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What Upsets Muslims About The Satanic Verses

Waqas Khwaja

Little things at first. If Mahound recited a verse in which God was

described as all-hearing, all-knowing, I would write, all-knowing, all-
wise. Heres the point: Mahound did not notice the alterations. . .
(SV 367)

For over two years I have been trying to explain that The Satanic
Verses was never intended as an insult; that the story of Gibreel is a
parable of how a man can be destroyed by the loss of faith; that the
dreams in which all the so-called insults occur are portraits of his
disintegration, and explicitly referred to in the novel as punishments
and retributions; and that the dream figures who torment him with
their assaults on religion are representative of this process of initia-
tion, and not representative of the point of view of the author. (Sal-
man Rushdie, The Times, 28/12/90, qtd. in LaPorte, 91).

In responding to the phenomenon of charged indignation and wide-

spread, at times violent, reaction in Muslim communities against The Sa-
tanic Verses, one may ask: Is there no room for humor and wit in Islam?
Isn't there a tradition of satire of some sort? While these questions
acknowledge the customary unfamiliarity with Islamic traditions and cul-
tures, the implied undermining of their formulation may strike a lyrical
resonance in certain quarters. For indeed the questions themselves sparkle
with wit and irony, the gift often (wrongly) attributed to the Enlighten-
ment to which the modern world, in its marriage of science and human-
ism, and ironically its postmodernist sequel are so heavily indebted, and
from which the Muslim world is seen to have been singularly exempt. But
then we must understand that scoffing at and ridiculing religion is as old
as the scriptures themselves, if indeed it does not predate them. More gen-
erally, irony and humor, even corrosive critique may be used to expose the
hypocrisy of sanctimonious priests or the corruption that may have seeped
into religious institutions, dogmas, or rituals. But a systematic, persistent
strategy of insult, innuendo and invective directed against a particular reli-
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gion and its apostle (or founder) may be a particular legacy of Europe, and
many critics and scholars, notably Edward Said and his intellectual inheri-
tors, have explored this theme at some length. Such methods and ad hom-
inem attacks may be more appropriate to the vitriol of the marketplace in-
cendiary, the rabble-rousing demagogue, than to the economies and ex-
cesses of literary discourse. In course of time, however, this typecasting
has been inevitably internalized though the expression of it may have tak-
en on more sophisticated modes and forms.
This essay examines the peculiar complexity and ambiguity that pro-
vide the enabling motivations for the text of The Satanic Verses. It fore-
grounds the vexed relationship between author, storyteller, and morphing-
character1 and the shifting categories of targeted/implied readers in an ef-
fort to identify the nexus of causes that produces the narrator's nervous,
serio-comedic debunking of a system of beliefs on the one hand, and the
discomfort, indeed the horror of a particular class of readers, Muslims in
general, in their encounter with the resultant text and its signifying field. It
also investigates familiar, easy assumptions in certain Western constituen-
cies about lack of critical self-examination and absence of satiric modes of
creative expression in matters pertaining to faith among Muslims and in-
terrogates, in the process, the limits of satiric license and excess.
Although it is important to inquire why many Muslims are unable to
see The Satanic Verses only as a work of fiction, it is equally, if not more
pertinent to ask why Salman Rushdie found it necessary to rely so heavily
on a narratorial strategy of thinly veiled aspersion. For though the narra-
tive offers the appearance and architecture of a heteroglossic text, it is
founded on a rather constricted and trite monoglossic discourse, one that
repeats medieval Christian arguments against Islam and its messenger and
confounds the distinction between satire and abuse, irony and invective.
There is a certain stridency of tone that alerts the reader to this discrepan-
cy, and it is reserved for special segments of the book, predictably those
that relate to, rather transparently, the Islamic tradition. Being unmindful
of the difference, then, suggests questions that are still more fundamental
to this discussion: Who is the book addressing? Who is it written for? Is it
cultural difference that causes one group of readers to see the work as
comedy and satire and another to view it as ridicule and derision? It is also
well worth considering in this context whether the author intentionally
confused these categories, in which case, the nature of representation itself
presents serious problems. As one commentator opines, You protest the
falsity of the accusation He must have known. No one could have fore-
seen all that would happen, but I incline to think that, if you really did not
grasp the offence you would give to believing Muslims, you were not
qualified to write upon the subject you chose (Michael Dummet, qtd. in
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LaPorte, 76).
The heterogeneity of reader expectation, not only in reference to the
same text, but also in terms of approaches to different genres of writing is
a matter of considerable importance to our study. Readers do not embark
upon the reading of a book of poems in the same way as they do a novel,
or a book of history. Each genre has its distinct discourse, though it is not
uncommon for discrete discourses to overlap somewhat. Making use of
everyday facts to construct works of fiction and imagination is a com-
monplace feature of the artistic process. A considerable license is claimed
and exercised by the writer/artist in this process, though this license may
be abbreviated a bit in works of historical fiction. The issue may become
prickly when dealing with religio-historical fictionalizing. LaPorte makes
some sound observations in this regard:

