The Importance of Being Earnest About Salman Rushdie*

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST ABOUT SALMAN RUSHDIE*

SADIK J. AL-AZM Damascus

Part One: Comparisons

There is plenty more to The Satanic Verses and the Rushdie affair than a mere succes de scandale. The least that one can say on this score is that we have had a very vivid demonstration of the fact that creative fiction matters politically and that books which make a dif- ference with the wide public can still be written and published. Therefore, assuming a dismissive attitude towards the novel and the furor it provoked is ill-considered, especially at a time when cultural chauvinism, conservative parochialism and narcissistic particularism seem to have the upper hand in many places. That such an attitude proved alarmingly widespread in American academic circles and among U.S. intellectuals, I learned from personal experience while lecturing, discussing and debating at various American institutions of higher learning throughout the last academic year (1988-1989). Thus, in commenting critically on such phenomena as Rushdie's indifferent defenders, undiscriminating critics and dismissive detractors in the West, I shall try to keep an eye on the revealing, the symptomatic and the unsaid in what passed as the Rushdie affair, debate and polemics.

* A condensed version of this article was given as a talk at Princeton University (Near Eastern Studies Department) in December, 1989. I shall use the following abbreviations to refer to Rushdie's works: (SV) The Satanic Verses,Viking, Lon- don, 1988; (MC) Midnight's Children, Picador London, 1982; (S) Shame, Picador, London, 1984; (J) The Jaguar Smile: A NicaraguanJourney, Penguin Books, New York, 1987. I would like to express my gratitude to the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris for kindly giving me access to their files on the Rushdie affair in September 1989.

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It was certainly revealing to me that hardly any of the Western intellectuals who rallied to the defense of Salman Rushdie- individually and collectively-came anywhere near regarding him as a Muslim dissident who bears some family resemblances to the celebrated literary-critical dissidents of the Communist countries so enthusiastically adopted by the West and so heartily defended by its intelligentsia. We all know by now that two members of Sweden's Nobel Prize awarding Academy of Letters took the unprecedented step of resigning their life-long membership in that august body on account of the Academy's refusal to come out fully in support of Rushdie the author. A simple comparison of the Academy's stand on the Rushdie affair with its highly publicized support of and prizes to dissident authors from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is sufficient to drive the message home. My impression is that Rushdie has been defended by the concerned segment of the Western intelligentsia, formalistically, legalistically, detachedly and at arm's length. I did not sense in any of their apologies that quality of warmth, commitment and genuine concern that usually informs their adoption and defense of the creative writers and critical thinkers of the Communist countries. Perhaps the political unconscious looms here much larger than one would have initially suspected. Perhaps the deep-seated and silent assumption in the West remains that Muslims are simply not worthy of serious dissidents, do not deserve them, and are ultimately incapable of producing them; for, in the final analysis, it is the theocracy of the Ayatollahs that becomes them. No wonder, then, if a Muslim's exercise in satirical courage and laughter should pass mostly unsung for what it is. To complete the picture, add to that the objective alliance between (a) the well synchronized anti- Rushdie coalition formed by assertive reactionary and conservative forces in the West, and (b) Khomeini's deadly condemnation of the novel and its author. Following are a few partners to that alliance: In the United States, Cardinal O'Connor of New York (the most important and influential Roman Catholic Prelate in the country) censured The Satanic Verses without any reference to the mortal 1 threats surrounding its author. In the Vatican, L'Osservatore

' The New York Times, February 19, 1989.

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Romano denounced the novel for blasphemy but made no specific mention of Khomeini's death sentence against Rushdie.2 In Britain, the famous jurist Lord Shawcross blamed Rushdie for abusing the freedom "which he shares with all of us",3 while another Lord accused him of something like treachery "at a time when attempts to mend bridges with certain Muslim countries (i.e., Iran) have been at so sensitive a stage" .4 In Israel, the chief Rabbi of Ashkenazi Jews, Avraham Shapira, called for a ban on the publication of The Satanic Verses in Israel. 5 On another Jewish front, the chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Com- monwealth, Immanuel Jakobovitz, called for British legislation to prohibit the publication of any material "likely to inflame, through obscene defamation, the feelings or beliefs of any sections of society".6 The restrictive message of the Ayatollah's 'objective' allies came through loud and clear: Religion is not to be criticized, satirized, lampooned and/or destabilized in these 'perilous' times. Thus, The New York Times reported the following item concerning the Rushdie case: "The Catholic bishops' conference has made no public comment on the case. Neither has any agency of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's second largest denomination, or of the United Methodist church or of the 7 Presbyterian Church (USA)".' As expected, Moral Majority leader, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, was no better. It was no less revealing to me that none of the participants in the extended and passionate debates on the Rushdie affair came anywhere near dealing with him as a possible Muslim Rabelais, a possible Muslim Voltaire and/or a possible Muslim James Joyce settling overdue accounts with his church; i.e., with his erstwhile former religious conscience and consciousness. True, I did see in the literature a few fleeting references to Rabelais, Voltaire and Joyce, but these had to do with style rather than substance, with aesthetics rather than historical significance. This is why I was

2 The New York Times, March 7, 1989. 3 The New York Times, March 10, 1989. 4 Ibid. 5 The New York Times, March 7, 1989. 6 The New York Times, March 10, 1989. 7 The New York Times, February 26, 1989.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 4 pleased to learn from The Daily Telegraph interview last August with Marianne Wiggin (Rushdie's wife and at the time still in hiding with him) that both of them had been reading 18th century works 8 and in particular Voltaire, Diderot and Thomas Pained I find these comparisons very inviting, partly on account of their inherent interest, and partly as a reminder and reply to those intellectuals who took the shortest of routes to an all too easy conscience by dismissing the Rushdie affair with appeals to such cliches as "he knew what he was doing", "he has only himself to blame" and "he had it coming to him".9 Did not Rabelais, Voltaire and Joyce know what they were doing? Is not Rushdie breaking new critical ground in Muslim cultural and historical consciousness? If so, then, are not adverse reactions to be expected? Or are Muslim societies and cultures supposed to remain where they have always been? If Louis Althusser can take pride in praising Spinoza's philosophy for "terrifying its time" by providing "one of the greatest lessons in heresy the world has seen", then I see no reason why we cannot take pride in praising Rushdie's novel also for "terrifying its time" by providing "one of the greatest lessons in heresy that the Muslim World has seen". In his own day, Rabelais terrified and entertained his time by producing in Pantagruel a profane, shocking, irreverent and subversive absolute best-seller. In later editions, he pushed his iconoclasm to the limit by bluntly affirming (with much glee) that his book "sold more copies in two months than there will be Bibles in nine years". We know that Rabelais' novel was condemned by established religion as sacrilegious, blasphemous and obscene, while Rabelais himself was judged an apostate. He managed narrowly to escape the stake more than once, either by hiding or by relying on the intervention of very powerful patrons and admirers in both state and church, a privilege obviously denied to Rushdie. In the fiction of Rabelais and Rushdie, we find a fabulous satire of contemporary life meant to shock, bewilder and awaken, while

8 InternationalHerald Tribune, August 4, 1989. 9 For example see the elitist reaction of S. Namanul Haq (tutor in the History of Science at Harvard University) published under the title: "Salman Rushdie, Blame Yourself"; in The New York Times, February 23, 1989. Also John Le Carre's "A Book Not Worth the Bloodshed" in The Guardian,January 15, 1990.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 5 at the same time formulating beneath its exaggerations, ironies, parodies, and criticisms very important truths about their respec- tive ages and societies. In Gargantua and Pantagruel, the description of the origins, birth, education, activities, adventures and travels of the two giants, energized by the chief currents of the Renaissance experience, provides the narrative frame of Rabelais' masterpiece. Similarly, the description of the origins, birth, education, activities, transformations, travels and adventures of Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta, energized by the Indian-Muslim experience of the modern world with all its aspirations, dreams, failures, illusions, wounds, humiliations, disappointments and calamities, provides the narrative frame for The Satanic Verses. In fact, there is even a 'Rushdian' trip to India in Rabelais to consult the Oracle of the Holy Bottle on sexual and marital matters. We also find in Rushdie's fiction a satire of Hindu-Muslim seers, fortune tellers, astrologers, political operators, priests of all sorts and kinds paralleling Rabelais' satire of the same phenomena in Renaissance society and culture. Rushdie's sarcastic attacks on Islam's ossified spirituality, on the profound obsolescence of its piously reiterated narratives, on the backwardness of its current dogmatic formula- tions, on the rigid and perilous refusal of its establishments to look seriously into its current contradictions, anomalies, paradoxes and weaknesses, are very much in the spirit of Rabelais' debunking of the fundamental dogmas, sacraments and narratives of an out- moded medieval scholastic Christianity. This is why Rabelais was highly revered by the leaders of the French Revolution who paid their ultimate respects to his progressive spirit and daring prose by renaming his hometown Chinon-Rabelais. Rushdie's use of Rabelaisian strategies of inversion, fusion and mixing of the profane and the holy, the ridiculous and the sublime, the pious and the grotesque reaches its height in the various parodia sacra that he invents and expounds, particularly in The Satanic Verses. Thus, in Rushdie's fiction, Gibreel is called Shaitan by his mother as a term of endearment and mild rebuke. The etymological con- nection between Islam's Allah and Qureish's rejected Al-Lat is brought out and exposed for all to see. The "Over-Entity" is at one and the same time God and Devil: Ooparvala (the Fellow Upstairs) and Neechayvala (the Guy from Underneath). Abu Simbel (Abu

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Sufian) the grandee of Mecca becomes, in effect, Khadim Al- Haramein (The Servant of the Two Shrines), King Fahd's official title. In India, Muslims rush to watch American cowboy movies where the cows are driven to the slaughterhouse, while the Hindus pack movie houses playing Indian Cecil B. de Mille type "theologicals" where the hero's main function is saving cows from their wicked captors (S61). Ayesha's spontaneous, chaotic, mystical Hay to Mecca in The Satanic Verses gives us a burlesque, not only of today's highly organized, stylized and pretentious hazy, but also of Exodus, the Flood, Pharaoh's drowning in the Red Sea and of popular religious illusions and disappointed hopes (represented by the butterflies covering Ayesha the seer) in general. In fact, the Ayesha Hajj is based on a real incident that occurred in Karachi in 1983. A young Shii woman-seer claiming to have visions of the Imam led a band of followers into the sea on the belief that the waters would miraculously part offering a path to holy Karbala via Basra. Most of the pilgrims drowned. Rushdie situates the Hayj to Mecca in Titlipur; i.e., the place of butterflies and something of an Indian Yathreb or Medina. Ayesha leads the whole population of the village into the sea in a burlesque procession described by Rushdie in a mock-heroic tone that turns into a biting satire of the stupidity of the whole affair and situation. Again, the butterflies are the religious illusions and false hopes that Ayesha lives on and then feeds to the simple and poor (SV 222,235). Rabelais created the famous Abbey of Theleme as an anti- monastery open to both sexes (under the motto "do as you will") where life is no more regulated by bells, walls and suffocating rules. In comparison, Rushdie creates the by now equally famous Meccan bordello, Hijab, as an anti-harem emancipated from Mahound's newly instituted rule-book and where, perhaps, something of the Theleme spirit lives on guiding behavior and fantasy. Whereas the real harem under construction belonged to one man, everyman had access to Hijab. The Rabelaisian substitution of the buttocks for the face and cheeks crops up early in Midnight's Children in an improved version: the buttocks' blush. All in all, I think Rushdie's parodies of the Islamic Sacred-and parodies of the sacred are not as unknown to classical Islamic letters and thought as some present day critics seem to assume-are no

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 7 more outrageous today than were Rabelais' famous travesties of Christendom's sacred texts, Christ's miracles (as in Epistemon's resurrection), Biblical genealogies, Holy Communion (where blood is transformed to wine), ecclesiastical hierarchies and so on and so forth. Rushdie's use of the Christian medieval "Mahound" to refer to the Prophet is to be similarly understood in terms of Rabelaisian strategies of naming and nicknaming where the abusive and laudatory are fused to produce a certain revealing ironic effect and a sense of the critically distancing paradox. It is an act of turning insults into strengths and vice versa. Following are some additional broad traits that I think Rushdie's s fiction shares with Rabelais': (a) In addition to being socially charged to the utmost, Rushdie's s novels draw copiously on politics, history, mythology, religion, theology, philosophy, fiction, poetry, folklore, anecdotes and all the varieties of life's quotidian experiences in the contemporary First and Third Worlds. (b) Like Rabelais before him, Rushdie adopts and expresses in his fiction the most progressive positions of the day on all the major political, cultural, social, ideological, religious, and scientific conflicts of his age. For example, Rushdie wrote the following about himself and his politics: "When the Reagan administration began its war against Nicaragua, I recognized a deeper affinity with that small country in a continent (Cen- tral America) upon which I had never set foot. I grew daily more interested in its affairs, because, after all, I was myself the child of a suc- cessful revolt against a great power, my consciousness the product of the triumph of the Indian revolution. It was perhaps also true that those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West, or North, had something in common-not, certainly, anything as simplistic as a unified 'third world' outlook, but at least some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and of how it felt to be there, on the bottom, looking up at the descending heel". 012).

