The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

It is an unfortunate fate for a book to be best known for being banned, for an author to be threatened with death and forced for years into hiding and round-the-clock government protection, for actual violence and death to follow: the Japanese translator murdered in his university office; the Italian translator stabbed in Milan (survived); the Norwegian publisher shot and critically wounded (survived); 37 dead in a hotel fire in Turkey, while the arsonist’s target, the Turkish translator, escaped. Such sorrow.

Violence and death flow not from the words of the book but the words of the fatwa spoken by Ayatollah Khomeini in the year after publication and still in effect and in effect permanently because a fatwa can only be lifted by the person who proclaimed it and Khomeini died in 1989, four months after issuing his fatal decree.

Rushdie’s book begins with a fictional act of terrorist violence. A plane from Bombay to London, after a three-and-a-half month stop in an Arabian desert due to a hijacking is exploded in a dispute among the hijackers as it crosses (at last) the English channel. Two men tumble from the explosion and miraculously survive, washing up on a snow-covered English shore. Both are Indians. Both are actors. Gibreel Farishta is a Bollywood-style movie star, specializing in “theologicals” where he plays divinities of the Hindu pantheon in religious stories. The other is Saladin Chamcha, a voice-over actor.

Chamcha is returning to London after a brief and unsuccessful homecoming trip to Bombay where he attempted to reconcile with his father after having come to London for education and stayed for life. Gibreel is leaving Bombay in the hopes of restarting with a lover whom he knew briefly in Bombay after recovering from an illness that ended, temporarily, his movie career. The lover, a mountain-climber, recently down from Everest, an English woman named Alleluia (Allie) Cone, doesn’t know Gibreel is coming. The two men, having only met on the fated flight, now become entwined. They fall together, clutching each other, and in the later telling of the novel pair off as balancing cosmic opposites. Gibreel, post-flight, post-fall, sports a glowing halo and the idea that he might actually be Gabriel, the angel of God. Chamcha, grows hairy goat legs, cloven hoofs, exuberant horns, and eventually, a tail.

So far so good, right? But the novel is not entirely satisfying. Gibreel’s angelic metamorphosis more and more seems explained as actual psychosis. And Chamcha’s more extreme and exciting transformation, though attested to by others, simply disappears halfway through the book (p. 294) without ever culminating in any form of diabolic action or power. I mean, come on! To introduce the devil and then let him be only pathetic makes for no fun.

Chamcha and Gibreel part ways shortly after they land on England’s shore and as they assume opposite forms the reader naturally expects they will attract again by book’s end in dramatic, matter/anti-matter fashion. But mostly, no. Their stories do cross. Chamcha, post-devil, torments Gibreel by enflaming his jealousy over Allie’s imagined infidelities. There’s a fire where Gibreel saves Chamcha’s life. The final scene has the two of them alone together in a room in Bombay. But this is no ultimate show-down between Good v. Evil merely the end of two human stories.

Those London and Bombay, Gibreel and Chamcha, stories, are fairly standard stuff. Man. Woman. Sex. Jealousy. Work. Gibreel connects with Allie. He explores re-starting his movie career. Chamcha’s wife has taken a lover and is pregnant by him. Chamcha has his own lover waiting back in Bombay. In London he hides out in Satan form upstairs at an Indian restaurant. The restaurant is owned by an old-country husband and wife with two new-generation teen-age daughters who wear sexy clothes and hang out at a dance club.

In the meantime, Rushdie tells other stories using the artifice of Gibreel’s dreams. Gibreel not only takes the physical form of the angel, he also dreams he is the angel. He is the angel giving Mahommed the verses that become the Qu’ran, and later, the story of Mahommed returning to Mecca from Medina after establishing Islam. These chapters reminded me of the Pontius Pilate chapters that interrupt the main Moscow narrative of The Master and Margarita. As in that novel these religio-historical stories are imagined and told as plausible human stories with human characters following human motivations, not the versions the orthodox tell.

In another dream Rushdie/Gabriel tells the story of an Imam isolated in London, but paralleling the true story of Ruhollah Khomeini in exile before the Shah leaves Iran and Khomeini returns as the Ayatollah. And one more story: Gibreel dreams a story of a mystic girl, clothed in butterflies, leading an entire Indian village on a march to the coast of India where they expect to miraculously cross through the Arabian Sea, Moses-style, to complete a Haj to Mecca. All the dream-stories share character names and themes with each other and with the main stories in London and Bombay. The meaning and pleasure of the novel depends on the accretion of all the story layers stacked together. I find these secondary stories, fanciful and fable-ous, to be the most enjoyable of the book. It is also these fables of Mahommed, I’m guessing, that got Rushdie into trouble with the Ayatollah.

