The Satanic Verses

by Salman Rushdie

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Criticism

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      The fatwa ordering Muslims around the world to murder Rushdie and his collaborators has irrevocably affected how Western readers approach the novel. Because of the dangerous and sensitive political context, many Western critics have downplayed the work’s direct engagement with the Islamic religion so as not to seem to be giving credence to the Islamic fundamentalist outcry against it. Rushdie himself, in a series of understandable attempts to save his own life, claimed to the press that his novel should not be seen as insulting Islam. At one point, he even went so far as to embrace the central tenets of the religion, although he later rescinded this position.

      The fact is that the novel’s commentary on Islam is at the center of its thematic agenda. The Satanic Verses is, first and foremost, about how humans develop and practice notions of good and evil, and, specifically, how these notions are determined by religion. Islam is the religion that Rushdie uses to explore these universal themes and, in the process, he makes a number of specific and satirical criticisms about common Muslim practices, including the typical treatment of Muslim women, the connection between Islamic fundamentalism and violence, and the persecution of writers in the name of Islam. Tracing all of these topical themes back to their historical and ideological origins, Rushdie provides a substantial criticism of the tenets and contemporary practices of the religion.

      This commentary begins explicitly, as “The Angel Gibreel” and Saladin fall from the heavens “To be born again,” a clear and common metaphor for spiritual rebirth. Rushdie’s references to religion then remain explicit and evident throughout the novel, as Gibreel transforms physically into an angel and experiences extended dreams about Muslim prophets, while Saladin becomes a goat man imbued with the features of the devil. Their epic battle, which eventually comes in the form of Saladin haunting Gibreel with the “satanic verses” of prank phone calls that make him, like the prophet Mahound, fiercely jealous, is portrayed in terms of a fight between good and evil.

      What good and evil actually entail, and whether Saladin and Gibreel can be said to conform to these notions has become indistinguishably complex by the time of final confrontations. Gibreel is depressed, schizophrenic, plagued by doubt, and when he does believe he is the angel of God his actions are often not just insane but destructive, as when he blows fire on London through his magic trumpet. Saladin, meanwhile, is revealed to be not so much an evil monster as a sympathetic victim of an identity crisis whose career, wife, and respectability are suddenly taken from him. His only act that can be considered “evil” is his revenge on Gibreel, and the terrible results of the prank phone calls are mainly a result of Gibreel’s own consuming jealousy.

      In fact, nowhere in the novel is the meaning of good and evil entirely clear, and the sacred is very often closely associated with or mistaken for the profane. Gibreel becomes the angel of God immediately after he has lost his faith and stuffed himself with pork, Ayesha the prophet stones a baby and then leads her followers to a watery death, Mahound’s wives are doubled in the brothel of Jahilia, and holy Imam of Desh, a parody of the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, is a bitter and “monstrous” figure fueled by hate and shown swallowing his people whole. Rushdie establishes with examples such as these that holy is by no means good and profane is by no means evil. The chapters about Mahound suggest explicitly that the Qur’an is by no means...

(This entire section contains 1575 words.)

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the infallible word of God and that good and evil are, in fact, entirely human constructions.

      A skeptic who dismisses the idea that the sacred and religious are morally good, Rushdie suggests that the chief prophet of Islam is much like a poet, which is perhaps why Mahound feels so threatened by Baal. The Satanic Verses suggests that the monotheistic, absolutist text of Islam is a fiction of verses just like that of Baal’s. Its only essential difference is paraphrased early in the novel by the Islamic terrorist Tavleen: “History asks us: what manner of cause are we? Are we uncompromising, absolute, strong, or will we show ourselves to be timeservers, who compromise, trim and yield?” In other words, the difference between the cause of art and literature and cause of the Islamic faith is not that one was inspired by God via the Angel Gabriel. Rather, the Qur’an is different from the words of a shape-shifting, multi-voiced and flexible poet only in that it claims to rigidly pin down exactly what is good and evil, for all time.

      Indeed, the narratives from Gibreel’s dream cycle establish that religious “good” and “evil” are simply categories that Mahound, Ayesha, and the Imam of Desh define based on what is most expedient for their personal desires. Since Gibreel has no answers from God, who appears as a combination God/Satan figure to clarify that there is no distinction between Al-la and Al-lat, it is clear that these devout figures have produced their certainties for themselves. Mahound (like Ayesha and the Imam of Desh) manufactures his timeless transcription of the will of God entirely from his own head, and he does so in order to impose his own ideas of authority and uncompromising power upon the world.

      It is because of this absolutism that Islam, to Rushdie, produces so many evils. Inflexible ideology is responsible for most of the evils in the novel, from the destructive religious impulses of Mahound, Ayesha, and the Imam, to the brutal and inflexible immigration policies of Margaret “the Iron Lady” Thatcher’s Britain. The inability of the British police to understand or accept diversity, as well as the harshly bigoted ideology of Britons like Hal Valance, is the true cause of the violence and mayhem in London, as well as the fact that immigrants are transformed into monsters by the “power of description.”

      Rushdie’s most fluent and specific condemnation of absolutism, however, remains in the context of Islam. One of the most important explications of the author’s attitude towards the religion comes during Salman Farsi’s conversations with Baal in which he condemns Mahound and the Qur’an. Salman (it is no coincidence that he shares his name with Rushdie) begins by ridiculing the many extremely specific and businesslike aspects of the Qur’an that make him suspect that Mahound is simply conjuring up the verses himself. He then traces the fact that the Qur’an gives men the right to have multiple wives back to Mahound’s desire to convert the widows of Jahilia, and the common Islamic practice for men to dominate women, to Mahound’s bitterness at the women of Yahtrib (Medina).

      This section is not merely a criticism of certain specific Islamic traditions; it is an attack at the entire premise of the moral authority of a religious text such as the Qur’an. Rushdie’s implicit argument is that uncompromising, faith-based morality is extremely dangerous because it does not need to answer to any rational critique and is easily crafted to suit one all-powerful authority. This criticism could apply, by extension, to religions such as Christianity and Judaism, but the analogy is less perfect because the belief that the holy text is a direct transcription of God’s will is uniquely important to Islam.

      To Rushdie, therefore, the moral system of Islam is nothing more than an extremely effective method by which individuals and groups gain absolute power and authority without the need to justify themselves rationally. Poets, scribes, and shape-shifting actors like Baal, Salman Farsi, and Saladin are contemptible to Islam, and therefore demonized, because they are constantly quibbling, satirizing, and questioning this moral tyranny. They are flexible and adaptable, and their ideas are similar to the “Satanic Verses” that Mahound originally included in the Qur’an because they make space for a variety of authority figures and power systems. Absolutism, both in politics and in morality, is the antithesis of their value system.

      Similarly, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is in direct confrontation with the moral foundation of the Islamic religion, and is so offensive to it, because it questions, satirizes, and ridicules Islam’s absolutist moral code. In a way, the extreme and fanatical reaction to the novel on the part of many Muslims including the Ayatollah Khomeini, an extremely powerful and influential religious leader with great authority, proves that a strong current of absolutism continues in many interpretations of the Islamic tradition. Indeed, Khomeini and the other Muslim fundamentalists who denounced the novel and demanded Rushdie’s death, proved not just that their moral systems are tyrannical and absolutist, but that an author, whether or not he/she claims to be a prophet of God, has the power to shake the world with a pen.

Source: Scott Trudell, Critical Essay on The Satanic Verses, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

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