim.⁵³

One of the more astonishing features of the Rushdie affair is the fact of its truly international dimensions, encompassing as it does political contexts as diverse as post-Zia Pakistan, the “communal” problem in India, and the politics of Asian immigration in Great Britain. And public responses by Muslims to the publication of this book, written by a writer of Indian origin naturalized and living in Britain, have been registered not only in Britain, India, and Pakistan, but also in places as diverse and as remote from the scene of the infraction as South Africa, (then) Soviet Central Asia, and Indonesia. What this range allows us to see is that it has become possible today to speak of an “Islamic” public sphere, incorporating elements of the public life of a large and diverse set of Muslim communities, ranging from nation-states in the Third World to ethnic minorities across the globe. Increased access to the international media, either directly or filtered through the regional and national media, continuing links between migrants and their parent communities, and increasing cooperation and coordination between agencies of the state and between religio-political groups in different parts of the world have all led to the transmission of information at unprecedented levels and with amazing speed. Public discussion of the place and meaning of Islam in contemporary life has therefore become surprisingly pan-Islamic in scope. What the response to the publication of the novel has also made clear is that this discussion is dominated by the literalist and universalizing discourse of fundamentalism.

It is the stability of this public sphere, in which resistance to neototalitarian movements and discourses is marginalized, deemed anti-Islamic, and often brutally suppressed, that The Satanic Verses disturbs. The concept of “public sphere” as defining institution of modern society owes its elaboration, of course, to the work of Jürgen Habermas. Habermas speaks of the “bourgeois public sphere” as the space for “rational-critical debate” within liberal society, in which “access is guaranteed to all citizens,”⁵⁴ and which is characterized by a co-incidence of the narrow interests of those who come to be defined as citizens and the “general interest” of society.⁵⁵ I use the term in a significantly different sense. My use of it points, first of all, to the processes of selection and transfiguration through which something gets to be constituted and disseminated as an object of dispute and discussion within this public sphere. On the one hand, low levels of literacy in the Third World and on the other, a generally high measure of access to electronic media and means of information transmission—radio, television, cinema, audio- and videotape technology, public address systems, fax machines—produce conditions of reception in direct contradiction to the requirements of most genres of (both indigenous and metropolitan) high literary production, a question to which I will shortly return. Secondly, I wish to point precisely to the enforced exclusions—in this case women, peasants and workers, dissident activists, artists and intellectuals—on which this public sphere is based.

But of more immediate concern for us at this point are the discursive constraints I have tried to evoke, which regulate discussions of “Islam” and its meaning and place in contemporary society. By questioning the infallible divinity of the Revelation, by refusing to accept the required code of strict reverence when speaking of the Prophet and his close circle of relatives and companions, and, more generally, by secularizing (and hence profaning) the sacred tropology of Islam in insisting upon its appropriation for the purposes of fiction, the novel throws into doubt the discursive edifice within which “Islam” has been publicly produced in recent years.⁵⁶ What this destabilization makes at least possible is the expansion of the discussion about Islam in the contemporary world, the insertion of other voices into this public sphere, and greater and more coherent resistance to the discourse of fundamentalism within it. It is in this sense that the politics the novel enacts is not one of constituency, but of displacement and offense. Critics who place the novel only or primarily within the metropolitan context ignore this mode of the novel's self-insertion into the politics of contemporary Islam.⁵⁷

It would be dangerous and naive, however, to see the novel as embodying an unambiguously antireligious viewpoint, for that, of course, is precisely the view of its fundamentalist critics. As Sara Suleri has convincingly shown, the Western liberal appropriation of the embattled author as “one of us” does not “acknowledge the strong possibility that Rushdie's latest novel epitomizes the profound cultural fidelity represented by specific acts of religious betrayal.”⁵⁸ “Rushdie performs,” she argues, “a curious act of faith: he chooses disloyalty in order to dramatize his continuing obsession with the metaphors that Islam makes available to a postcolonial sensibility.”⁵⁹ For the effect of this disloyalty is not to replace belief with the final certitude of disbelief. It is, rather, to posit doubt as “the opposite of faith” (Satanic Verses, 92), as the inevitable corollary of faith, or, as Suleri puts it, as “the very historicity of belief.”⁶⁰

