Читать книгу The Unknown Satanic Verses Controversy on Race and Religion - Üner Daglier - Страница 8
ОглавлениеThe Satanic Verses was a novel about blasphemy in the widest sense. It tackled both supernatural and worldly dogmatism. Although its critique of supernatural dogmatism centered on Islam, other religious movements or traditions, including American Christianity, Hinduism, and Sikhism, got some critical attention. As for secular blasphemy or worldly religion, the novel’s focal point was white racism as epitomized by its English variant. Hence there was parity between Salman Rushdie’s critique of Eastern and Western civilizations.1 In terms of sheer physical length, Islamic criticism constituted a relatively minor portion of The Satanic Verses, but it was the most poignant. And its stylistic—if not essential—sense of gravity overshadowed and framed a separate layer of inherent lewdness or profanity. In contrast, the novel’s major portion, devoted to migrant woes and racism in England, as mainly articulated through nonwhite and non-Christian perspectives, was arguably less significant in its dramatic impact and value. To say the least, Rushdie’s arduous attempt to bind the novel’s twin concerns, religion and race, or disparate species of dogmatisms, within the compass of this latter portion exacerbated its alleged artistic failure.2
Yet irrespective of its artistic qualities, The Satanic Verses has been widely hailed for its religiopolitical potentialities.3 Its first publication in 1988 has time and again been compared to Martin Luther’s nailing of his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg or the symbolic beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517.4 Indeed dissident poet Baal’s posting of his amorous verses for twelve prostitutes on the outer walls of their prison, each one of them exactly nicknamed for a real wife of prophet Mahound in the novel, has served as a concrete basis for such speculations.5 However, the so-called parallelism between Luther and Rushdie and their pious intentions might beg the question. To assume that these two figures had comparable faith in or intentions toward Christianity and Islam, respectively, might be too much to assume. Rushdie’s skeptical take on the origins of Islam in The Satanic Verses could well be the harbinger of a destructive challenge rather than the foundations of constructive reform per se. Accordingly, more than one academic critic has likened Rushdie to Voltaire, an irreverent icon of the Enlightenment.6 (He has also been likened to James Joyce, the author of Ulysses, reputedly another obscene and blasphemous works of art, and Finnegan’s Wake.)7
These conflicting perspectives on The Satanic Verses, ranging from its call for religious reform to its call for religious renunciation, could be bridged by hypothetically distinguishing between what Rushdie considered to be practically plausible and his ideal intentions. In this context, it should be worth noting that Rushdie’s take on religion and dogmatism in The Satanic Verses was not limited to Islam, and his views on Islam did not correspond to his final word on religion. For discovering the latter, his token reference to Friedrich Nietzsche in the butterfly prophetess Ayesha story line of the novel has to be a useful key. That is, a careful reading of The Satanic Verses would unmistakably suggest that religion is or may be false but its appeal or the need for it is irresistible, at least for the majority of mankind. Booker (1994, 252) wrote, “Rushdie is . . . not an anti-religious writer. Like Nietzsche before him, he rejects religious dogmatism while at the same time recognizing that human beings have a fundamental need for beliefs and values.” And this Nietzschean spirit, or Rushdie’s rejection of a pristine faith in human rationalism, distanced him from the Enlightenment tradition. Hence although Rushdie was widely reputed to be a postmodern due to his bizarre and erratic artistic style, his broad philosophical stance merited the very same appellation.8
Rushdie’s artistic style has repeatedly been described as a liberating device to escape from colonial patterns of domination.9 In specific, as imperial power relations of domination and subordination were justified and legitimized by the rule of the rational over the irrational, or the enlightened over the unenlightened, Rushdie, who was from the Indian subcontinent, apparently aspired for a level playing field in which he could express himself on equal—or even advantageous—terms vis-à-vis the English reading public by sidestepping modern rationalism. Khan (2005, 43) remarked, “Rushdie’s oeuvre attempts to revive the genre of myth in order to formulate a ‘viable alternative ideology’ to the deadlock of Manichean binaries that confronts the subject in postcolonial societies. These binaries accentuated by former colonial regimes included black and white, savage and civilized, silent and articulate, rational ruler and irrational ruled” (quote in quote from Afzal-Khan 1993, 173). Thus Rushdie’s novels, including The Satanic Verses, did not conform to the bounds of reason, both in terms of their enigmatically chaotic organizational structure and magical realism, and this was of symbolic significance for his postcolonial critics.10 In addition, Rushdie’s stylistic blend of Indian slang with English proper, partially referred to as Hobson-Jobson, was allegedly another postcolonial liberation strategy that sought to open the mastery of the English language to dispute.11
However, postcolonial arguments in praise of surrealism and literary chaos need not take away from The Satanic Verses’ reputation as failed art.12 So far, critics from the press corps have routinely described it to be a reputedly “‘unreadable’ book” (Wheatcroft 1994, 28), or “difficult” and “unreadable” (Ruthven 1990, 12), and “more parts than whole” (Bakshian 1989, 44). And despite comparatively more leisure, balance, and understanding of the novel, such negative impressions have intermittently been echoed by scholarly critics as well. For example Clark (2000, 147) claimed, “The novel’s postcolonial politics and cosmic politics are worlds apart. Perhaps that is why the novel is not a complete success.” But the political uproar created by The Satanic Verses has reaffirmed literature’s enduring importance, and in that way, it has been an incomparable contemporary success.13
Given Rushdie’s challenge to commonsensical reason, The Satanic Verses did not easily succumb to scholarly attempts at analysis. Its architectonic structure did not conform to a simple and clear logical pattern that allowed for systematic deconstruction.14 Consequently, its overall meaning was ambiguous.15 Due to the sensitive nature of Rushdie’s concerns, including Islam, such epistemic imprecision, if intentionally produced, could have been a protective buffer between dangerous arguments or truths, on the one hand, and public opinion, on the other. Indeed comparable textual devices have served philosophers and literary figures against persecution throughout history, especially before the advent of modern liberalism.16 Of course, Rushdie’s remarks about the original foundations of Islam and Muhammad have been so obviously critical and even insulting, it has to be an open question why he would ever have cared to spare anything else from public scrutiny. Nevertheless, the architectonic structure of The Satanic Verses has existed as an inbuilt constraint against random access. As Werbner (1996, 65) stated, “Few readers, whether religious Muslims or secular intellectuals, crack the code.”
