 Cover of the first edition, showing a detail fromRustam Killing the White Demon from the Large Clive Album in the Victoria and Albert Museum | |
| Author | Salman Rushdie |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | |
| Published | 26 September 1988 |
| Publisher | Viking Penguin |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (hardcover andpaperback) |
| Pages | 546 (first edition) |
| ISBN | 0-670-82537-9 |
| 823/.914 | |
| LC Class | PR6068.U757 S27 1988 |
The Satanic Verses is the fourth novel from the Indian-British writerSalman Rushdie. First published in September 1988, the book was inspired by the life of the Islamic prophetMuhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie usedmagical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters. The title refers to theSatanic Verses, a group ofQuranic verses about threepagan Meccan goddesses:Allāt,Al-Uzza, andManāt.[2] The part of the story that deals with the satanic verses was based on accounts from the historiansal-Waqidi andal-Tabari.[2]
The book was a 1988Booker Prize finalist (losing toPeter Carey'sOscar and Lucinda), and won the1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year.[3]Timothy Brennan called the work "the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain".
The book and its perceivedblasphemy motivatedIslamic extremist bombings, killings, and riots and sparked adebate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. Fearing unrest, theRajiv Gandhi government banned the importation of the book into India.[4][5] In 1989,Supreme Leader of IranRuhollah Khomeini declared afatwa against Rushdie, resulting in several failed assassination attempts on the author, who was granted police protection by the UK government,[6] and attacks on connected individuals, including the Japanese translatorHitoshi Igarashi who was stabbed to death in 1991. Assassination attempts against Rushdie continued, including anattempt on his life in August 2022, in which he lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand.[7]
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The Satanic Verses consists of aframe narrative, using elements of magical realism,[8] interlaced with a series of sub-plots that are narrated as dream visions experienced by one of the protagonists. The frame narrative involves Indian expatriates in contemporary England. The two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are both actors of Indian Muslim background. Farishta is aBollywood superstar who specialises in playingHindu deities (the character is partly based on Indian film starsAmitabh Bachchan andN. T. Rama Rao).[9] Chamcha, anAnglophile emigrant who has cut himself off from his Indian heritage, works as avoiceover artist in England.
At the beginning of the novel, both are trapped in a plane hijacked by Sikh separatists, flying fromIndia to Britain.[10] The separatists land the plane and take many of the passengers hostage for months, but after negotiations fail, the separatists force the plane to take off and detonate it over theEnglish Channel. While everyone else aboard the plane perishes, Farishta and Chamcha are magically saved. In a miraculous transformation, Farishta takes on the personality of the archangelGabriel (referred to as Gibreel) and Chamcha that of a devil. Farishta develops a halo that occasionally manifests, while Chamcha grows horns and goatlike legs. After both men take refuge with an elderlyEnglish Argentine woman, Chamcha is arrested and is subjected topolice abuse as a suspected illegal immigrant.
Both characters struggle to piece their lives back together. Farishta seeks and finds his lost love, the Englishmountaineer Alleluia "Allie" Cone. However, their relationship is overshadowed by his growing sense that he is the Angel Gibreel and other symptoms ofschizophrenia. After attempting unsuccessfully to evangelise in London, Farishta steps into the street and is hit by the car of movie producer S.S. Sisodia. Sisodia takes Farishta to get treated for schizophrenia with Allie and proposes a plan to revitalise Farishta's movie career. Meanwhile, Chamcha is fired from voice acting and becomes distressed by his increasingly goatlike appearance and behaviour, as well as by the revelation that his estranged wife Pamela and friend Jamshed "Jumpy" Joshi have begun a relationship under the impression that Chamcha perished in the explosion. Jumpy convinces the Shaandaars, a family operating a hostel, to let Chamcha stay with them. Chamcha's devil-like appearance intensifies until he recognizes his anger at Farishta for not defending him from arrest and abandoning him after the plane crash, after which he is transformed back into his human shape.