The thematics of doubt appear repeatedly in the Jahilia sequences and are most successfully figured as the dissolution or overlapping of subjectivities. Thus, in the process of “listening” for the divine revelation concerning the three pagan goddesses, Mahound finds himself first reversing positions with Gibreel and then becoming indistinguishable from him, so that it is no longer “possible to say which of us is dreaming the other” (110). Furthermore, Rushdie makes it clear that, in insisting upon doubt as a constitutive modality of human experience, what he is opposing is any conception of belief that denies its materiality, placing it outside the realm of human effort and will:

Angels are easily pacified; turn them into instruments and they'll play your harpy tune. Human beings are tougher nuts, can doubt anything, even the evidence of their eyes. Of behind-their-own eyes. Of what, as they sink heavy-lidded, transpires behind closed peepers … angels, they don't have much in the way of a will. To will is to disagree; not to submit; to dissent.

(92-93)

“Doubt” therefore becomes in The Satanic Verses a sign of resistance to the fundamentalist hijacking of Islam, a means of prying open, even if ever so slightly, the seamless whole regarding which the only public choice offered the contemporary Muslim is submission or disbelief. When Rushdie speaks of his sustained respect for the religious mind, this must be taken not just seriously, but as the very basis of his novel's complex engagement with the culture and politics of contemporary Islam.

Since the beginning of the controversy, Rushdie's Islamic critics have argued that the enormous literary machinery within which these relatively short passages occur—their framing as the hallucinations of a man going mad, their only partial and “fantasticated” use of places, events, and persons significant in the narratives of Islam, their relatively minor place within the “plot” of the novel, traditionally conceived—do not in any way modify or condition the directness of the attack. Within weeks of the publication of the book in Britain, Shahabuddin warned Rushdie in his open letter that “you cannot take shelter behind the plea that after all it is a single dream sequence in a piece of fiction.” And, responding to Rushdie's charge that “some of us have condemned you without a hearing and asked for a banning without reading the book,” he replied:

Yes, I have not read it, nor do I intend to. I do not have to wade through a filthy drain to know what filth is. My first inadvertent step would tell me what I have stepped into. For me, the synopsis, the review, the excerpts, the opinion of those who had read it and your own gloatings were enough.⁶¹

Such sentiments were in fact voiced repeatedly in the course of the controversy. Akhtar, for instance, wrote of the offending chapters as “Rushdie's attempt to rewrite chronologically the history of early Islam … (and to) proffer an alternative biography of Muhammad, his wives and companions.”⁶² In other words, the militant opposition to the novel has insisted from the start on a realist and fragmented reading. An understanding of this insistence therefore requires critical rethinking of the relationship between reception and form.

The question of form in Rushdie's novels can be approached in a number of ways. I will sketch out three related issues that may be subsumed under the rubric of parody and pastiche: the manner in which an important aspect of the novels' critical self-consciousness—their awareness of colonial-metropolitan affiliations—is worked out on the level of form; the correspondence between the novel's form and its pastichelike reception within the “Islamic” public sphere; and the fact that the formal ambivalence of pastiche becomes in The Satanic Verses an enabling condition for this political intervention.

In a series of essays on the functions of pastiche in Latin American fiction, Jean Franco has argued that the notion of pastiche “needs the notion of originality as counterpoint” and is therefore a natural corollary of the exhaustion of modernism's “search for originality.”⁶³ For the same reason, pastiche is also a corollary of the decline of the “high” narrative of the (postcolonial) nation's cultural originality. For the purpose of this discussion, I suggest the following working definition: pastiche is hybridity or mélange, but it is also imitation and citation. It is not merely the seemingly random juxtaposition of different discourses; it is also a repetition of something that went before. More specifically, it ironically enunciates the signs of the colonizer in order to subvert their meanings. Against Jameson's stricture regarding the sharp contrast between (postmodern) pastiche and (modernist) parody—“pastiche … is a neutral practice of … mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives”⁶⁴—it is my argument that parody and pastiche constitute in Rushdie's novels two aspects of the same formal intention, marking the texts' hesitation with notions of originality and purity on the one hand, and their self-critical sense of affiliation on the other. Parody thus provides ironic distance as a means of expressing a simultaneous sense of continuity and discontinuity with the (colonial) past, offering “a workable and effective stance toward the [latter] in its paradoxical strategy of repetition as a source of freedom.”⁶⁵

Gayatri Spivak has spoken of postcolonial claims to nationhood, democracy, and social and economic justice as “catechreses,” the assigning of new and unfamiliar values to the “concept-metaphors” of metropolitan culture.⁶⁶ In The Satanic Verses, postcolonial culture incorporates such acts of citation, of repetition “with a difference.” In the hybrid identities of the postcolonial world, in these shifting, unsettled perspectives, it is repeatedly suggested, may be found a metaphor for the modern world. Rushdie is unapologetic about an ambivalent “insider/outsider” status, a “historically validated eclecticism,” as Zeeny puts it to Saladin (52). To borrow, in The Satanic Verses, is therefore also to appropriate and renew.

