Читать книгу The Unknown Satanic Verses Controversy on Race and Religion - Üner Daglier - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe first part of the novel, titled The Angel Gibreel, was composed of four chapters, which were all devoted to the story of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. They were both actors, originally from the Indian subcontinent and with Islamic roots, who otherwise had totally contrasting characters, convictions, and life experiences. From a cultural-ideological point of view, Gibreel gradually abandoned his trademark Indian eclecticism in favor of Islamic fundamentalism, and Saladin gradually abandoned his slavish will for Englishness, or his zeal for total assimilation, to make peace with his eclectic Indian identity. And their consequent antagonism, laden with symbolic or ideological import, constituted the novel’s main plot.
The name of Gibreel for one of these two protagonists was pun intended. In his dreams, which gradually took on the nature of a separate reality, Gibreel was God’s archangel. Without exception, all of the novel’s other story lines, or subplots, were Gibreel Farishta’s dreams in which he was God’s archangel, Gibreel.1 And each of these dreamy subplots included a religious coming and pilgrimage that determined the success or failure of a nascent spiritual project.
Gibreel’s unique role in connecting the novel’s separate dimensions could explain why part I was named after him. That said, the novel’s main plot on the paired adventures of Gibreel and Saladin chronicled a profane journey from India to England, which was akin to migration. This plot, too, was about rebirth in that it contemplated the shedding off of immigrants’ old identities and their painful attempts at establishing new identities in a despairingly multicultural adopted homeland. However, both the sacred and the profane narratives in The Satanic Verses contained miracles. These miracles were not eventually or categorically revealed to be shams, rhetorical symbols, or exaggerated characterizations of reality in the novel, despite some conflicting cues throughout. As such, Rushdie left the contemplation of what miracles are to be believed and what others to be rejected, or why have societies historically accepted the truth of some miracles on the basis of belief and rejected comparable others, to his readership. About The Satanic Verses, Werbner (1996, 57) wrote, “[I]t is, above all, an inquiry into the nature of religious belief and religious certainties from a humanist perspective.” Taken in this last sense, the novel broached a universal question, although its immediate concerns were largely Islamic, and it did not pretend to deliver a systematic philosophical inquiry or an approximate answer.
Chapter I.1
The opening chapter and, thereby, the very novel began with a reinterpretation of a signature Nietzchean dictum. To be reborn, one first has to die, sang Gabriel Farishta.2 This statement and its advanced variations were to be repeated throughout the novel in separate story lines and by different characters, including the narrator. Accordingly, it was Rushdie’s most conspicuous device in bringing the novel’s separate parts together. By the same token, it had to be the first and foremost key for dissecting it with an eye to its nonlinear development.
Indeed in the opening chapter, there was another—and a rather full-fledged—expression of Rushdie’s preoccupation with rebirth. The narrator mused about the origins of newness in the world, about the fusions, translations, and conjoinings that facilitated newness, about the ways and means of its survival, especially as newness was always perceived as extreme and dangerous, and about compromises, deals, and betrayals of its essential characteristics, which allowed it to escape its deadly and threatening opponents. Of great import, throughout The Satanic Verses, Rushdie measured up almost each and every character with personal aspirations or spiritual visions, immigrants and prophets alike, against this last musing about political struggle, determination, morality, and flexibility that ultimately distinguished success from failure.
Within the confines of the novel’s main plot, which concerned a secular theme, rebirth essentially referred to emergent immigrant identities. After the explosion of the jumbo jet carrying Gibreel and Saladin from India to England over the English Channel, remains of human souls, shattered memories, abandoned selves, discontinued native languages, trespassed sense of privacies, jokes meaningless outside of their original context, annihilated possibilities, unrecoverable dear ones, and neglected and hollowed out yet deep and resonant words, such as homeland, territory, attachment and fitting in hovered over the skies. This description symbolized that rebirth for immigrants was consequent to an earlier sense of being, identity, and its demise.