Rushdie, in depicting what he regards as historical events, in a fic-

tional work, is more able to distort the truth. The prophet is presented as
a cheat and charlatan, the religion is presented as a ridiculous compendi-
um of rules suited to the promiscuous and business-minded prophet. The
trouble with this is that the genre of The Satanic Verses is fiction and as
fiction it endorses a number of derogatory stereotypes about Islam
which unlike a factual work provides no arena in which these negative
depictions can be fought against. Furthermore, a reader of fiction would
approach the novel uncritically unlike the reader of a critical study for
example. (116)

Barring some infelicities of expression, LaPorte is making a valid point.

To many, unaware of the actual history and background of Islam, Rush-
dies book will offer a rather skewed picture, and though the readers of
novels are not entirely uncritical in their approach, it is quite likely, in-
deed, for the general readership, highly probable, that questions of aesthet-
ics and character dynamics within the novel may marginalize discussions
about the accuracy or otherwise of the portrayal.
It has been widely believed that hostile Muslim reaction to The Sa-
tanic Verses is based upon only those passages in the novel that relate to
Islam and the life of its prophet, Mohammad. In fact, Daniel Pipes, in The
Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, And the West, a book riddled
with inaccuracies and transparently hostile to Muslims and the messenger
of Islam, notes: "Only by reading isolated quotes ina literal and humor-
less manner can the book's effect be gauged. Indeed, to understand its im-
pact fully, The Satanic Verses ideally should be read excerpted, out of
context, and preferably in translationfor that is how most of its critics
became acquainted with it" (54). This suggests in sub-text that if the book
were read as a whole it would not appear as offensive to its critics. Pipes
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proceeds to state this in explicit terms:

Is The Satanic Verses blasphemous? To use Rushdie's favorite locution,

it is and it is not. While the book contains many elements of high sacri-
lege, the author is usually careful to place them in frames--dreams, am-
biguous wordings, and the likewhich masks his intent. In other cases,
he carefully avoids specific mention of historical names such as Mu-
hammad, Qur'an or Islam. The sum of the novel, then, is far less sacrile-
gious than its parts. (68; my emphasis)

Margaret Atwood also notes this point about the separation of author
and character and disjunction between dream and reality in her letter of
support to Salman Rushdie. How could a Muslim, she asks, be "seriously
[disturbed by a] passagemeant to be part of a dream, taking place in
the head of a character who is a reprobate"? (39). But the Irish writer
Dermot Bolger sees this as quite within the realm of possibility even as he
affirms Rushdie's right to freedom of expression: "for me," he writes,
"nothing which is outside the range of human experience can be outside
the scope of the writer to explore. The Satanic Verses is a work of blas-
phemy and many people have a right to be offended by its contents" (72).
A writer, on the other hand, has a right to blaspheme, says Bolger, when
more pressing claims are at stake, "when any religion is hijacked in the
name of love, when any religious leader invokes the name of God to send
barefoot children walking through minefields, no more than when any
Western leader calls God's blessing down on genocide, a far greater blas-
phemy takes place; a blasphemy which calls out to be redeemed by
smashing those very icons which have been invoked" (72). Yet he also
slyly remarks, "Few of those who have read [The Satanic Verses] can
have understood what it was about, few of those who would understand it
will have deemed it fit to read," and goes on to admit, "[t]he argument is
no longer about the book's merits or faults or about literature; the contents
of the book have been lost in a war between times and exploding and re-
ceding cultures" (71, 72).
The last part of the statement describes a situation that is as unfortu-
nate as it is true. It has become impossible to discuss the book without in
some way being affected by, or addressing, the controversy that surrounds
it. Yet, major critical voices are ranged on both sides of the divide. While
the fatwa was not generally supported even in the Muslim countries, it has
assumed iconic significance for the West, for whom it signifies all its
worst suspicions and fears about Islam and Islamic societies. In a crude,
ironic kind of way, it has been seen as a validation of Rushdie's portrayal
of Mohammad and his times in the novel. Discerning critics, a number of
them teaching in universities in America, Canada, or England, though
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quick to point out Rushdie's right to say and publish what he wishes to or
believes, draw attention to the astigmatism that afflicts general western
perception of the situation. A thousand-year tradition of demonizing Islam
appears still to be at work though occasional, resolute efforts have been
made to break free of it. Yet, because of this long, entrenched tradition,
the worst that can be said about Islam is readily accepted. Anti-Islamic
views, slander, and vilification directed against muslims, the prophet of Is-
lam, and their way of life fall on fertile ground, though, once again (until
9/11 at least), because of the increasingly multicultural environment in
Europe and the United States, this too was slowly changing.
Bolger appears to be taking the high moral ground of mutual accommoda-
tion and differential adjustments of rights and obligations as opposed to
Pipes who privileges blatant satire, but both to varying extents agree that
blasphemy and sacrilege are not absent from the book. The former, in fact,
concedes to readers who may be so affected the right to be offended by
its contents. His point about the smashing [of] icons which have been
invoked to perpetrate acts of brutality and genocide is persuasive as well,
though it may help to keep in mind that there are not many religions or po-
litical ideologies that have not been adduced to serve this end. But here
too one would be advised to proceed with caution and choose ones tar-
gets carefully. Considering the current political climate, it would be rather
reckless for Muslims in the United States to challenge regimes of capital-
ist libertarianism and ideologues of universalistic democracy for the wide-
spread misery and destruction that has been (and continues to be) caused
in their name. Yet attacks on Islam and detrimental comparisons with
Christianity and western ways of living are a commonplace feature of An-
glo-American cultural and political discourse. Nor are the academic cir-
cles exempt from this. It is a practice that has generated an environment of
deep-seated suspicion and distrust between communities and cultures that
have learned much from each other, have a lot in common, but have been
taught to see each other in terms of irreconcilable differences and diamet-
rical opposition. Malise Ruthven provides a classic example of this ram-
pant affliction:

