The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses

Introduction

The publication of this novel led to perhaps the most extreme attempt at censorship in the history of literature when the leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a "fatwa"—essentially a death warrant—against the author and offered rewards to any Muslim who carried out the sentence; Salman Rushdie spent several years in hiding as a result (Rushdie, 2011). The novel's title refers to the tradition that the Koran (Qu'ran) had included some verses that had to be emended because Satan had disguised himself as the Archangel Gabriel in order to dictate (Rushdie & Smale, 2003). A work of fiction that explored this territory was bound to be controversial, since some of the faithful might regard it as impugning the status of the Koran as the verbatim word of God. Additionally, sections of the novel can be read as a roman À clef featuring a character based on Ayatollah Khomeini (Ray & Kundu, 2003). The ultimate result for the novel has been to cast it permanently in the shade of the international stir it created.

Rushdie's complex and challenging novel is a surreal and riotously inventive mixture of realism and fantasy. In a cycle of three interconnected tales set in present-day London and Bombay, an Indian village, and seventh-century Arabia, it explores themes of migration and dislocation, the nature of good and evil, doubt and loss of religious faith (Rajeshwar, 2003).

The novel has a double structure, with plot elements in the present-day world and in the remote past (during the seventh-century founding of Islam), with settings in England and in India, with a pair of characters who occur in both settings and in both times, and with a thematic emphasis on the struggle between good and evil (Pipes, 2003). The double structure extends to the chapter numbering: The odd-numbered chapters are set in the present and follow the lives of Gibreel Farishta, an Indian actor, and Saladin Chamcha, an Indian-born English voice actor, while the even-numbered chapters are set in the past and feature the angel Gibreel/Gabriel and Saladin/Shaitan, the two alter egos of the contemporary characters (Hassumani, 2011).

Summary of the Satanic Verses

The modern story begins quite dramatically: Gibreel and Saladin are traveling to England on the same Air India jet when a terrorist bomb blows it up 29,000 feet above the English Channel (Cundy, 1996). Miraculously, they survive the explosion and the fall (and the fact that they undergo a fall is symbolically significant); by the time they reach land, Gibreel has acquired a halo and Saladin has acquired cloven feet. But Rushdie subverts the stereotypical association of "angel" with good fortune and "devil" with pure evil (Rushdie & Smale, 2003). Saladin's fortunes decline at first but then ultimately improve, and he occasionally acts in ways that produce good results; inversely, Gibreel's fortunes at first soar but then ultimately decline, and his judgment sometimes fails him, leading to bad events. Interspersed with the chronicle of their lives after the fall is the recurring motif of racial ...