Critical Evaluation
Upon its publication, The Satanic Verses elicited the harshest of reviews, a death sentence, from Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose familiarity with the novel was apparently limited to secondhand reports of Gibreel’s “blasphemous” dreams. The fatwa, or decree, of death, which was issued on February 14, 1989, had less to do with Salman Rushdie and his novel than it did with the power struggle then going on in Iran between hard-liners such as Khomeini and moderates. The author and his book suffered greatly as a result. Rushdie was effectively made a hostage to a new form of international terrorism backed by the promise of financial and heavenly rewards for the assassin. He had to go into hiding. His novel, when not either burned or banned, was initially discussed almost exclusively with reference to the fatwa.
In its intricate and provocative exploration of postmodern and postcolonial sensibilities, The Satanic Verses celebrates and extends what one character calls “the eclectic, hybridized nature of the Indian artistic tradition.” Its multiplicity of styles and stories, its blurring of the boundaries separating reality from dream, fact from fiction, its “pitting levity against gravity,” and its allowing characters’ names to migrate, as it were, from one narrative to another, do more than confuse some readers and entertain others. Metaphorically, such techniques work much the same way as the novel’s intertextuality does in drawing on a wide variety of ceaselessly metamorphosing texts—the Qur՚n, the Bible, the Mahabharata (200 b.c.e.-200 c.e.), and Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.; English translation, 1614) on one hand and Hindi films and British television shows on the other. “Democracy can only thrive in a turbulent environment,” Rushdie has noted, and The Satanic Verses is a narratively turbulent novel in which pyrotechnic style is put to political purpose as Rushdie considers both the chances for and challenges to democracy in an increasingly intolerant and multicultural world. Not even a writer as ambitious as Rushdie can hope to be completely democratic.
Rushdie has written that the telling of one story in effect censors the telling of others. In The Satanic Verses Rushdie does, however, imply the existence of these other tales and, more important, make clear what happens in a world ruled by a “terrifying singularity” where “and, or, maybe” has no place, no voice.
The stasis and “purity” of Mahound’s “Rule” and “the Untime of the Imam” (Khomeini’s “revolt against history”), Rushdie believes, pervert one of Muḥammad’s greatest achievements, his having situated himself in the actual historical circumstances of his time and place. The Satanic Verses may be critical of religion, but it is not antireligious and certainly not blasphemous. “Fact is,” the stuttering but good-hearted Whisky Sisodia tells Chamcha, “religious fafaith, which encodes the highest ass ass aspirations of human race, is now, in our cocountry, the servant of lowest instincts, and gogo God is the creature of evil.” The novel views these aspirations in secular terms and religious movements—whether Islam in the early seventh century or Muslim and Hindu fundamentalism in the late twentieth—as responses to specific economic and political problems. Rushdie is, however, equally critical of the West, whose freedoms he embraces but whose racism he deplores in all its forms. These range all the way from physical assaults to more subtle variations on the old Asian theme. Chamcha learns from another transmogrified immigrant, “They have the power of description, and we conform to the pictures they construct.” The most insidious form of racism is the creation of the monoculture of multinational capitalism, what Rushdie only half-jokingly calls “the Coca-Colonization of the planet.”
Metamorphosis at all levels is...
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at the heart ofThe Satanic Verses. The questions it asks—“Who am I?” and “How does newness come into the world?”—may be old, but Rushdie gives them a new urgency as he ponders “the migrant condition.” Rushdie has argued that mass migration has created radically new types of human beings: people who root themselves in ideas rather than in places, in memories as much as in material things. Such people have been obliged to define themselves, because they are so defined by others, by their otherness. In a melting pot, strange mixes are made. The Satanic Verses succeeds on many fronts—managing to be at once narratively compelling, stylistically flamboyant, psychologically insightful, and sociopolitically relevant—and it succeeds most in that it creates a space where postcolonial and postmodern sensibilities intersect, where the migrant condition becomes a metaphor for all humanity.