The focus for the outrage [against The Satanic Verses] . . . is less the
raising of doubt than the lampooning of the Prophet. Many Chris-
tians, of course, have been similarly offended by the appearance of
Christ in profane situationsnotably in the recent row over Martin
Scorceses film of Kazantkaziss novel The Last Temptation, where
Jesus fantasizes about sexual relations with Mary Magdalene. To note
the parallels, however, is also to become aware of the differences. If
Imitatio Muhammadi, as Armand Abel has astutely observed, is an
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imitation of the Prophets activity, Imitatio Christii is rather the imita-

tion of Christs suffering. . . Christianity thrives on persecution . . .
The Christian response to insult is to try to gain the moral and psy-
chological advantage, to turn the other cheek.
(Ruthven, 47-48)

But historians and critics like Malise Ruthven and Daniel Pipes carry
too much of the baggage from the past to be cognizant of their own inabil-
ity to see the muslim position in the first place, and too contented with
their own process of reasoning to notice the faulty assumptions behind it
or appreciate an alternate point of view. It is this complacency that leads
Pipes to charge that those who protest the book are "intellectually defi-
cient" and read it "in a literal, and very unliterary manner" (53). Such an
indictment mirrors the initial objections of certain academic constituencies
to post-colonial, black, or feminist readings of time-honored classics like
The Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Eyre, among others. Yet, Pipes
admits, "blasphemyfits into a long tradition of criticism from within [Is-
lamic societies]; and Rushdie's work was far from being the most critical
of that tradition" (83). He cannot understand the furor in the Islamic world
when "plenty of other books have been published that matched or even
exceeded Rushdie's impiety toward Islamwithout rousing anything like
the controversy his did" (77).
Pipes inability to come to terms with what he perceives as a contra-
diction in the Islamic worlds reaction to Rushdies book raises the crucial
question of reader competence. It would have helped had he elaborated a
bit on his statement about the long tradition of internal criticism in Mus-
lim societies. His failure to do so obliges the reader to interrogate the na-
ture and extent of his familiarity with such a tradition and vitiates the
process of his reasoning. For though it is important to recognize that the
Islamic world too has its legacy of religious satire, philosophic and popu-
lar questioning of dogmas, rituals, and even the basic elements of Islamic
belief, not to forget, disputations about and challenges to received versions
of the Divine, one must not terminate ones observations here but reflect
also on the nature of texts that exemplify these practices. Four broad cate-
gories may be identified: (1) Secular narrative traditions of the nature of
Alif Laila wa Laila (A Thousand Nights and One Night), folktales, dastans
(i.e., long oral or written romances), and common everyday conversation,
including the retailing of disparaging religious jokes on social occasions;
(2) poetic compositions of Sufis like Rumi, Rabia Basri, Qurrat-ul-Ain
Tahira, Omar Khayyam, Madholal Husein, and Bulleh Shah, and Bhakti
(devotional) poets, Baba Farid Ganjshakar, Kabir, Nanak, and others; (3)
poetry in the secular literary tradition represented in the Indian sub-
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continent by Mir, Ghalib, Daagh, the early Iqbal, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, and
feminist poets Fehmida Riaz and Kishwar Naheed, to name a few; and (4)
Religious disquisitions and disputations; foundational documents of het-
erodox religious sects, for example, doctrines of the Shaykhi School of
Shiism, the Bayan of the Babis, writings of Mirza Husain Ali Nuri es-
tablishing the Bahai faith, all three originating in 19th century Iran, and
the works of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the Ahmadiya denomina-
tion in India in the last decade of the same century. Of these, the last listed
development excited the greatest ire of the South Asian Muslim popula-
tion, and this was so, in large part, it may be noted, because the new sect
was perceived to be inspired by the imperial British rulers of India. How-
ever irreverent or sacrilegious though these works or practices often are,
ad hominem attacks on the messenger of Islam were scrupulously avoid-
ed, as much as a matter of decorum appropriate to the nature and level of
discourse as for the genuine admiration for and attachment to one who is
regarded, even among most heterodox circles, as the embodiment of the
highest excellence.
Private conversation remains the one exception to this practice. In
such social exchange, occasionally, the critique and satire of both the reli-
gion and its messenger are far less restrained. These moments, however,
are intimate and privileged cultural experiences, and a society may view
their public display as a violation of a shared cultural code. It is not so
much as what gets displayed as who displays it and for what purpose. For
a culture that reveres mystics like Mansoor Al-Hallaj, who was beheaded
for blasphemy when, on being asked, What is the Truth?, he uttered the
words, Un-al haq! (I am the Truth) makes instinctively an important dis-
tinction between those who stand up for their convictions and those who
are perceived to play merely the role of an informer or reporter for an out-
side audience. On the other hand, behind this reverence for an Al-Hallaj
and other Sufis, like Sarmad and Shah Hussein, is the recognition that
they flout rituals and formulas of faith, putting their lives at risk in doing
so, only because they have attained a true and personal apprehension of
the spirit of the Divine.
The problem indeed may then lie in the politics of identity, who
Rushdie is and who he is seen to represent, as much as in the modalities of
creative expression, the form he employs to set his critique of Islam in
motion. After all, this is a mere novel, we are repeatedly told, a work of
fiction. Why should it be confused with reality or history? Why should it
be seen as threatening those two different categories of experience? The
difficulty, however, is that if it is humorless and unimaginative not to be
able to differentiate between fiction and reality, a condition, by the way,
from which a number of artists and writers may suffer, or to see the for-
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mer as a threat to the latter, which too is not an uncommon perception,