Chamcha wants to take revenge on Farishta for having forsaken him after their joint fall from the hijacked plane and resents him for his successful return to movie stardom. Aware of Farishta'spathological jealousy andparanoid schizophrenia, Chamcha harasses Farishta and Allie over the phone, using different vocal impressions and intimate details of Allie's life to insinuate that Allie is unfaithful to Farishta. Provoked by Chamcha's calls, Farishta destroys his relationship with Allie.
Jumpy, Pamela, and Chamcha attend a rally in defense of Dr. Uhuru Simba, a controversial black activist seemingly framed for a series of gruesome serial killings. Simba dies suspiciously in police custody, and Sikh youth on community patrol catch the real murderer, a white man. The police plan a cover-up and raid a popular South Asian nightclub, inflaming tensions and leading to riots. Pamela and Jumpy intend to photocopy and distribute compromising information about the police, but during the riots, masked men set fire to the building they are in, destroying the evidence and killing Pamela and Jumpy. During the riots, Farishta believes that the rioters' flames are the result of his angelic powers. He realises that Chamcha was to blame for the calls, tracking him down to the now-burning Shaandaar hostel with the intent of killing him, but relenting when he sees that Chamcha tried in vain to save Mr. and Mrs. Shaandaar from the fire.
Both return to India, Farishta to star in a series of movies that turn out to be unsuccessful and Chamcha to see his estranged father, who is terminally ill. Farishta is discovered to have murdered both Sisodia and Allie and visits Chamcha at his father's estate, seemingly about to shoot him, but he turns the gun on himself. Chamcha, who has found not only forgiveness from Farishta but also reconciliation with his father and his own Indian identity, decides to remain in India.
Embedded in this story is a series of half-magic dream vision narratives, ascribed to the mind of Farishta.
One of the sequences is a fictionalised narration of the life ofMuhammad (called "Mahound" or "the Messenger" in the novel) inMecca (calledJahilia in the novel). At its centre is the episode of the so-calledsatanic verses, in which the prophet first proclaims a revelation requiring the adoption of three of the oldpolytheistic deities, but later renounces this as an error induced by the Devil. There are also two opponents of the "Messenger": aheathen priestess, Hind, and a sceptic and satirical poet, Baal. When the prophet returns to Mecca in triumph, Baal goes into hiding in an underground brothel, where the prostitutes assume the identities of the prophet's wives. One of the prophet's companions escapes to Jahilia and claims that he, doubting the authenticity of the "Messenger", has subtly altered portions of theQuran as they were dictated to him, seemingly disproving Mahound's divine revelation. When Mahound takes over Jahilia, he has Baal and the prostitutes executed, though Hind's supernatural machinations are implied to have caused Mahound's illness and eventual death.
The second sequence tells the story of Ayesha, an Indian peasant girl who claims to be receiving revelations from the Archangel Gibreel. She entices all her village community to embark on a foot pilgrimage to Mecca, claiming that they will be able to walk across theArabian Sea. The pilgrimage ends in a catastrophic climax as the believers all walk into the water and disappear, amid disturbingly conflicting testimonies from observers about whether they simply drowned or were in fact miraculously able to cross the sea.
A third dream sequence presents the figure of a fanatic expatriate religious leader, the "Imam", in a late-20th-century setting, an allusion toRuhollah Khomeini in his exile in Paris.[11] The Imam forces Farishta, who has assumed the form of the angel Gibreel, to do supernatural battle with the Imam's bitter enemy, his exiled homeland's empress Ayesha.