Already in Midnight's Children, Rushdie showed an anxious but ironic awareness of the novel's metropolitan affiliations. The opening, like that of Forster's novel of India, centers on a Dr. Aziz. (And the name of another character in the novel, Wee Willie Winkie, recalls the story by Kipling.) But whereas Forster's novel begins with Aziz in a mosque, anxiously protecting its sanctity from imagined desecration by a European—he thinks Mrs. Moore is wearing shoes in the place of worship—Rushdie's Aziz has an experience during the act of praying that leaves “a hole inside him” and takes him away permanently from religious faith. The Midnight Children's Conference is also an allusion, to both the Marylebone Cricket Club and the “Mayapore Chatterjee Club” to which the anglicized Indian Hari Kumar in Paul Scott's The Jewel in the Crown is laughingly said to belong.⁶⁷ As Timothy Brennan has pointed out, “Rushdie even mimics Scott's method of introducing the novel's defining themes in a painting's iconography.”⁶⁸ In Scott's case, the painting referred to in the title shows an Indian prince presenting a bejeweled crown to Victoria, the classic tributary exchange between a colonial subject and his foreign ruler; in Midnight's Children, Rushdie gives us a picture of the young Raleigh seated at the feet of “an old, gnarled net-mending sailor … whose right arm, fully extended, stretched out towards a watery horizon”—and in fact westward toward the Arabian Sea, visible from the window of Saleem's room, in which the picture is hung (122). This scene of colonial conquest with its inviting gesture, ominously echoed in Mary Pereira's lullaby, “anything you want to be, you can be,” becomes for the child Saleem a source of horror and anguish. At the end of his life, in the final, unstoppable passage of the novel, he hears once again that refrain, with the role it promises for the national elite molded in the image of the colonial rulers, and says, “I hear lies being spoken in the night, anything you want to be you kin be, the greatest of all lies” (445).

In the case of The Satanic Verses, pastiche comes to refer at the most general level to the novel's formal equivocation between genres and styles, between realism, magical realism, the fantastic, the historical novel, reportage, allegory, autobiography. The question here, first of all, is the old Adornian problem, which reemerges with a vengeance in poststructuralist theory, of the appropriateness of form to the object of representation. Pastiche, in this context, is the textual correlate of a hybrid external reality, the presence/reflection within the text of the Third World's “uneasy and unfinished relationship to modernity.”⁶⁹ But in fact the question of repeating the colonial text acquires in The Satanic Verses an even greater significance. As many of its Islamic critics have pointed out, the Jahilia chapters employ motifs, imagery, emphases, and phrasing—ranging from the use of the medieval derogatory “Mahound” to a fascination with the sex life of the Prophet—that have a well-known pedigree in the discourses of Orientalism.⁷⁰ And the fact that the protagonist of Rushdie's novel is called Saladin, and Mahound is merely the figment of a demented mind, recalls Dante's preference for the historical Saladin over “Mahometo” in the Inferno. In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie himself addresses the question of repeating the Orientalist sign:

His name: a dream name, changed by the vision. Pronounced correctly, it means he-for-whom-thanks-should-be-given, but he won't answer to that here. … Here he is neither Mahomet nor MoeHammered; has adopted, instead, the demon-tag the farangis hung around his neck. To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise, our mountain-climbing, prophet-motivated solitary is to be the medieval baby-frightener, the Devil's synonym: Mahound.

(93)

But in fact the repetition here goes beyond the mere inversion of an Orientalist hierarchy. For, by simply accepting the colonizer's words, even if with the intention of standing them on their head, that is, by inserting the polluting colonial sign within the space of the authentic and divine, the novel enacts another, formal transgression within the discursive field of contemporary “Islam,” calling into question the assumption of purity vis-à-vis colonial-metropolitan culture upon which the authentic and divine are based.