and not without reason, for who can pretend that language usage and
character portrayal are innocent of social and political consequences, it is
equally simplistic to assume that these categories are entirely distinct, that
they do not in many ways impinge upon, determine, or shape each other.
Salman Rushdie, unlike a number of his supporters, is well aware of this,
and, in an essay written for The Observer, London, he expresses his faith
in the art of the novel in no uncertain terms:

The art of the novel is a thing I cherish as dearly as the book burners of
Bradford value their brand of militant Islam. Literature is where I go to
explore the highest and the lowest places in human society and in the
human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but truth of the tale,
of the imagination, and of the heart. So the battle over The Satanic Vers-
es is a clash of faiths, in a way. Or, more precisely, it's a clash of lan-
guages. As my fictional character 'Salman' says of my fictional prophet
'Mahound,' 'It's his Word against mine. (Critical Fictions 95)

The distinction he makes needs to be registered here. His art of the

novel is juxtaposed against not the Qur'an but against book burners of mil-
itant Islam. The differentiation is clever and apt, but he complicates the is-
sue by drawing the further comparison from his book in which one "fic-
tional character" proffers his word against another fictional character, the
"fictional prophet 'Mahound.'" So yes, he does and does not bring the orig-
inal messenger and his message under attack, but no alert reader after
reading this passage would remain unaware of the undermining intent. Af-
ter all, the name of the fictional prophet has a history behind it which is
not quite innocent, as Rushdie himself acknowledges in his novel:

Here he is neither Mahomet nor MoeHammered; has adopted, instead,

the demon-tag the farangis hang 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 Devils
synonym: Mahound. (93)

Emphasizing the fictionality of a character with a historically charged

borrowed name only underscores the connection with the actual historical
person thus obliquely referenced. At the same time, the unnamed but
clearly referenced Mohammad is narratorially tagged with the name Ma-
hound, to turn insults into strengths, the narrator says with a mixture of
mockery and ironic undercutting.
These are devices that novelists, lawyers, critics, teachers, and politi-
 9