The Satanic Verses was a coded text. And some of the motivation behind this was stylistic. But ultimately, Rushdie did not easily want to give away his concrete proposal for Islamic reform, which directly emanated from his diagnosis of a perennial Islamic flaw in the novel, or misogyny.17 Werbner’s well-defined methodological approach to cracking the novel—or decoding it—through comparing and contrasting prophetic visionaries from its main plot and various subplots, instead of vainly seeking for a progressive linear connection between them has been useful, although her conclusion derived thereof was utterly questionable: “Set against these six figures [Gibreel and Baal, Chamcha and Saladin, the Imam and Ayesha] the Prophet is the almost perfect man. He is a creative genius who transformed the world; he overcomes temptation and transcends passion; he is always a man of integrity. He is courageous in weakness, magnanimous in power. He teaches love and respect for women” (Werbner 1996, 64).18 Yet of the six comparable figures whom Werbner took into account and several others in the novel, one of them, Ayesha the butterfly prophetess, was of particular significance. Albeit a character with multiple personal flaws, prophetess Ayesha and the openness she promoted was antithetical to Islam as perennially misogynist, both in theory and practice, and in a state of arrested development. As Suleri (1992, 198) put into comparative perspective, the Ayesha episode has been an attempt “to locate an idiom for the feminization of Islam”; “Mahound’s old idea of submission is now substituted by the idea of opening” (ibid., 204).19 In parallel, Morton (2008, 80–81) remarked, “It is through the female character Ayesha that a rethinking of Islam is most clearly articulated in The Satanic Verses . . . it is Ayesha and Mirza’s pilgrimage from the Indian village of Titlipur to Mecca that offers a more progressive model of Islam.”20 If so, the imperfect future promise of prophetess Ayesha superseded the problematic brilliance of the novel’s prophet Mahound, who was closely modeled on the Islamic religion’s founder.
In addition to its architectonic structure, The Satanic Verses has been baffling due to its textual ambiguity.21 Almost each and every narrative episode in it with prophetic visionaries was perfectly fine-tuned for totally contradictory interpretations. Rushdie’s nearly unequivocal critique of the foundations of Islam, or his challenge to the veracity of its founder’s holy claims, has come close to being the most noticeable exception to this pattern. Nevertheless, Rushdie’s postcolonial critics maintained that The Satanic Verses’ textual ambiguity was part and parcel of his postcolonial liberation strategy. As stated before, Rushdie was against binary oppositions of all sorts, above all including those which have justified colonial rule in the past, such as the distinction between the rational and the irrational, and also the binary opposition between what constituted an Englishman proper and what did not, which has made it difficult for nonwhite postcolonial immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean to successfully integrate. This said, Rushdie’s ambivalence in The Satanic Verses could not be divorced from his subject matter, or religious dogmatism.22 The novel’s irresolvable textual ambiguity was essentially related to its author’s philosophical postmodernism and critique of the Enlightenment. Although Rushdie was overall dismissive of supernaturalism, he did give some credit for its appeal to ordinary people, through tacitly admitting to its theoretical possibility, in the sense that universal sources of supernaturalism either could not be or have not been disproved by science and philosophy for certain. As such, leading prophetic visionaries in the novel were more often cynically false or mentally deluded but, in one way or another, struck audiences as factually credible. At the least, there was always a special occasion to contradict their otherwise obvious disingenuousness.
Paradoxically, as Rushdie by and large sought to demystify supernatural beliefs and traditions and, thereby, undo religious dogmatism in The Satanic Verses, he advanced the novel’s very worldly concern with immigrant woes and racism in England with a mystical plot that made heavy use of supernatural tricks, or miracles and the like.23 The prophet of English racism and his trademark verses in the novel were possibly chosen somewhat randomly, but nevertheless there were repeated allusions to former Tory politician Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech, in which he had powerfully decried postcolonial immigration to Great Britain and called for urgent repatriation.24 “It led to him being sacked from the shadow cabinet, ending his hopes of a post in a future Conservative government. However, thousands of workers staged strikes and marches in support of his views and he was inundated with letters from well wishers” (BBC (n.d.)).25
Again paradoxically, this aspect of The Satanic Verses, or its case against racism, xenophobia, and bigotry, has by and large been hidden from public view, due to the influence of the very postcolonial immigrants whose cause Rushdie sought to champion.26
Public protests by Islamic immigrants against The Satanic Verses which initially developed with book burning in Bradford, England, and led to convulsions in Islamic countries worldwide and Ayatollah Khomeini’s notorious fatwa against its author, calling for his death, eliminated the chances for a wholesome understanding of the novel, at least in the short-term. Reputedly, The Satanic Verses survived as a much talked about but mostly unread book, barring few photocopied passages that were distributed by religious interests to bolster rage.27 More often than not, hostile critics, including Muslim immigrants in the European diaspora, claimed to have not read it and, in fact, having not read it at all was a source of pride to them.28 For its supporters too, just to buy the novel, as distinct from reading it, largely sufficed, as it was supposedly unreadable.29 And unfortunately, politicization of the debate from early on had a narrowing influence on scholarship too. An overwhelming portion of early studies on The Satanic Verses were enquiries as to whether it was insulting to Islam, Muhammad, or Muslims, and concomitantly, whether it should have been banned from publication.30 In Kimmich’s (2008, 141) words, this was “a discussion which largely focused on the allegations of blasphemy and on ideological issues such as freedom of speech, but which, more often than not, gave the literary dimension of the work itself rather short shrift.”31 Remarkably, some academic critics went so far as to suggest that The Satanic Verses could not have been interpreted at all without regard to the public controversy it generated.32
Fortunately, it would not be reasonable anymore to talk of a dearth of insightful studies on the text of The Satanic Verses. In hindsight, the public controversy around it must have been a blessing. For without it, given its limited artistic appeal, The Satanic Verses could have remained in an eternal state of neglect and obscurity. Even so, untranslated and banned, its impact on Islamic societies throughout the world has thus far been infinitesimal. Therefore, Brennan (1989, 165) characterized Rushdie as a novelist with next to no influence on the third world, as someone whose audience was “the cloistered West and its book market.” However, a more accurate judgment on Rushdie’s potential religiopolitical impact should necessarily have to take strict limits against free expression in contemporary Islamic societies into account and compare English, Rushdie’s literary medium, to Greek and Latin in the Middle Ages, as a secluded language of higher learning and philosophy. Such a view would certainly be in accord with Rushdie’s coded disclosure of his proposal for reform, most probably targeting an elite audience rather than the public at-large and, thereby, hoping to generate trickle-down change for unsuspecting and unresisting throngs of Islamic believers. Indeed despite Rushdie’s shattering take on the founding and founders of Islam, The Satanic Verses has repeatedly been described as an Islamic or deeply Islamic novel,33 a representative of Islamic secularism,34 an agent of Islamic reform or modernization,35 and an example of historically tolerant Islamic traditions.36
In sum, The Satanic Verses was a novel of eclectic concerns. It has often been characterized as primarily about migration, with Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina—a symbolic moment that marked the beginning of the Islamic calendar, justifying his inclusion in the novel’s migrant fold. Yet to the extent that The Satanic Verses was also about religious beliefs, as it undeniably was, a rich variety of academic scholars have acknowledged it to be about both Islam and white racism, or about two separate dogmatisms, worldly and otherworldly.