(c) In Rushdie's fiction the natural functions of the body acquire again some of the importance that they actually have in real life. His images of the human body involved in eating, drinking, defecating, urinating, copulating, and so on, recall their far more grotesque Rabelaisian antecendents. To be specifically noted here.-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 8 is his emphasis on the body's apertures and appendages such as the mouth, the nose, the belly, the genitals and the breasts (Zeeny Vakil's breasts receive lavish attention in The Satanic Verses, while Saleem Sinai's nose acquires massive importance in Midnight's Children) . 10 The image in The Satanic Verses of Khomeini's wide open mouth swallowing the revolutionary popular masses is stereotypically Rabelaisian. Furthermore, one function of Rabelais' grotesque realism of the body is to unmask and dethrone the officially sanctioned and highly sanitized religious ideals of human appearance and propriety (remember the contrast between Don Quixote de la Mancha and Sancho Panza). Similarly, in The Satanic Verses one function of the grotesque bodily metamorphoses suffered by immigrants upon arrival in Lon- don (ugly and hideous changes in English eyes) is to expose the racism inherent in the reigning beauty standards of the host society and to ridicule the aesthetic ideals of a sweeping officially sanctioned commercial high ideology. Expectedly enough, the same ugly bodily metamorphoses act at times as a source of community, solidarity and rebellion among the immigrants themselves (Cham- cha's experience of organized insurrection at the sanatorium). Generally speaking, just as Rabelais' art ridiculed, with contempt and derision, the requirements, ideals and dictates of the then officially prevalent medieval Christian ideology of the sublime, similarly Rushdie's fiction ridicules today, with no less contempt and derision, medieval Hindu and Muslim official ideologies of the sublime, the good, and the true. (d) As in Rabelais, I find in Rushdie's imaginative depictions of contemporary realities, a reassuring measure of healthy cynicism which makes whole again, because it never degenerates into fashionable pessimism and/or nihilism. His admirable critical ironic detachment prevents his satire from becoming a mere camouflage for despair and guards his art against the pitfalls of dogmatizing and moralizing anew. This comes out most clearly in his humorous denunciation (in Midnight's Children) of "the disease

10 The importance of this point in Rabelais' novel was brought out and emphasized by Mikhail Bakhtin. See his Rabelais and His World, Indiana Univer- sity Press, 1984, particularly chapters 5 and 6.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 9 of optimism" meaning that self-serving triumphalism so cynically propagated by the post-independence neo-colonialist elites ruling countries like India and Pakistan. This trait brings Rushdie's art closest to Voltaire, the greatest progressive critic of the diseases of mindless optimism and unrestrained triumphalism. There is nothing odd about this con- nection, considering that Rabelais has been rightly called "the Voltaire of the sixteenth century", while Voltaire himself acknowledged his great debt to Rabelais' satirical works. In addition, Rushdie's novels are replete with the imaginary voyage theme so characteristic of Voltaire's famous "Contes Philosophiques" (Zadiq, Candide, L )lngénu). Thus, I think, it should be no problem at all inferring from Rushdie's fiction that he would give his unqualified support to Voltaire's famous motto: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities!" For example, in Midnight's Children Pakistan's military dictator prepares for the atrocities to be committed against the Bengali people in the name of a purer and more authentic Punjabi Islam by serving his people a diet of the most absurd forms of chauvinism, communal fanaticism and religious bigotry. Of course Rushdie does not hide his attachment to the Enlightenment, its achievements and its revolutionary contributions to the modern world. If, by universal consent Nobel laureate Najib Mahfouz is the Arab Balzac, then I am inclined to think that Salman Rushdie may very well turn out to be the Muslim James Joyce. It seems to me that the same cultural forces, historical processes and social oppositions that made the emergence of an Arab Balzac probable have also made the emergence of a Muslim Joyce possible. Now, let me note some relevant resemblances, parallels and points of contact between the two novelists. The avant-garde Chicago literary journal which first serialized Ulysses (The Little Review) was prosecuted for publishing obscene and subversive material. Upon full publication in Paris (in 1922), this most powerful and influential of our century's novels was not only denounced for blasphemy, obscenity and subversion, but also critically disparaged in such terms as "literature of the latrines", "an invitation to chaos", "literary Bolshevism", and "enough to make a Hottentot sick". Joyce's Ireland at the time reacted to his

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fiction the way Rushdie's India-Pakistan reacted recently to The Satanic Verses: Ban the book, icrasez l'infame. Just as a novel about the Irish by an emigre Irishman was not supposed to be for the Irish, similarly a novel about Indians and Pakistanis by an emigre Indian-Pakistani is not supposed to be for Indians and Pakistanis. Just as the fiction of Joyce, emanating from his inner Ireland and dealing with the sickness of the real Ireland, infuriated and shocked his countrymen and co-religionists through its revelations, characterizations and criticisms, similarly, Rushdie's fiction, emanating also from his inner India and dealing with the sickness of the real India, has infuriated and shocked his compatriots and co- religionists (and many others too). As a result the two found themselves in similar predicaments: Joyce, a Parisian Irishman condemned by his church, Rushdie, a Londoner Indian denounced by several churches and condemned by a specific one. In the United States, the ban on Ulysses was not lifted until 1933, and only after protracted legal battles. The presiding judge-turned- literary-critic concluded his deliberations as follows: "But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of "Ulysses" on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac" .1' In England the ban remained until 1936. Considering that Rushdie's art was born on the borderlines of the Anglo-Indian experience (as Joyce's was born on the borderlines of the Anglo-Irish experience), it should surprise no one if The Satanic Verses turns out to be either the Anglo-Indian Ulysses or at least a major novel of the restructured Thatcherite multiracial new England, where the invasion of the ruling high ideology of commercial opportunism, vulgar self-interest and crude racism has spared no one. On these matters Rushdie does not mince either his words or his critical parodies and comic caricatures. In Midnight's Children, we do have a satirical portrait of the artist, Saleem Sinai, as a young man freeing himself from the narrow claims of bourgeois family, established religion and prevalent chauvinism. He says of himself (or of Saleem Sinai): "With the

'1 The full text of the court decision lifting the ban on Ulyssesis published in the Random House edition of the novel (1933).

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 11 eclectic spirit of my nine years spurring me on...I I had entered into the illusion of the artist, and thought of the multitudinous realities of the land as the raw unshaped material of my gift. 'I can find out any damn thing!' I triumphed, 'There isn't a thing I cannot know!'" (MC 174). As with Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Portrait, Rushdie places Saleem Sinai at the center of his novel surrounded by widening circles of family, religion, city, country and empire all defining and conditioning the artist and at the same time waiting for him to interpret and transcend them. Saleem thinks in Mid- night's Children, ` `I am the sum total of everything that went before me". The work of both authors is dominated by the theme of exile (the one and only play penned by Joyce is entitled Exiles). Their art unfolds against the background of an abandoned priest and politician-ridden Ireland for Joyce and an equally priest-mullah and politician-ridden India-Pakistan. Needless to say, both countries had been bled white and dismembered by British colonialism. Both authors exiled themselves to the West in the strictest sense of the term; viz., to its two most illustrious capitals, Paris and London. In exile, just as Joyce remained profoundly an Irishman obsessed with the condition and fate of his native land and hometown, Dublin, so too Rushdie remains profoundly an Indian obsessed with the fate of his native India-Pakistan and the condition of Bombay, his hometown. Joyce's heightened sensitivity to the fact that he was writing about Ireland in a language other than his own, thus enriching the oppressor's literary treasury, is to be detected in Rushdie's art too. Both Ulysses and The Satanic Verses are in the strong sense of the term, multilingual works exhibiting much heteroglossia (to use Bakhtin's term) and copious interlingual play on words, double- entendre, puns and slang usages. Here Rushdie follows Joyce faithfully in insisting on a plurality of styles, idioms, narratives and forms of demotic speech; as well as in cannibalizing the various languages, dialects and traditions he is familiar with (Arabic, Per- sian, Urdu, Turkish, Hindi, Sanskrit, Indian English, plus some European languages) for composing his masterpieces. The signs of the exiled artist's remorse, bitterness, fear, isolation, pain, conflict and the ever present dream of reconciliation are

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all manifest in the novels of both writers (i.e., the exile's unhappy consciousness). Joyce expressed himself on exile by describing it as a state of being "loveless, landless, wifeless" and by remaining permanently obsessed with the themes of isolation, usurpation and banishment. Following are two typically Rushdian statements on the same subject. The first is part of a reported conversation with his revolutionary Nicaraguan interlocutors, while the second comes from The Satanic Verses: (a) "I said, 'You're lucky'. The idea of home had never stopped being a problem for me. They didn't understand that, though, and why should they? Nobody was shooting at me" (J86). (b) " We are creatures of air, Our roots in dreams And clouds, reborn In flight. Goodbye" (SV13, Rushdie's italics). The endless delays plaguing the publication of Joyce's Dubliners prompted him to write the following words to his publisher in 1906: "I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass" .12In a similar vein of high concern, the banning of The Satanic Verses in India led Rushdie to publish an open letter to Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi informing him that, in effect, his government is banning a book that is in India's best interest and for its own good. 13 Both books then, are, at one and the same time, the most realistic and the most artificial of novels. They meticulously combine the free sweep and breadth of dream, reverie, and myth (these most universal of intimate human experiences), with the documentary precision of a modern survey. In fact, Rushdie consciously adopts the Arabic appellation takalluf for a characterization of his art in The Satanic Verses. This combination of contrived realism and unreal concreteness is what allows both authors justifiably to say, living in contemporary Ireland-India-Pakistan is something like your experience of our fiction instead of merely saying life in contemporary Ireland-India-Pakistan is something like what our fiction depicts. Above all, neither author believes what his country and '2 Stuart Gilbert (ed.), Letters of James Joyce,Faber and Faber, London, 1957, p. 64. 13 The New YorkTimes, October 19, 1988. Republished in same, February 17, 1989.