cians all use. But the attempt to pretend that the connections and insinua-
tions are not there is an affront to the intelligence of the readersnot in
using these devices, but, having done so, in denying that it ever was done,
feigning that it was not. What is acknowledged and not acknowledged
simultaneously in the Observer passage quoted above is that the Qur'an
too is a literary text. By referring to it as his Word, Rushdie accepts it as
a linguistic construct, which therefore should, like other such texts, require
interpretation of its linguistic and literary codes, but he relegates it to a
dubious evidentiary status by forcing it in a confrontational relationship
with anothers witness. Further, its slant conjoining with the "book burn-
ers' brand of militant Islam," robs it of authority and undermines its ethical
and literary credentials as a legitimate, polyphonic, and open-ended (i.e.,
heteroglossicnotice the phrase "clash of languages") work. Thus it is
less than inferior, limiting, a work that retails in absolutes, whereas the
surface heteroglossia of The Satanic Verses presents itself as precisely the
opposite of a reductive and closed text.
Admittedly, there are segments of the Muslim population that reject
the hybrid and poetic character of the Quran, but Islamic scholars of
many highly-regarded exegetical traditions accept and discuss this aspect
of the Quranic text at great length in their writings. Fischer and Abedi
provide an illuminating insight into some of these traditions in their im-
portant anthropological study of modern Iran within the context of Islamic
dialogics. They note that although the Quran inveighs against poets and
spinners of idle tales (lahw al-hadth) which distract one from the path of
God, and this arguably might be opposed to all novels and other fictional
genres, the Quran and the hadth literature, are themselves full of richly
didactic stories: the Quran calls itself the best of all stories (12:3), the
most truthful of stories (3:64), (412). Fischer and Abedi also make a cru-
cial observation about the significance of orality in Islamic tradition:

the Quran is profoundly enigmatic on more than just mythic or dog-

matic grounds. Though it is a text generative of a scholastic tradition, the
Quran insists on its own orality and musicality, and warns against writ-
ing: it is a quran (oral recitation), not merely a mus-haf (written text).
Memorization/preservation (hifz is the word for both) are obligatory for
each Muslim communityand may not be left to pen and ink. Muslims
pride themselves that their book resides not on paper but in their
chests. (97-98)

This challenges the widely held opinion that the written word is privileged
over the oral and thus is more authoritative. In an interesting ironic re-
versal, the view highlights not just the alleged authority of the written
word but also, consequently, its limitations in terms of dialogic and inter-
 10

pretive possibilities. The written word is thus seen as rigid and, ultimately,
barren; it needs to be continually resurrected by fertilizing it with oral in-
tervention. Significantly, this line of argument points up the instability and
unreliability of the written word which post-modernist thinkers and de-
constructionists have repeatedly demonstrated. For Fischer and Abedi,
emphasis on the oral over the textual renders the Quran a premier text
of poetic enigma, a text that can speak to all the mysteries of contempo-
rary (postmodern) literary criticism (xxi). As a consequence, they ar-
gue, Islamic culture can be an intellectual interlocutor in the modern
world scene, as it was in the days when it gave form to the nascent mod-
ern Western civilization (xxi).
But why cannot Rushdie see the Quran on its own terms, or to use
his words, as another attempt to enshrine what he calls "the truth of the
tale"? Accommodation of alterity in the particularized instance appears to
be missing in this exceedingly flexible artist. He comes across as expedi-
ently selective in assuming his postures of cultivated, though sensibly cur-
tailed, liberalism and conditioned, localized revulsion. Behind the hetero-
geneous voices of the narrative lie the age-old biases, stereotypical per-
ceptions, and familiar vilifications of a thousand years of monoglossic
pronouncements on Islam. Other possibilities are shut out. Yet, Rushdie
did not need to go outside the European, or, even more specifically, the
British critical tradition to resurrect some of these interpretive options. As
an instance of the latter, in terms of the Keatsian aesthetics, founded on
"the holiness of the heart's affections" and the assumption that "[w]hat the
imagination seizes as beauty must be truth" (Keats 1274), the Qur'an may
be seen as a paradigm for the miracle of "negative capability." The "mes-
senger" being just that, a medium through which language and ideas are
conveyed, and nothing more. It is not the province of this essay to expand
on the direction sketched here, but I suggest it as another one of numerous
unexplored possibilities open to a mind not trammeled by received notions
of pure and spurious, original and copy, the genuine and fake. Within the
very categories formulated by Salman Rushdie in the passage from The
Satanic Verses quoted above, alternative readings cannot be eliminated.
After all, it is one person's word against another's. But Rushdie is ad-
dressing a divided audience, its separate assumptions exploited to privi-
lege one over the other. The process may be likened to playing the race
card from the point of view of the dominant group to an audience of its
peers. The Satanic Verses after all was written for a Western publisher
with a mainly Western market in view, a market in which Muslims
formed a very small, largely unorganized, and embattled group. Western
condescension and approval were thus indispensable to the success of this
enterprise, however one looks at it. As several observers have pointed out,
 11