Miraculously, Gibreel and Saladin were the only survivors from the doomed Flight AI-420, and the narrator imposed a supernatural aura to their adventures. In this vein, the time and date of their aircraft’s explosion was portentous. It had happened almost immediately before daybreak, morning time, either the first day of the New Year or around then. Hence the narrator likened their celestial fall to rebirth on a grandiose scale. He referred to a sort of big bang and, consequently, stars dropping-down, and an all-embracing start, which resembled the beginning of everything, albeit on a much smaller scale.3 And several religious allusions in the chapter further served to furnish a supernatural aura to their fall. First, the doomed jumbo jet Bostan was named after one of the four gardens of heaven, according to the Islamic tradition. Second, the explosion took place at 29,002 feet, or at a height corresponding to that of the Himalayan Mountains. This precision made perfect sense in relation to chapter III.5. There, Gibreel’s girlfriend Alleluia Cone, a mountaineer who had made it to the Himalayan summit, described what she had seen, or the Himalayas extending underneath her, and that corresponded to the face of God. If so, Gibreel and Saladin’s flight exploded at a godly height. Third, as the two actors were falling toward London, the narrator associated their destination with references to hellishness, respectively in theater, the Bible, and cinema. He referred to Mahagonny, Babylon, and Alphaville. And Gibreel, clearly evoking his Indian background, referred to London as Vilayet’s capital. Thus allegorically, Gibreel and Saladin were jettisoned from the bosom of God in heaven to hell down below. With characteristic ambiguity, the narrator described this incident as their “angelicdevilish fall” (SV, 5).4
During their free fall, Gibreel and Saladin exposed their contrasting attitudes toward identity politics and integration. Gibreel chanted a song that emphasized his Indian eclecticism: “O, my shoes are Japanese . . . These trousers are English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart is Indian for all that” (SV, 5).5 In rebuke, Saladin sang the British patriotic song “Rule, Brittania!” which was closely associated with the Royal Navy and imperial expansionism. And as another indication of his slavish commitment to cultural self-denial, throughout his headfirst descent, Saladin was wearing a grey suit with his jacket buttons done up and a bowler hat. Yet for all the implied stiffness of his ideological positioning, central to the plot’s further development was that, both his and Gibreel’s attitudes were not meant to be static.
Unbeknownst to them, their celestial free fall marked the beginning of their supernatural transmutation, with significant influence on their identity politics, normally a secular concern. With direct reference to Lamarck’s evolutionary theory, the narrator noted, Gibreel and Saladin began to acquire environmental characteristics. They passed through series of clouds, constantly metamorphosing into different forms, gods becoming bulls, women becoming spiders, and men becoming wolves. Notably, these cloud things were described as hybrid entities. And Saladin was semi-consciously gripped by a rising awareness of his own cloudiness, metamorphosis, and hybridity. From this point onward, Saladin painfully moved toward cultural eclecticism or hybridity, initially Gibreel’s trademark Indian trait, and Gibreel eventually adopted a sort of religio-cultural dogmatism with Islamic tones, whose strictness recalled Saladin’s initial opposition to cultural eclecticism as a strategy for successful integration to England. The narrator alternately referred to their concurrent but irreconcilable change as their transmutation, mutation, and reincarnation.6
Always exuberant, Gibreel was even less aware of the political momentousness of their fall than Saladin, who was introspective. And a miracle within miracle distracted Gibreel. Before touchdown, up in the air, he saw the specter of Rekha Merchant, seated on a flying carpet. She was a married Muslim woman who had committed suicide, due to heartbreak after their illicit love affair. Gibreel repeatedly sought Saladin’s confirmation of her spectral presence, to no avail, and Rekha interjected, further ascertaining the novel’s essential ambiguity. Rekha said, she was only for Gibreel’s seeing, and added, perhaps he was going crazy.
Still in jealous fury, Rekha cursed London-bound Gibreel with life in hell. By implication, her emphatic gesture cast doubt on Gibreel’s angelic repute. Confessedly, she cursed Gibreel with a hellish life and damned him because, in the first place, it was him who had sent her to hell. And she called him devil, who both came from and was going to hell. Indeed the subsequent development of the novel’s main plot undid the strictly dichotomous distinction between angels and devils. This said, provisionally, Rekha’s damning words had to be taken with a grain of salt. As Islam shunned suicide, she was a character doomed to hell. Accordingly, she uttered verses in an unidentifiable and unintelligible language, which was remarkably harsh and sibilant. This was almost certainly Arabic, and Gibreel vaguely discerned the word Al-lat in her revengeful verses. Al-lat was the leading goddess of Mecca before the advent of Islamic monotheism. Hence Rekha’s goddess was antipodal to Islam’s God, or Allah, and morally suspect.