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religion say officially and unofficially about themselves nor accepts what the locations of exile imagine and think about themselves. In all these places and cases nothing is what it seems, just as in a dream. Bombay enjoys the kind of central role in Rushdie's fiction that Dublin occupied in Joyce's productions, and the image that emerges of the 'Bombayers' is no more complimentary than that painted of the Dubliners. The urban India and Bombay 'society' unveiled by Rushdie are as concerned with the making and spend- ing of money, and are socially diseased, morally corrupt, religiously bigoted and politically oppressive as the urban Ireland and Dublin 'society' unmasked by Joyce. For both writers the cash nexus emerges as the value really respected by a Dublin-Bombay 'society' that knows no other way of organizing its spiritual and religious affairs except on the model of its financial dealings. Joyce's art had sarcastically denounced those who abandoned Ireland in the service of Mammon to become "merchant princes through police contracts". In Rushdie's art we find the same ring- ing condemnation of those who abandoned India and its "midnight children" in the service of "Businessism" to become Muslim "merchant princes" through police and other kinds of contracts. Clearly, Rushdie is no less concerned about the material, moral and political condition of Bombay than was Joyce about Dublin's. The author of Dubliners realized very early the importance of the cinema and its techniques for the kind of urban fiction he was developing at the time. In fact, Joyce made a valiant attempt early in his career to establish the first motion picture theater in Ireland, but without much success. Early in his career, Rushdie also dabbled in the cinema, and many of the inglorious heroes of his Satanic Verses are actors, actresses and show business people. No attentive reader of his fiction can miss the dazzling uses he makes of the cinematic medium and its techniques (a la Joyce) including montages, collages, cuts, close-ups, fade-outs, flash-backs, superimpositions, angles of observation and so on. There is no doubt that both novelists have met with great success in turning their pens into roving 'candid cameras' giving us successive scenes of Dublin and Bombay which add up to panoramic views of the two cities.

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As with Joyce the pioneer, the reveries, hallucinations and dreams of Rushdie's characters unreel like a film and then become actual movies ("Theologicals" of one sort or another). That part of The Satanic Verses entitled "The Parting of the Arabian Sea" is at once the unfolding of the strange events of "Ayesha's Hajj" from Titlipur to Mecca via the Arabian Sea and a Muslim "theological" starring Gibreel Farishta in the role of the Archangel. The same applies to the events related in that part of the novel entitled "Mahound". Again, like Joyce before him, Rushdie packs his novel with flashing impressionistic parodies of such modern day phenomena of urban life (particularly Bombay and London) as advertising, journalism, tabloid press, radio, television, cinema, blinking bulbs, neon lights, song, poetry, fiction, sex, racism, petty politics, small time left-wing radicalism and so on (and as Bakhtin points out the idiom of the marketplace and its epithets are copiously drawn upon by Rabelais, particularly the cries of barkers and hawkers advertising their wares). Joyce places his modern mock-epic Ulysses on the frame of the ancient Odyssean epic, but to the detriment of an unheroic contemporary reality. Rushdie places his mock-epic The Satanic Verses on the frame of the old Muhammadan epic, but to the detriment, this time, of an unflattering contemporary Muslim reality beholden to and shackled by its grand historical narrative. Thus, the importance in Ulysses of such symbols as journey, Telemachus, Cyclops, Calypso, Hades, Sirens, Wandering Rocks, Circe, Ithaca and Penelope. This is matched in The Satanic Verses by the prominence of such symbols as Hajj, Mahound, Abu-Sufian, Ayesha, Jahan- nam, Gibreel, shifting sands (Jahilia), Hind, Mecca and Khadija. Both novels journey not only through time and space, but are also, themselves, long journeys through mazes of political-cultural times and spaces. As part of the journey both authors invest the acts of flying and falling with special symbolic importance. Thus, like Dedalus' son (the winged Icarus) before him Stephen Dedalus flies out of the Irish labyrinth only to fall back into the whirlpool of exile and its sea of troubles. In the Portrait, Joyce invokes also the image of the falling Lucifer: "Brightness falls from the Air". Similarly, in The Satanic Verses Chamcha flying out of the Indian labyrinth suf- fers an 'angelic' fall from a wrecked winged creature called Bostan

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(garden) into a sea of Londonese troubles. Leopold Bloom's journey ends in a return to the bed of his unfaithful Penelope, the simple, practical, realistic and unpretentious Molly Bloom. Dublin remains his Ithaca. Saladin Chamcha's journey likewise ends in a return to the bed of his unfaithful Penelope, the earthly, genuine, uncomplicated, active and liberated Zeeny Vakil (the only really admirable character in The Satanic Verses). Bombay never ceases to be his Ithaca; and as her name implies, Zeenat Vakil not only adorns the whole novel but also acts as the chief agent in Chamcha's reclamation for Bombay and India. Both novels reach famous literary climaxes in bordello scenes and adventures: Bella Cohen's public house in Dublin's Nightown for Joyce; and Madame Hijab's establishment in Mecca's "date- palmed water-tinkling courtyards", for Rushdie. Both incidents parody well-known religious subjects. In Ulysses, the Circe incident is partly a Mass in honor of the prostitute Georgina Johnson where the Eucharist and the Passion of Christ are savagely travestied, where the salesman Mr. Lambe from London becomes "Lamb of London who takest away the sins of our world", where the bawds appear as three wise virgins and where the Blessed Trinity takes the form of Ireland, the British Empire and the Church. Compared to Joyce's attack on the Christian most sacred of the sacred at Bella Cohen's, Rushdie's identification of the prostitutes of the Meccan bordello with the Prophet's wives seems quite tame (more on the subject later). There is no doubt that Rushdie, like Joyce, uses his art, and in particular the art of satire in all its multitudinous manifestations, to debunk the truth claims of the kind of religiosity he grew up with and on, in favor of affirming the rights of a new spirituality incar- nate in literature and art. In the Portrait, Joyce savaged his Church and settled his accounts with its dogmas, sacraments, mysteries and Jesuits. In opposition to a literal-minded claustrophobic, anachronistic and defensive official Irish Catholicism, Joyce adopted for his motto the Luciferian Non-Serviam. Similarly, in opposition to a literal-minded, claustrophobic, anachronistic and defensive official Indian Islam, Rushdie adopted implicitly the same motto by travestying openly the religion of "Submission", where every human being is no more than a Abdallah or Amatullah

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(God's slave). In addition, Rushdie's case is complicated by the additional collective psychological complexes plaguing India's Islam such as, (a) the fact that the absolute majority of its adherents have no real access to the Koran in the original, (b) the fact that they constitute a mere minority in the Indian sub-continent, and (c) the fact that their more powerful neighbors are not even 'people of the Book' but abominable idolaters, kafirs, majus and "stone washers". The complexes of Irish Catholicism, resulting from the overbearing presence of the superior Protestant neighbor and master, are well-known. Obviously, both Joyce and Rushdie were acutely distressed to discover that what was dished out to them as ultimate truth and the highest spiritual wisdom is held by the surrounding modern world in no higher esteem than "the subtle and curious jargon of heraldry and falconry", as Joyce put it. Unquestionably, our two authors are masters at the Rabelaisian art of inventing and propagating debunking parodia sacra. For Joyce, God is "a shout in the street", while for Rushdie He is the "Over-Entity". Stephen Dedalus refuses the Eucharist and mocks the doctrine of transubstantiation by declaring that what he fears most is the chemical action that "this symbol of submission and ser- vitude" may have on his soul. Of course The Satanic Verses is in part a burlesque of the Islamic doctrine of prophecy and Wahi (divine revelation). For Joyce, the faithful take Holy Communion like an anaesthetic that calms pain, while his Bloom regards communion as Dublin's chief drug ("shut your eyes and open your mouth"). Naturally the lulling effects of religion are not limited to Roman Catholicism, for Joyce refers, also, to "Buddha taking it easy with his hand under his cheek" and to that particular kind of religiosity represented by American revivalists. Similar images appear in Rushdie's fiction. In Midnight's Children, the founding of Pakistan is farcically attributed to the Buddha sitting "enlightened under a tree at Gaya", while the Buddah's abstraction from worldly sor- rows and attainment of inner peace are tied directly to Saleem Sinai's learning "the arts of submission" and, thus, becoming a good citizen of contemporary Pakistan (MC 350). At the same time, the up-to-date American creation-scientist-revivalist, Eugene Dumsday (doomsday), plays some role in The Satanic Verses. In Ulysses, the problematic nature of Bloom's Jewishness is

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accentuated by his breakfasting heartily on a pork kidney (pig, urine and guts), and by his hallucinatory image (at Bella Cohen's) of the new "Bloomusalem", constructed like a huge pork kidney, where pork sausages are available in great abundance (tripe and sausages are eminently Rabelaisian images). In a similar vein, to accentuate the problematic 'Islamicness' of Gibreel Farishta, Rushdie has him feasting on pork sausages, cured York hams and rashers of bacon before the Mahound scenario starts unreeling in his fantasy. I would like to close this comparison with Joyce by making two comments: (a) The ultimate concerns of Joyce and Rushdie are Ireland and India, respectively. Joyce rejects the idea of an Ireland subservient to "medicinemen", priests and Empire. Rushdie rejects with equal strength the idea of an India no less subservient to her 'magicmen', priest-mullahs and the new representatives of Empire (the new Raj). Contrary to superficial appearances, there is not much room for bohemian indifference in the fiction of either. The laughter of their art is meant to subvert that subservience. It is part of a transforming liberating literary-critical praxis. (b) These parallels with Joyce naturally raise the problem of comparing Rushdie's fiction with the new Latin American novel (Borges, Asturias, Cortazar, Marquez). In my view the contemporary Latin American novel is so heavily Joycean (and more specifically Ulys- sean) in the first place, that only a return to the master himself would best serve the purposes of this article. In addition, the Latin American novel belongs to the New World in more than the geographical sense of the term, for it is still in search of a definition of its more profound spirituality and cultural identity, is it peninsular-Iberian, European-continental, north American- cosmopolitan or nativist-Amerindian? In contrast, the novels of Joyce and Rushdie react to no such uncertainties but to a very Old World with overly defined identities and by now completely ossified traditional spiritualities. The parts of The Satanic Verses that provoked most controversy, aroused greatest anger and invited most censure (both East and West) depict the adventures of Baal, the great satirical poet of Jahilia, at the Meccan bordello Hijab and their ultimate outcome. The Prophet, who actually was far harsher with his ideological

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 18 enemies than his physical ones, ordered Baal brought before him dead or alive soon after triumphantly entering Jahilia (Mecca). Baal, who had remained faithful to Al-Lat, took refuge at Madam Hijab's establishment where he concocted a symbolic revenge against Mahound by impersonating (in fantasy) the Prophet himself and convincing the bordello girls to impersonate Mahound's wives. As I read and reread the Hijab episode in Rushdie's novel, four major associations kept pressing, on my mind: Brecht's first play Baal, the Circe incident in Ulysses, Jean Genet's play The Balcony and the Harem episode in Fellini's autobiographical movie Eight and a Half (1963). Like Rushdie's, Brecht's Baal is also a poet and a satirist. Both Baals are outsiders who play by their own rules. Both are coarse, sensual, opportunistic, chaotic and fond of womanizing and booz- ing. Both are anti-heroes tending towards the amoral, the asocial and the destructive. Rushdie's Baal is described as "this young lampoonist" who ` `already has the most feared tongue in Jahilia" , and as the composer of the greatest and most famous "triumphal odes of revenge" around. Furthermore, "if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him" (SV97,362). Both Baals have the mark of defiance stamped on their mode of existence, a trait which shines in their poetry and in their views as to the role of that poetry. Rushdie describes his Baal as "the proud arrogant fellow" and gives the following account of the function of his poetry, "to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep" (SV97,198). Consequently, this Baal has no friend- ships save for the brief relationship of trust that develops between him and Salman the Persian just before the latter's narrow escape to his original country. Similarly, Brecht's Baal is friendless except for the stormy love-hate relationship binding him to Ekhart. Neither Baal could say, in Rushdie's words, "whether he was the most contented or the wretchedest man alive". Finally, both Baals go to their death with their eyes wide open, satisfied but defiant, undefeated and undestroyed. Since neither surrenders in his struggle, their death comes through emphatically as a life-affirming act rather than as a nihilistic and meaningless

