On The Satanic Verses

Photo by Rob Croes / Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Author Salman Rushdie was attacked on August 13th by Hadi Matar.

There have been a handful of essays explaining this or that about the risks of free speech (Vox had a piece titled “Salman Rushdie and the enduring risk of political art“) and I don’t think anything new would be hammered out by yet another discussion balancing the importance of artists being free to create their own art with their own vision balanced against the importance of respecting how others might be offended by sufficiently visionary art.

I mean, if you want to read us discussing this sort of thing in the past, you can read the “Blasphemy, Culture, and Reasonable Arguments” post and comments. We had several posts about the Charlie Hebdo killings. There were some really good points made in those threads and I doubt I could improve on any of them here.

What I wanted to talk about were The Satanic Verses: There are a handful of verses in the Koran that are referred to as The Satanic Verses. There is also a book by Salman Rushdie called “The Satanic Verses”.

I want to talk about both.

As for the verses in the Koran, they’re a couple of verses that, at first glance, don’t seem like that big of a deal:

Have you thought of al-Lāt and al-‘Uzzá? And about the third deity, al-Manāt?
These are the exalted gharāniq, whose intercession is hoped for.
–Quran 53:19–20

Well, if you’re into the whole “Monotheism” thing, you might see that these verses are a very big deal indeed. We go from “There is no God but God!” to “hey, there’s a third deity”.

On top of that, one of the arguments about the Koran is that every word in it came to Mohammed from the mouth of the angel Gabriel.

And that brings us to the question of “how did those verses get in there?”

Well, the official answer is that Satan tempted Mohammed to put those in there and Mohammed succumbed. Which brings us to a huge problem: Well, if these verses are in there… are there any other verses like that in there? It’s really easy to say “No, absolutely not!”, of course. It’s a lot harder to argue it, though.

There are a handful of arguments about how this happened. Some scholars argue that this moment of weakness on Mohammed’s part is humanizing and demonstrates how important it was to him to bring all sorts of people into the big tent of Islam… including those who thought of al-Lāt and al-‘Uzzá and about the third deity, al-Manāt. But if it is important to have an infallable prophet and an infallable Koran, you can’t really run with “Well, he was fudging to get more people to follow.”

This gets a handful of people to argue that this never happened and enthusiastic missionary types who were trying to be more appealing falsely put those verses in there (and, importantly, Mohammed did *NOT* put them in there). Unfortunately, a bunch of scholars have hammered out that, yeah, these verses show up in the earliest traditions… not just the ones from conveniently after the death of Islam’s earliest players.

For the most part, this was merely an exceptionally esoteric debate among the most hardcore of the scholars who were content to have nobody else really talking about it… until Rushdie’s book came out.

Rushdie’s book has The Satanic Verses as a major event.

The book itself is mostly set up as split in two. There is the story of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. Gibreel is an Indian actor who plays Indian deities in Bollywood movies. Saladin is an Indian voiceover actor. The story follows both of them. We watch Gibreel descend into madness and look for a former lover. We watch Saladin wrestle with how he emigrated to England and never really fit in and watch him go back to India and see him not really fit in there anymore. The story kicks off with them falling from a plane blown up in a terrorist attack and Gibreel picks up the trappings of an angel and Saladin picks up the trappings of a demon and we watch how their lives evolve from there.

Those chapters are interspersed with dream-like chapters filled with stories from the life of the Prophet Mohammed. Those stories include the Satanic Verses incident, stuff involving all of Mohammed’s wives (including Aisha), and an absolutely haunting story of a village’s pilgrimage to Mecca by walking across the ocean. And one chapter mocking a modern day Imam.

I first read the book when it came out (I got it in an Easter basket). I read it and dove into it because it was an *IMPORTANT* work. Filled with *IMPORTANT* messages. It was important enough for there to be a religious fatwa put out on Rushdie’s head because of it! I read it and found it ponderous but was absolutely enchanted with the dream chapters. I didn’t get much of anything from the Gibreel/Saladin portions of the book but I *LOVED* the stuff about the Prophet Mohammed.

About 10 years ago, for whatever reason, I went back and re-read it. This time it wasn’t particularly *IMPORTANT*. It was far enough away from the fatwa that I could just, you know, read it.

And, holy cow, it is a laugh-out-loud *FUNNY* book. It’s got incisive comedy, pathos, and some absolutely brilliant characters that are absolutely engrossing and charismatic and lovable and terrible. I felt the alienation of Saladin as he sat in boarding school not knowing how to eat the fish in front of him. I laughed at Gibreel as he finally gave in and ate mouthfuls of bacon and sausage after not dying in a terrorist attack. I read the stories about the Satanic Verses Incident and finally got what Rushdie was going for… he condensed centuries of theological debate to a handful of pages and explained why Mohammed did it. (“What are you like when you win?”) The chapter dealing with Mohammed’s wives? There’s a barking laugh on every page.

It’s an absolutely amazing book that walks the tightrope of being light and being heavy without falling.

It was not well-served by being made *IMPORTANT*.

If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s really, really good. You can get it in paperback from Amazon for about $15.