Pastiche therefore becomes a means of appropriating and rewriting the colonial text—novel of empire, Orientalist motif, narrative of adventure and conquest—for contemporary purposes, within a global situation that might simultaneously be termed post- and neocolonial. The rewriting of the metropolitan text is itself in other words, a double-edged activity: on the one hand, it extracts from the metropolitan text a new knowledge of (colonized) self and (colonizing) other, precisely by problematizing that radical alterity; on the other, the rewriting uses the metropolitan text to question the authoritative discourses of public culture within the periphery. The scene of colonial conquest and the iconic presence of the novel of empire therefore make possible in Midnight's Children a severe critique of the cultural and material privileges of the national(ist) elite; and the Orientalist term of abuse, hurled down this time by an “insider,” challenges in The Satanic Verses the premises of authoritarian Islamic theocracy. The fitful, fragmented, and “doubt-ridden” narrative of The Satanic Verses must therefore be read as the writing of a supplement—in Derrida's double sense of an addition as well as a voicing of the silences and suppressions of the original—to the totalizing narratives of contemporary “Islam.” It is, to borrow a phrase once again from Jean Franco, an act of “substitution that undermines all essentialisms.”⁷¹

The second sense of pastiche I want to address relates to the novel's reception. I have already suggested that the failure of progressive critics to identify with the novel's anti-fundamentalist “Islamic” politics results in part from outmoded notions of reception. There is now a need for a sustained effort to theorize the kinds of conditions of reception I have tried to evoke, under which a text, after a process of fragmentation and selection, becomes consumed within already existing cultural and political discourses, and becomes an object of debate, dispute, and discussion within different but often overlapping public spheres. As Arjun Appadurai has argued, the “globalization of culture is not the same as its homogenization.”⁷² Much of the confusion caused in the West by the Islamic reaction to the book is due precisely to this failure of perception: the political life of The Satanic Verses in the Islamic world cannot be contained within the rubric of “novel.” The same text that has been acclaimed in the West as a major experiment in that genre (and rejected by many as a failed experiment) is “read” in very different ways in what I have called the Islamic public sphere.

It might be useful in this context to quickly check the facts of the early stages of the anti-Rushdie campaign in Britain, as described in a Sunday Times report of February 9, 1989:

Aslam Ejaz, of the Islamic Foundation in Madras, [had] already written to Faiyazuddin Ahmad, a friend in Leicester, telling him about the impending ban in India. A similar campaign, wrote Ejaz, should be mounted in Britain, which still remained largely oblivious to the blasphemous nature of the book. … Ahmad, who came to Britain from India five years ago, is public relations director of the Islamic Foundation in Leicester. His actions, as much as anything, were to spark the row in Britain. … He sent out a secretary to buy the novel for £12.95 at a local bookshop. The offending passages were photocopied and immediately sent on October 3 to the dozen or so leading Islamic organizations in Britain. Four days later copies were despatched to the 45 embassies in Britain of the member countries of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC), including Iran.⁷³

This process then repeated itself in several directions, leading to petitions asking various British officials to ban the book, the soliciting of assistance from Muslim governments and the OIC, and greater coordination between the various organizations in Britain itself. In India extracts from the book were not widely available even after the actual ban, but the Hindu fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party announced plans for publishing passages in Hindi translation in its official newspaper. (I have been unable to determine whether these plans were carried out.) The “dissemination” of the novel in India—through written and verbal commentary, and general rumor and hearsay—therefore involved an even greater degree of fragmentation and transformation. And in Pakistan the novel and its purported offense against Islam have received greatest publicity in the form of fantasticated representation in the cinema: the popular Punjabi and Urdu film International Guerrillas tells the story of the men of a Pakistani family who have taken an oath to avenge the blasphemous act by assassinating Rushdie, here portrayed as the scotch-guzzling, woman-molesting agent of an international Zionist conspiracy to destabilize Pakistan. In the final scene of the film, the defeated brothers (who had appeared in an earlier scene in Batman costumes), nailed by Rushdie and his allies to wooden crosses, pray to God for intervention. Help descends from the heavens in the form of three copies of the Koran, which then strike Rushdie down with what looks like a laser beam. The only reference to the content of the novel anywhere in the film is a suggestion that it calls the Prophet's wives prostitutes.⁷⁴