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 19 happening (as current literary fashion would dictate). The sense of a sad victory emanating from their demise thus imposes itself on the reader and viewer. At the decisive moment Rushdie's Baal, at Hijab, "began, stumblingly, to move beyond the idea of gods and leaders and rulers, and to perceive ... that some great resolution was necessary. That this resolution would in all probability mean his death neither shocked nor bothered him overmuch ... Baal understood the form his final confrontation with Submission would have to take" (SV379). Baal so resolved "lost that strange sense of safety that life at The Curtain had briefly inspired in him; but the return- ing knowledge of his impermanence, of certain discovery followed by equally certain death, did not, interestingly enough, make him afraid ... he found to his great surprise that the effect of the approach of death really did enable him to taste the sweetness of life ..." (SV 378). I think these lines could just as easily have been written in description of Brecht's Baal. After the closure of Hijab, the suicide of its Madam and arrest of its dozen working prostitutes, Baal defiantly announced, "I am Baal, I recognize no jurisdiction except that of my Muse; or, to be exact, my dozen Muses' ". Similarly, after the final phase of his act of revenge against his persecutor, he hurled the following defiant declaration in the face of Mahound the Prophet: "I've finished. Do what you want". There is a serious utopian sense in which Baal's death (and Rushdie's present predicament) give the lie to the widely held realistic belief expressed by Abu Simbel: "Here's a great lie, thinks the Grandee of Jahilia drifting into sleep: the pen is mightier than the sword" (SV102). It is a great tribute to Rushdie's satirical wit, moral resolve and inner fortitude that one should be able to compare him to the best in his Baal, for Rushdie also named the unnamable, pointed to frauds, took sides, started arguments, shaped the World and stopped it from going to sleep. Consequently, the current representatives of the Prophet in Islamic Iran want him dead or alive. Forces beyond his control drove him to take refuge in quarters far less charming than Hijab and with types far less inspiring than Baal's dozen Muse-girls. Rushdie, like the best in the two Baals faces the death threat hanging over him with his eyes wide open, undefeated, undestroyed and without sur- rendering in his struggle. He shows every sign of understanding the

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 20 form that his final confrontation with Submission will take. And as with Baal's last and most beautiful odes, Rushdie's literary revenge is probably in the making. Interestingly enough, the primary business of such artistic con- structions as Hijab, Bella Cohen's bordello, Madam Irma's Grand Balcony and Fellini's harem is not sex, but the erotic release of fantasy, not in any negative escapist sense to be sure, but in a humanly revealing, personally cathartic and socially effective sense. As Genet's plays The Maids and The Blacks intimate, fantasy can con- template 'dangerous' options, pose radical alternatives to established fact and rehearse deferred forms of transformative praxis and liberative action. I say this knowing full well that in all strictness, praxis in Genet's works remains a praxis of ultimate despair and no more. In all the above mentioned places artists like Baal, Stephen Dedalus, Genet himself (represented by the slave-poet in The Balcony) and Guido (Fellini himself in 81/2) unlock their minds through the combined experience of erotic fascination of the prostitute (the concubine for Guido), the spiritual elevation of the Virgin or its equivalents (the Mothers of the Faithful for Baal) and the poetic inspiration of the Muse-girl. Let us not forget that Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy had already presented her in the classical feminine guises of virgin, wife, mother and whore. For Baal, also, the Hijab girls appear as "Mothers" (of the) "Faithful", "wives" and "whores". In Joyce's Circe incident, fantasy is transmuted to hallucinatory experiences compared by many a critic and specialist to Goethe's Walpurgisnacht. Rushdie constructs the Hijab episode around a double hallucination where Gibreel dreams Hijab and thus dreams at the same time Baal's dream of revenge against the Prophet. Rushdie makes us perfectly aware-a la Brecht and Genet-that the double hallucination is a figment of the author's creative imagination about which we learn in our function as readers of his novel. Still, both authors present the dreams, fantasies and hallucinations of Circe and Hijab as powerful enough to actually produce externalized bodily phenomena and patterns of behavior, not only in their bearers but also on us readers. Of course, we all know by now the kind of violent impact the Hijab hallucinatory sequence has had on pious and not so pious Muslim readers and non-readers.

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Baal's fantasy of himself as the Prophet and the Hijab prostitutes as his wives can be seen as a 'Muslim' artistic counterpart to Stephen Dedalus fantasizing himself, at Bella Cohen's, as suc- cessively : the Prodigal Son, "His Eminence Simon Stephen Car- dinal Dedalus", Father Confessor to the whores who had just appeared to him as three wise Virgins and the high priest of a mock-Mass celebrating the rites of Circe at the altar of the Roman goddess Ceres (in spite of his godlessness Baal never really aban- dons Al-Lat). In both instances the underlying motive is symbolic, but still extremely important, revenge against "Submission". Stephen Dedalus is avenging himself in fantasy against submission to family, church and Empire. He labors to kill "the priest and the King" in himself, as he says on his way out of Nightown. As in Baal's case, Stephen's imaginary revenge allows him to face the possibility of death satisfied and with his eyes wide open. When two drunken soldiers threaten him while leaving the bordello he shouts back at them with extraordinary composure and calm, "Damn death, long live life". Then, as he falls down to the ground, under the impact of the trooper's blows, he immediately assumes the foetus position, as if ready to be born again. Rushdie's Baal was reborn before Mahound had him executed, as evidenced by the rejuvenation of his beautiful poetic talent, daring spirit and brilliant satirical wit. The double or triple hallucinatory character of Fellini's film Eight and a Half is well known. Guido's harem-dream is an episode in a film that Guido is working on, as described by the film dreamed up and directed by Fellini for us to watch. Again, the Virgin, the mother, the wife and the whore pack the reveries of the Jesuit trained and educated Fellini. He makes clear in Eight and a Half that his first revelation of womanhood as a boy came via the monstrous form of Saraghina, the resident prostitute of the local fishermen. The experience earned him the excepted severe physical and spiritual punishment of the seminary's priests. The Jesuits tried to impress on him as forcefully as possible the fact that Saraghina is the Devil. Guido's harem-dream takes off when his demanding mistress, Carla, and nagging wife, Luisa, accidentally descend on him at one and the same time, while busy trying to direct a new movie. He

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imagines all the women-including wife and mistress-he had ever either admired or desired or fancied happily and harmoniously cooped up in a country house simply fussing over him, dancing for his pleasure and wanting nothing more than his smiles and bless- ings, all under Luisa's management and supervision. Here, not only is the traditional range of the feminine experience (Virgin, mother, wife and whore) surveyed, but Guido fantasizes himself in a series of roles such as Santa Claus, little boy being washed in a tub, King Solomon, Blue Beard, and Latin lover cracking his whip at admiring and submissive women. This universal feminine har- mony bathing Guido resembles a portion of Baal's fantasy at Hijab and the pious Muslim images commonly dispensed when the subject of the Prophet's marital and domestic life is brought up. Like Guido, the inspired artist Baal (now the poet-Prophet and the Prophet-poet), fantasizes at Hijab that his girls-also of all ages- want him to "Be the boss". They "wanted nothing more than to be the obedient, and-yes-submissive helpmeets of a man who was wise, loving and strong" (SV384). Just as Luisa presides over Guido's show, Khadija presides over Baal's (as played by the Madam of Hijab). Like Guido, Baal imagines himself in variety of roles vis a vis his women: "Baal discovered what it was to have twelve women competing for his favors, for the beneficence of his smile, as they washed his feet and dried them with their hair, as they oiled his body and danced for him, and in a thousand ways enacted the dream-marriage they had never really thought they would have" (SV384). Again, like Guido and his whip, Baal managed "to find the confidence to order them about, to adjudicate between them, to punish them when he was angry". Ultimately, Guido's symbolic revenge against both Carla and Luisa is taken. In his utopian harem, demanding mistresses and nagging wives are simply eliminated. The vengeance visited on Luisa is quite harsh. She not only appears as a dutiful conventional Italian country housewife (apron and all) carrying buckets of steaming water and scrubbing floors, but goes in her selfless devo- tion as far as offering Guido a sexy black American dancer for a gift. This detail is of some relevance. Both Hijab and its real counterpart contained at least one black beauty, while at Bella Cohen's Bloom imagines himself a slave-girl at the mercy of Bello the moustachioed slave auctioneer.

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Like Rushdie's fiction, Genet's theater is intensely political, critical, abusive and iconoclastic. The censors of the Fourth Republic found The Balcony intolerable and banned its production in Paris in 1957 (in 1962, Pasolini was arrested in Rome on charges of insulting the Church in the "Ricotta" episode of his film Rogopag; a parody of Hollywood-style biblical epics or "Theo- logicals"). The appearance of such symbols of authority and power as Bishop, Judge and General at Madam Irma's bordello was too much at the time, even for the normally more relaxed French authorities in matters of culture and morals (the first edition of Ulysses appeared in Paris rather than Dublin, London or the United States). Lucien Goldmann called The Balcony the first great Brech- tian play in French literature. The very name of Genet's bordello, The Grand Balcony, is synonymous with publicity and spectatorship as befits his medium, the theater (and a modern society of spectacle); while the very name of Rushdie's Hijab is synonymous with privacy and concealment as, also, befits his medium, the novel (and a Muslim society of shame and secretiveness). Nonetheless, the two establishments comple- ment each other, for at The Balcony activities of an intimate and private nature take place behind drawn curtains while Hijab remains a public house in which the working girls are on constant display during working hours. While The Grand Balcony is "une maison d'illusions" where fantasies are transformed into the old realities of Bishop, Judge and General, Hijab is "that house of costly lies" where the new realities of Prophet and harem are transmuted into the stuff of illusions. However, not only do such illusions contain their own truth, but through them important truths are glimpsed and many an eye is opened. As Genet says somewhere, we have to lie to tell the truth. At Madam Irma's Balcony we get a glimmer of what contemporary Bishops, Judges, Generals and Chiefs of Police are, while at Hijab we acquire a suspicion as to what Prophets, Archangels, Divine Revelations and Submission are. Thus it is in this "house of illusion" that Roger, Genet's chief revolutionary, finally confronts the 'truth' of his adversary, the Chief of Police, and takes revenge on him destroying himself in the process. Similarly, it is in this "house of costly lies" that Baal, Rushdie's chief rebel, finally confronts the 'truth' of his

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 24 adversary and takes his revenge on him also destroying himself in the process. The self-enclosed universes of Hijab and The Grand Balcony exist and function against the background of a revolution taking place in the outside world. In both instances, the revolution forms a threat to the very existence of the bordello. In The Balcony, the revolution fails after destroying the Queen, the Archbishop's palace, the law courts, and the army headquarters. As the Chief of Police becomes the master of the new counter-revolutionary order, Genet transports Madam Irma and her clients out of the "house of illusions" to become the Queen, the Archbishop etc. in support of the new regime of repression. In the Hijab episode the revolution succeeds after destroying the old centers and symbols of Jahilian power. As its chief, Mahound, becomes the master of the new revolutionary order, Rushdie transports him and his "queens" into the "house of costly lies" to become the eunuch-poet, the Madam and the working girls in subversion of the new regime of Submission (if in the theater of a Genet Irma can become the Queen, then there is nothing to prevent the 'Queens' of Islam from becoming Irmas in the fiction of a Rushdie). But it remains true that the background to both Hijab and The Grand Balcony is the installation of a new order by a chief efficient enough to maintain his authority over the populace and intelligent enough to exploit their traditions and practices to render his power absolute. Thus, just as the Chief of Police sought successfully the assistance of Irma and her clients to legitimate his supremacy, Mahound also helped consolidate his newly achieved mastery by allowing Hijab to con- tinue in its old ways for a time. The two works taken together make clear that neither the legitimation nor the subversion of real power in the real world can proceed without houses of illusion and costly lies. And again, the big utopian question poses itself: Is it possible for modern humanity to attain a condition where the exercise and transfer of power shall require neither "houses of illusion" nor "houses of costly lies"? Inside both Hijab and The Grand Balcony the main concern is the new political order being installed outside, while the fantasies and images unfolding inside them center around themes of social power and prestige. In other words, the main preoccupation inside