a similar attack on Christianity or Judaism would not have been as benev-

olently tolerated.
No less unsatisfactory, as a justifying argument, is the strategy of set-
ting up of one "faith" against another. If the battle over The Satanic Verses
is seen as a clash of faiths, the formulation destabilizes both positions.
Rushdie's commitment to the art of the novel becomes as fanatical as the
book burners' faith in their brand of militant Islam. Recalling Bolgers rea-
soning, quoted above, there may be more significant matters in life than
religion or novel writing when one is so willing to use either in order to
sow seeds of division, hatred, or violence among human beings. In The
Satanic Verses, the poet Baal, pressed into service by the Grandee Abu
Simbel against Mahound, says: A poet's work . . . is to name the unnam-
able, to point frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and
stop it from going to sleep (97). The narrator adds, "And if rivers of
blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him."
These words ironically evoke Enoch Powells controversial speech of
April 20, 1968,2 (and the implication of poets and politicians cannot be
lost on the readers), but they are prophetic in view of the post-publication
history of The Satanic Verses. Though no rivers of blood have flowed,
the book has claimed a number of lives, and Rushdie has reaped his re-
wards of fame, close cousin to notoriety, and fortune. In economic terms,
it is no more than is to be expected from the dynamics of supply and de-
mand. He has, however, also been forced to spend ten years of his life in
hiding, a rather heavy price for writing a book unpalatable to some of his
readers. But, then, he is not the only one to suffer for his writing.
At this stage, it may be remarked that the refracted portrayal of Mo-
hammad in the novel, whether as the fictional Mahound or as Gibreel
Farishta, is not wholly irreproachable, and that, however much we know
that the author and the characters are not to be confused with one another,
authorial implication in the unfolding events of the narrative is not entirely
absent. Although, as Margaret Atwood suggests, the events relating to
Mahound may be but a dream of the "reprobate Gibreel Farishta," they are
still dreams about Mahound, and the stories generated to form the novel
are not related, or compiled, by Gibreel Farishta. They follow a certain
historically conditioned, culture-specific, course and are not recounted
generally from Gibreels point of view. The narrative "I" is used very ear-
ly in the novel, and it is clear from the start that the tale is told, mostly in
the third person, by a narrator who has chosen to work with limited om-
niscience and could have assumed complete omniscience had he chosen to
do so. Near the end of the first chapter he says: "I know the truth, obvious-
ly. I watched the whole thing. As to omnipresence and -potence I'm mak-
ing no claims at present, but I can manage this much, I hope" (10; my
 12

emphasis). Then again, early in the Mahound chapter he blurts out: "I
know; deviltalk. Shaitan interrupting Gibreel. Me? (93), the narrator cast-
ing himself here in the role of both Shaitan (a trickster and a devil in the
context) and Gibreel Farishta. It is as if the whole tale were scrambled by
this intrusive presence, both author and fictional narrator, who, in turn,
could be either the agent of confusion or the subject whose discourse is
discomposed by the intrusions. He becomes thus both the persecutor and
the persecuted. But the "Me?" at the end also complicates the narratorial
identity by conflating both author and fictional narrator with the protean
Gibreel in the process of tale telling. Not only does this present a con-
fusion and interplay of identities, but the interpenetration also seeks to
claim, simultaneously, absolute power to direct the tale.
It is this author/narrator morphing-character who consciously pro-
vides, as manager of the performance, correspondences between Gibreel
Farishta and Mohammad, and in so doing develops another (for Muslims,
rather transparent) strategy for launching an attack on him. Gibreel, like
Mohammad, has a miraculous experience at age forty. In a sequence that
parallels the first revealed verses of the Qur'an, and also, with the same
ironic inflection, the Fall of Man, he is commanded to do the impossible
as he and Saladin hurtle downwards after a terrorist woman has blown up
their airplane in the clouds. "'Fly,' Chamcha shrieked at Gibreel. 'Start fly-
ing now'" (8). The command is repeated a little later as Gibreel continues
to fall through the air: "'FlySing'" (9). And strangely enough Gibreel
does so. A couple of pages later the narrator reflects, that given Gibreel's
past and his "miraculous" victory over the "Phantom Bug," the external
and internal change that had been effected by this incident was quite the
thing to be expected: "So maybe someone should have been able to fore-
cast, only nobody did, that when he [Gibreel] was up and about again, he
would sotospeak succeed where the germs had failed and walk out of his
old life forever within a week of his fortieth birthday, vanishing, poof!,
like a trick into thin air" (11). Only after suggesting these refracted con-
nections with Mohammad is Gibreel's past life revealed, and he is shown
to be "a philanderer of the worst type" who is "also learned in the arts of
dissimulation, because," it is noted, "a man who plays gods must be above
reproach" (25). On the one hand, the last part of this statement alludes to
Gibreels film roles in which he acts out the parts of various gods from the
Hindu pantheon. On the other, the extension of these remarks to, and the
insinuation against Mohammad cannot be missed by a Muslim reader.
Though Mohammad repeatedly declared that he was no more than a mes-
senger of God, there is an insidious suggestion here that in claiming to re-
ceive revelations from the Divine Being he was actually arrogating to
himself the power and position of God (playing god).
 13