What is of greatest interest in this “reception” of The Satanic Verses in the Islamic world is the text's own provocation of the manner in which it has been consumed. In the conversation with Günter Grass that I have already quoted from, Rushdie himself makes an attempt to relate the two, usually separate, questions of form and reception. I will quote the passage in full:

In India the thing I've taken most from … is the oral narration. Because it is a country of still largely illiterate people … the power and the vitality still remains in the oral story-telling tradition. And what's interesting about these stories is that they command huge audiences, the best story tellers, with literally hundreds of thousands of people. … It's a very eclectic form, and of course is not at all linear. … And it seems to be formlessness. … Now, it occurred to me to ask the opposite question. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that this is not formlessness but that this is a form which after all is many thousand[s] of years old and has adopted this shape for good reasons. Now, if so, what could those reasons be? It struck me the answer is very simple, which is that the story teller has the problem of holding the audience. … And suddenly this suggested to me that what we were being told was [that] this very gymnastic form, this very convoluted, complicated form was in fact the reason why people were listening.⁷⁵

While I do not think that Rushdie's account of the relationship of his work to orality should be taken literally, it is nevertheless interesting that he should have formulated the problem in this way during the period when The Satanic Verses was in the works. For it allows us to think through the manner in which “readers” in the Islamic world have been “listening” to the novel's transgressions. The novel's pastichelike structure—the situating of different discourses in juxtaposed, textually marked sections, the playful rewriting of well-known and easily recognizable episodes from the narratives of Islam, the enactment of these Islamic transgressions within brief, self-contained passages—corresponds to the selection, extraction, and the immediate, almost totemic identification of textual episodes with bits of Islamic lore that have characterized the novel's reception in the Islamic world. In linking form with reception, I am not, of course, making an argument about authorial intention. What I am suggesting is that there is, in “the Rushdie affair,” a co-incidence of the (political) imperative of “holding the audience,” textual form, and the dynamics of mass communication in the contemporary postcolonial world.

Finally, the novel's formal ambivalence also has more fundamental implications for its political life in the public sphere of contemporary “Islam.” As we have seen, the Islamic opposition has insisted throughout on a reading that takes the offending passages literally, as a recklessly revisionist account of the birth of Islam, a rewriting of narratives held sacred by every practicing Muslim. Rushdie, on the other hand, has insisted that the novel is “fiction” and “fantasy,” and cannot be read as “history.”⁷⁶ It is the fact that the novel equivocates formally between these possibilities that allows it a positive political role in the Islamic world. Rushdie's demand to be read “fantastically” is, in this context, a demand for expressive freedom. The “Islamic” response to this demand is basically the following: “Despite the machinery of freedom you have erected, and beyond its ingenuity and splendor, we can see what the novel is really about.” The opposition and struggle are not between the prerogatives of literature (fiction) and faith. The kind of cultural autonomy sought by The Satanic Verses must not be confused with the claims that are made on behalf of “autonomous art.”⁷⁷ On the contrary, the conflict is about a particular kind of writing and its ineradicable connection with reality, and the social and cultural goals for which it can be (and has been) mobilized. Rushdie and the fundamentalists understand each other only too well. For what The Satanic Verses represents is an attempt to give “freedom”—not some abstract, universal freedom, but rather the concrete freedom to write outside and against the totalizing discourses of contemporary “Islam”—a literary form.

Discussions of Rushdie and The Satanic Verses have been conducted, understandably, in explicitly polemical terms, in the somewhat stark language of “for” or “against.” It has been an aim of this essay to at least partially disengage itself from this discourse, in order to distinguish more clearly between the cultural politics highlighted by the “affair” and the person of the author himself. The point is to make it possible for us as critics on the left to identify those elements of this cultural politics of the novel's political intervention in the “Islamic” public sphere that we may consider positive and politically useful, despite the obvious problems posed by what Brennan has quite correctly identified as Rushdie's “complicity … with power.”⁷⁸ (Khomeini's fatwa may be read as an attempt to make this complicity unequivocal, a fact Rushdie himself seems not to have understood.) And we should not be deterred from this task by Rushdie's rather clumsy experiments, through the language of “conversion,” with the meaning of Muslim “community.”