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 25 is not sex but the use of sex for the fulfillment of certain dreams in fantasies acted out. At Madam Irma's, fantasies are ritualistically acted out to the order of a Bishop forgiving the sins of a beautiful penitent girl, a judge delighting in passing sentences on petty thieves and a general glorying in his military conquests while riding his horse (played by one of Irma's bawds). Bloom had had similar double fantasies at Bella Cohen's. He saw himself both as seducer, traitor, forger, Jack the Ripper, bigamist, bawd, cuckold, Judas Iscariot and as the world's greatest reformer, benefactor of mankind, "emperor president and king chairman", Solomon the wise, husband of the moon-goddess and founder of the new Bloomusalem. At Hijab's, the gossip is all about the new Jahilian revolutionary order, its Master and his twelve wives. The clients constantly com- plain, "one rule for him, another for us" (Rushdie's italics). One of the Hijab girls describes the situation thus: "Listen, those women in that harem, the men [i.e., the clients] don't talk about anything else these days. No wonder Mahound secluded them, but it's only made things worse. People fantasize more about what they can't see" (SV379). And just as Irma runs her establishment so as to fulfill the fantasies of her clients, similarly the Madam of Hijab arranges for her girls to play the roles of the wives of Mahound to satisfy the fantasies of her clients. Just as in The Balcony the girls had become their roles drawing their prestige from this continual being-for-the-other, so too in Hijab, the girls "entered into the spirit of their role" to the point where they even forgot their own proper names. "The years of enacting the fantasies of the men had finally corrupted their dreams". In fact, the Hijab girls became their roles so much that the alliances there came to mirror the political cliques at the Yathrib mosque (where Mahound and his wives lived) and the Ayesha of Hijab became the "Best Beloved" of the clients and even grew jealous of her status as the Best Beloved. Interestingly enough, Carmen, Irma's senior whore at The Grand Balcony, enjoys being the Immaculate Conception of Lourdes so much so as to implore the Madam to allow her to play that same role again and again. In recompense, Irma assigns her the role of Saint Theresa. In all this Genet and Rushdie provide debunking laughter and critical social comment, as when Hijab's masked clients rotate around its cen-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 26 trally positioned Fountain of Love much as pilgrims rotate, for other reasons, around the Meccan Black Stone. A satisfied Baal watching the ceremony thinks, there are "more ways than one of refusing to Submit" (a similar fountain stands in the middle of the lower court of Rabelais' Abbey of Theleme). Secluded as Hijab and The Grand Balcony are, the driving force of the dreams unfolding inside them derive from an external source; viz., the new master of the new social order who, in wielding real power in the real world, is supposed to be the antithesis of the bordello and its world of illusions and costly lies. The central problem of The Grand Balcony is that no visitor has as yet asked to act out the role of the new master thus enhancing the greater glory of the Chief of Police. The problem of Hijab is the exact opposite. Baal and the prostitutes have already acted out the roles of the new master and his wives to the greater detriment of everyone concerned. In The Balcony, Roger, the leader of the defeated revolution, takes his revenge on the enemy by arriving at Irma's bordello to act out the role of the Chief of Police and castrates himself in the process. Through an act of imitative magic, so to speak, he avenges himself by impersonating the image of his enemy and then destroying that image. Rushdie's Baal avenged himself in exactly the same way. In both instances the fact that the master of the situation is imper- sonated in houses of illusion and costly lies means that his power has become secure and absolute. In both instances the only remaining course of action is an assault on the shadow of the adversary in the utopian hope that that would render the images of Repression and Submission impotent at some point in the fullness of time. In Genet, Roger's fantasy-revenge is so powerful as to make the Chief of Police think for a moment that he is actually castrated. In Rushdie, also, Baal's fantasy-revenge is so powerful as to make Mahound, for a moment, the laughing stock of his own faithful and obedient disciples. Baal inflicted this final humiliation on his foe by simply recounting publicly-at his own trial before Mahound- what he had fantasized at Hijab. Finally, I would like to point out that Baal's revenge is culture- specific and predicated on the assumption that in patriarchal and strongly shame-oriented Muslim societies a man's honor, social

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 27 standing and status are very intimately dependent on the chastity and sexual purity of his womenfolk. Thus, one of the most powerful insults that an Arab male can hurl at a despised foe is, "may the sanctity of your womenfolk (hareem) be violated", or alternatively, "may your womenfolk be scandalized". The ultimate form of ver- bal aggression is the threat: "I am going to f..k your womenfolk". At the same time, in imploring someone or wishing him well an Arab often invokes the standard formula: "May your womenfolk remain protected" (against sexual scandal and violation). Baal's fantasy-revenge in The Satanic Verses is simply an application of these two traditional insults to Mahound and his womenfolk. Thus Baal dreamt the following (in Gibreel's dream): The scandalization of the wives of the Prophet by creating doubles for them at Hijab, the ultimate violation of their chastity and sanctity by having sexual intercourse with them all the time and the consequent public humiliation of Mahound on account of what happened to his "Mothers of the Faithful". Let us not forget that in shame-oriented cultures what is worse than the act itself is the shame and scandal it generates. Thus 'Sutra' (the opposite of scandal in Arabic) remains a very prized condition and desired value. This accom- plished, the poet contentedly and defiantly walks to his death having turned himself in to his executioners through the medium of his poetry. In the exchanges over the Rushdie affair comparisons were drawn between The Satanic Verses and Martin Scorsese's movie The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), also denounced by certain orthodox and conservative quarters as blasphemous and sacrilegious. I would like to give reasons why I think this comparison is superficial, beside the point and completely mistaken. The Satanic Verses and The Last Temptation are diametrically opposed as to their statements, messages and objectives. Scorsese's movie made sense to me only against a certain theological background. I mean the high Modernist Protestant Theology embodied in the teachings of such famous thinkers and critics as Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth and Paul Tillich. Among other things, I am referring here to Bultmann's radical project of demythologizing Christianity in general and the New Testament in particular. For example, as a result of his efforts the miracle stories

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of the New Testament got explained away by reinterpreting them purely allegorically and as sheer metaphor. Even such doctrines as the Incarnation and Resurrection did not escape the cutting edge of the demythologizing program. Thus, in the hands of Bultmann and his students, the traditional supernatural Christian discourse became no more than a metaphorical way of speaking about human existence, the human condition, the human predicament and its modes, dispensing completely with the mythological image of God as a super-person (or as Rushdie would have it in his fiction: "The Over-Entity"). Bultmann substituted for the discarded mythology, his concept of Kerygma, i.e., the proclamation of Jesus _as Christ in the New Testament, to which one can respond only by a pure and absurd act of faith a la Tertullian and Kierkegaard. In other words, the Christ of faith is to replace completely the questionable Jesus of history. In fact, one of Bultmann's disciples, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, called for a "religionless Christianity" for the modern world. In Tillich's theology, "Ultimate Concern with the Ultimate" occupied pride of place and the pure symbolism of the Jesus story was emphasized and brought out as against its literal understanding and acceptance. In those days one could still speak without embarrassment about symbolism and the importance of symbols and the symbolized, for the Derridean pure sign signifying nothing had not arrived on the intellectual scene as yet. In the same vein, Karl Barth had already separated radically the "Word of God" from what he called the "empirical Christianity" of the New Testament and the standard version of the Jesus story. Therefore, it came as no surprise to me when the eminent English philosopher J. N. Findlay concluded in his essays on Philosophical Theology that atheism is the highest stage and purest form of Protestantism. 14 My thesis is that Scorsese's Last Temptation is both a post- Modernist and a counter-Modernist reactionary restatement of the Jesus story and of Christian Theology in general. It is a work of restoration-in the political sense-favoring a strict return to the literal meaning and uncritical reception of the New Testament. As we all know, Max Weber complained about "the disenchant-

'4 See J. N. Findlay's two contributions to: New Essays in PhilosophicalTheology, edited by Antony Flew and Alasdair Macintyre, SCM Press, London, 1955.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 29 ment of the modern world". If high Modernist Theology had disenchanted Christianity, then Scorsese's movie is out to enchant it anew. In other words, The Last Temptation simply re- mythologizes, re-mystifies and re-literalizes the Jesus story of the New Testament. Scorsese's Jesus shows no signs either of existen- tial Angst or alienation; the drama of ultimate risks and choices does not seem to affect him; the hesitations and doubts characteristic of fateful decisions do not appear to invade the core of his being; the crisis of God's absence never seems to touch him; the absurdity of the project he is embarked on never crosses his mind; and Sartre's s nausea of spirit remains completely foreign to him. He is also a far cry from the angry, militant, socially engaged Jesus of Pier Paolo Pasolini as portrayed in his famous film The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1964). In brief, Scorsese's Jesus is literally God and not man. In other words, the identification of the 'empirical' Jesus of history and narrative with the absurd Christ of faith is again full and complete. This may be the Gospel according to the Monophysite and Jacobite heresies, but blasphemy it is not. This is why throughout The Last Temptation; (a) Jesus has the composure, serenity, and equanimity of the superior person who knows beforehand all that will come to pass; (b) everything unfolds as if according to a preordained plan-God's plan-and Jesus is no pilgrim in this world; (c) Jesus informs Judas, in a very casual and matter-of-fact manner, that Judas' fate will be far worse than his own; (d) Jesus' temptations are no temptations at all-including the last one which scandalized orthodoxy-considering that he shows every sign of knowing their outcome in advance; (e) his miracles are real miracles (no metaphors and allegories here) where the water literally turns into wine and Lazarus is more than literally called out from his tomb; and (f) the devil is a real personal devil, ultimately defeated as befits a literal reading of the Jesus story. Now, for those interested in either admiring or condemning blasphemous movies, Martin Scorsese is the wrong director to seek and The Last Temptation is the wrong film to watch. I advise such people to turn to that great master of cinematic art, Luis Bunuel (Jesuit educated and trained, like Joyce and Fellini). They should see Bunuel's classic L'Age d'Or (1930), co-directed with Salvador Dali, where the Catholic Church is savaged, his hiridiana

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(1960), where the Last Supper and the figure of Jesus Christ (crown of thorns and all) are travestied and his La Voie IActie (1969), where the Holy Trinity is devastatingly burlesqued and where God the Father gives only to those who already have while taking away from those already deprived. In contrast to The Last Temptation, The Satanic Verses is eminently a novel of high Modernism at its finest, very much in the spirit of Brecht, Chaplin, Bunuel, Joyce and Bultmann. It is in total opposition to the conservative post-Modernist literalism and vulgar spiritualism of Scorsese. Rushdie, here, is a demythologizer, a demystifier and a dereligionizer, and let me add, blessed are the disenchanters and the unveilers among us as against the Schleier- machers. This is why Rushdie's historical Muhammad is a Meccan businessman while his Prophetic Muhammad is existentially shaken to the core of his being by that inner compelling force trying to externalize itself in and through him.

