This year, I wonder whether there’ll be much stomach, or courage, for celebrating a novel that should rank among the most hilarious and important of the last generation: Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, published in England 20 years ago--on Sept. 26, 1988. In retrospect, the reaction to the book was a precursor of 9/11 for the burst of Muslim rage it let loose for the first time against the West, just as (ironically) the book’s portrayal of fanaticism run amuck had anticipated that rage. Rushdie wasn’t just imagining it, of course. Nor was he imagining what he termed “the inescapablity of the unforeseeable.” He sensed these things coming.
Of Good and Evil in the “Many-Sided Human Soul”
The Satanic Verses spelled out the heart of its main theme: “The question that’s asked here remains as large as ever it was: which is, the nature of evil, how it’s born, why it grows, how it takes unilateral possession of a many-sided human soul.” And the damage it wreaks from on high: the book opens as its two heroes, one of whom will dream of himself as the Prophet Muhammad in his delirium, tumble from a jet that’s just been blasted from the sky by terrorists.
Khomeini was reportedly conducting his most important ritual of the day — watching the evening news — when he saw footage of Pakistanis burning The Satanic Verses, rioting and killing each other. He’d never heard of the book, never heard of Rushdie, but immediately (so it was also reported in the London Times soon after the event) sentenced Rushdie to death for allegedly insulting Islam.
The Real Insult to Islam
The book does no such thing. The verses in question are a minor footnote in the Prophet’s history. A couple of ancient Islamic historians believed that one of Muhammad’s Quranic “revelations” had made an allowance for three goddesses. The revelation was to be a bone to the powerful pagan tribe that had excommunicated Muhammad from Mecca: The tribe thought his belief in just one god unacceptable. He thought the tribe's pagan beliefs blasphemous. Making an exception for the three goddesses might have been a compromise. On second thoughts Muhammad reversed himself and declared the verses inspired by Satan. Hence, the satanic verses. [See a full explanation of the satanic verses in their historical context.
How this unoriginal sub-plot, or even the fabulously original re-imagining of Muhammad in the flesh of an occasionally delirious Indian exile in Modern London, should have upset the fanatics is a mystery. Fanaticism is by definition, like the death cult this particular kind of Islamist fanaticism revels in, beyond irrational. Instead of lightening up since, Islamists have lit up the world in their satanic vileness.
Islam and Islamists
By Islamist I don’t mean 1.5 billion Muslims, but that small, violent, militantly rear-ending portion of the Muslim world that’s doing its best to keep Islam’s more admirable legacy from moving past its arrested development. That, too, is what The Satanic Verses is about. Still, it may not be the sort of thing some Muslims want celebrated during Ramadan (Eid, the celebration marking the end of the holy month, falls this year three days after the “Verses”’ birthday), though as I see it that’s precisely when Muslims should celebrate it if art as unbounded inquiry and subversion of olden dogmas is to find expression again in the Islamic world (as it mostly cannot today).
Then again, it may not be the sort of thing the enlightened West wants to be reminded of, either. The moment Khomeini sentenced Rushdie “and all those involved in [the book’s] publication who were aware of its content,” writers fell silent, bookstores removed the book from their shelves and publishing houses in France, Greece, Turkey and what was then West Germany quit printing it. Governments took their time speaking up for Rushdie (or providing protection).
Censorship, Still
To this day, there are those who, still blaming Rushdie first, confuse respect for other cultures with submission to those cultures’ deadliest impulses. In August 2008, Random House recalled from distribution The Jewel of Medina, a novel based on the life of Ayesha, the Prophet’s child-bride. The publishing house got word that Muslims would be unhappy with the book. So The Satanic Verses’ 20th anniversary is marked by censoring on the same theme. It’s not just Islamists who aren’t lightening up.
Originally published in the Daytona Beach, Fla., News-Journal.
