Satanic Verses

by Salman Rushdie
This entry was created for the Fall 2014 semester by Anna Greenawalt and Austin Amsler.
Why Banned: Bad for Gods and Government

Banning History:

The Satanic Verses has arguably undergone some of the most intense opposition ever received in reaction to a written work. Almost immediately upon its publication in 1988, it was banned in over 12 countries for its supposed defamation of Islam. This reaction was due to the thought that Salman Rushdie claimed the Qur'an was the work of the devil after the novel's title and its numerous references and rehashing of stories from the Qur'an. Upon being read an excerpt of the book, Iran's leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for the death of Rushdie as well as anyone connected with the books's publication.
As backlash from the novel intensified, many riots and mobs resulted. In Bombay, India (now Mumbai), riots injured 40 and killed 12 when demonstrators in a march protesting against the UK's decision to hide Rushdie battled with police. In Pakistan, 83 were wounded and 6 killed when police opened fire on protestors outside an American cultural center who were demanding the book be banned from sale in the United States. This backlash reached into the UK and US as well, with numerous bookstores receiving death threats and forcing US booksellers Barnes & Noble and Waldenbooks to remove the books from sale. Two bookstores in California were subsequently firebombed in connection to selling the book, along with many stores selling the novel in London.
Two people charged with translating and publishing the book into other languages were eventually attacked as a result, with another perishing after being stabbed: William Nygaard of Norway and Ettore Capriolo of Italy were both attacked near their homes but recovered from their injuries; Hitoshi Igarashi of Japan was not so lucky however, and perished from multiple stab wounds after being attacked at the university office he worked at. Salman Rushdie issued an apology to Iran in an effort to revoke this fatwa, but failed. Despite Iran eventually claiming it would neither support nor hinder assassination attempts on Rushdie, in 2007 a prominent Muslim cleric claimed the fatwa is still in effect.
Almost all of the original countries that banned the sale of The Satanic Verses reversed their decisions in due time, however, import of the book is still illegal in India.

Author Bio

Author Salman Rushdie was born on June 19th, 1947 to father Anis Ahmed Rushdie, a businessman, and mother Negin Bhatt, a teacher, in what was formerly Bombay, India. Despite being born into a Muslim and Indian household, his parents were not insistent on religion. This lead to Rushdie identifying as an atheist for the majority of his life until later when he promoted himself as a secular Muslim in an attempt to reconnect with his cultural heritage.
As a teenager, Rushdie moved to the United Kingdom where he attended boarding school. Staying in the UK, he went on to graduate from the University of Cambridge with an M.A. in history. Immediately after graduating, Rushdie began a very short career in acting before starting work as a copywriter for the advertising agency Ogilvy and Mather in the early 1970s. There, he helped to write several popular taglines for companies like Aero and American Express. During the time from 1975 to 1987, Rushdie published four novels: Grimus, his first novel in 1975; Midnight's Children in 1981, which went on to win him numerous awards and international recognition, Shame in 1983, and The Jaguar's Smile in 1987. Then, in 1988, Rushdie published his fifth novel, The Satanic Verses, which brought about some of the most intense controversy to ever surround a book.
In response to upset in the Muslim community over the book's accused insulting nature, a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death was issued by the Iranian government. This forced Rushdie to go into hiding and police protection after receiving numerous death threats. In spite of the danger, Rushdie made regular appearances in the UK, culminating in him appearing onstage with the rock band U2 during a London concert.
While most of the backlash from The Satanic Verses' publishing has died down, Rushdie is still experiencing its effects. Despite Iran claiming that it will no longer enforce the fatwa against him in 1998, Rushdie notes that he still receives mail from them every year reminding him that the fatwa still stands. As recently as 2012, Rushdie was forced to cancel an appearance at a literary festival in Jaipur, India, after learning of a potential threat against his life by the local police. This threat later turned out to be a hoax. He was then supposed to appear by livestream to the festival over the internet, but the Indian government pressured the festival into canceling it.

