The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

I continue my Salman Rushdie journey, and for those that have not yet travelled that road, I can strongly recommend the effort. Much to the annoyance to Mr Rushdie, much of the commentary on his Satanic Verses has centred on the non-literary aspects, and I must apologise for now adding to that mountain of over-heated polemic. But before I get going, a few words on the story itself. It’s a cracker! And I would bet my last five quid that most of the religious fanatics that so damned the book have not even read the thing.

Maybe they have read a few seemingly controversial passages selectively picked out by their enraged Mullahs, passages taken out of any literary context, but I’m damn sure that the majority of those apoplectic street critics that were calling for Rushdie’s head, have not sat down for a long, enjoyable and considered read. If they had, they would have found a quite brilliant essay on the messy dialectics of good and evil, an essay that at least might have made them pause to consider what their ever so sacred religious texts were really telling them.

Yes, I am quite happy to say that The Satanic Verses is every bit a classic novel as was Rushdie’s earlier Midnights Children. Admittedly there were the odd few moments where I felt the phantasmagorical leaps in time and space may have been a little strained, a little contrived, but to create a great novel, the novelist must take chances. And for the most part Rushdie takes his readers with him, allowing us to buy into his fantastic world of dreams, hallucinations and the unexplained because we all want to travel where Rushdie is leading us to that interface between the knowable and the seemingly inexplicable. I would have thought there was more than enough metaphysical and miraculous comings and goings in the story to satisfy even the most religiously superstitious amongst us, but it seems some people are never satisfied. Where Rushdie does deal explicitly with the origins of Islam, he does so with care and a gentle satirical probing that ought to offend nobody. But these are highly charged times, and to merely mention the sacred texts from a secular viewpoint is to threaten to bring down no end of hell fire and brimstone.
What is screamingly obvious to all secularists is, at the very least, all the world’s great religions are crying out for a thorough going reformation where the old dogmas are jettisoned in favour of a streamlined humanistic creed that would sit comfortably with both believers and non-believers. I suspect all the world’s religions were originally founded in response to oppression and injustice, and all the absurd, repressive religious dogmas and dictates have been added on, over the centuries, by successive power-hungry patriarchs. If today’s religions could somehow recapture that original spirit of universal humanism then at least we could happily and peacefully divide into two great camps; those that believe in a supernatural being and those that don’t. Of course religions are organically bound up with class interests so that to be realistic, there can be no rational reckoning with religious absurdities until the ultimate absurdity of class divisions has its final reckoning.

Enough with the day dreaming, time to return to the text. Gibreel, part time Indian movie star and part time Archangel, miraculously recovers from a debilitating illness, and his first metamorphosis begins.

O God most beneficent most merciful, be with me in this my time of need, my most grievous need. Then it occurred to him that he was being punished, and for a time that made it possible to suffer the pain, but after a time he got angry. Enough, God, his unspoken words demanded, why must I die when I have not killed, are you vengeance or are you love? The anger with God carried him through another day, but then it faded, and in its place there came a terrible emptiness, an isolation, as he realized he was talking to thin air, that there was nobody there at all, and then he felt more foolish than ever in his life, and he began to plead into the emptiness, ya Allah, just be there damn it, just be. But he felt nothing, nothing, nothing, and one day he found that he no longer needed there to be anything to feel. On that day of metamorphosis the illness changed and his recovery began. And to prove to himself the non-existence of God, he now stood in the dining hall of the citys most famous hotel, with pigs falling out of his face. P30

Any devout follower reading this passage, out of context with the whole novel, might feel a little put out, a little unsettled.But this is only one of many dramatic metamorphoses that our leading protagonist is to undergo. To pick one out of many is to render Rushdie’s work unintelligible, but Im afraid, that is precisely what we have come to expect from our humourlessly devout fellow citizens. Pure irrationality. My god is better than yours and to hell with those that dare to contest my incontestable beliefs. And of course, Rushdie is clever. If you read the above passage with a cool head, the religiously inclined could easily argue that it is in fact God, acting in his usual mysterious ways, that has intervened to cure our ailing Gibreel. Rushdie employs this ambiguity masterfully throughout. No need for the devout or the atheistic to be alarmed. Rushdie provides something for everybody.

This theme of ambiguity is successfully maintained throughout. But as a vital quality of the great storyteller that Rushdie is, unlike this clumsy and didactic blogger, the ambiguity flows naturally from his characters. Saladin, the other key protagonist and the means by which Rushdie teases out the dialectic between good and evil, has these few thoughts for the reader to ponder:

Why demons, when man himself is a demon? And why angels, when man is angelic too. P408

And further on Saladin, in conversation with his mate Sisodia, muses:

Communalism, sectarian tension, was omnipresent: as if the gods were going to war. In the eternal struggle between the world’s beauty and its cruelty, cruelty was gaining ground by the day.