Part Two: Realities

Certainly, intellectual life and cultural activity in the Muslim world-and I speak here with some authority only about the Arab World-is not as Islamically conformist, religiously unquestioning and spiritually stagnant as one is led to believe from the countless accounts, interpretations and explanations given by Western commentators, critics, journalists, specialists, politicians and the media in general a propos of the Rushdie affair. I do not need to inform readers of this journal about incidents and affairs-big and small-similar to Rushdie's that involved such authors, thinkers and intellectuals as: call- cabd ar-Raziq, Taha Husain, Najib Mahfuz, Khalid Muhammad Khalid, Muhammad Ahmad Khalaf Allah, cabd Allah an-Najjar, cabd Allah al-Q,usaymi, Nadim Bitar, Ibrahim Khlas, Sadiq Jalal al-cazm, cabd Allah al-calayli, Sulaiman Bashir, Hammud Salih and the list can be expanded almost at will. Here I shall limit myself to commenting on two particularly interesting cases. The interest of the first derives from the fact that even such an upstart in contemporary Arab life as Northern Yemen has already had its own `Rushdie' affair and scandal. I am referring

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 31 here to Dr. Hammud Al-?Udi who, until some years ago, tried to teach the history of Yemen at San'a University from the point of view of a serious historian and social scientist instead of the point of view of 'Muslim Creation Science'. Muslim fundamentalists denounced ?Udi as a kafir and infidel and asked for his head. The official list of accusations against him included such standard charges as apostasy, poking fun at Allah, his Prophet and the Prophet's Companions, attacking Islam and the Koran, preaching Communism, spreading its teachings and glorifying its leaders. Although hounded, ?Udi fought back valiantly. He published an open letter to the President of the Republic and a long spirited defense of himself, his writings and calling. Udi went underground for a while to surface later on in Southern Yemen where he is currently teaching at the University of Aden. A number of communi- qu6s were published by prominent Arab intellectuals, authors and artists in support of rights and in condemnation of his persecution and those responsible for it." The second case takes us back to the late seventies in Beirut where the venerable Sunni Lebanese ciilim and cleric 'Abd Allah Al- ?Alayli published his book under the title Ayna-l-Kha 'ta' ( Where Is The Mistake?) in 1978. The fact that Sheikh calayl-i is very well known for his formidable classical and linguistic erudition and for his daring modern mind contributed greatly to the big stir that the book generated among the ranks of the Lebanese culamii) of all colors and hues. In fact, his status as a prominent cleric and religious scholar simply added insult to injury in the eyes of his less endowed col- leagues. The Muslim religious establishment in Lebanon generated enough pressure at the time to have the book quickly recalled from the bookshops. Of course it did not take the attentive reader long to realize that in spite of its very conventional Arabic and traditional style calayli's book is an oblique expose of the culama-s utter mental laziness and a sarcastic commentary on their abysmal ignorance of

15 ?LJdi published all the documents pertaining to his case in 1986, under the following title: The Accusationand the Defense:The First Dossier.No publisher is mentioned, though the printing took place, most probably, in Aden. A list of the names and signatures of the Arab intellectuals who solidarized with him is also reproduced (135 names in all).

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both their din and dunya; i.e., of their religious heritage as well as of the encircling modern world that is squeezing them ever more tightly. For those Muslims troubled by the problems and dilemmas inescapably imposed by the requirements of modern life and its quickening pace, ?Alayli makes many revolutionary suggestions, all ironically argued and defended in the impeccable style of a traditional Muslim faqih and with all the appropriate Koranic quota- tions, hadith citations and so on. His most important proposal calls fo the creations of a Muslim Justinian Code that takes in Muslim law in its entirety and without any exceptions and/or exemptions. In other words, calayli is openly suggesting a universal code that fully incorporates the legal traditions of every Muslim sect, group, school and shade of opinion past and present: Sunni, Shi?i, Khariji, Durzi, ?Alawi, Ibadi, Mu?tazili, Ismdcili, Yazidi, you name it, it is there. Now on account of the richness, variety and diversity of such a standard legal reference, calayli affirms confidently (and tongue in cheek, of course) that there is not a single problem of modern life and practice faced by Muslims today which cannot find either a solution or the key to a solution (in accordance with modernity's requirements and needs) by appealing to some section of this proposed Muslim Justinian Code. By way of application calayll- scandalized Lebanese orthodoxies of all kinds by producing a beautiful and complicated fatwd allowing any eligible Muslim woman to marry any eligible non-Muslim man in a routine fashion, afatwii particularly relevant and thorny in a country like Lebanon. ?Alayli also comments, with barely concealed sarcasm, on the old debate in Muslim quarters as to whether stage acting is halal or hardm (religiously permitted or forbidden), by saying: "I do not see why this embarrassment before impersonation; for, as many Hadiths relate, the Archangel Gabriel himself used to appear in the image of other people, to impersonate them and assume their form. ... Now if the Archangel could appear in ways most similar to a cinematic scene or presence, then why not other creatures? Were I not dealing with the sacred here, I would have said Gabriel is the most ancient actor and impersonator".'6 To avoid misunderstan-

16 P. 144. My apologies a priori to the professional translators.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 33 ding let me mention that the debate on the religious status of acting and the modern theater is nothing peculiar to Islam. In Europe, the Church continued to condemn the secular theater and automatically excommunicate actors and deny them the rites of a Christian burial for a long time indeed. Not even as great a dramatist as the author of Tartuffe managed to escape such a fate in spite of direct royal patronage and intercession. The long series of Rushdian-type affairs in the Arab World extending from ?Ali cabd ar-Raziq (one can even go back to Qasim Amin) to Hammud Al-?Udi calls for some general observations: (a) It can be fairly said, I think, that this succession of books, incidents and controversies has had a cumulatively liberating impact on recent and contemporary Arab thought, culture and life in general, bringing previously untouchable subjects within the compass of critical thought, autonomous reason and worldly debate. In a certain sense, Rushdie's The Satanic Verses is a natural continuation of this trend at the level of creative writing. This is a particularly important point considering that in contemporary Arab fiction such religious issues and taboos have not been dealt with openly and courageously. The notable exception is Mahfuz's novel The Childern of Our Alley, which, in spite of its delicate, discreet and conciliatory approach, earned its author the condemnation of Al-Azhar. Nonetheless the novel is available everywhere in the Arab world. (b) It is significant to note also that the books and authors involved represent the entirety of the socio-political spectrum, right, left, and center (at times books can be more radical than their authors). For example, cabd ar-Rdziq was an enlightened conservative Azhari cleric who argued his case in favor of the abolition of the khzldfa like a classical ciilim and on grounds internal to the traditional Islamic discourse on such matters. Taha Husain represented the classical liberal position both politically and in the critical approach he chose to apply to his subject matter. My book Critique of Religious Thought combined a left wing marxisant position with radical enlightenment-type critiques of religion. cabd Allah Qusaymi, on the other hand, was satisfied to remain the nihilistic Nietzschean iconoclast that he always was, while Muhammad Ahmad Khalaf Alldh's Arab nationalism edged closer and closer to chauvinistic self-aggrandizement. If I may be allowed to make a

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 34 classification of The Satanic Verses along these lines, then, I would say that it belongs solidly to the camp of the radical democratic left and expresses much of its spirit and vision in its critiques, ironies and satires (a similar case can be made, I think, for Rushdie's two earlier novels). (c) It can be confidently affirmed that the scandals arising from each and every one of these affairs had far more to do with the affairs of state than the affairs of faith. For example, in the case of 'Abd ar-Raziq his opposition to the palace-inspired moves and movements to have King Fu)äd the First of Egypt declared the Caliph of all Muslims is well known. There is no doubt, either, that King Fu)äd used his full powers to instignate and pressure the Azhar establishment to punish ?Abd ar-Raziq by declaring him a kdfir and dismissing him from that Muslim citadel altogether. In fact, it is the political conjuncture that always decides which of these cases shall remain localized (Khalaf Allah, Qusaymi, Al-?Udi) and which shall turn into overblown scandals and celebrated causes (Taha Husain, Al-cAzm, Rushdie). The regional and international political conjuncture that catapulted Rushdie's novel into an international incident of the first order and an unprecedented world- encompassing cause célèbre is well known. This same conjuncture explains plainly why the Rushdie affair generated no notable reactions in the Arab World beyond the expected ritualistic condemnations uttered by the spokesmen of governments and the representatives of religious establishments. Given the struggle between King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and Kho- meini over the leadership of the "Islamic International" and the Ayatollah's attempt to arrogate to himself (via The Satanic Verses) the position of an overarching Muslim pope, no wonder the Arab World took the whole Rushdie affair with a grain of salt. In all fairness, I should also add that the series of Rushdie-like incidents have increasingly desensitized the Arab World's mainstream cultural life to critical debates over religion. None of the Arab 'anti- heroes' involved in the explosive affairs mentioned above either lost his life for the cause or suffered really serious injuries along the way; this, in spite of official accusations of apostasy, denunciations for kufr in Friday sermons and trials for blaspheming against Islam.1' I

" The one exception, here, is the Sudanese Modernist Muslim theologian and

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Of interest also is the fact that within the entire realm of Islam the Arab World produced the strongest and most vocal defense of Rushdie on the part of intellectuals. In Damascus fifty Arab writers, dramatists, critics, poets, painters and university teachers circulated a substantial petition defending Rushdie's right to "live and write" and condemning openly all threats against him including the Ayatollah's death sentences In spite of later waver- ing, Egypt's Nobel Laureate Najib Mahfuz solidarized with Rushdie and denounced the hysterical curses emanating from Iran's clerics. The London-based Syrian thinker and critic 'Azlz al- 'Azmeh very courageously defended Rushdie on British television and in print during the hottest and most perilous moments of the crisis. 19 In light of these considerations it should be evident why arguments in the West over Rushdie's personal role and respon- sibility in bringing about the scandal (he knew what he was doing!) are simply naive, misleading and beside the point. To his geat credit, Rushdie's earlier novels had infuriated powerful ruling elites in India and Pakistan. Undoubtedly such armed and dangerous enemies can be counted on not to miss an opportunity like the publication of The Satanic Verses to settle accounts with their detrac- tor. I beg the reader's permission, here, to mention that after the instantaneous Israeli military victory of June 1967, my critical writings about politics, culture and society in the Arab world similarly infuriated powerful class vested interests and ruling elites (particularly in Egypt and Lebanon) who seized the occasion of the religious reformer Mahmud Muhammad Taha who was hanged for apostasy in 1985 by Numeiri shortly before a popular uprising brought down his bankrupt military regime. In a mock of a trial Taha acquitted himself in a manner worthy of a Socrates and/or of an Ibn Hanbal. '8 The Beirut daily as-Safir published the operative paragraphs of the petition plus the names of the signatories (March 23, 1989). See also Milton Viorst'ss "Syria", The New Yorker,January 8, 1990. About thirty Paris-based intellectuals from Muslim countries (among them nineteen Arabs) declared their solidarity with Rushdie in Le NouvelObservateur under the telling title: "We are all Rushdie". (February 23-March 1, 1989). '9 An-Ndqid, London, No. 9 March 1989 and No. 16 October 1989 (in Arabic). See also his "Poisoned Utopia", The Guardian, February 17, 1990. See also, Feisal Darraj's "Salman Rushdie in the Mirror of the Extremist Religious Forces", The New Jordan, Nicosia, Cyprus, No. 12-13, Spring, 1989, pp 155-162 (in Arabic). And Fawaz Tarabulsi, "Salman Rushdie's Case: The Satanic Game", Zawaia, Paris, No. 1, July-August, 1989, pp. 30-31 (in Arabic).

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 36 publication in Beirut of my book Critique of Religious Thought in December, 1969, to settle scores with their critics and foes.2° Thus, given the all too evident tendency of Western critics and commentators to depoliticize Rushdie's fiction (and predicament), it becomes doubly imperative to emphasize the importance of its militant progressive political dimension. In other words, contrary to what seems to me to be widespread Western literary critical opinion about The Satanic Verses, Rushdie is neither a beautiful soul exploring the Human Condition in general, nor a detached artist struggling with the eternal metaphysical problem of Good and Evil. Rushdie's fiction is an angry and rebellious exploration of very specific inhuman conditions and very concrete wicked social situa- tions and rotten political circumstances. Take, for example, the universal affirmation by critics and commentators that Saladin Chamcha metamorphoses into a goatish monster and devil upon hitting English soil, when in fact nothing of the sort happens, considering that the metamorphosis takes place only in the beholding eye of the white racist society. Thus, what puzzles Chamcha most during his adventure in the London police van is the fact that the officers regard "a circumstance which struck him as utterly bewildering and unprecedented-that is, his metamorphosis into this supernatural imp- ... as if it were the most banal and familiar matter they could imagine" (SV158). At the sanatorium, later on, Chamcha learns of other such ugly transformations: "There's a woman over that way ... who is now mostly water-buffalo. There are businessmen from Nigeria who have grown sturdy tails. There is a group of holidaymakers from Senegal who were doing no more than changing planes when they were turned into slippery snakes" (SV168). Then Chamcha-who regards himself as a "British citizen First Class"-is made to understand how the whites manage to do it: " 'They describe us...That's s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pic- tures they construct"' (SV168). As in Genet, the maids are

20 See the following two articles by Stefan Wild: "Sadiq Al-Azm's Book 'Criti- que of Religious Thought' " in "Correspondance d'Orient No. 11", ve Congres International d'Arabisants et d'Islamisants, Bruxelles, 31 Aout-6 Septembre, 1970, Actes, pp. 507-513. "Gott und Mensch im Libanon: Die Affdre Sadik al- 'Azm", Der Islam, 48, 1972, pp. 206-253.