The situation of secular left intellectuals in South Asia and in the wider Islamic world today is characterized by a problematizing of the category of the “popular” in a manner that bears chilling comparison to the predicament of the German left intelligentsia in the 1930s. To recognize the class-marked nature of “secular” political and cultural claims in much of the Third World is one thing; to then fail to distinguish between official secularism and oppositional ones, and to reduce “secularism” as such to the ideological reflex of the indigenous national bourgeoisie—as in Brennan's declaration that “the banner of ‘secularism’ has for more than a century been the standard of a Westernized elite”—and leave the matter at that is quite another.⁷⁹ Such critiques of “secularism” do not acknowledge the participation (or at least acquiescence) of sections of the local elites (and of metropolitan interests) in the production of “Islam” and the rise of fundamentalist groups and parties in South Asia and across the Muslim world. While clearly needing to rethink its relationship to Islamic traditions and cultures and to engage in new ways with progressive Islamic groups, the secular left cannot and must not pretend to be anything but that—secular. For us as critics located in the West to reject the ideals of “secularism” in the Third World wholesale because these are not spontaneously produced within the domain of subaltern political and cultural life would not be so different, after all, from bureaucratic condemnation of reproductive rights and artistic freedom in the United States as the demands of a “cultural elite” alienated from the values of society at large.⁸⁰

The importance of the cultural-political intervention in the public sphere of contemporary “Islam” that The Satanic Verses represents is therefore that it highlights the fact that the fight is far from over. The magnitude of the agony and anxiety it generated is in part a reflection of the fact that it made palpable, however fleetingly, the manner in which “Islam” has been produced in recent years. The left must not fail to take advantage of the consequences of this intervention, even as it distances itself from Rushdie's visibly growing comfort in the corridors of metropolitan power.

Notes

1. Gayatri Spivak, “Reading The Satanic Verses,” Public Culture 2, no. 1 (Fall 1989): 79.

2. I am grateful to Homi Bhabha for suggesting the use of this term in the context of The Satanic Verses.

3. For a discussion of the necessity (and simultaneous difficulty) of balancing the critique of Western Orientalist discourse with one directed at the authoritarian politics of the contemporary Islamic world, see Eqbal Ahmed, “Islam and Politics,” in The Pakistan Experience, ed. Asghar Khan (Lahore: Vanguard, 1985).

4. Ervand Abrahamian, “Khomeini: Fundamentalist or Populist?” New Left Review 186 (March/April 1991).

5. See, especially, Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (London: St. Martin's, 1989), chapter 6; for a far more nuanced reading of the cultural politics of the Rushdie affair, but one nevertheless limited to the politics of South Asian immigration in Britain, see Talal Asad, “Ethnography, Literature, and Politics: Some Readings and Uses of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses,” Cultural Anthropology 5, no. 6 (August 1990): 239-69.

6. For a collection of Western reactions to the Rushdie affair, see Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland, The Rushdie File (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990), henceforth File. It should be said that Rushdie has himself leveled this charge against his opponents. See, for instance, his open letter to Rajiv Gandhi, written in response to the banning in India, reprinted in File, 34.

7. See Dahl's February 28, 1989, letter to the London Times in File, 200. For Le Carré, see “A Book Not Worth the Bloodshed,” Manchester Guardian Weekly, January 28, 1990, 26-27.

8. See Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986). I am indebted to Jean Franco's discussion of pastiche in “The Nation as Imagined Community,” in The New Historicism, ed. H. A. Veeser (New York: Routledge, 1989) and “Pastiche in Contemporary Latin American Literature,” Studies in 20th Century Literature 14, no. 1 (Winter 1990).

9. Brennan, Salman Rushdie, 164. See also Asad, “Ethnography,” and David Caute, “Prophet Motive,” New Statesman, February 16, 1990, 18-19.

10. See Timothy Brennan, “India, Nationalism, and Other Failures,” South Atlantic Quarterly 87, no. 1 (Winter 1988) and Nasser Hussain, “Hyphenated Identity: Nationalistic Discourse, History, and the Anxiety of Criticism in Salman Rushdie's Shame,” Qui Parle 3, no. 2 (Fall 1989).

11. The idea of nation as imagined community is, of course, drawn from Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

12. See, for instance, “Author from Three Countries,” New York Times Review of Books, November 13, 1983, 3, 22-23.

13. Jameson, “Third-World Literature.”

14. Ibid., 85.

15. All page references are to the 1981 Jonathan Cape edition.

16. For the paradigmatic dramatization of this theme of intellectual mediation, see Nehru, “Bharat Mata,” in The Discovery of India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 60-61. A thorough and brilliant discussion of this theme in Nehruvian thought is to be found in Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed, 1986).