With regards to the most appropriate methodology for interpreting The Satanic Verses, scholars have pointed at the problems associated with an analytical breakdown: either such a comprehensive analytical argument was utterly implausible or, inevitably, it came at the cost of gross omissions, given the multilayered and ambivalent nature of the work, its multivocal and multifocal narration, and its nonlinear development.37 Brad Leithauser (1989, 127) wrote, The Satanic Verses “is so dense a layering of dreams and hallucinations that any attempt to extract an unalloyed line of argument is false to its intention.” And Clark (2000, 131) related the novel’s epistemic ambivalence to the confusion over its narrator’s identity: “This indeterminacy might also apply to the satanic narrator’s mode of operation, for he moves in and out of the text in order to insinuate that there is no such thing as a single, transcendental Meaning and Unity, no Ideal toward which all beings can aspire.”38 By the same token, when it came to The Satanic Verses’ occupation with religious dogma and supernaturalism, whether in the context of its critical treatment of religious phenomena or magical realist take on race and migration in England, nearly each and every scene was open to contradictory interpretations. Hence both the chaotic organizational structure of The Satanic Verses and its almost total ambivalence on the nature of supernatural phenomena ruled out an analytical interpretation of its treatment of religion or dogmatism in this study and, instead, called for a chapter-by-chapter approach, which was bound to be comprehensive but uneconomical. This is not meant to suggest, no extensive argument could be derived of the novel, but one had to be aware of limitations that imposed moderation. As Bardolph (1994, 215–17) forewarned, The Satanic Verses’ “coherence is provided by analogy,” and it therefore demanded active reader participation and “an alert eye to the presence of oblique meanings.”
The present monograph has been unique in its attempt to interpret The Satanic Verses through detailed attention to the entirety of its text. Indeed each of its nine parts has exactly corresponded to the parts of the novel, which in total critically examined nineteen chapters, in their original order. And it has separately concluded with a discussion of the comparative linkages between different parts and characters of the novel that, in any case, have been less systematically brought up throughout the analysis until then.
Due to expressions of Salman Rushdie’s impressively rich cultural background in The Satanic Verses, its challenging thematic diversity, intentionally cultivated epistemic ambiguities, and tricky structure, the nine parts of the present monograph that constitute its body necessarily aspired to bring forward textual intricacies and other relevant details for a better understanding of the novel that could not be suitably included elsewhere.
And all said, textual analysis in the present monograph began with a look at The Satanic Verses’ epigraph, a short passage taken from Daniel Defoe’s (1819 [1726]) The Political History of the Devil, which signaled the novel’s ambition to unite notions of rebirth, immigration, and blasphemy, by reminding that Satan was a wanderer.
In due order, part I of The Satanic Verses was titled The Angel Gibreel, and it was devoted to the novel’s two protagonists, Gibreel and Saladin. They were two wealthy Bombayites with distinctly contrasting characters and Islamic roots. Their concurrent passage to London was not strictly treated as a secular story line with racial and cultural undertones. Instead, as the very nature of migration corresponded to cultural and psychological rebirth, they were related to the novel’s other main characters, both worldly and spiritual, who were in pursuit of rebirth, renewal, or a new beginning. To further facilitate parity among such a diverse variety of restless heroes and heroines, the novel’s concern with migration was heavily imbued with a religious imaginary, whereas the novel’s concern with religion, especially including Islam, was largely skeptical. Within this framework, Gibreel’s role was unique and accounted for part I’s title. Notwithstanding Saladin’s supernatural experiences, alternatively miraculous and horrible, it was Gibreel who served as a bridge between the novel’s worldly and religious concerns. In addition to his role as an inspirational midwife to the novel’s secular aspirants, the religious story line of the novel, essentially including the separate but comparable adventures of Mahound, Ayesha the butterfly prophetess, and the Imam, was exclusively presented through Gibreel’s dreams, in which he was the archangel. And The Satanic Verses’ attempt to establish parity between migration and religion with reference to rebirth was accomplished so comprehensively that the novel’s veiled enquiry into the nature of miracles was felt from the very start. However, the novel’s opening chapter most conspicuously mused about what determined the success or failure of rebirth. Within the context of emergent immigrant identities, it suggested, Gibreel’s outlook emphasized cultural eclecticism and this accorded with his Indian heritage, whereas Saladin was in slavish cultural self-denial and yearned for pure Englishness, and a marker of things to come and the novel’s ultimate resolution, it hinted at attitudinal transformation. At the same time, chapter I.1 chronicled a miracle that saved the lives of Gibreel and Saladin. The plane carrying Gibreel and Saladin to London exploded in the skies, but the migrant duo’s landing on the shores of England, however miraculously safe, was eventually bound to resemble Satan’s fall. Indeed this mixed blessing took place after Saladin commanded Gibreel to fly, and looking back there was sufficient reason to suspect