Overall, the book received favourable reviews from literary critics. In a 2003 volume of criticism of Rushdie's career, the influential criticHarold Bloom namedThe Satanic Verses "Rushdie's largest aesthetic achievement".[12]
Timothy Brennan called the work "the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain" that captures the immigrants' dream-like disorientation and their process of "union-by-hybridization". The book is seen as "fundamentally a study in alienation".[3]
Muhammad Mashuq ibn Ally wrote that "The Satanic Verses is about identity, alienation, rootlessness, brutality, compromise, and conformity. These concepts confront all migrants, disillusioned with both cultures: the one they are in and the one they join. Yet knowing they cannot live a life of anonymity, they mediate between them both.The Satanic Verses is a reflection of the author's dilemmas." The work is an "albeit surreal, record of its own author's continuing identity crisis".[3] Ally said that the book reveals the author ultimately as "the victim of nineteenth-century Britishcolonialism".[3] Rushdie himself spoke confirming this interpretation of his book, saying that it was not about Islam, "but about migration,metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London andBombay".[3] He has also said "It's a novel which happened to contain a castigation of Westernmaterialism. The tone is comic."[3]
After theSatanic Verses controversy developed, some scholars familiar with the book and the whole of Rushdie's work, like M. D. Fletcher, saw the reaction as ironic. Fletcher wrote "It is perhaps a relevant irony that some of the major expressions of hostility toward Rushdie came from those about whom and (in some sense) for whom he wrote."[13] He said the manifestations of the controversy in Britain:
embodied an anger arising in part from the frustrations of the migrant experience and generally reflected failures of multicultural integration, both significant Rushdie themes. Clearly, Rushdie's interests centrally include explorations of how migration heightens one's awareness that perceptions of reality are relative and fragile, and of the nature of religious faith and revelation, not to mention the political manipulation of religion. Rushdie's own assumptions about the importance of literature parallel the literal value accorded the written word in Islamic tradition to some degree. But Rushdie seems to have assumed that diverse communities and cultures share some degree of common moral ground on the basis of which dialogue can be pieced together, and it is perhaps for this reason that he underestimated the implacable nature of the hostility evoked byThe Satanic Verses, even though a major theme of that novel is the dangerous nature of closed, absolutist belief systems.[13]
Rushdie's influences have long been a point of interest to scholars examining his work. According toW. J. Weatherby, influences onThe Satanic Verses were listed asJames Joyce,Italo Calvino,Franz Kafka,Frank Herbert,Thomas Pynchon,Mervyn Peake,Gabriel García Márquez,Jean-Luc Godard,J. G. Ballard, andWilliam S. Burroughs.[14] According to the author himself, he was inspired to write the novel by the work ofMikhail Bulgakov,The Master and Margarita.[15]Angela Carter writes that the novel contains "inventions such as the city of Jahilia, 'built entirely of sand,' that gives a nod to Calvino and a wink to Frank Herbert".[16]
Srinivas Aravamudan's analysis ofThe Satanic Verses stressed the satiric nature of the work and held that while it andMidnight's Children may appear to be more "comic epic", "clearly those works are highly satirical" in a similar vein of postmodern satire pioneered byJoseph Heller inCatch-22.[13]
The Satanic Verses continued to exhibit Rushdie's penchant for organising his work in terms of parallel stories. Within the book "there are major parallel stories, alternating dream and reality sequences, tied together by the recurring names of the characters in each; this provides intertexts within each novel which comment on the other stories."The Satanic Verses also exhibits Rushdie's common practice of using allusions to invoke connotative links. Within the book he referenced everything from mythology to "one-liners invoking recent popular culture".[13]
The novel has been accused ofblasphemy for its reference to the "Satanic Verses".Pakistan banned the book in November 1988. On 12 February 1989, 10,000 protesters gathered against Rushdie and the book inIslamabad, Pakistan. Six protesters were killed in an attack on the American Cultural Center, and anAmerican Express office was ransacked. As the violence spread, the importing of the book was banned in India[17] and it wasburned in demonstrations in the United Kingdom.