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"maids" and the blacks are "blacks" only in and because of the gaze of the masters. In The Blacks, the blacks keep repeating: "We are what they want us to be. We shall therefore be it to the very end, absurdly". Here lies the secret to the absurdity of Chamcha's transmutation into the hideous monster that dominates Rushdie's novel. Rushdie's colored creatures succumb so much that Chamcha's deformed devilish condition grows even worse in the eyes of his own people while he is in hiding among his own people. Each one of these creatures had got accustomed to seeing himself the way he is seen by that Other so much so that the metamorphosed Chamcha numbly "crouched down in his little world, trying to make himself smaller and smaller, in the hope that he might eventually disappear altogether, and so regain his freedom" (SV162). The sanatorium (purgatory) is where Chamcha is cleansed of his misplaced allegiances, disabused of his British illusions and prepared for the final trip of reconciliation with Zeeny Vakil, Bom- bay and India. He regains his human form only after an intense and highly charged cathartic experience at the Hot Wax Club where the colored creatures take nightly symbolic revenge against real and imagined oppressors. Just as in Genet's The Blacks the whites are routed in imagination through the ritual enactment of a murder, similarly the white oppressors are also routed in The Satanic Verses at the level of the imaginary, through the enactment of a "meltdown" ritual of a wax doll of "Maggie the Bitch" and other hate figures (SV292-93). Rushdie has been accused of unfairness to the immigrant com- munities of England in his novel, people whose cause he supposedly always championed and defended. I think the accusation itself is very unfair. A close reading of The Satanic Verses shows that Rushdie concentrates his ridicule primarily on the established Asian petty bourgeois social stratum whose modus operandi with the white masters can be summed up in the simple formula, exploit and let us exploit. As owners of boarding houses and hostels, for example, they squeeze the newer immigrants and, particularly, their West Indian tenants. They are the "import-export off-license corner shop" crowd who never tire of complaining about being stranded in a Jew and stranger-ridden country that keeps lumping them with

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Negroes, Blacks and other such inferior types. Rushdie describes London as "a Crusoe-city, marooned on the island of its past, and trying, with the help of a Man-Friday underclass, to keep up appearances" (SV439). The object of his attack are the allies of the exploiters of the "Man-Friday underclass" and not the underclass i itself. Nonetheless, Rushdie is unambiguous in his denunciation of any kind of interimmigrant racism as well as of the various forms of racism in reverse that surface and assert themselves. He deplores and laments the fact that the colored creatures waste so much effort and time inventing false images of themselves and deceptive descriptions of The Other in order to counter the lies invented about them, concealing in the process (for reasons of security) their own secret selves. This is when the truth of the oppressed becomes the oppresssion of truth. Thus, The Satanic Verses holds up a satirical revealing mirror to both sides of this sorry equation, a mirror that exposes and magnifies the ridiculous and farcical nature of their dialectically opposed and complementary pretensions. The other main target of Rushdie's ridicule is unscrupulous, ruthless, egotistical and vulgar wheelers and dealers, operators and manipulators, such as: the lawyer Hanif Johnson who is "in perfect control of the languages that mattered: sociological, socialistic, black-radical, anti-anti-anti-racist, demagogic, oratorical, ser- monic : the vocabularies of power" (SV281). John Maslama (recall- ing the false Arabian prophet Musaylima the Liar) who boasts "in his well-modulated Oxford drawl ... 'I have done well for myself, sir. For a brown man, exceptionally well' ". And with "a small but eloquent sweep of his thick ham of a hand, he indicated the opulence of his attire: the bespoke tailoring of his three-piece pin- stripe, the gold watch with its fob and chain, the Italian shoes, the crested silk tie, the jewelled links at his starched white cuffs. Above this costume of an English milord there stood a head of startling size..." (SV191). Billy Batuta, Pakistani playboy and con-man with a "predilection for white women with enormous breasts and plenty of rump, whom he 'treated badly' ... and 'rewarded hand- somely"' (SV260-61). Hal Valance, creator and owner of "The Aliens Show", who "takes for his motto the advice given by Deep Throat to Bob Woodward: Follow the Money" (Rushdie's italics).

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Whiski Sisodia, the Indian movie producer, "the most slippery and silver-tongued man in the business", who after moving from "Bombay's Ready Money Terrace" to apartments in London and New York has "Oscars in his toilets" and carries in his wallet "a photograph of the Hong Kong-based kung phooey producer Rum Rum Shaw, his supposed hero, whose name he was quite unable to say" (SV342). After this digression, I would like to return to the important question which I have not seen addressed in the debates and polemics over The Satanic Verses; namely, why do these Rushdie- type cases and incidents keep coming up with such striking regularity? Why all these Rushdies? Could it be that Muslim societies in general and Arab societies in particular are so positioned in the modern world, so integrated into the main drift of contemporary history, so racked by transforming oppositions and tensions as to make the production of more and more Rushdies a virtual inevitably? Answers to such questions can be formulated at a variety of levels, economic, social, political, cultural, ideological and so on. The discourse appropriate to each level is in principle translatable, and without much difficulty, to the terms of the discourses appropriate for the other levels. For the moment, I shall limit myself to a general answer formulated at the epistemological level. As rising bourgeois Europe de-catholicized, modernized and secularized, science as a method of inquiry, as a body of knowledge and as applied technology became its primary and most decisive form of theoretical and practical knowledge. For all intents and purposes, this new type of knowledge displaced all earlier forms of appropriating, interpreting and acting on the world, such as myth, magic, religion, legend, affective encounter, scholastic reason and so on. Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children explores, with great acumen, thoroughness and wit, those quarters of Hindu and Muslim life and society where these archaic forms of appropriating the world are most densely present, alive and dominant. Of course Rushdie is no romantic working to sentimentalize the 'Authenticity' of the abject conditions exposed by his explorations. Neither does he show any sympathy for the "tourists looking for the mysteries of the East" in the lower depths of Indian society. The

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 40 phenomenon of Western flower boys and girls seeking cosmic spiritual sustenance at the feet of Indian gurus teaching such things as "Bottomless deeps of Celestial Space-Eternity" is appro- priately satirized and exposed for the fraud that it is. Nor is Rushdie the kind of local hardened cynic who rationalizes the lower depths around the corner by claiming that its victims are better off this way because they are nearer to God and/or the Cosmic Spirit. This world of abject misery, illusion and mock spirituality is debunked, demystified and ultimately rejected by Rushdie. His fiction is equally keen on investigating the conflicts, incongruities, paradoxes, absurdities and tensions attendant on the impact of the modern forms of knowledge on the ancient systems of belief and archaic forms of appropriating the world and acting on it. The opening pages of Midnight's Children are devoted to the tragic-comic incongruities and absurdities of an Adam Aziz (please note the Aziz of A Passage to India), a modern trained physician who had read Lenin's What Is To Be Done? at the University of Heidelberg, trying to practice his art on a wealthy feudal female in the backwoods of Kashmir. I think it is Rushdie's fervent hope that Adam Aziz's personal tragedy not be India's in the modern world. In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx affirmed that no pre-capitalist socio-economic formation will be able to resist the penetration and destabilizing impact of the modern European capitalist socio-economic formation. If ever a prediction in the social and historical sciences came completely true, this is it. I would argue by analogy that since no pre-scientific system of beliefs and /or means of appropriating the world and acting on it is capable of successfully resisting the penetration and destabilizing impact of the modern system of scientific knowledge, then Rushdies will keep appearing in Muslim societies with a regularity approaching that of a natural law. Similarly, as long as existing Muslim societies reach out for development, seek economic progress and acquire scientific- technical knowledge, then a point will always arrive at which a courageous Rushdie will speak the painful truth, the Islamic emperor has no clothes left on him anymore. As a child of that extraordinary Indian Midnight, Saleem Sinai was blessed with "the greatest talent of all-the ability to look into the hearts and minds of men". After taking a good look, Rushdie,

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 41 like his hero Saleem Sinai, discovered that the mind of the old Islamic emperor had no truths left in it valid for the modern world, while his heart had become bereft of beliefs and convictions either adequate for or relevant to contemporary life. Following is the novelist's account of this situation:

"Omar Khayyam passed twelve long years, the most crucial years of his development, trapped inside that reclusive mansion, that third world that was neither material nor spiritual, but a sort of concentrated decrepitude made up of the decomposing remnants of those two more familiar types of cosmos, a world in which he would constantly run into-as well as the mothballed, spider-webbed, dustshrouded profusion of crumbling objects-the lingering, fading miasmas of discarded ideas and forgotten dreams". (S30).

It is my considered opinion that there is growing awareness in Muslim societies that opting out of the modern scientific systems of knowledge, belief and appropriating and acting on the world is possible only on pain of consignment to the dust bin of history. Rushdie communicates this message to those concerned in simple and unambiguous words: "History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise, and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: fieldpatterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement. No room in it for Pinkies; or, in Isky's view, for the likes of Omar Khayyam Shakil" (S124).

The mounting realization of truths like these partially explains (a) the current fury of conservative and fundamentalist Islamic reactions and (b) the nature of the breeding grounds out of which the future Rushdies will certainly arise. A protracted crisis obtains when the old is dying while the new is unable to be born. The Rushdies grasp, express, use and react to this socio-historical crisis of Muslim societies, but they do not produce it. This is why those Muslims who premeditatedly act to suppress the Rushdies may be condemning themselves and their societies to a fate far worse than Rushdie's. Let me note finally that as Europe decatholicized, modernized and laicized, it was blessed

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 42 with a plethora of 'religious' movements which made the very fulfillment of that eminently secular bourgeois historical project look like a movement towards God and a working out of His supreme will instead of the exact opposite. For better or worse, contemporary Muslim societies have not been able to produce such a comprehensive, potent and expedient illusion. The Rushdie debates have shown that this image of a completely conforming unquestioning and stagnant Muslim cultural, religious and intellectual life is repackageable in subtler, kinder and more sophisticated forms. I am referring here to the currently fashionable juxtaposition of "our deepest Western values" as against their ` `profoundest cherished Muslim values". The argument is decep- tively simple and appealing: Such practices as religious tolerance, democracy, the right of free speech and all that goes with them are really Western values, which other adjacent cultures (especially Muslim societies and cultures) find alien, repelling and generally antithetical to their most authentic values, cherised beliefs and honored heritage.21 It is at moments like this one that I find the absence of a giant like Sartre from the world stage so painfully conspicuous. I can envisage how he would have intervened, fearlessly, unambiguously and unwaveringly in the world-wide debate over The Satanic Verses and its ramifications. A Sartrian intervention would have cut across cultures, classes, particularistic arguments, parochial values and petty considerations, to be heard, understood, appreciated and reacted to in China no less than in the Arab World, in the Soviet Union no less than in France; in the United States no less than in clerical Iran. Sartre never thought of himself as a prisoner of the supposed Western universe of discourse and its deepest values, nor did he ever condescendingly think of other human beings as eter- nally sealed within their own cultural totalities and/or permanently condemned to live their lives within the confines of their "most authentic" systems of beliefs and values. For him there are only

2' For example, Princeton's Christopher Taylor argued ably this position in the Christian ScienceMonitor (March 3, 1989). Daniel Pipes made the same point in CommentaryOune 1989) while Newsweek(February 27, 1989) put the matter much more crassly by pointing out that "in the age of communication we and they live on different planets".

