THE SATANIC VERSES opens with two characters, Gibreel and Saladin, miraculously surviving a 29,000-foot fall from an exploding plane onto an English beach. During their descent, Gibreel, a Bombay superstar famous for portraying Indian deities, acquires a halo like the archangel Gabriel, whom he dreams himself into impersonating throughout the novel. Saladin, an Indian migrant who has become a snobbish Anglophile, grows horns and cloven hooves and turns into the Devil. The novel unfolds between these characters through a series of fascinating and often irreverent narratives with the flavor of a twentieth century THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. Opponents in the struggle between good and evil, Gibreel and Saladin constitute the novel’s thesis and antithesis. Yet because the novel blurs the distinction between good and evil, a thematic synthesis never occurs: Gibreel is involved in several deaths, Saladin in acts of compassion.

If Salman Rushdie has a message, it must be that the days of revelation are long gone. The best he can do to clear things up is have his narrator repeat, in the Arab storytelling refrain, “It was so, it was not.” One of the most controversial aspects of Rushdie’s universal doubting concerns his allegedly blasphemous attitude toward the Koran and Islam. For example, he refers to Muhammad by the derogatory name Mahound, a term once used for the Devil. Though Rushdie claims to be repossessing pejorative language so people can “wear with pride the names they were given in scorn,” a particularly offensive insult for Moslems is the novel’s questioning of the Koran’s status as the word of God. The satanic verses of the Koran, which allowed for three pagan deities, were later removed when the archangel Gabriel told Muhammad that they were dictated by the Devil in disguise. In the novel, Gibreel undermines the distinction between the two dictations: “it was me both times, baba, me first and second also me.”

And yet Rushdie contradicts in practice what he doubts in theory. As he asserts in a recent essay, “Unable to accept the unarguable absolutes of religion, I have tried to fill up the hole with literature.” The art of the novel for Rushdie is thus a locus of revelation not without its spiritual element. According to the Vedic literature of India, one can experience through an expansion of consciousness a level of language known as pashyanti, which is not of human creation. This level, experienced by saints such as Muhammad, can be approached by artists through aesthetic rapture. Despite its irreverence, THE SATANIC VERSES is not devoid of this experience.

Bibliography

Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Discusses both the strengths and weaknesses of Rushdie’s cosmopolitanism and the ways in which his fiction draws on Third World materials but does not adequately represent Third World concerns.

Harrison, James. Salman Rushdie. New York: Twayne, 1992. A good general introduction to Rushdie; separate chapters on the novels, Rushdie’s biography, and India.

MacDonogh, Steve, ed. The Rushdie Letters: Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Write. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. In addition to the letters to Rushdie written by twenty-seven prominent writers, the volume includes essays by Rushdie and Tom Stoppard and Carmel Bedford’s compilation, “Fiction, Fact, and the Fatwā.”

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. New York: Penguin, 1991. Several essays deal specifically with The Satanic Verses and the fatwā; many others, no less relevant, deal with various postcolonial topics.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Although it includes no extended discussion of Rushdie and his novel, Said’s book is required reading for anyone hoping to understand The Satanic Verses in the postcolonial context.