As if this were not enough, a few pages later, Gibreel Farishta is

shown to be suffering from a fear of sleep because of a recurring and se-
quential dream, brought about after he ate the unclean pigs, in which
he was always present, not as himself but as his namesake, that is, the
archangel Gibreel. His friend, Saladin, finds his revelations pathetic, an-
ticlimactic, what was so strange if his dreams characterized him as the an-
gel, dreams do every damn thing, did it really display more than a banal
kind of egomania? But Gibreel was sweating from fear (83; my em-
phasis). Here too, it is the occasion of Mohammads first revelation that is
being fictionalized and defining features from that event, which every
Muslim knows from childhood, are decontextualized and thereby subject-
ed to mockery and derision.
As several sources attest, it was Mohammads habit since his youth to
seclude himself occasionally in a cave on the mountain rock of Hira just
outside Mecca. Here he is said to have reflected on the inequities and in-
iquities of Meccan society. One night, in the fortieth year of his life, near
the end of the month of Ramadhan, he lay self-absorbed in the cave
when he heard a voice calling out to him, Recite. Twice the voice com-
manded, and Mohammad was unable to respond. At the third command,
he asked, What shall I recite?, and the first Quranic verse was revealed.
It is said that when this occurred Mohammad broke into a sweat. He re-
peated the verse after the voice, which turned out to be that of the Angel
Gabriel. As one source recounts, A great trembling came upon him, and
he hastened home to his wife, and said, O Khadija! What has happened to
me? He lay down, and she watched by him (Ali 17-18; Lings 42-43). In
some accounts he is said to have suffered from paroxysms. His initial re-
action is to doubt the experience because he fears he might have become
possessed.
This brings us back to the difficulty of reader reception. The novel is
indeed a work of double-consciousness, but it also addresses two different
audiences in contrasting ways, playing upon the experienced familiarity
with the subject of one and the acquired predilections of the other. In so
programming his text, Salman Rushdie slights both audiences, but it is the
Muslims who are forced into the awkward position of defending them-
selves and their beliefs against the same old charges of more than a mil-
lennium of conscious, self-righteous calumny and obloquy. Already be-
sieged by gathering antagonism from the West, which is still learning to
see them in ways that do not assume in them a negation of all its cultural,
political, and religious values, customarily painted and projected as igno-
rant, backward, immoral, intolerant, and extremist (the wild progeny of
the savage, disinherited Ishmael), Muslims are now obliged to defend
themselves from a similar assault by one from their own ranks. What is
 14

more, the "insider" uses the same epistemology of calculated interfacing

that served so well the purposes of the traditional Orientalist for so long.
Thus, fragments of accurate information, decontextualized, are superim-
posed on undermining misrepresentation and deliberate misreading of mo-
tive and circumstance. Or, misrepresented facts are interfaced with far
more damaging, and damning, fictions. For most readers in the West,
there would be no way of separating one from the other. For Muslims, the
person of their Prophet, the paradigm of goodness and integrity, is sudden-
ly fictionalized into a depraved and monstrous figure who squeezes the
original out of the novels real and imaginary space. "Poof!" as Salman
Rushdie would say. "Vanished!"
Are Muslims the aggrieved party here or the persecutors? Was Rush-
die cannily exploiting a situation and subjecting already embattled Mus-
lim immigrants to a kind of political intimidation to further his own inter-
ests? Perhaps, he counted on the Islamophobia of the West and its anxie-
ties about Muslim immigrant communities to keep the Muslims in check
even as they smarted under what they perceived as an attack on their faith
and a mockery of their religious beliefs. Or do the problems of the world
really arise from the fact that Mohammad was a fraud and Muslims stub-
bornly refuse to see this? However we formulate these questions, they re-
quire an honest engagement from the readers, as the novel itself demands
an honest confrontation of themselves from its readers.
As a text that appears to undercut a lot more than it affirms, what in-
sights does The Satanic Verses offer? That, no matter what happens, East
and West can never meet? Witness the break-up of Gibreel Farishta and
Alleluia Cone, and of Saladin Chamcha and Pamela Lovelace. That Islam
is a pack of lies and Mohammad was an imposter, a profligate, and a se-
ducer? That Abraham was a "bastard" for abandoning Hagar and Ishmael
in the wilderness? That the English are cold and brutal toward all immi-
grants? That Indians are querulous, envious of each other, and shallow?
That they all desperately wish to become like their former colonial mas-
ters and hate their own country? That those who don't (if they don't) are
crazy like Gibreel Farishta? That Mohammad's general amnesty after his
victory without battle over Mecca was a sham, a roguish, designing act
calculated to obtain personal power and gain, but that Gibreel Farishta's
deliverance of Saladin from the flames was an act of selfless virtue
enough to offset any dissipation of mind, body, and spirit to which he may
have been subject? That despite the redemptive power of Gibreel's one act
of compassion, it is not enough to prevent him from a rather sordid suicide
in the end? That only the most envious, bitter, and nastiest characters sur-
vive with some hope for the future? Witness Saladin Chamcha, for in-
stance, who goes back to India and finally claims his full name to become
 15

