Notes for Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses Paul Brians Professor of English, Washington State University [email protected] Version of February 13, 2004 For more about Salman Rushdie and other South Asian writers, see Paul Brians’ Modern South Asian Literature in English . Table of Contents Introduction 2 List of Principal Characters 8 Chapter I: The Angel Gibreel 10 Chapter II: Mahound 30 Chapter III: Ellowen Deeowen 36 Chapter IV: Ayesha 45 Chapter V: A City Visible but Unseen 49 Chapter VI: Return to Jahilia 66 Chapter VII: The Angel Azraeel 71 Chapter VIII: 81 Chapter IX: The Wonderful Lamp 84 The Unity of The Satanic Verses 87 Selected Sources 90 1 fundamental religious beliefs is intolerable. In the Western European tradition, novels are viewed very differently. Following the devastatingly successful assaults of the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment upon Christianity, intellectuals in the West largely abandoned the Christian framework as an explanatory world view. Indeed, religion became for many the enemy: the suppressor of free thought, the enemy of science This study guide was prepared to help people read and study and progress. When the freethinking Thomas Jefferson ran for Salman Rushdie’s novel. It contains explanations for many of its President of the young United States his opponents accused him allusions and non-English words and phrases and aims as well of intending to suppress Christianity and arrest its adherents. at providing a thorough explication of the novel which will help Although liberal and even politically radical forms of Christianity the interested reader but not substitute for a reading of the book (the Catholic Worker movement, liberation theology) were to itself. Many links are provided to other sites on the Web where emerge from time to time, the general attitude toward religion further information can be found. among that class of people who value serious fi ction has been negative. The “Rushdie Affair” Pious bigots were the objects of scorn by such popular This is not a site for polemics about the novel or the “Rushdie Nineteenth-Century authors as Charles Dickens and Mark Affair”. To many Western1 readers The Satanic Verses appears Twain. Twentieth-Century writers as different as James Joyce as a brilliant attack on religious bigotry. To many Muslims, East and Margaret Atwood have vividly depicted in novels the threats and West, it appears as a vicious series of insults to many of their posed by conservative religious beliefs. So-called “Catholic” most cherished beliefs. There are other positions: liberal and authors such as T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene routinely explore conservative non-Muslims deplore his irreverence, and liberal doubt more than faith; and even the greatest of all Christian Muslims deplore the fatwa against Rushdie and support his right novels, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov is so to publish, or even admire his work; some American and British harrowing in its investigation of the challenges of faith that it has non-Muslim critics have been critical of him. But the important probably swayed more people away from religion than toward it. debate, the one that makes a difference in the real world, is the Furthermore, from the time of Matthew Arnold onward, it one between the extremes, and between those extremes there has been frequently claimed that serious fi ction and art could remains a seemingly unbridgeable gulf. It is not my desire to largely fi ll the gap left by the collapse of the cultural infl uence exacerbate the tensions surrounding this novel, nor to delve in of traditional religion. The claims to the importance of high any depth into the controversy. That has been done, exhaustively, seriousness in fi ction have been under assault by the most by many others. I recommend especially Michael Hanne’s recent generation of critics for some time; but the justifi cation “Salman Rushdie: ‘The Satanic Verses’ (1988)“ as a thoughtful for studying novels in an academic setting ultimately rests on overview of the “affair” and Joel Kuortti’s Place of the Sacred: the very claims of cultural signifi cance that these critics attack. The Rhetoric of the Satanic Verses Affair (1997). But one cannot Fiction has not just been an irritant to religion in the West; it has entirely ignore the controversy. posed itself as an alternative to it. Perhaps the contribution I can most usefully make is to discuss Rushdie’s own claims for the importance of the novel are only the differences in perspective of the antagonists in the affair slightly less exalted in his essay, “Is Nothing Sacred“. Although toward the modern novel as a form. Islam is a religious tradition at its end he rejects the claims of the novel to be able to replace which in many infl uential quarters is self-consciously seeking religion, he makes some strong claims for it: to purify itself from modernizing, liberal tendencies. Although Islamic tales both short and long abound, and there are many Between religion and literature, as between politics and authors of fi ction who are highly honored, the modern novel as literature, there is a linguistically based dispute. But it is such is not a comfortable form in the Muslim world. Often it not a dispute of simple opposites. Because whereas religion is identifi ed with the West, with mere entertainment, with lax seeks to privilege one language above all others, the novel morals. In addition, Muslim writers who write novels are often has always been about the way in which differentdifferent languages, critical of tradition. The 1994 near-fatal assault on the Egyptian values and narratives quarrel, and about the shifting relations Nobel Prizewinner Naguib Mahfouz illustrates the perils that between them, which are relations of power. The novel does even the most acclaimed of novelists may encounter in an era not seek to establish a privileged language, but it insists upon of religious polarization. To be sure, most Muslims abhor such the freedom to portray and analyse the struggle between the assaults; but the feelings which cause them are all too familiar in different contestants for such privileges. such countries as Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, and even Turkey. Carlos Fuentes has called the novel “a privileged arena”. To a conservative Muslim, Islam is not just a religion in the By this he does not mean that it is the kind of holy space sense that most Westerners use the term, a private faith which which one must put off oneʼs shoes to enter; it is not an arena provides hope and consolation within a secular world. Islam is a to revere; it claims no special rights except the right to be way of life, a body of law, an all-embracing cultural framework the stage upon which the great debates of society can be within which novels are distinctly unimportant and potentially conducted.(420) troublesome. That a mere novelist should dare to satirize 2 . while the novel answers our need for wonderment and consider himself a Muslim (see below, note on p. 29). Certainly understanding, it brings us harsh and unpalatable news as he was never an adherent of that sort of Islam which believes well. that apostasy is a capital offense. He was steeped from an early period in fi ction, both Eastern and Western; and as a writer It tells us there are no rules. It hands down no seems to have accepted the High Modern view that the writing of commandments. We have to make up our own rules as best outspoken controversial fi ction is a calling, perhaps even a duty. we can, make them up as we go along. All of his works contain controversial themes; and beginning with Midnight’s Children in 1981 he took on South Asian politics And it tells us there are no answers; or rather, it tells us in a way that earned him denunciations and bans as well as praise that answers are easier to come by, and less reliable, than for his courage. He has often expressed his opposition to the questions. If religion is an answer, if political ideology is religious extremism that informs modern Pakistani and Indian an answer, then literature is an inquiry; great literature, by politics, and The Satanic Verses is another stage in a consistent asking extraordinary questions, opens new doors in our critique of such extremism. What makes it different, however, minds. (423) is that in it he chose to criticize not only modern religious fi gures such as the Ayatollah Khomeni, but dared to question . literature is, of all the arts, the one best suited to the authority of the very root of Islam: the inspired nature of the challenging absolutes of all kinds; and, because it is in its Qur’an and the authority of the Prophet Muhammad. origin the schismatic Other of the sacred (and authorless) text, so it is also the art most likely to fi ll our god-shaped To a secularized European, his critique of Islam in the novel holes. (424) seems very mild and tentative; but there has never been anything like it in the Muslim world. Scoffers and libertines there have In the Twentieth Century the novel came to be viewed as been; but they were fundamentally unserious. Rushdie seems to primarily oppositional, critical of the culture which produced it. have been trying to become the Muslim Voltaire; but Islam has Rather than providing values, it challenges them. Modern novels never undergone an equivalent to the European Enlightenment, are praised for their courage in exposing hypocrisy, challenging let alone the development of a “higher criticism” such as the West tradition, exploring forbidden themes. If blasphemy is not the has subjected the Bible to for the past two centuries.