of Saladin’s demonic possession. Finally, a miracle within miracle here, or Gibreel’s encounter with the specter of Rekha Merchant during their fall and Saladin’s unawareness of the incident, was a forerunner of the novel’s preoccupation with the subjective nature of belief. Chapter I.2 narrated religious influences on Gibreel’s past life and other learning and experiences that might account for his religious dreams and spectral encounters. Chapter I.3 dwelt on Saladin, with particular reference to his tortured relationship with his father, which was at the root of his unequivocal rejection of Indian roots and desire for assimilation in England, the ungodliness and bravery of attempting to recreate oneself, and his looming identity crisis. Despite outward success, what best illustrated the shortcomings of Saladin’s singular desire for assimilation was his declining and sterile marriage to Pamela, who was white, blond, and aristocratic. Chapter I.4 described events leading to the explosion of the plane carrying Gibreel and Saladin over the skies of England by Sikh terrorists, and it loosely resembled the explosion of Air India Flight 182 off the coast of Ireland by Sikh terrorists in 1985. The Sikh terrorists were led by Tavleen, and her religious leadership tacitly contrasted with that of Mahound later in the novel. Tavleen was an unyielding fanatic who, by committing a suicide bombing, had brought her project to a premature end. In contrast, The Satanic Verses made clear that Mahound’s success in founding a new religion was partially due to flexibility and political acumen. In addition to a critique of Sikh fanaticism, Saladin’s encounter in this chapter with ridiculous American evangelist Eugene Dumsday, who campaigned in India against Darwin and evolutionism, indicated that The Satanic Verses was broadly critical of dogmatic extremism without privileging any particular religious tradition.
Part II was titled Mahound, which was a medieval epithet for Islam’s founder, and it was the story of the founding of the religion of Submission in the city of Jahilia. That this story was apparently a movie script based on the archangelic dreams of Gibreel, a deranged Bollywood icon, accounted for its similarities and differences with the original history of Islam. And despite its skeptical aspect, part II was a grave and impressive account of the social circumstances, corruption, and pilgrimage economy that could not be detached from the drama surrounding the birth of a new religion. Most importantly, through its interpretation of the historic satanic verses incident, part II called into question the veracity of the original sources of Submission and pointed toward theological misogyny, which was at the core of The Satanic Verses’ take on Islam and proposal for its reformation. Submission theology was misogynistic because, above all, it replaced goddesses, most notably including Al-lat, with a male god, Al-lah. Indeed Rushdie’s reinterpretation of the historical satanic verses incident served to illustrate that transformation. Due to political pressure, Mahound publicly accepted compromise between god and goddesses, soon after regretted his tactical misstep, revoked the holy verses that he founded his decision upon, blamed Satan for misleading him, and recited revised verses. However, both of the conflicting revelations were delivered through Mahound’s unique ability to speak with angel Gibreel, and Gibreel’s role in delivering revelation called into mind his role in earlier facilitating a lifesaving miracle with Saladin, who was plausibly possessed by the devil.
Part III’s title Elloween Deeowen corresponded to London. Its five chapters were devoted to migration and the demonization of ethnic newcomers, characters in quest for secular rebirth, and the nature of supernatural phenomena. Chapter III.1 presented Gibreel and Saladin’s first moments in England after their fall. Gibreel who looked down on England and its culture acquired angelic traits, including a halo, and found a welcoming host, whereas Saladin who admired English culture and single-mindedly yearned for assimilation acquired satanic traits, including a horn, and was detained by constables, who refused to believe he was a British citizen. Chapter III.2 dwelt on Gibreel’s relations with his spiritually gifted host Rosa Diamond, who utilized him to produce spectral visions of her past, thereby ascertaining Gibreel’s role as an inspirational midwife. These spectral visions demonstrated that Rosa Diamond had sought a new beginning in Argentina but had to return back in consequence of an extramarital affair that went wrong. Evidently, this episode symbolized British yearning for the lost empire, and Rosa Diamond’s honest encounter with her past, albeit painfully slow, contrasted with contemporary Islamic attitudes toward the historic satanic verses incident, which essentially has been defined by refusal. Chapter III.3 expanded on the humiliation of ethnic migrants through the use of supernatural imaginary. Saladin, undeniably transformed into a half-man half-goat, was tortured by constables. Chapter III.4 chronicled another stage in Saladin’s fall. It expanded on Saladin’s recent realization that his English wife was having an affair with another subcontinental migrant, Jumpy Joshi. Jumpy’s amateur poetry explicity grappled with Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech. This was the first of several allusions to Powell’s xenophobic vision in the novel that would eventually prove to be prophetic. Chapter III.5 narrated Gibreel’s voyage to London in search of mental and romantic relief. There, he finally met his lover, Alleluia, another seer. Yet due to tension caused by his recent supernatural experiences, Gibreel’s mental state further deteriorated, and it became increasingly unclear whether he was an angel or delusional.