Arguably, the novel’s description of the exact workings of the supernatural miracle that saved Gibreel and Saladin was an all the more forceful blow to the traditionally conceived notion of an angel. In contrast to angels that were intermediaries between gods and men, the angel Gibreel of The Satanic Verses was a highly malleable figure, who apparently conveyed messages between man and man, that is, between the same man—utilized as a sort of inspirational midwife. This last aspect of Gibreel’s angelic nature became more obvious in the novel’s following chapters and story lines with other prophetic revelations, including those devoted to Mahound and prophetess Ayesha. Nevertheless, the opening chapter did subtly broach the topic. It demonstrated angel Gibreel’s subservience to mankind in the making of a supernatural miracle and, in this connection, his malleability in the hands of man. Angel Gibreel did not act as a go-between God and men, or between God and Saladin. Of the two, in what concerned their safe landing, Saladin’s role has apparent primacy. Up in the air, despite his distaste for the boisterous and extravagant Gibreel, Saladin instinctively refrained from shunning the latter’s embrace. Somehow against himself, he did not get to command the other to stay away from him, to go away. Something that began to move and make loud noises in his intestines kept him from rejecting Gibreel. Instead he received Gibreel’s embrace with open arms. According to Saladin, in retrospect, what took over his will and saved his life despite himself was an inner volition. This inner volition had risen up against his slavish desire for assimilation through cultural self-denial, which symbolically amounted to death or disappearance. Hence a genuine, unspoilt, an all-powerful desire for survival overtook him, and it immediately condemned his pitiful character and its trademark quality, being his incomplete artificial presence. Saladin simply surrendered to such an innermost and expansive force. However, what overruled his will had an outside origin too. An external entity, resembling a hand, embraced him, so tightly yet so gently, but in all cases causing extreme discomfort, and it was capable of controlling his words and movements too. Then whatever its exact origin, this volition of and through Saladin, commanded angel Gibreel to fly and sing. Consequently, angel Gibreel began to flap his arms with increasing rapidity and sang in a language and with a tune that was reminiscent of Rekha’s curse in verse. And already embraced, they thereby save their lives. Apparently, Saladin commanded Gibreel, and Gibreel did what was asked from him.
Afterward in safety, Gibreel took this incident to be a celestial miracle, but the more Westernized of the two, Saladin, attributed it to disturbed perceptions and sheer luck. More truly, he attempted to reject the experience through reasoning. Yet paradoxically, in their dealings with other people, it was Saladin who honestly attempted to explain what happened and was taken for an absolute fool. Gibreel, man of the people, showed more common sense.
When all is said and done, the opening of The Satanic Verses heralded a momentous reinterpretation of the division of labor between man and angel. Most noticeably in this new relationship, God was out of the picture. But instead, the narrator made a vague reference to Satan to explain the chapter’s lifesaving miracle. He said, he knew what had really happened, he had seen it all. He avowedly made no claims to omnipresence and omnipotence but suggestively asked who really worked the miracles and whether Gibreel’s song was angelic or satanic? Then he put his identity into question and asked who had the best melodies. Inevitably, this and additional narratorial interjections have led to recurrent speculation about a satanic narrator. And not far removed from such speculation was the possibility of Saladin’s demonic possession, especially given his later transformations, both physical and moral. All the more so because during Saladin’s fall from the skies to England, he had felt a relentless grip on his heart, which made him think death was out of the question. Indeed it was after his supernatural or demonic possession, possibly effected through a light ray, he had ordered Gibreel to fly and sing.7 Hence his miraculous safe landing at England marked rebirth in dual sense, as the demonic newcomer.
Chapter I.2
In The Interpretation of Dreams, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1950 [1899]) argued, dreams were a subconscious attempt to reassemble thoughts, images, and sensations incurred in the conscious or awake state of being. In parallel, the narrator’s detailed description of Gibreel’s previous life in chapter I.2 offered sufficient evidence for supposing that his angelic revelations were projections based on his past learning and experiences. Although none of these shed any light on Gibreel’s miraculous safe landing in England, they did possibly explain his spectral or holy visions. Thus, for example, the narrator informed that Rekha, whose specter had visited Gibreel flying on a Bokhara rug, in real life owned carpet showrooms. As to her flying, she had committed suicide by throwing herself down Bombay’s highest skyscraper, the Everest Vilas. She had committed suicide because Gibreel, with whom she was having an extramarital affair, had vanished. And Gibreel’s enigmatic farewell note that referred to airborne activity might have inspired the way in which she had committed suicide, for it referred to humans as aerial entities, with origins in dreams and clouds, and their flying to regenerate themselves. Hence while never explicitly admitted in the novel, Gibreel was possibly feeling responsible, or his sense of guilt lay at the root of Rekha’s frequent spectral visits to him.
Nonetheless, throughout his life Gibreel, a fictional Bollywood movie icon, was fed by a religious imaginary. He was born Ismail Najmuddin. His first name was inspired by the child that Ibrahim (Abraham) sought to sacrifice. His last name meant, the faith’s star. He substituted Gibreel for Ismail on his way to stardom. This was in homage to his mom who originated the idea. She considered him to be her personal angel and called him farishta, meaning angel.
