The Satanic Verses

Author: Salman Rushdie | Published: 1988

Summary

The Satanic Verses begins with two Indian actors—Gibreel Farishta (a Bollywood star who plays Hindu deities) and Saladin Chamcha (who has erased his Indian identity to become a British voice actor)—falling from a hijacked airliner that explodes over the English Channel. They survive through supernatural transformation: Gibreel acquires the halo of the archangel Gabriel; Saladin acquires goat horns and cloven hooves. The novel interweaves their stories in contemporary London—examining the experience of Indian Muslim immigrants in Thatcher’s Britain—with Gibreel’s hallucinatory dreams of a Prophet who resembles Muhammad, his companions and wives, and the ancient city of Jahilia. The dreams-within-dreams structure and the alternation between contemporary England and dream-historical Arabia give the novel its formal complexity and its political consequences.

The novel explores themes of identity, migration, transformation, and the nature of religious experience with Rushdie’s characteristically exuberant, maximalist prose—allusive, punning, moving between registers of comedy and tragedy with dizzying speed. The “Mahound” sections—the dream sequences involving the Prophet figure—were the source of the controversy that resulted in Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa declaring the novel blasphemous and calling for Rushdie’s death; these sections reimagine episodes from early Islamic history in ways that many Muslims found deeply offensive. Rushdie has argued that the novel is an exploration of the experience of religious doubt from the inside—that the dreamer is Gibreel, a man losing his faith, and the dreams are his—but this defense did not mitigate the controversy.

The Satanic Verses is a major novel that has been more discussed in political and religious contexts than read carefully as fiction; the controversy has both made it globally famous and made dispassionate engagement with it difficult. It remains one of the central texts of postcolonial literature, a sustained exploration of what it means to be Indian in England, to be of two cultures and fully at home in neither, and to inherit a tradition while also critiquing it.

Critical Takeaways

  • The fatwa and its consequences: Khomeini’s 1989 death sentence on Rushdie is one of the most significant events in the history of literary censorship; it forced into public consciousness the question of whether artistic freedom includes the freedom to offend religious sensibilities, and at what cost.
  • Postcolonial identity: The novel’s treatment of Indian immigrants in London—the dehumanization, the metamorphosis, the question of which identity is the “real” one—is Rushdie’s most sustained engagement with the experience of cultural displacement.
  • The Mahound sections: The dream sections imagining early Islamic history are the most controversial and the most literarily interesting simultaneously; they engage with the historical scholarship on early Islam (particularly the “satanic verses” episode, a historical controversy about verses Muhammad may have initially accepted and later revoked) in fictional form.
  • Form and excess: The novel’s formal extravagance—its allusions, its puns, its narrative multiplicity—is both its greatness and its difficulty; critics have divided on whether the excess is productive or exhausting.
  • Rushdie’s project: Read alongside Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh, and Shame, the novel is part of a sustained project of reimagining Indian and Islamic history through magical realism; The Satanic Verses is the most ambitious and most contested installment.

My Takeaways

  1. The metamorphosis conceit—Gibreel as angelic, Saladin as devilish—is a formal device for exploring how identity is assigned and resisted: the immigrant is labeled monster; the question is whether to accept or transform the label.
  2. Reading the Mahound sections as Gibreel’s hallucinations—the dreams of a man losing religious faith, not as Rushdie’s own critique of Islam—changes their meaning significantly; the controversy was partly generated by a refusal to read them in their narrative context.
  3. The London immigrant sections—the Bangladeshi community, the racist police, the difficulty of being neither Indian enough nor British enough—are the novel’s least discussed and most historically precise sections.
  4. The fatwa made it impossible to read the novel without carrying the weight of the controversy; this is one of the most significant ways in which external history has transformed the experience of a text.

Footnotes