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 43 events, circumstances and processes formed and reformed by human praxis in history. Sartre would have never either defended Rushdie on grounds of abstract right alone or opportunistically pro- vided excuses for his persecutors in the name of their profound attachment to alien but nonetheless "most authentically" held values. As the philosopher of freedom par excellence, in addition to defending Rushdie on principle he would have defended him even more strongly on concrete socio-political grounds pertaining to the needs and requirements of human emancipation in our historical epoch. As I travelled in the winter and spring of 1989, lecturing at various American institutions of higher learning, discussions of the Rushdie affair were certainly not in short supply. Invariably, a large number of my interlocutors would fall back politely on this condescending static and exclusive juxtaposition of Western values versus Muslim values. To hear them speak, one would think that the West had never known the bloody practices of intolerance, persecution and religious bigotry and that the Muslim non-West had known nothing but the fanaticism and repression of the Ayatollahs and their like. In reply I tried to point out the following double truth: The "deepest values" of the West were not always what they are taken to be today and the supposed "authentic values" of the Muslims need not remain what they are currently perceived to have always been. I remember the puzzlement on the faces of students and younger faculty members when I informed them that when I was a doctoral student in their country-and that was not so long ago, after all-I could not legally buy a copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover. The suprise on their faces did not diminish when I reminded them that during the same period the novels of Henry Miller were printed in Paris by Olympia Press with the following prohibition on the cover: Not to be imported into Great Britain and the United States of America; i.e., Customs officials were law- bound to confiscate The Tropic of Cancer if found on a traveller entering the United States or the United Kingdom. Let me confess that I found this historical amnesia among university audiences simply shocking. The ups and downs of the recent past seem to have been levelled in their minds to an undif- ferentiated extension of the immediate American present and its

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 44 currently dominant values. If The Satanic Verses has no other virtue than distancing us all from the anomic immediacy of a seemingly 'eternal present', then it will have earned its worth and served its purpose. In fact, at times it was almost embarrassing for an Arab like myself to have to remind my American interlocutors that although religious tolerance was conquered for the modern world in Europe-at a very high and bloody price-it is a common good and not just a "deep Western value" inaccessible to non-Westerns and to Muslims in particular. They all agreed, but always after the fact. Of course they all knew from history books about the Inquisi- tion, the drama and violence of the West's protracted religious wars, the fate of the Huguenots and so on, but it all seemed, then, like a kind of historiless knowledge of history. I mean that that knowledge of history was neither spontaneously brought to bear on the understanding of a highly engaging present event such as the Rushdie affair, nor readily seen as of immediate relevance for the interpretation of its world-wide meaning and significance. In other words, history is abstractly recognized but practically denied. Carnival has been classically defined as the time and place where it is permissible to speak freely about everything. The Satanic Verses contains all the elements of carnival: Actors, clowns, mimics, costumes, masks, disguises, revelries, ceremonials, reveries, laughter, grotesqueness, metamorphoses and free speech about everything, all energized by a strong rebellious impulse. In a previous work Rushdie has briefly stated that "The true purpose of masks, as any actor will tell you, is not concealment, but transformation. A culture of masks is one that understands a good deal about the processes of metamorphosis" (J26). Rushdie's carnivalesque frankness of thought and speech about everything encompasses Islam past and present. In this same spirit of openess I would like to make a confession. In my youthful years I did entertain thoughts, ask questions, harbor doubts, and raise objections very similar to those taken up by Rushdie in The Satanic Verses. I struggled with such questions as, was Muhammad a prophet or a statesman and politician? Was he a world-historic figure or an instrument of Divine Will and Plan? Was he a pious God-fearing figure of traditional legends or a shrewd and calculating long-distance trader and merchant? Was he a servant of

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the Spirit and its higher ideals (having read some Hegel) or a philanderer and womanizer? After some exposure to Freud I did ask myself questions about the psychoanalytic significance of his earlier marriage to a woman fit to be his mother and about his later infatuation with girls fit to be his daughters. His move to abolish the old tribal practice of adoption in order rapidly to acquire the young wife of his adopted son not only did not leave me unper- turbed but led me to delve deeper into Freud, which in turn raised the additional question: What was he up to collecting all these women around him, monopolizing their favors in contravention of his own laws, rules and regulations? At the time, not having freed myself from residual moralistic approaches and puritanical scruples, I dared ask myself and discuss with like-minded friends the most difficult of the Rushdian questions: Whether the set-up with his womenfolk was a real marital household? Of course, upon greater maturity I came to realize that the two sides of the dilemmas implicit in my questionings were not exclusive of each other in the least, and that the Prophet was all these things at once and many things more also. However, I did convince myself, then, of a small explanation pertaining to the set-up with his wives and womenfolk. I had noticed at the time that all kinds of decolonizing countries were joining the United Nations Organization. Many of them seemed to act as if the main attributes of statehood and sovereignty were the flag, the national anthem and the airline. By analogy, I naively concluded that most probably Muhammad, the state builder par excellence, with his gaze fixed on the surrounding royal retinues and imperial courts, saw in the institution of the harem an important outward symbol of power and statehood. Now, the parts of The Satanic Verses which drew greatest orthodox censure and provoked most hostility are exactly the ones which speak to me most personally. They review in their own funny manner the maturing mental experiences, doubts, intellectual anxieties and soul-searchings of a young educated Arab "Muslim" struggling to live the life of his century and not of some other century. This is why I can safely say that The Satanic Verses does not really add much to what critically-minded Muslims have discussed with each other in private (and often publicly over the ages).

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In fact Rushdie reviews, utilizes and accentuates in his novel the same well-known paradoxes, incongruities, improbabilities, contradictions and anomalies inherent in Islamic sacred and semi- sacred narratives that have given pause to and occupied the minds of reflective Muslims almost from the very start of the Prophet's mission. I think Salman the Farsi, the most educated and sophisticated of the Prophet's early disciples, is supposed to represent such minds in The Satanic Verses. Thus Salman's critical spirit, searching inquiries and skeptical bent of mind gave him plenty of grounds for seriously doubting the truth-claims of Submission's narratives and teachings. He poses on behalf of us all the problem of the Koran as Divine Speech or as a human document. As his inner tensions become intolerable Salman defects, escaping back to Persia to save his life. On another plane, the novel shockingly invites today's educated Muslims to do a little better on the vexed question of the examined life, both individually and collectively a la Salman the Farsi. I hope it is clear that this issue of the examined life is neither an elitist exercise nor a refined spiritual luxury. It is important because those Muslim societies that refuse to engage seriously and consciously in it will find themselves more than ever before on the outer margins of modern history's movement. They can abstain from it only on pain of radical irrelevance and chronic impotence. This means in turn, (a) learning how to endure and profit from the painful and destabilizing critical discussions that such an examination entails and requires; (b) raising frankly and discussing freely the kind of serious questions and issues that underlie Rushdie's satirical prose; (c) struggling creatively and earnestly with the ultimate implica- tions of those questions and issues for one and all; and (d) reconcil- ing themselves once and for all to the inevitable plurality, incompleteness and contradictoriness of the answers that will emerge out of this process of self-examination. In this sense Rushdie's fiction-like the best in Modernist art-is a sustained attack on the unexamined and on those powers that always feel threatened the moment a Muslim starts examining anything seriously and critically. More specifically, The Satanic Verses is a product, for better or worse, of Rushdie's own experience with the examined life. This should explain the novel's insistence

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 47 on bringing out so graphically the whole host of absurdities, incoherences, paradoxes, archaisms and irrelevancies that plague received Muslim certainties when examined in the light of contemporary knowledge and evaluated in terms of their irrelevance to continued survival in the modern world. For example, at the collective level, Rushdie forces on our consciousness, like no one else at present, what we had suspected all along; viz., those ludicrous incongruities between projected Muslim self-images and Muslim realities, between trumpeted Muslim pretensions and concrete Muslim conditions, between continuing Muslim triumphalist delu- sions and actual Muslim impotence. Joyce also had called his Ireland "a paradise of pretenders." At the individual level, Rushdie's novel forces us to ask ourselves questions such as: How is an educated Muslim, at the end of the century, to approach and deal with a canonical Muslim story which assures us that the devil literally misled the Prophet into reciting certain verses as if they were Divine Revelation? Am I to understand this story (or any other Islamic or Koranic story) allegorically and as pure metaphor? Am I to take it literally on blind faith? Am I to consign it to the realm of the mystical and the mysterious? Am I to turn a blind eye? May I deal with it as creative myth and legend? May I deal with it as signifying something very important in and about the history of mentalities, world views and ideologies? May I appropriate it for my own creative, artistic and literary purposes ? In spite of the reality and even "banality of evil" (to borrow Hannah Arendt's phrase), is rational belief in a personal devil still possible? Is the pious standard version of the miraculous rise of Islam credible? Then, there are questions of the ethic of respon- sibility. Would the possible and latent Rushdies of the Islamic world be doing a service to the liberation and progress of their peoples, societies and cultures by simply rehearsing-often hypocritically-the Muslim standard version of history and by going along uncritically with the mainstream of accepted myth, false belief and dominant mystification? These are the kinds of issues which Rushdie's confirmed enemies will do anything to prevent from being openly raised, aired and critically debated. And let me repeat, these are also the kinds of questions that Rushdie's debunking and humorous prose forces on

Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 06:41:52PM via free access 48 our consciousness with an impact that no other form of discourse or mode of expression can match. In this sense, Rushdie's enemies are right in seeing The Satanic Verses as an all-out polemical assault on their fortresses and a vicious attempt to discredit the mindless certitudes of their positions through biting satire, skeptical iconoclasm and ribald irreverence. Rushdie's carnivalesque manner of calling things by their names without mental reservations and/or resort to euphemisms is already a contribution to greater contemporary Muslim self-awareness and critical self-examination. More specifically, his work will eventually find its place in the mainstream efforts of millions of living educated Muslims searching to make sense out of the deplorable conditions of historical irrelevance that their cultures and societies unquestionably suffer in the modern world. Rushdie expresses what these millions often sense, think and repress. He articulates what they do not dare voice, at times, even to themselves. And like all of us, Rushdie has his tentative answers to advocate and bogeys that he would like dethroned. This is why such harmful monstrosities as the alliance of Hindu fanaticism with Indira Ghandi's state of emergency (forced sterilization and all) and of Muslim bigotry with Ziaulhaq's martial law are thoroughly attacked and irreverently debunked in his fiction. To paraphrase the inimitable Rushdie, where God is in charge, some things cannot be allowed to be true. The compromising involvement (and whitewash) of the West's free press and media with regimes that do not permit certain things to be true is satirized by Rushdie as follows: " `General Hyder ... informed sources opine, close observers claim, many of our viewers in the West would say, how would you refute the argument, have you a point of view about the allegation that your institution of such Islamic punishments as flogging and cutting-off hands might be seen in certain quarters as being, arguably, according to certain definitions, so to speak, barbaric?' " (S245).

Interestingly enough a line from an early poem by Joyce expresses beautifully Rushdie's position vis-à-vis this kind of quasi-feudal militaristic form of authoritarianism.

"0 Ireland my first and only love Where Christ and Caesar are hand and glove?"

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This is why, when I think through to their logical consequences the kind of positions, criticisms and politics implicit in Rushdie's explosive intervention, I inevitably conclude that what these societies desperately need are the two great R's of the modern world; Reason and Revolution, rather than mere good old Submis- sion. For, ultimately, there is nothing either absolute or predestined about their frustrated and depressed modern condition.

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