17. See Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, 30: “Even as [nationalism] challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the very intellectual premises of ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination was based.”

18. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 30-33.

19. Ibid., 33.

20. Rushdie, in conversation with Günter Grass, “Writing for a Future,” in Voices: Writers and Politics, ed. Bill Bourne, Udi Eichler, and David Herman (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1987), 58.

21. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 35.

22. Frantz Fanon, “On National Culture,” in The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1979), 225-27.

23. Rushdie, “Writing,” 53.

24. For similar contradictory moments in Latin American fiction, see Jean Franco's introduction to the issue “Contemporary Latin American Fin de Siècle,” Studies in 20th Century Literature 14, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 6.

25. All page references are to the 1983 Knopf edition.

26. The other autobiographical trace in the Jahilia dream sequences is of course the poet Baal. And there are obvious autobiographical moments in Saladin Chamcha as well.

27. Emphasis added. All references are to the 1988 Viking edition.

28. The passages about the exiled Imam, obviously based on Khomeini and the Iranian revolution, have not played any significant role in the public controversy. What role they might have played in the decision to issue the fatwa, however, is not known.

29. Syed Shahabuddin, “You Did This with Satanic Forethought, Mr. Rushdie,” Times of India, October 13, 1988; quoted in File, 39.

30. Shabbir Akhtar, Be Careful with Muhammad! The Salman Rushdie Affair (London: Bellew, 1989), 1.

31. Ibid., 4.

32. Ibid., 6, 12.

33. See Eqbal Ahmad and Richard Barnet, “Afghanistan,” New Yorker, April 11, 1988, and Raja Anwar, The Tragedy of Afghanistan: A First-Hand Account (London: Verso, 1988).

34. For the Jama'at's activities around the issue of women, see Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shaheed, Women of Pakistan: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back? (Lahore: Vanguard, 1987).

35. See the special issue on “Communalism: Dangerous Dimensions,” India Today, October 31, 1989.

36. See Akhtar, Be Careful, and “The Case for Religious Fundamentalism,” Guardian, February 27, 1989, in File, 227-31.

37. Ahmed, “Islam,” 19.

38. Ibid., 27.

39. For a discussion of the consequences of the Gulf War for the fortunes of fundamentalism, see Eqbal Ahmad's introduction to Beyond the Storm: A Gulf Crisis Reader, ed. Phyllis Bennis and Michel Moushabek (New York: Olive Branch, 1991).

40. Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society, revised edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), ix-x.

41. The literature on “women and Islam” in the modern world is of course enormous, but much of it is guided by ahistorical and excessively textual notions of Islam. For a critique of such tendencies in diverse writings on Muslim women, see Marnia Lazreg, “Feminism and Difference: The Perils of Writing as a Woman on Women in Algeria,” Feminist Issues 14, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 81-107. For a set of regional studies that carefully and self-consciously avoid the pitfalls of essentialism by focusing on the state as the locus for determinations of notions of gender, see Deniz Kandiyoti, ed, Women, Islam, and the State (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). Also see Nayereh Tohidi, “Gender and Islamic Fundamentalism: Feminist Politics in Iran,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 251-67.

42. Akhtar, Be Careful, 89.

43. See Ervand Abrahamian, Radical Islam: The Iranian Mojahedin (London: Taurus, 1989), especially chapter 2.

44. Quoted in Abrahamian, “Khomeini,” 103.

45. See Abrahamian, Radical Islam, and Michael M. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), especially chapter 6 and the epilogue.

46. It should be noted that the Shi'i fundamentalism of the Iranian clergy is a partial exception to this, for reasons that lie within Shi'ism's own status as unorthodox opposition to mainstream, Sunni Islam.

47. See Ziaul Haque, “Islamization of Society in Pakistan,” in Khan, Pakistan Experience, 114-26.

48. Since the writing of these words, the issue achieved international notoriety following the destruction of the mosque by a throng of Hindu fundamentalist “volunteers” on December 6, 1992.

49. For a somewhat more detailed account, see my “In the Realm of the Censors,” Voice Literary Supplement, March 1989, 13.