Part IV, titled Ayesha, presented Rushdie’s contrasting evaluation of contemporary perspectives for the future Islam. Its title, a feminine name, was a nod to Islamic misogyny and proposals to overcome it. Arguably, part IV was the most enigmatic chapter of The Satanic Verses. It was composed of two seemingly disparate stories except that they both included an Ayesha character. The first of these was the story of the Imam, who vaguely corresponded to Ayatollah Khomeini of the Iranian revolution—and perhaps this explained Khomeini’s notorious death threat against Rushdie. The Imam was a religious purist, a dogmatic religious leader with an ahistoric perspective on his faith, who was hate-laden and lusted for revenge. His archenemy was Ayesha. He succeeded in returning to Desh and ending her rule. But the Imam’s violent revolution and triumph contrasted with the peaceful return of Mahound to Jahilia later in the novel. The second story in part IV was that of a fictional Islamic prophetess, also called Ayesha. In contrast to the hate-laden Imam, she was an erotic figure who evoked love and inspired hope. She peacefully convinced fellow villagers in India for foot-pilgrimage to Mecca, the sacred heartland of Islam in Arabia, and—practically—to their doom. Of note, Ayesha’s attempted pilgrimage was loosely based on the 1983 Hawkes Bay case in Pakistan. Although Ayesha’s prophetic career eventually corresponded to a suitable path for Islamic reformation, part V was more so a device for showcasing the third-world condition, including rural poor in the fringes of modernity and internal divisions of the modernizing elite. The rural poor basically all joined the ranks of Ayesha’s mobile congregation, and a prominent wealthy urbanized couple effectively broke up because of her: Mishal became her foremost disciple and the Mirza her foremost opponent. Part V included the novel’s only reference to Nietzshe, the principal philosophical critic of modern rationalism, and this reference was a key to grasping The Satanic Verses’ epistemological standpoint and final word on supernaturalism. Or succinctly stated, despite his opposition to Ayesha, the Mirza was a Nietzsche reader, and his intellectual background might have subtly facilitated his gradual opening to the possibility of Ayesha’s supernaturalism by the end of the story. Finally of significance in part IV were Gibreel’s services to the contrasting religious leadership of the Imam and Ayesha, which further attested to his angelic malleability.
Part V, titled A City Visible but Unseen, concerned the lives of ethnic immigrants in London. In it, chapter V.1 focused on prevalent racism and racist violence in England, and it included repeated references to Enoch Powell. After some deliberation with his ethnic friends, it dawned on Saladin that racist ideology rather than magic accounted for his satyrical transformation. However, in all fairness, racism was not simply an affect of the host nation or its dominant white population. Chapter V.1 equally displayed racial prejudices and exploitative relations among ethnic immigrants and dark-skinned people. Notably, faced with rejection by his English wife and professional abandonment, Saladin could not help but accept that his lifelong attempt at anglicization hit a dead end. And the kindness of the Bengali family that took care of him in that moment of immense personal despair innerly prepared Saladin to question his categorical rejection of ethnocultural ties and lack of solidarity with vulnerable migrants and minorities. Chapter V.2 switched to the relatively mild tribulations of white immigrants, specifically with reference to Gibreel’s lover Alleluia’s Eastern European Jewish heritage. In addition, it dwelt on Gibreel’s struggle with his mental state, ranging from an attempt to fight back against possible paranoid schizophrenia to an embrace of his archangelhood, divine mission, and growing religious zeal, which contrasted with his original Indian cultural eclecticism. Gibreel’s newly assumed task against Satan somehow paralleled Saladin’s seething envy for his apparent romantic success with Alleluia in the previous chapter, and these developments paved the way toward an ultimate confrontation between angel and devil.
Part VI, titled Return to Jahilia, chronicled Mahound’s triumphant comeback home after long exile. It included passages that gave most offense to Muslims and attracted violent protests worldwide. Above all, it dealt with Mahound’s misogyny and the notion of feminist revenge, questions about the authenticity of Submission or its revelation, and the irreconcilable tension between theocracy and intellectual freedom. That said, Mahound’s peaceful return home as the glorious founder of Submission, merciful and sparing reconciliation with former enemies, and relative tolerance—at least initially—contrasted favorably with other leading religious visionaries of The Satanic Verses, including the unbending and self-destructive Tavleen, violently hateful and murderous Imam, and even prophetess Ayesha, whose dogmatic zeal would be directly responsible for the senseless murder of an innocent infant. Arguably, critique of misogyny and prevalent occupation with the notion of feminist revenge in part V was the novel’s final groundwork for proposals for feminist Islamic reform as symbolized by the prophetess Ayesha story line. Since the demise of Submission’s Mahound was artfully related to two women, Hind and Al-lat, by implication, it could be claimed, Islam’s reconciliation with femininity, or feminist reform, was imperative for its fortunes. The most conspicuous exception to the aura of mercy upon Mahound’s return was the case of writers, thus pointing to the irreconciliable tension between theocratic establishment and freedom of conscience and expression. One writer, Salman the scribe, who had earlier tested Mahound’s theological hypocrisy and fled to Jahilia, saved his neck undignifiedly, through betraying the other, Baal the satirist. In hiding, Baal and his female company gradually came to embody a philosophical mirror image of Mahound and his family, and thereby supported a pocket of resistance for the people. In time, as Mahound’s theocracy tightened its grip on society, rather than abandon them, Baal choose to die for his muses.
Part VII, titled The Angel Azraeel, depicted the embodiment of Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech through a race riot and fire in the imaginary London neighborhood of Brickhall. Rushdie left little doubt that his narrative was inspired by the 1981 riots in Brixton, South London. But the title of part VII referred to angel Gibreel’s magical realist involvement in fueling the inferno. In it, chapter VII.1 was devoted to Saladin’s soul-searching, including his love for London, English culture, English wife, unfulfilled wish for fatherhood, and final attempt to regain enthusiasm for total assimilation. However, his attendance at a community event against racism, which among other things made him recall Enoch Powell’s rhetoric, inadvertently caused him to accept his demonic immigrant identity and, arguably, by implication a more radical strategy for integration. On the supernatural level, Saladin’s embrace of devilhood precipated a heinous encounter with the angel, Gibreel. Chapter VII.2 chronicled the way in which Saladin gained the trust of Gibreel and Alleluia and utterly ruined their relationship. Saladin’s playful telephonic utterances for the purpose were explicitly described as satanic verses and, thereby, reinforced the parity between the novel’s worldly and religious story lines. And the contrasting linkages between Saladin’s trademark attempt to disown his origins and remake himself and his devilry, on the one hand, and Gibreel’s recent obsession with cultural purity or wish to remain constant and his angelhood, on the other, further served to unite the novel’s secular and metaphysical dimensions. Chapter VII.3 described riot and fire in Brickhall, due to entrenched prejudice, police racism, and brutality against minorities. Yet in accord with Rushdie’s magical realism, a Gibreel with angelic-religious motives and in delirium because of his break up with Alleluia apparently started the deadly fire by supernatural means. As events unfolded, Saladin, in the role of the devil, risked his life to save the Bengali family that had previously sheltered him, and Gibreel saved his life. Hence in a roundabout way, these highly unconventional actions, or devil sacrificing his life to save humans from fire and exterminating angel saving devil, expressed The Satanic Verses’ case against strict epistemological dichotomies and preference for cultural hybridity.