Furthermore, in his fifteen years long career, Gibreel, the biggest star in the history of Indian movies, specialized in theological movies.8 He incarnated every god in the pantheon of gods, including blue-skinned Krishna, elephant-headed Ganesh, Hanuman the monkey king, and Gautama under the bodhi tree. For his fans across religious boundaries, he represented the most suitable and immediately noticeable image of God. When he mysteriously disappeared, it literally meant the demise of the Supreme. The demarcation line between the actor and his performances had for a long time become defunct. Interestingly, on the one hand, Gibreel suffered from halitosis, which the narrator suggested was a devilish trait, and his face was profane, sensual, and lately—after his mysterious near-fatal illness—debilitated. On the other hand, his face was godlike. Holy, perfect, and graceful.
Psychic notions were deeply ingrained in his mind. Even before stardom, he felt special. According to his mom who called him angel, just looking at him meant the fulfillment of her dreams. Earlier than anything else, this communicated to him a sense of uniqueness. Apparently, he was always able to satisfy others’ most intimate desires without even knowing how it happened. He had become an orphan at the age of twenty, but a well-off and well-connected childless couple took pity on him, and within five years he became a movie star. These bittersweet experiences fostered the feeling that he was not on his own, something in the world was watching over him. And he eventually came to believe in the existence of a guardian angel.
Since his formative years, Gibreel believed that the supernatural world existed, including God, angels, demons, djinns, and afreets. His mother had told him many stories of the Islamic prophet. Afterward, Gibreel was able to compare himself to Muhammad, who was once orphaned and poor, like him. Then, while a novice in the movie business, he devoured ancient Greek and Roman mythology and Western theology. Among his readings were the satanic verses incident at the dawn of Muhammad’s prophetic career, incidents at his harem after his triumphant return to Mecca and, separately, the surreal newspaper story of butterflies flying into damsels’ mouths, to be willingly consumed. Most plausibly, these readings fed Gibreel’s angelic dream revelations in subsequent chapters with Muhammad and the butterfly prophetess Ayesha.9 (In addition, chapter I.2 also offered a clue about the sources of Gibreel’s dream and revelation in part IV, featuring the Imam, who closely resembled Ayatollah Khomeini of the Iranian revolution. Gibreel’s apartment in Bombay was decorated like a Bedouin tent by a French interior designer, who was recommended through Shah Reza Pahlevi. Needless to say, Khomeini had toppled the Shah during the revolution.)
Gibreel was particularly well acquainted with the notions of reincarnation and rebirth. Above all, he was an Indian theological movies actor. Even his name change from Ismail to Gibreel was a worldly reincarnation. In addition, his adopted father, fat like Buddha and amateur psychic, had inculcated notions of reincarnation and spectral visitations on him. Once he had told Gibreel about a visit by a co-operative spirit, to shed light on the existence of God and devil. This had left a deep mark on Gibreel’s consciousness. And as stated before, consciousness was the fountainhead of dreams.
Of the events leading up to his miraculous fall, his most personal encounter with the notion of rebirth took place on a hospital bed. All of a sudden, at the height of his career, he had become gravely ill, due to an inexplicable internal hemorrhage. The hospital called it strangely mysterious, a divine incident. But after a week of internal bleeding, he rapidly and miraculously recovered. This time, the hospital called it a godly development. Gibreel’s return from the brink of death generated rebirth in another sense too, in that he completely lost his Islamic faith and became an atheist. This had come about in several stages: desperate pleas to God for help, a sense of divine punishment for wrongs done that made his pains justifiable and bearable, eventual anger for the unevenness of his divine punishment, realization that he was talking to thin air and that there was no God, the terrible sense of nothingness that came with this discovery, and a renewed longing for God out of desperation, and—finally—his coming to terms with the nonexistence of God and nothingness.
There was an additional twist to his rebirth after internal hemorrhage. He fell in love. Immediately upon discharge from the hospital, he had gone to Bombay’s most famous hotel, the Taj, to eat Islamically forbidden—or unclean—foods and, thereby, ascertain the nonexistence of God. Based on his new sense of unbelief and secularism, he filled his plate with Wiltshire pork sausages, York cured hams, bacon rashers, gammon stakes, and pig’s trotters. And there, by chance, he spoke to Alleluia Cone, a Jewish visitor from London, who was watching him. He explained, the point was lack of divine punishment. She retorted, the point was, he had returned back to life, he was not dead.
Alleluia’s incisively witty remark had a disturbing effect on Gibreel. After consuming pork, religiously forbidden, he began to suffer from retributive dreams, which resembled divine punishment. If so, Alleluia’s role in triggering Gibreel’s prolonged and painful return back to faith was not coincidental. Her name, a variant of Hallelujah, meant God be praised, and she had prophetic qualities. She claimed to have seen the face of God at Mount Everest, and she routinely experienced spectral visits by Maurice Wilson, a mountaineer who died in the Everest. And due to her physical appearance, Alleluia had an angelic aura. She had rather whitish light blond hair. Her translucent complexion resembled mountain ice. Notably, as angel Gibreel’s lover to be, she was possibly his supernatural peer.
