A Few Thoughts on Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses”
A Few Thoughts on Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses”
AFBR
The Satanic Verses had been on my reading list for at least several decades. I had the work on my library shelf, having purchased it from a Half-Price Books sometime in the early 2000s. Because this champion of free speech was brutally attacked last August, a residue of the original death fatwa issued on his life by the Ayatollah Khomeini shortly after the book’s publication in 1988, I decided to finally read it. I am about four fifths in and have a few comments to make so far.
First, this novel is a work of magical realism in the tradition of books like Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, which I taught many years ago. Unlike HOS, however, TSV combines the setting of 1980s London with a look back at an alternate version of how the Revelation for the Quran may have happened in the West Arabian deserts. Rushdie’s mixture of realism and fantasy, of secular and religious imagery, setting, and theology was what triggered the fatwa and, most probably, the recent attack on his life. To the point: So far, I recommend this novel to anyone interested in magical realism, the history and theology of Islam, and just a good, if sometimes complex, story. Be prepared - some characters share the same names across time periods and I am having to look a lot of stuff about Islam up on the internet.
Second, as I am somewhat steeped in the Christian tradition – with its theology, texts, scholarship – I am captured by what Rushdie’s doing with the holy traditions and stories of Islam, even as I don’t know much about them. His book is nudging me to explore these traditions as I read and consider overlaps with the Hebrew and Christian stories. His playing around with the way Islam began, experimenting with tropes, themes, gestures, is engaging and highly insightful for believers and atheists alike, if you can get past the mixture of the sacred and the profane as Rushdie blends the common with the holy, the pedestrian with the numinous. This is the very thing that got him in trouble with Islam’s leader in Iran. But, ironically, TSV make someone like me more interested in Islam than I might have been otherwise.
Finally, more to the point regarding Rushdie’s reconsideration of Islam and how the Quran was written and received, and to the overlap with Jewish and Christian origins, there is a curious passage in the chapter, Return to Jahilia. Much of this chapter concerns a scribe, Salman, recounting how he wrote down Mahound’s (read here an alternate name for the Prophet Muhammad) revelations from the Angel. Mahound would dictate Allah’s words, via the Angel, to Salman, who took diligent notes.
Yet, in time, Salman begins to doubt Mahound’s revelations. He notices, among other things, that the dictates of the Angel/Allah very conveniently match up with Mahound’s own political and spiritual ideas. He suspects Mahound may be using his new found faith to justify his personal proclivities. Salman wants desperately to believe in Mahound and his new faith of Submission, so he does an experiment. He sometimes changes Mahound’s words. He writes Jew when the Prophet says Christian; he writes all-wise when Mahound says all-hearing. He does this many times. Upon reading back his edits, Mahound does not catch the mistakes. Let’s hear Rushdie tell it.
Here's the point: Mahound did not notice the alterations. So, there I was, actually writing the Book, or rewriting it, anyway, polluting the word of God with my own profane language. But, good heavens, if my poor words could not be distinguished from the Revelation by God’s own Messenger, then what did that mean? What did that say about the quality of the divine poetry?
I think about how, in the Judeo-Christian textual traditions, there is always and ever what I call the intrusion of the redactors. Any study Bible worth its value will have textual critical notes that draw attention to some if this. In short, we have received the books of the Bible from multiple time periods and sources, from pieces of texts spaced hundreds of years apart in many cases. We read multiple voices and diverse traditions inside the same ‘one’ book – Genesis, for example, where the Priestly and Deuteronomic Traditions collide and redactors (editors) over time must sort this out to produce a final book of Genesis. The textual tradition is replete with such examples.
Rushdie offers at least one scenario for how redactors might work – they are human beings concerned with truth, politics, the veracity of their leaders and traditions. They add, subtract, alter – sometimes for noble purposes; occasionally for personal reasons. This is true, most probably, for Islam, Judaism, and Christianity – all religions of The Book. Thanks, Mr. Rushdie, for expanding my world of religious understanding just a bit more clearly.