50. Rushdie, “Open Letter,” File, 36.

51. Shahabuddin, “Satanic Forethought,” File, 37-41.

52. Ibid., 37.

53. Akhtar, “Fundamentalism,” File, 228.

54. See Jürgen Habermas, “The Public Sphere,” New German Critique, Fall 1974, 49.

55. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 88.

56. For a brilliant discussion of the complex dynamic of loyalty and betrayal in this act of appropriation, see Sara Suleri, “Contraband Histories: Salman Rushdie and the Embodiment of Blasphemy,” Yale Review 78, no. 4 (Summer 1989).

57. Such is the case with Brennan's sense that all aspects of Rushdie's art and politics are to be explained by his membership in a group he (Brennan) terms “Third-World cosmopolitans” (Salman Rushdie, viii-ix): “those writers Western reviewers seemed to be choosing as the interpreters and authentic public voices of the Third World-writers who, in a sense, allowed a flirtation with change that ensured continuity, a familiar strangeness, a trauma by inches.” For a far more nuanced critique of Rushdie's novelistic intervention, see Asad, “Ethnography, Literature, and Politics.”

58. Suleri, “Contraband Histories,” 605.

59. Ibid., 606-7.

60. Ibid., 617.

61. Shahabuddin, “Satanic Forethought,” 39. The Islamic Society of North America also decried the novel as a “blatant assault on Islam and the Prophet,” File, 174. And Dr. H. Morsi, director of the Islamic Cultural Center of Chicago, declared that there was “no doubt that the book … slanders the Prophet in particular and the religion of Islam in general,” File, 177.

62. Akhtar, Be Careful, 4.

63. Franco, “Pastiche,” 95; also see Fredric Jameson, “The Shining,” Social Text 4 (Fall 1981): 114.

64. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146: 65.

65. Linda Hutcheon, “Modern Parody and Bakhtin,” in Rethinking Bakhtin: Extensions and Challenges, ed. Gary Morson and Caryl Emerson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 41.

66. Gayatri Spivak, “Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value,” in Literary Theory Today, ed. Peter Collier et al. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 229.

67. Brennan, Salman Rushdie, 82.

68. Ibid.

69. Franco, “Nation,” 211.

70. See Shahabuddin, “Satanic Forethought,” File, 39, and Akhtar, “Fundamentalism,” File, 228.

71. See Jean Franco's discussion of Silviano Santiago's Em Liberdade in “Pastiche,” 102-4.

72. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 16.

73. See File, 44-46.

74. Steve Coll, “Salman Rushdie, Blueprint for a Bad Guy,” Washington Post, June 25, 1990.

75. Rushdie, “Writing,” 58-59.

76. Rushdie put it thus in his open letter to Rajiv Gandhi: “The section of the book in question (and let's remember that the book isn't actually about Islam, but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay) deals with a prophet who is not called Muhammad living in a highly fantasticated city-made of sand, it dissolves when water falls upon it-in which he is surrounded by fictional followers, one of whom happens to bear my own first name. Moreover, this entire sequence happens in a dream, the fictional dream of a fictional character, an Indian movie star, and one who is losing his mind, at that. How much further from history could one get?’ (File, 35-36, emphasis added.) See also the interview with India Today, September 15, 1988, File, 32. However, Rushdie has also suggested that the book itself “metamorphoses all the time” (File, 7).

77. In criticizing what appeared to be Rushdie's “embrace” of Islam in late 1990, Sara Suleri suggested that he is a “naive reader” of his own novels (“Whither Rushdie?” Transition 51: 212). A reading of Rushdie's post-fatwa pronouncements on the place of art and literature in society will confirm this verdict. See, for instance, his “Is Nothing Sacred?” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (London: Granta, Viking, 1991), 415-29. For a completely different account, written in 1984, see “Outside the Whale,” in Imaginary Homelands, 87-101.

78. Brennan, “Rushdie, Islam, and Postcolonial Criticism,” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 275.

79. Brennan, Salman Rushdie, 144.

80. Andrew Rosenthal, “Quayle Attacks a ‘Cultural Elite,’ Saying It Mocks Nation's Values,” New York Times, June 10, 1992, 1.

An earlier version of this essay appeared in Social Text 29. I am grateful to John Archer for suggesting some of the revisions that have been incorporated in the present version. Final responsibility for its content is of course mine.