However, like Gibreel, who had chronic halitosis and was rather dark and gloomy instead of haloed, Alleluia’s qualities were not impeccable. Consequent to their first encounter, they had spent three carnal days in a hotel room. Nevertheless, then, she had delivered a morally worthy challenge to Gibreel, a philandering womanizer. She had urged him to pursue a different life, as his return from the brink of death had to be for something.
Gibreel took up Alleluia’s challenge for a new life, built on genuine love. When Bostan exploded, he was on his way to London for a new life with her. Hence like The Satanic Verses’ numerous other characters, Gibreel’s was pursuing rebirth. He was pressed by the urgency of an unthinkable conception to actually realize itself. He later explained to Saladin, his two experiences with half-expiry, internal hemorrhage and celestial free fall, added up to one complete, and to be born again one had to die at first. However, his figurative death comprised other deaths. As he had disappeared from Bombay, a heartbroken Rekha had committed suicide. And miraculously, his face on billboards began to rot and crumble, his images on the covers of newly printed shiny magazines faded and then blanked, and movie projectors unaccountably jammed the moment he appeared on film. Thereby, his celluloid memory literally got burned.
Chapter I.3
Alternative rebirth scenarios in the novel were not exclusive to Gibreel and his dream revelations. As chapter I.3 revealed, the story of Saladin, Gibreel’s counterpart in the main plot, also concerned transmutation or rebirth. Saladin’s story, which was based on an immigrant’s struggle to wholly redefine his identity, was essentially secular, although Rushdie took great pains to convey it in religious terms. Thus the novel’s narrator alerted, anyone wishing to recreate himself was practically assuming the position of God. As such, he was acting unnaturally, blasphemously, and truly becoming utterly loathsome. Yet the narrator also saw heroism in this ungodly attempt at identity reconstruction, which might come to a tragic end. After all, survival of mutants’ was risky business, a matter of chance.
To the extent that Saladin’s heroic attempt at identity reconstruction was devilish, there was a comparable precedent in his father, Changez. After Saladin’s mother Nasreen had died, his father had married another woman, also named Nasreen. On that occasion, Changez had enjoined his son to be glad because of the rebirth of the deceased. And Saladin, albeit secularized, had retorted in traditional terms that were relevant to his reclusive father, who—according to rumor—had lately become preoccupied with the supernatural;10 he had accused him of devilment and possession. Then years after, when Saladin visited his father’s mansion, he saw another woman, his former nanny, wearing his deceased mother’s clothes, which he for a moment took to be her ghost. For the narrator, their reunion amounted to an unholy trinity of the father, his son, and mistress.
As Saladin’s begetter, his originator, was satanic, Saladin logically represented a continuation of the same traits, but the narrator momentarily highlighted another dimension, this time psychological, which denied the biological influence of the father over the son. By pointing out a usually prudish reaction against satanic fathers by their sons, the narrator briefly distinguished between Saladin and Changez on moral grounds. Indeed Saladin had blamed his father for worshiping his deceased wife and the erotic role-play involved in the process, as they clearly evoked blasphemy. But in return, his father had accused him of devilry, due to his immigrant attempt at identity construction. For him, someone who betrayed himself was a walking falsehood, a creature that corresponded to the devil’s most perfect fabrication.
To save his son, Changez urged him to return to his origins. He claimed to have safely preserved Saladin’s immortal soul and asked him to abandon his form, which was devil-possessed. This precondition met, Saladin could retrieve his true essence. But any possibility for a return to his homeland after approximately a quarter century in England actually depended on Saladin’s ability to resolve his conflict with Changez.11 Truly, Saladin’s attempt at transformation to an Englishman was a direct reaction to childhood scars caused by his domineering father, although miscommunication rather than lack of love seemed to have lain at the root of the problem. It was his father who had sent Saladin to study in England at the age of thirteen, but the outcome had defied his expectations. After university, Saladin had settled in London and become an actor, despite his father’s strong objections. Uncoincidentally, Saladin was first attracted to show business through his mother’s social circles in Bombay.
On the surface of it, Saladin was fully committed to his anglicized new life and was absolutely not yearning for a return to the past. If anything, he was slavishly committed to his identity-transformation project. For example, he had substituted the funny-sounding and salad-like Saladin for his original name Salahuddin, which corresponded to that of a historic Muslim warrior who had defied Christian crusaders and recaptured Jerusalem.12 In addition, Saladin had shortened his original last name Chamchawala to Chamcha, which literally meant spoon in Hindu/Urdu, although it was slang for lackey. Even as a child, once when England had played India in cricket, he had prayed for England. By the same token, in adulthood, during their celestial free fall, when Gibreel sang a song that celebrated Indian eclecticism, he had retorted with “Rule, Brittania!”