Part VIII, titled The Parting of the Arabian Sea, was The Satanic Verses’ last section specifically devoted to Islam. Its title referred to Ayesha’s promise of a miracle on their foot-pilgrimage, but it served to put the novel’s all other religious chapters into comparative perspective. Accordingly, it was by and large The Satanic Verses’ final word on Islam. Despite her noticeable flaws that ultimately wasted a village people collectively, increased dogmatic hardness, and some vicious cruelty, Ayesha was still the best available contemporary alternative for her faith. This was because of the openness she promoted on three levels: openness to feminine leadership in a distinctly misogynistic religious tradition, openness to diversity and inclusion, or the erotics of her prophecy that accounted for a diverse fold in a society otherwise defined by intercommunal tensions, and openness to supernaturalism, as exemplified by Ayesha’ ability to eventually convince her skeptical opponent, the Mirza. Part VIII devoted considerable attention to the lure of material enjoyments as a counterweight to spiritualism, or its excesses, and the nature of miracles. Like elsewhere in the novel, it proposed intersubjectivity as a measure of veracity, and it warned against the tendency to confuse random natural phenomena, however timely, with supernatural miracles.
Part IX’s title, A Wonderful Lamp, referred to Saladin’s childhood belief in magic, possibly relegating supernaturalism to the nonage of humanity. Indeed as The Satanic Verses’ concluding chapter, part IX carried messages about both philosophy and religion, and immigration and identity. Saladin came back to Bombay to accompany his ailing father, Changez, and they made peace. And his blooming romance with a devotee cultural eclecticism in India, Zeeny Vakil, transformed his visit to a permanent return. A telling gesture, he reassumed his original name, Salahuddin. His sterility was arguably not an overwhelming concern for Salahuddin in Bombay, because he was deep-rooted there, whereas the affirmation that came with fatherhood was essential to psychologically secure his hold on to England or Englishness. As distinct from Salahuddin’s newfound eclecticism, Gibreel had totally succumbed to his archangelic phantasmagoria, religious dogmatism, and concurrent msygony. Evidently a reflection of the novel’s ultimate cultural political prefence, Gibreel, now madly dogmatic, committed suicide in front of Salahuddin, who—having reconverted to Indian eclecticism—survived. In parallel, part IX emphasized Salahuddin’s complete admiration for Changez, due to his philosophical attitude in the face of death, without seeking refuge in imaginative hope or religious illusions. The supreme dignity accorded to Changez suggested that the philosophical worldview—perhaps only for the brave few—was superior to its alternatives, even when reformed according to Rushdie’s recommendations. Seen in this light, the postcolonial and cosmic politics of The Satanic Verses were in full accord, as they both rejected dogmatism and exclusionary paradigms.
NOTES
1. For The Satanic Verses as religious blasphemy and secular blasphemy, the latter corresponding to cultural heresy, see Suleri (1992, 189–94), Bhabha (1994, 225–26), and Sanga (2001, 7). In parallel, Kimmich (2008, 167) wrote, The Satanic Verses subverted dominant discourses on race and religion, and it was a blasphemous novel (ibid., 162). Said (1994, 260) wrote, The Satanic Verses “overturns not just religious orthodoxies, but national and cultural ones as well.” As such, what Rushdie did was to “speak out against power” (ibid., 261). Phillips (1989, 344) claimed, “There is no doubt that it is an attack on Islam. It is also not very friendly toward the social norms of the Thatcher government in Great Britain.” In contrast, Mazrui (1990, 133, 136–38) claimed, The Satanic Verses was racist hate literature against Muslims, comparable to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
2. Accordingly, Brennan (1989, 146–47) characterized The Satanic Verses as a novel on both England and Muhammad. Ruthven’s (1990, 20) perspective bridged The Satanic Verses’ thematic divide by claiming that it presented religion as cultural baggage for immigrants.
3. See Fisher and Abedi (1990, 108) and Werber (1996, 55), who considered The Satanic Verses’ publication “a historic ‘event.’”
4. See Morton (2008, 80) and Easterman (1992, 119–20).
5. See Morton (2008, 80). In contrast, Hitchens (2003) argued that lack of a religious hierarchy made the possibility of Islamic reformation unlikely.
6. See Al-Azm (1994, 257) and Almond (2003, 1140). Yet for Trousdale (2013, 154), Rushdie’s engagement with serious religious doubt rendered him more like St. Augustine than Voltaire. Al-Azm (1994, 261) likened Rushdie to Voltaire, Joyce, and Rabelias. Like Rabelias, his “healthy cyncism” did not degenerate “into fashionable pessimism and/or nihilism.” Werber (1996, 57) likened Rushdie’s cause to “the same battles against dogma fought by writers and philosophers of the Enlightenment.” In parallel, Sanga (2001, 125) argued, The Satanic Verses’ juxtaposed Western Enlightenment against Eastern dogmatism.
7. For comparisons between The Satanic Verses and Ulysses, see Harris (1998), Kane (2006, 434), Majumdar (2010), Booker (1991, 196), and Sanga (2001, 124). For comparisons to Finnegan’s Wake mainly as a critique of patriarchy through religious myth, see Booker (1991, 199) and Harris (1998). For broader comparison to Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake, see Majumdar (2010, 99–118).
8. Fischer and Abedi (1990, 110) described Rushdie as the first postmodern comic novelist from the Muslim world. For Almond (2003, 1142), The Satanic Verses was the first postmodern Islamic novel. For a comparable view, see Grant (1999, 23). However, apart from Booker (1994), Rushdie’s philosophical affinity to Nietzsche in The Satanic Verses was by and large ignored. For a passing reference to Nietzsche and The Satanic Verses, see Fischer and Abedi (1990, 147).
