Spoofing the Ayatollah Khomeini
In a lesser-known controversial passage of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie does what he does best: he mercilessly spoofs figures of contemporary history. In this case, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini—who, in 1989, decreed the fatwa sentencing Rushdie to death, along with anyone connected with the publishing and translating of the novel. It’s believed that Khomeini never read the book. Surely though, he must have caught wind of the passage portraying him as a slightly mad, child-killing Imam who launched suicide-soldiers to their death in the Iran-Iraq war:
Gibreel unsderstands that the Imam, fighting by proxy as usual, will sacrifice him as readily as he did the hill of corpses at the palace gate, that he is a suicide soldier in the service of the cleric’s cause.
The “Imam” orders Gibreel to kill Al-Lat:
Down she tumbles, Al-Lat queen of the night; crashes upside-down to earth, crushing her head to bits; and lies, a headless black angel, with her wings ripped off, by a little wicket gate in the palace gardens, all in a crumpled heap.—And Gibreel, looking away from her in horror, sees the Imam grown monstrous, lying in the palace forecourt with his mouth yawning open at the gates; as the people march through the gates he swallows them whole.