Nevertheless, Saladin’s story in The Satanic Verses began at a moment when an identity crisis was looming for him. He was visiting Bombay for the first time in fifteen years, on tour with his theater troupe from London, but his real purpose was to see his father, who was now in his late seventies. Before arrival, during the flight, he had noticed traces of his Indian accent coming back, like evolutionary retrogression, and he had dreamt of a bizarre stranger with glass skin begging to be liberated from his skin prison. The dream had terminated in blood, screams, and detached flesh as the stranger battered his own glass skin with a rock. And Saladin’s identity crisis loomed larger. Accordingly, on the way back to England, in the immediate aftermath of his flight’s airborne explosion, he was driven by an absolute and irresistible will to life that had expressly condemned his strategy for integration, which amounted to complete cultural self-denial, as a pathetic act of mimicry. In other words, something in him had finally rebelled against his slavish quest for assimilation.
During his stay in Bombay, Saladin had failed to resolve his conflict with his father. Therefore, the mental and psychological conditions that would allow him to contemplate a permanent return did not materialize. But his erotic encounter with Zeeny (Zenaat) Vakil did open a window to the charms of the homeland. Zeeny was a childhood friend, who had become a medical doctor and an independent and attractive woman. More importantly, she was an art critic who had published a sensational book in favor of Indian cultural eclecticism. For her, authenticity was a restrictive fable, a narrowing tale. She was attempting to exchange it with the ethos of traditionally proven eclecticism. After all, Indian cultural heritage had been generated through selectively borrowing whatever suited best, be it Aryan, Mughal, or British. Although Zeeny practically took aim at Hindu fundamentalism, her thought was equally a challenge to Saladin’s slavish yearning for pure Englishness.
Interestingly, the centerpiece of Saladin’s proud claim to have transformed himself into an Englishman, or the most convincing evidence of what he took to be his conquest of England, was his marriage to Pamela Lovelace, who was white, blond, and of aristocratic stock.13 Initially, Saladin had not known that Pamela’s aristocratic parents had gone broke and committed suicide during her childhood and that she had never forgiven them for their abandonment. Thus while Pamela’s purebred Englishness gave much-needed existential affirmation or comfort to Saladin, she was basically a self-hating Englishwoman who, precisely for that reason, had married an immigrant from India.
Saladin’s looming identity crisis and erotic encounter with Zeeny were triggered by his declining marriage. This was a symbolically portentous development that he could not yet openly admit to himself. But more easily discernible, his marriage was sterile, due to his faulty genetic inheritance. Hence Saladin’s inauthentic attempt at identity construction, based on Indian self-hatred and advanced through slavish mimicry of Englishness, was bound to hit a dead end.
On the face of it, Saladin was a triumphant immigrant. He was a naturalized Briton, married to a blond aristocrat, and flush with money from show business. This was no easy feat but with insurmountable and humiliating limitations. After much effort and deliberation, he had changed his voice, face, and name—in fact, his embarrassing last name change was first proposed by his agent for commercial reasons. He was now known to possess a 1,001 voices, and his voice-over career was outstanding. Extraordinarily talented, he ruled the British radio waves, but his big break on British TV had come with The Aliens Show, where he was cast as Maxim Alien and buried under prosthetic makeup. Thus he and stage partner, an Armenian-Jew, were severely handicapped icons, hidden celebrities. They were bound to remain unseen. Their invisibility and vocality were two sides of the same coin. Unsurprisingly, on tour back in Bombay, he was acting the part of an Indian doctor in Bernard Shaw’s The Millionairess.
Chapter I.4
In concluding the first part of the novel, chapter I.4 chronicled the events leading up to doomed flight Bostan’s explosion over the English Channel. Above all, however, it had to be of interpretative interest for its treatment of two figures with possible prophetic features. These were Saladin and Tavleen, a religiously motivated Sikh female terrorist. Tavleen’s flaws and virtues were presented in pointed contrast to those of Mahound, ultimately adding to his fame and glory. In addition, chapter I.4 was noteworthy for Rushdie’s attack against Western irrationalism and religious bigotry, with particular reference to American Christianity.