Is there blasphemy in The Satanic Verses? Probably. But blasphemy is in the eye of the believer. For me, a non-believer, there is only the interesting question posed by any revelation from any prophet. How do we, hearing what the prophet says, trust that the source is divine? And more fundamentally, how does the prophet trust the origin of the voice he’s sure he hears? In one story, Rushdie tells us that one of Mahommed’s scribes, named Salman (notice) notices that the verses given Mahommed by Gabriel often seem to relate very closely to a specific problem that Mahommed has just now been experiencing in his domestic or political life and that the verses seem always to give divine instruction in exactly the manner that best serves Mahommed’s purposes. Salman decides to test the divinity of the recitation by here and there changing a word between what Mahommed dictates and what Salman writes, and then, when Salman reads back what he has written, Mahommed fails to catch the alteration. And in another story, the true story of the actual “Satanic Verses” of Islam, Mahommed first recites that Gabriel has allowed that three goddesses revered of Arabia: Al-lat, Uzza, and Manat, are indeed divinities of a sort, which solves a temporary conflict between Mohammed’s emerging religion and the established religious powers of Mecca. But then later, soon, Mohammed claims that he had been deceived by a voice from Satan. The three goddesses are actually false. The original “satanic” verses are recanted. But how does he distinguish? How do we? Is the revelation from God or the devil, from Gabriel or Mohammed, are the verses from Salman, or from Salman Rushdie?

Rushdie adds one more layer. Throughout the book, now and then, an authorial “I” appears. After the plane explodes: “I know the truth, obviously. I watched the whole thing” (p. 10) After Gibreel’s and Chamcha’s transformation: “What? I should enumerate the changes?” (p. 133). After Chamcha recognizes his satanic transformation and wonders how and why: “And comes to that, by whom? (I held my tongue.)” (p. 256). And so on in a half-dozen or so more places throughout the novel. Is this God? Well, more obviously, it’s the novel’s author who knows and sees all, who is guiding events, Salman Rushdie, the writer but also the author of events, making narrative decisions, manipulating his characters, Gibreel and Chamcha acting the stories, the scripts, the novel, determined by an omnipotent other.

Presciently, The Satanic Verses opens with a bombed plane and debris spread over England’s shore. The plane bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, (21 December 1988) occurred only months after publication. Rushdie includes in his novel a character modeled on Khomeini, the very man who will issue the fatwa against his life. In the novel, Rushdie seems to predict his fate and defend himself simultaneously. He describes a film project to be undertaken by Gibreel Farishta: “The film was to be – what else – a theological, but of a new type. It would be set in an imaginary and fabulous city made of sand, and would recount the story of the encounter between a prophet and an archangel; also the temptation of the prophet, and his choice of the path of purity and not that of base compromise… But would it not be seen as blasphemous, a crime against… Certainly not… Fiction is fiction, facts are facts… a high-taste, quality picture. A moral tale: like – what do you call them? – fables.” (p. 272).

But it would be seen as blasphemous, as a movie or a novel. Because there are no fables, no fabulousness, in fundamentalism. No fiction, and no fact either, only faith. And so to read The Satanic Verses as merely a work of fiction is now, post-fatwa, post-violence and actual death of those associated with this novel, an impoverished reading of the text. As a novel it’s about the immigrant experience: Indians in England. It’s tone is comic. It’s structure is multi-layered. It’s method; magical realist. It’s influences, let’s say, Joyce in its language (words run together, Finnegan’s Wake is name-dropped at p. 528), Calvino in its tale-telling, Marquez in its fantasy, and a lot of Updike or Roth in its man/woman trouble. But what it is, what it has become, more than any of that, is an artifact of evil or, conversely, an artifact of secular courage in the face of evil. It is a novel containing that which, because of the reality of religious evil, must never be spoken, or that which, because of the reality of human evil, must be spoken fearlessly. I admit I read it primarily for what it is now rather than for what it was permitted to be for only a few months after publication before it’s divine/infernal transformation. It’s worth reading in both modes. But what it actually is, or rather was, is only a pretty good, not great, not always even entertaining, somewhat too long, and only occasionally touching-the-profound, novel.