9. See Nyla Ali Khan (2000, 88, 91, 94) and Sanga (2001, 63).
10. Concerning Rushdie’s postmodern artistic technique and postcolonial liberation, Mishra (2009, 407) observed “a recognition of a colonial inheritance, as well as a transcendence over it.” For a wider commentary on artistic technique and postcolonial liberation, see Teverson (2007, 44), Mann (1995, 282), Mishra (2009, 387, 407), and Brennan (1989, 66). In addition, Afzal-Khan (1998, 138–39) noted, Rushdie’s characteristic combination of different novel genres, such as comic, mythic, and surreal, was another postmodern liberation strategy. Engblom too, took note of different narrative styles and liberation in The Satanic Verses: “[C]arnivalization and dialogicality . . . ” (1994, 295), “to break of the imperial containments of official, metropolitan, monologic versions of the Western novel” (1994, 303). For another account of contrasting narrative modes in The Satanic Verses, see Majumdar (2010, 109).
11. For Rushdie and Hobson-Jobson, see Mishra (2009, 385–90).
12. For the novel’s alleged failure, see Kuortti (2007, 128). For a broad statement on Rushdie’s art, containing too much, and its failure therefore, see Afzal-Khan (1998, 138).
13. According to Gray (1989, 82), the international attention and controversy evinced “that some people still care about serious fiction after all.” For Al-Azm (1994, 255) too, The Satanic Verses controversy proved that literature still mattered.
14. For a comparable view, see Clark (2000, 4), Brad Leithauser quoted in Ruthven (1990, 15), Grant (1999, 19), and Morton (2008, 67).
15. For a comparable view, see Kimmich (2008, 176), Morton (2008, 76), and Assad (1990, 240).
16. See Strauss (1959, 221–32).
17. Booker (1994, 252) noted, “Rushdie is an apostle of freedom . . . he has become more and more concerned with the oppression of women in Islamic society. After all, the male-female distinction is among the most important of the dual oppositions that Rushdie consistently attacks, and as long as women are oppressed, men cannot have true freedom either.” For Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, and his critique of patriarchy and support for feminism, also see Booker (1994, 199), Mann (1995, 292), Bhabha (1994, 228), Ruthven (1990, 25), Hussain (2002, 12), and Hassumani (2002, 68). And for a remark on support from women for the author of The Satanic Verses in the Muslim world, see Fischer and Abedi (1990, 115).
18. For the broad principles of a comparable methodological approach, see Bardolph (1994, 215–17) who remarked that the novel lacked a logical linear structure, it was a puzzle with similar bits and no mode d’emploi, and it demanded active reader participation. Suleri (1992, 194–95) argued, the novel was a divisible subcontinental narrative with convolutions of several autonomous stories. And Engblom (1994, 295, 303) remarked, The Satanic Verses responded to the imperial containments of monologic Western novel through carnivalization and dialogicality.
19. Accordingly, Grant (1999, 86) argued, The Satanic Verses was not anti-Islam but anti-closure. For a comparable view, see Afzal-Khan (1993, 168).
20. For a similar reformist-feminist recommendation for Islam in the novel, see Afzal-Khan (1993, 168–69), Sanga (2001, 115), and Harris (1998, 387–88).
21. As such, according to Teverson (2007, 148), Rushdie promoted a third way against extremes. For a comparable assessment, see Kuortti (1997a). Afzal-Khan (1993, 166–73) claimed, Rushdie was against binary oppositions and categories, including those that sustained colonial patterns of domination and impeded freethinking, such as race and religion. Kortenaar (2008, 343) regarded Rushdie’s postcolonial hybridity as a challenge to categories. For Sanga (2001, 7, 94–96), the author celebrated hybridity.
22. According to Kimmich (2008, 171), Islam’s dominant principle, singularity, was in discord with Rushdie’s preference for ambiguity and hybridity. For a comparable view, see Ranasinha (2007, 54). For Hassumani (2002, 88), Rushdie rejected binaries for hybridity, but (2002, 72) Islam was problematic because its singularity contradicted Rushdie’s principle of hybridity. Mann (1995, 301–02) too remarked on the incompatibility of postmodern indeterminism and grand Islamic narrative. Whereas Morton (2008, 67) argued, “The Satanic Verses also seeks to interrogate this reductive dichotomy between the civilisations of the West and the so-called Islamic world by exploring the experience of the postcolonial migrant in the Western metropolis.” In contrast, Mondal (2013, 432–33) claimed, for all his reputation, Rushdie imposed orthodoxies on Islam, and he blamed Rushdie for his secular fundamentalism. Elsewhere Mondal (2013b, 70–71) claimed, The Satanic Verses corresponded to a secularism that rejected an accommodation with religion and it was, therefore, an ethical failure; Rushdie’s characterization of Islam as unhybrid precluded a third way. It imposed “a secularist orthodoxy” (ibid., 67–71). In parallel, Booker (1994, 249) noted, Islam is “a symbol of monologic thought” in Rushdie’s fiction; “Islam is the religion of one God, a monotheism that forms a particularly striking symbol in the context of heteroglossic, polytheistic India.”
23. Kortenaar (2008, 341) observed, there was more magic in Britain than in Jahilia. Khan (2005, 67) noted, the novel is “a mix of contemporary-historical and mythical-religious concepts”; it “melds fiction and history, the magical and the real” (ibid., 44). Whereas Bardolph (1994, 216) argued, Rushdie utilized an unsuitable secular European genre to represent God and mysticism.
24. Based on Rushdie’s treatment of British racialism, François (1994, 315, inspired by André Comte-Sponville) concluded, “All ideologies are religious.”
25. Goontellike (1998, 83) characterized Powell as the spokesman of British racism in the 1960s. Asad (1990, 240) claimed, Powell’s preferred policies were now British policy. Cundy (1996, 65) noted, book burning due to The Satanic Verses controversy fulfilled Enoch Powell’s conflictual vision. For Parashkevova (2012, 84), Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher were “racist politicians” in the novel.