Saladin Chamchawala, i.e., from being a spooney himself, he becomes

one who has "spoons" or spooneys of his own. And so the respective fates
of Baal, Salman the Persian, Abu Simbel and Hind, Mirza Saeed, Zeeny
Vakil, and others. It could be said that for Salman Rushdie's acidic sensi-
bility, there is nothing truly positive or worthwhile in the world of this
novel. His narrative works like a massive, churning vortex of negation. If
this is a novel about the processes of change and how newness enters into
the world, as has sometimes been claimed, it has perhaps one of the bleak-
est views on this that one can find.
Despite all this, Rushdie writes of his faith in the "art of the novel"
which he professes to "cherish as dearly as the book burners of Bradford
value their brand of militant Islam." It seems that what he affirms in writ-
ing the book is not so much his right to express himself and explore his
version of the truth as to preach what he believes by emphasizing his abil-
ity, and right, to insult and offend those he does not agree with? In other
words, he too is trading in absolutes though that may not appear readily on
the surface. On the other hand, as Michael Hanne has noted, Rushdie "is
uncomfortably but irremediably both inside and outside Islam--and that is,
in large part, what his book is about!" (Hanne 224). This statement may be
extended to include Rushdie's sub-continental origins as well to which he
is obliged to remain a stranger and a familiar at the same time. So is it too
farfetched to say that Rushdie's anger and ridicule are directed as much
against himself as against others, or that he mocks, condemns, and jeers at
others because he cannot stand himself for what he is: a subject of a for-
mer colony, with pretensions like Saladin Chamcha, straining to gain ac-
ceptance in the world of his erstwhile masters, and like Saladin tolerated,
even in his fame, only under certain limited and severely limiting condi-
tions. Only if he abstains from criticizing the holy cows of Western civi-
lization, and publicly abhors that part of himself that relates to his physical
origin and the place where he comes from will his country of adoption
open its arms to him.
Bhikhu Parekh provides an illuminating quotation in this regard from a
member of the Asian community, a "graduate working in a textile mill in
England:

They are all stooges of the whites. They talk a lot about struggle, but
when have they been beaten up, lost their jobs or suffered a reduction in
their salary? They think highly of themselves and hate us. It seems they
are even ashamed of us. (Parekh 87)

Though Parekh goes on to say that such "criticisms were highly exagger-
ated and bitter," he warns, "the Asian intellectuals can only ignore them at
their peril." True, but the "Asian intellectual" turns away from such com-
 16

ments in disdain only because they are true, literally, and at a deeper, sub-
jective level. What the "graduate working in a textile mill" fails to note or
state is the self-hatred of the intellectuals he targets in his comments.
Product of multiple cultures, uncomfortable with the dichotomies that tear
him apart, post-colonial Salman Rushdie suffers from a sense of dis-
placement that he has not yet resolved by embracing his much flaunted ec-
lecticism but uses it, paradoxically, to deny it and/or denigrate it in others.
No wonder Bolger makes that equivocal comment about The Satanic
Verses, "few of those who would understand it will have deemed it fit
to read."
__________________________________________________________

Notes
1
The term morphing is adapted for use here from Thaddeus Beiers
description of it as the combination of generalized image warping with a cross-
dissolve between image elements. As Beier explains, The term is derived
from image metamorphosis and should not be confused with morphological
image processing operators which detect image features. Morphing is an image
processing technique typically used as an animation tool for the metamorphosis
from one image to another. The idea is to specify a warp that distorts the first
image into the second. Its inverse will distort the second image into the first. As
the metamorphosis proceeds, the first image is gradually distorted and is faded
out, while the second image starts out totally distorted toward the first and is
faded in. Thus, the early images in the sequence are much like the first source
image. The middle image of the sequence is the average of the first source
image distorted halfway toward the second one and the second source image
distorted halfway back toward the first one. The last images in the sequence are
similar to the second source image.For morphs between faces, the middle
image often looks strikingly life-like, like a real person, but clearly it is neither
the person in the first nor second source images. This is helpful in
understanding some of the metamorphic changes and cross-pollinated cultural
and social transformations that characters like Gibreel Farishta, Mahound,
Saladin Chamcha, and Salman Farsi, among others, go through in The Satanic
Verses during the course of its complex polyphonic narratorial unfolding.
2
Powells actual words were slightly different. He declared, As I look
ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber
foaming with much blood. Rushdies The Satanic Verses is as much located in
the context of immigrant-phobia in Britain as in the dream worlds of Jahilia,
Khomeinis Iran, and Bombay, even as the inflections of this phobia embrace the
world of Mahound too in its embrace. Yet the connotations of the allusion remain
ambiguous, intentionally so, it appears, as much else in the novel.
 17

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