Meanwhile, theCommission for Racial Equality and a liberal think tank, thePolicy Studies Institute, held seminars on the Rushdie affair. They did not invite the authorFay Weldon, who spoke out against burning books, but did inviteShabbir Akhtar, a Cambridge philosophy graduate who called for "a negotiated compromise" that "would protect Muslim sensibilities against gratuitous provocation". The journalist and authorAndy McSmith wrote at the time "We are witnessing, I fear, the birth of a new and dangerously illiberal 'liberal' orthodoxy designed to accommodate Dr. Akhtar and his fundamentalist friends."[18]
In September 2012, Rushdie expressed doubt thatThe Satanic Verses would be published today because of a climate of "fear and nervousness".[19]
In mid-February 1989, following the violent riot against the book in Pakistan, theAyatollahRuhollah Khomeini, thenSupreme Leader of Iran and aShiite scholar, issued afatwa calling for the death of Rushdie and his publishers,[20] and called for Muslims to point him out to those who can kill him if they cannot themselves. Although the BritishConservative government underMargaret Thatcher gave Rushdie round-the-clock police protection, many politicians on both sides were hostile to the author. BritishLabour MPKeith Vaz led a march throughLeicester shortly after he was elected in 1989 calling for the book to be banned, while the Conservative politicianNorman Tebbit, the party's former chairman, called Rushdie an "outstanding villain" whose "public life has been a record of despicable acts of betrayal of his upbringing, religion, adopted home and nationality".[21]
JournalistChristopher Hitchens defended Rushdie and urged critics to condemn the violence of thefatwa instead of blaming the novel or the author. Hitchens considered thefatwa to be the opening shot in a cultural war on freedom.[22]
In 2021, theBBC broadcast a two-hour documentary byMobeen Azhar and Chloe Hadjimatheou, interviewing many of the principal denouncers and defenders of the book from 1988–1989, concluding that campaigns against the book were amplified by minority (racial and religious) politics in England and other countries.[23]
Despite a conciliatory statement by Iran in 1998, and Rushdie's declaration that he would stop living in hiding, theIslamic Republic News Agency reported in 2006 that thefatwa would remain in place permanently sincefatawa can only be rescinded by the person who first issued them, and Khomeini had since died.[24]
Hitoshi Igarashi, Rushdie's Japanese translator, was found by a cleaning lady, stabbed to death in his office at theUniversity of Tsukuba on 13 July 1991. Ten days prior to Igarashi's killing, Rushdie's Italian translator Ettore Capriolo was seriously injured by an attacker at his home inMilan by being stabbed multiple times on 3 July 1991.[25]William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher ofThe Satanic Verses, was critically injured by being shot three times in the back by an assailant on 11 October 1993 inOslo. Nygaard survived, but spent months in the hospital recovering. The book's Turkish translatorAziz Nesin was the intended target of a mob of arsonists who set fire to the Madimak Hotel after Friday prayers on 2 July 1993 inSivas,Turkey, killing 37 people, mostlyAlevi scholars, poets and musicians. Nesin escaped death when the fundamentalist mob failed to recognize him early in the attack. Known as theSivas massacre, it is remembered by Alevi Turks who gather in Sivas annually and hold silent marches, commemorations and vigils for the slain.[26]
In March 2016, the bounty for the Rushdie fatwa was raised by $600,000 (£430,000). Top Iranian media contributed this sum, adding to the existing $2.8 million already offered.[27] In response, theSwedish Academy, which awards theNobel Prize in Literature, denounced the death sentence and called it "a serious violation of free speech". This was the first time it had commented on the issue since the book's publication.[28]
On 12 August 2022,Rushdie was attacked onstage while speaking at an event of theChautauqua Institution. Rushdie suffered four stab wounds to the stomach area of his abdomen, three wounds to the right side of the front part of his neck, one wound to his right eye, one wound to his chest and one wound to his right thigh.[29] He was flown by helicopter toUPMC Hamot, atertiary-level hospital inErie, Pennsylvania.[30] The attacker, Hadi Matar, was immediately taken into custody.[31] He was charged with attempted murder and assault, pleading not guilty, and was remanded in custody.[32] By 14 August, Rushdie was off the ventilator and able to talk.[33] Rushdie's agentAndrew Wylie reported on 23 October that Rushdie had lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand, but survived the murder attempt.[34][29]
The Satanic Verses with its filmic, multiple narrative structure, is itself a species of "theological".
The death threats and bounty led Rushdie to go into hiding under a British government protection program, which included a round-the-clock armed guard
