Critical Overview
An enormous amount has been written about Rushdie’s extremely controversial novel, although only a segment of the reaction to The Satanic Verses and its effects around the world involves any literary analysis of the work. Writings about the novel can be roughly separated into several main categories, the first being its prominent place in the news media. Newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times carried the story of the controversy on the front page and quoted Khomeini’s original fatwa (in “Khomeini Says Author of ‘Satanic Verses’ Should Be Killed,” by Charles P. Wallace and Dan Fisher): “I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of ‘The Satanic Verses,’ a book which is against Islam, the prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are hereby sentenced to death.”
Rushdie’s novel has been widely denounced and condemned by Muslims who consider it blasphemous. The most influential of these condemnations was that of Khomeini, but numerous other Muslim scholars and leaders condemned the novel and its author. In their 1989 anthology The Rushdie File, Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland collect the most important writings and speeches by both sides of the debate about The Satanic Verses. Another category of writings about the novel is that of the historians and cultural theorists that have taken Rushdie’s novel as their subject, using the events surrounding its publication to explore relations between Islam and the West, and to explore as well postcolonial politics and intercultural attitudes.
The final category of writings about The Satanic Verses involves critical analysis of the literary content of the novel, although this style of writing was initially overshadowed by the furor following the book’s publication. In the fall of 1988, the novel received the Whitbread Prize for the best novel in England that year, and some critics lauded the book’s literary merits. In his 1988 review for London Review of Books, Patrick Parrinder writes that the book is “damnably entertaining, and fiendishly ingenious.” American newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times printed mixed reviews, however, and some critics criticized Rushdie for his indirectness and incomprehensibility. However, The Satanic Verses is generally considered a key novel in Rushdie’s oeuvre, and many literary critics have written at length about its theological, philosophical, political, and cultural meanings.
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