"Contemporary Reviews" Review

The allegory surrounding Satanic Verses can be even more complicated than the allegories present in the novel. To clarify one fact or disentangle one knotted symbol, demands the research of the other hidden symbol that presses for another researching of ever deeper and tucked away histories. The most alarming and prolific exaltation found among the many reviews was the dissonance found between East and West patterns joining haphazardly with the acceptance that each are different.
Rushdie was “called impenetrable, convoluted, confused, too elitist” (Gillis, Matuz) which caused the storm in Iran as well as the dumb struck liberal cognition of the wild west. What was meant to suspend a bridge between cultures was used as an annihilation of borders causing chaos and destruction in the path marked out for the construction of discourse. A very interesting suggestion was the anti-Islamic conspiracy as noted by Paul Berman. The theory blamed British intelligence for hiring the misleading muslim Rushdie to undergo the cultural conspiracy and therefore fight Islam in another episode of invasive colonialism. Berman went on to defend his review by pointing out that “novels are not an ancient art form in Iran; the Qur’an is read literally, not in context” (Berman). What this means is that the entire fabled conspiracy was the subject of a huge misunderstanding lead by matters of unyielding interpretations. Berman defends Rushdie’s anti-colonialism and believes the political conspiracy was just as fantastical as Rushdie’s imaginative work in Satanic Verses. As far as literal accuracies, muslims were not able to see the novel in context because the new, the intermingling, the hybridity is a product of the intruding imperialism that oppose the very morality the nation of Islam is trying to protect. Not entirely flawless, but entirely void of new enlightening thought that would destroy the laws of a faith. A less common narrative with yet a pervasive element of contradiction came from Magill Book Review. The Vedic literature of India, pashyanti, was referenced and likened to Rushdie’s revelatory work, claiming that Satanic Verses is a form of “aesthetic rapture”(Magill). This leads one to believe that Satanic Verses has much more within it, than the eye can see, the reader may have to allow themselves to be lifted into the very angelic realms Rushdie contradicts in praxis. The review also pointed to the language being distinctly used as a practice of affirmation that takes pride in previously used contemptuous language, yet another expansion of consciousness as raised by the foreigner in new subjective territories. An embrace as well as objection came from a NYT article by A.G. Mojtabai. Mojtabai who praised Rushdie’s “narrative energy and wealth of invention”, but just as much thought the work “as sustained exploration of human condition flies apart into delirium” (Mojtabai). So what is completely fascinating is also completely dulling because of its velocity.
All in all, one of the most important features to synthesize of the reviews was the fact that all of the fury and craze surrounding the books controversy have done nothing to bring humanity closer to educating our ignorance. Each side seems to annihilate the other but without real evidence or tolerance for the others point of view. A more recent review analyzing migration and the grotesque in Satanic Verses does just that, but from a scholarly approach that may never fall into the hands of the masses. From Katharina Donn’s analysis of Satanic Verses the novel represents a “discourse of fundamentalism” (Donn) from a postcolonial migrant experience. In this way Satanic Verses presents a leitmotif of alterity; the otherness the foreigner experiences in new land as well as the otherness that comes by assimilation and the metamorphosis that transpires through the process. The question that still persists, what have we learned from these divides and how do we bridge the gap?

Works Cited

Berman, Paul. “Shame.” New Republic 203.15 (1990): 31. MAS Ultra – School Edition. Web. 4 Nov. 2014
Donn, Katharina. “Migration And The Grotesque In Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.” Anglia-Zeitschrift Für Englische Philologie 131.1 (2013): 100-120. Humanities International Complete. Web. 4 Nov. 2014
Ed. Roger Matuz and Mary K. Gillis. India Today. “Salman Rushdie: Satanic Storm.” India Today 14.3 (15 Mar. 1989): 14-24. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 55. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 Nov. 2014.
Magill Book Reviews “The Satanic Verses.” (1990): MAS Ultra – School Edition. Web. 4 Nov. 2014
Mojtabai, A. G. “Magical Mystery Pilgrimage,” New York Times Book Review Jan. 29 1989, pp. 3, 37. Web. 4 Nov. 2014

Discussion Questions

What irony did you find in the controversy surrounding Satanic Verses?
How does the controversy surrounding Satanic Verses imply the study of intercultural communication?
What underlying identities do you find, if any, between Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha?
Where do you see themes of liberalism and/or totalitarianism?
What hidden meaning did you find behind the flooded use of allegory?
Considering Gibreel and Saladin are actors, what is the importance of this in defining their characters?
Does anything stand out as being particularly blasphemous? Or is it all simply fictitious?
Why does Rushdie change the names of those which reference the Qur’an? What does he ultimately achieve by doing so?

Creative Adaptations

You’re Dead! – Austin Amsler

For this adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, I utilized the particular scene in which Saladin and Gibreel fall from the sky after being subject to a terrorist attack on a plane. As they descend and subsequently start to take on their respective characteristics of a devil and an angel, I reinterpreted their transformations using my modular synthesizer to compose fields of sound to represent the major parts of the scene. I then combined them all into my main audio production program to create a retelling using only audio.