The chapter began with Saladin. For all his success in anglicizing himself and contrived aristocratic poise, Saladin had retained something of a traditionalist or Eastern background. Fear could remove his nearly impeccable varnish and show remnants of a superstitious heritage. To his own embarrassment, during takeoff on his flight back to London, he had crossed two pairs of fingers and rotated his thumbs, evidently practicing an Indian superstition, which he had picked up from his father in childhood. Given that his flight was hijacked and eventually exploded by Sikh terrorists, this superstitious trick was insufficient protection. Nevertheless, the whole incident of the hijacked aircraft did actually reveal a supernatural prophetic aspect to him. Before the flight, he had dreamed of a Canadian-accented bomber, carrying her explosives under the guise of a baby held close to her breasts. And once in the cabin, he noticed the almost perfect resemblance between his nightmare vision and fellow passenger. Although he severely admonished himself for Indian superstitiousness, soon afterward the nightmare came true. The woman of his dream, Tavleen, turned out to be the leader of a Sikh terrorist quartet.14
While the rest of chapter I.4 did not provide enough material for a comparison between Saladin and Mahound, it did hint at the future possibility by presenting Saladin as someone with supernatural prophetic qualities in pursuit of rebirth. Yet this chapter did offer a compact basis for comparison between Tavleen and Mahound. To begin with, the determined Tavleen and her weak-willed male counterparts sought for an independent homeland for Sikhs, religious freedom, and justice. Hence like prophet Mahound in the subsequent chapter of The Satanic Verses, Tavleen launched her religious project with three subordinates. Also noticeable, Tavleen and fellow hijackers landed their London-bound aircraft on a six-lane highway at the Al-Zamzam oasis and held it there for 111 days. The narrator’s reference to the oasis of Al-Zamzam here pointedly served to establish another link to the Mahound story line. In that story about the foundations of Submission, a religion closely modeled on Islam, the pioneering members of the faith community congregated at Zamzam—indeed in the Islamic tradition, the Zamzam Well in Mecca was an essential destination for pilgrims. Finally, in another obvious reference to Mahound and other and spiritual visionaries in the novel, Tavleen was also preoccupied with rebirth. In this context, she murmured, unique ideas and causes had to respond to some essential enquiries upon their advent. Of historical import, they had to make known whether they were unyielding, determined, and forceful, or demonstrably easygoing, reconciliatory, and giving in.
For her part, Tavleen was unyielding. Rather than accept a weakened resolve, failure, or surrender, she exploded the hijacked aircraft over the skies of England and killed everyone, except Saladin and Gibreel who were saved miraculously. Thereby, the strong-willed amazon’s religious aspirations came to naught. Her last words on record referred to the distinctiveness of martyrs, akin to the sun and stars. In contrast to self-destructive Tavleen, who was blinded by fanaticism, Mahound knew how to combine his religious zeal with political acumen. He was therefore able to achieve his ends. Uncoincidentally, Saladin wanted to tell Tavleen that unwillingness to compromise might become a pathological obsession, sort of a dictatorship, and make for fragility when, in contrast, flexibility was a civil trait that promoted longevity.15
Although The Satanic Verses has widely been held to be critical of Islamic misogyny, Tavleen’s tragic excesses showed that Rushdie’s alleged feminism was not impeccable. To add, Rushdie’s description of suicide bomber Tavleen, sexy like a bomb, was bound to raise the ire of his feminist critics, who accused him of sexism, due to his penchant for physically attractive heroines.16
As stated before, chapter I.4 also included Rushdie’s attack against Western irrationalism and religious bigotry, with particular reference to American Christianity. Although Rushdie’s primary Western target in The Satanic Verses was racism and xenophobia in England, or a variety of social conservatism, in chapter I.4 he launched a mini frontal-attack on American Christianity through his depiction of Saladin’s seat neighbor Eugene Dumsday, a ridiculous American evangelist, who was leaving India, where he had campaigned against Charles Darwin and evolutionism. Dumsday wore a neon-green shirt with luminous golden dragons, and he had huge red hands and the voice of an innocent ox. According to Dumsday, the belief that humans evolved from a chimpanzee had depressed American youth and made them turn to drugs and premarital sex. Saladin mused, in India, a nation of passionate believers, Dumsday’s case against science as God’s adversary was bound to be quite appealing, but the American had failed to connect with his audience. And in the aftermath, he had been solicited by drug dealers, an incident that struck Saladin as the revenge of Darwin. However, Rushdie concocted an even worse revenge for this ridiculous American religious fundamentalist. Somewhat accidentally, Tavleen cut his tongue off.17
Chapter I.4 ended with the trials and tribulations of prophetic lives, most notably including Tavleen and Gibreel. In the 110th day of the hijack, just before takeoff from Al-Zamzam, Tavleen sacrificed a cut-sird, meaning a Sikh who had abandoned the turban and cut his hair, or a religious renegade. The hijackers had already released all but fifty passengers, including women, children, Sikhs, Saladin’s fellow actors, and eventually Dumsday who complained too much. Then, traveling incognito and in need of company, Gibreel took Dumsday’s former seat next to Saladin. Saladin noticed Gibreel’s remarkably bad breath and painstaking efforts to stay awake, among other things by studying Dumsday’s pamphlet on contemporary academic attempts to reconcile science and religion. Dumsday had written that dry scientific characterizations were no match for the old-fashioned notion of a Supreme Creator. Finally, Gibreel fell asleep, woke up after four days, and urinated for eleven minutes. Saladin learned, Gibreel shunned sleep to escape dreams that had begun the very night he had eaten pork and always continued from where they had last stopped. In these dreams, which exacted a heavy toll on his nerves, Gibreel consistently embodied God’s archangel Gibreel. Avowedly, he was not acting. He was truly and unmistakably embodying Gibreel, the very archangel. Saladin took these confessions for egomania, although Gibreel was genuinely disturbed. Meanwhile, in the desert heat and feeling abandoned, some of the other passengers were seeing and hearing specters outside. In time, as was befitting a prophetic leader, Gibreel animatedly lectured his co-hostages on reincarnation, death, and rebirth, and likened their captivity to a process of regeneration: the day of their release would be the day of their rebirth. Thereby, he became a source of both their annoyance and optimism. Privately, however, his highest thought and ultimate obsession remained a woman, albeit named Alleluia.