And Sisodia replies:

Fact is, religious faith, which encodes the highest aspirations of human race, is now the servant of lowest instincts, and God is the creature of evil. P518

No one does the dialectical interpenetration of good and evil within the human psyche better than our Mr Rushdie. It’s as if, if you’ll excuse the poetic licence, he was put on planet Earth just to help us unravel the seeming paradox.

Of course, there is no doubting Rushdie’s commitment to a secular world and an atheistic outlook, inevitably he will at times come crashing into the childlike sensitivities of our devout religious brethren. Islam must, at the very least, learn to deal with satire and criticism rather than, as it does today, damn all non-believers to hell fire and eternal damnation. Christianity has slowly but surely rid itself of these medieval outpourings, but not until after centuries of the most viscous bloodletting both within Christianity and without. The defining moment for modern Christianity, still plagued as it is with centuries of accumulated archaic dogmas, was the arrival of the film, The Life of Brian. Admittedly, there were some protests outside cinemas, but by and large Christendom begrudgingly put up with ridicule by simply ignoring it. Some may even have allowed themselves a little smirk, a little giggle in the privacy of their own homes. I’m sure their God cannot have totally outlawed all humour. But then again.

Here then is one of Rushdie’s more provocative passages, but a passage which I suspect is well founded on historical research. Mr Rushdie is nothing if not thorough, and even if the story is not to your liking, the book is well worth a read for the historical perspectives alone. Here is a taste of Rushdie at both his satirical and historical best:

The faithful lived by lawlessness, but in those years Mahound or should one say the Archangel? should one say Al-Lah became obsessed by law. Amid the palm trees of the oasis, Gibreel appeared to the Prophet and found himself sprouting rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelation, Salman said, rules about every damn thing, if a man farts let him turn his face to the wind, a rule about which hand to use for the purpose of cleaning one’s behind. It was as if no aspect of human existence was to be left unregulated, free. The revelation recitation told the faithful how much to eat, how deeply they should sleep, and which sexual positions had received divine sanction, so that they learned that sodomy and the missionary position was approved of by the archangel, whereas the forbidden postures included all those in which the female was on top. Gibreel further listed the permitted and forbidden subjects of conversation, and earmarked the parts of the body which could not be scratched no matter how unbearable they might itch.

And Gibreel the archangel specified the manner in which a man should be buried, and how his property should be divided, so that Salman the Persian got to wondering what manner of God this was that sounded so much like a businessman. This was when he had the idea that destroyed his faith, because he recalled that of course Mahound himself had been a businessman, and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom organisation and rules came naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should have come up with such a businesslike archangel, who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if non corporal God. P363-364

Yes, it’s a damning indictment of the foundations of Islam, but more accurately it’s a damning critique of religion generally, because if you examine any of the world’s religions with any degree of historical seriousness, you quickly realise just what an earthly sham they really are. What could be more farcical than the story of Moses heading up the mount and coming down with tablets of stone from God? Any well-meaning person, concerned with the lawlessness of the Israelites, could have come up with the ten-commandments on their way home from work. It took the cunning of Moses to wrap the thing up with the authority of an all seeing, all knowing god to convince the superstitious Israelites of its validity. I’ve no doubt that all the great historic religious leaders had some good and worthy intentions, but then the machinations of men quickly soiled those good intentions and hey-presto, before you know it, repressive religious diktat rules the day.

Rushdie’s work operates on numerous levels and it is this that gives his novels their rich and rewarding texture. A sub-theme to his Satanic Verses is the never-ending story of human migration and the trials and tribulations therein. Again Rushdie is superb at exploring the dialectic between the comfort of home and the need to break away and re-establish one-self on new territory. I know that conflict well. Speaking of London, Rushdie, in my view, accurately captures the paradox between a hostile and welcoming city, one that can be brutal to its newcomers yet at the very same time absorb and even welcome them. London, perhaps like no other city on earth, has that strange ability to do both at the very same time:

It’s hospitality yes! in spite of immigration laws, and his own recent experience, he still insisted on the truth of that: an imperfect welcome, true, one capable of bigotry, but a real thing, nonetheless, as was attested by the existence in a South London borough of a pub in which no language but Ukrainian could be heard, and by the annual reunion, in Wembley, a stone’s throw from the great stadium surrounded by imperial echoes ‘Empire Way, the Empire Pool of more than a hundred delegates, all tracing their ancestry back to a single, small Goan village, – We Londoners can be proud of our hospitality. P398

Written twenty five years ago, it is as true today as it was then. Only today the pub may now contain exclusively Polish, Russian or Lithuanian voices. How many cities in the world could so easily accommodate the arrival of some half million economic migrants from Eastern Europe with barely a murmur?

So Mr Rushdie, it’s a massive thank you for the history lesson on the origins of Islam, an equally big than you for the polemic against the tribal idiocy of all religions, and a most sincere thank you for another great piece of story-telling.

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