26. Wheatcroft (1994, 26–27) maintained that a critic of racism, Rushdie is a natural “hate figure for British conservatives. . . . Everything about Rushdie’s history and personality make him obnoxious to many Englishmen.” In parallel, Khan (2005, 67) claimed, “Rushdie consciously explores a radical sense of otherness, which is heightened for immigrants as a consequence of displacement.” For Rushdie’s broad advocacy for immigrant issues in the UK and The Satanic Verses, see Teverson (2007, 90), Jussawalla (1996, 60), Ruthven (1990, 12–13), Kimmich (2008, 147), Mann (1995, 288), Bardolph (1994, 210), Clark (2000, 147), Sanga (2001, 15), and Fischer and Abedi (1990, 112). For Brennan (1989, 151), The Satanic Verses facilitated religious questioning for Islamic immigrants in England, not necessarily in a negative way. For The Satanic Verses as a novel against immigrants, see Asad (1990, 259) and Mondal (2013b, 63), who wrote that the novel represented Muslims as “Other” and it was reminiscent of Orientalist discourse. And Mazrui (1990, 117) blamed Rushdie for “treason to the faith.” Whereas Grant (1999, 92) saw no grounds for real offense for Muslims, and Engblom (1994, 299) remarked, Thatcher’s portrayal in the novel was “extremely harsh and perhaps tasteless.”
27. See Kimmich (2008, 141), Asad (1990, 247), Weber (1991, 372), Kuortti (2007, 125), and Bakshian (1989, 44).
28. See Roger Ballard in Werbner (1996, 70–71), Gray (1989, 82), Fischer and Abedi (1990, 117), and Asad (1990, 247).
29. See Roger Ballard in Werbner (1996, 70), Bakshian (1989, 44), and Trousdale (2013, 152).
30. Works mainly focused on The Satanic Verses and the right to free expression include, Hitchens (2003), Ruthven (1990), Pipes (1998), Gardner (1990), Weber (1991), Trousdale (2013), Wheatcroft (1994), Clarke (2013), DeCandido (1989), For (1994), Said (1989), and Ranasinha (2007). For a contrary perspective, which considered the novel hate literature and recommended a ban, see Mazrui (1990, 116–39).
31. For a comparable assessment of scholarship, see Clark (2000, 129), Teverson (2007, 5), Kuortti (1997b, 89), Sanga (2001, 107), Cundy (1996, 65), Trousdale (2013, 151), Suleri (1994, 221), and Werbner (1996, 67).
32. See Asad (1990, 248) and Parashkevova (2012, 71).
33. See Suleri (1992, 222), Jussawalla (1996, 53–54), Afzhal-Khan (1993, 168), Almond (2003, 1130), and Werbner (1996, 65). For Hussain (2002, 12), the novel was pro-Islam but anti-Muslim. In contrast, Kortenaar (2008, 340) claimed, Rushdie’s Muhammad fought corruption but ushered in intolerance and misogyny. And for Hassumani (2002, 68), Islam and monotheism was problematized in the novel through dreams.
34. See Suleri (1992, 190).
35. See Almond (2003, 1142), Teverson (2007, 158), Jussawalla (1996, 56–7, 63), Fischer and Abedi (1990, 109), and Morton (2008, 61–62). For Al-Azm (1994, 279–80), Rushdie re-energized Islamic thought through the novel. For Mufti (1992, 278), the novel was engaged “in the cultural politics of contemporary ‘Islam.’” Webner (1996, 55) argued, the novel presents “a serious modernist vision of Islam as a universal, liberal, and tolerant tradition”; it is “a serious attempt to explore the possibility of a liberal more ‘open’ Islam” (ibid., 69); “[T]he central project of the book: to reclaim Islam as an ethical religion for secular Muslims, a new breed. Rushdie does so by exploring the central ethical values of Islam as he understands them but also by rejecting Islam’s current stress on extreme purity and ritualized praxis at the expense of ethics” (ibid., 65, italics in original).
36. For Jussawalla (1996, 54), the historically tolerant Islamic tradition that Rushdie built upon was Indian Islam. In contrast, according to Ruthven (1990, 9), when compared to Arab Islam, Indian Islam was unsure of itself and, therefore, more aggressive. Fischer and Abedi (1990, 150) claimed, the novel reflected Persian sensibilities not Arab Islam.
37. For a comparable view, see Clark (2000, 4, 130), Kimmich (2008, 177), Asad (1990, 240), Grant (1999, 71), Ruthven (1990, 15), Kuortti (1997b, 129–30), Kuortti (2007, 125–26), Mann (1995, 281), Sanga (2001, 68), Mann (1995, 281), Majumdar (2009, 48, 100, 118), Morton (2008, 67), Booker (1994, 242–43, 251), and Engblom (1994, 298).
38. An exceptional genre of analytical argumentation on the novel concerned the voice of its narrator, or its alleged satanic narration. Clark (2000, 134) forcefully argued, the novel’s narration alternated between the voice of its Godlike author and Satan. However, his literature review (136–41) was a case in point that even for a narrowly confined debate on narration, a confounding array of viewpoints were inevitable: According to Knönegel (1991), it was difficult to identify the novel’s narrator, although a satanic point of view constituted its ideological core; on the contrary, Harrison (1992) claimed, Rushdie must have toyed with the idea of satanic narration, eventually abandoning it, with vestiges left behind; Brennan (1989) regarded the whole novel as a rival to the Quran with Rushdie as its prophet and Satan as its supernatural voice, even though this Satan may have actually corresponded to tricky opportunists who used and abused the name of God to justify their own and unjustifiable ends; Booker (1994) pointed out, although Satan was the novel’s narrator, its narrator might actually be God or archangel Gabriel, as they were intertwined and virtually indistinguishable; Corcoran (1990) noted, satanic narration, albeit plausible, was basically in chapter two; Nair (1989) and Aravumiddin (1989) separately suggested, the whole novel served to convey the idea that evil poisoned life, incurably and inescapably, like a devilish trap. For other references to the novel’s satanic narration, see Kimmich (2008, 145) and Booker (1994, 247) who argued, confusion about the authority of the narrator and, therefore, about the authority of the text was effectively an attack against the authority of text-based religions.