NOTES
1. As Bardolph (1994, 216) noted, these dreams do not purport to be truth and, therefore, should not be considered blasphemous. And Hussain (2002, 10) informed of the exalted status of dreams in the Islamic tradition, notwithstanding the subversive nature of The Satanic Verses’ dreams.
2. Nietzsche was unacknowledged in the passage. Among the many comparable Nietzschean formulations in Thus Spoke Zarathustra was, “And whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative” (Nietzsche 1978 [1883–1891], 116).
3. For Brennan (1989, 154), Gibreel and Saladin’s fall from the skies combined rebirth in the biblical tradition and the Hindu notion of reincarnation. Kimmich (2008, 166) evoked Miltonic fall.
4. The Satanic Verses, hereafter referred to as SV.
5. For the song and its origins in Indian film Shree 420, see Stadtler (2014, 89–93). Stadtler informed, Shree 420 was a film about journeying and identity in postcolonial India. For another study on Shree 420 and allusions to it in The Satanic Verses, see Aravamudan (1989, 6–10).
6. Kuortti (2007, 132–33) argued, Saladin first realized his becoming hybrid during his celestial fall, and his demonic turn afterward suggested a link between blasphemy and identity construction.
7. For Saladin and demonic possession during the fall, see Clark (2000, 145). Demon-possessed Saladin’s order to angel Gibreel to fly and sing and the latter’s subservience marked a shift in the cosmic order: “Satan usurps God’s position in the cosmic chain of command.”
8. Brennan (1989, 153) informed, in Indian cinema the theological genre was actually called “mythologicals.” He added, the Gibreel character was inspired by actor Amitabh Bachan, who had fallen ill and been visited in hospital by Indira Gandhi. Aravamudan (1989, 10) claimed, Gibreel was a composite of N. T. Rama Rao and Amitabh Bachan.
9. For a similar view, see Brennan (1989, 127).
10. In the ultimate chapter of the novel, Changez will be strictly presented as a secular.
11. According to Goontellike (1998, 73), Changez’s conflict with his son paralleled Salman Rushdie’s conflict with his father.
12. Clark (2000, 148) informed, Salahuddin was “the romanticized enemy of Richard the Lionheart in the Crusades.”
13. Ruthven (1990, 21) observed a broad parallel between Pamela and Salman Rushdie’s first wife Clarissa Luard; also see Kortenaar (2008, 344). Sanga (2001, 34) informed of Rushdie’s possible debt to Frantz Fanon’s discussion of being loved by a white woman as an assumed strategy for becoming white for the colonial man. In this context, Kuortti (2007, 131) reminded of “the worst fears of colonialists: the native violating a woman.” Also see Fanon’s (2008 [1952]) Black Skin, White Masks.
14. The novel’s hijacking incident was based on a real event, or the explosion of an Air India Boeing 747 off Ireland by Sikh terrorists in 1985. See Goontelllleke (1998, 74) and Fischer and Abedi (1990, 136).
15. As Afzal-Khan (1993, 172) noted, the novel suggested that those who were flexible survived. And according to Cavanaugh (2004, 398), Tavleen’s core flaw was lack of mercy.
16. For a broad literature review of feminist critics of Rushdie’s alleged feminism in The Satanic Verses, see note 9 in the conclusion.
17. Brennan (1989, 162) pointed out, the Dumsday character was a device to show the backwardness of the West.
