The Satanic Verses: A Novel

I am reading this for the third time. It is one of my favorite books. Mr. Rushdie obviously has a brilliant, quick intellect. This book is comprised of several stories, mostly centering on the experiences of a man who is elevated to the status of an angel, the other demoted to the status of a devil. Even though this book has a large imaginative and intellectual scope, there are some scenes of such tenderness and pathos that lead me to believe that Mr. Rushdie is a most compassionate soul. However, even though I have read it several times, I am still unable to determine if Mr. Rushdie had any theme in mind or if he was just spewing out his brilliant mind. The book starts with the two protagonists falling through the sky after the plane they were riding was hijacked and bombed by a terrorist. For what seems forever, Mr. Rushdie creates the sensation of falling, falling, falling. This book is a tour de force of writing.Actually, there are two possible themes that are coming to mind. First is the pain of not belonging which is shown clearly by the lives of South Asian and black immigrants in London; and very poignantly by a character in India who earns his living as a clown. He was born a lower caste Hindu and to escape the pain of it converted to Islam, but he isn't even accepted in that world either. His only true companion is his pet bull who he dresses up and uses in his clown acts. The other possible theme could be the paradox of good and evil existing side by side. Gibreel Farishta's lover's father, a Holocaust survivor, says, "'...the most dangerous of all the lies we are fed in our lives,' which was in his opinion, the idea of the continuum. 'Anybody ever tries to tell you how this most beautiful and most evil of planets is somehow homogenous, composed only of reconcilable elements, that it all adds up, you get on the phone to the straightjacket tailor...'"Yes, there is a destructive Mahound and imam who either themselves or whose helpers torture and gorge on innocent people, but that is a fact of life. I read several reviews in which the writers were claiming that Rushdie was being spiteful in writing this book, but even though I believe he knew exactly what were going to be the results of publishing it, I doubt he meant spite. An artist reacts intellectually and emotionally to the world around them, gets ideas, thoughts, tastes, and a writer is compelled to write them. However, I am waiting for someone to write a novel about a writer with only one successful book behind him, whose sales are diminishing, who makes an arrangement with a notorious religious despot that he will write a disparaging expose and the despot will put a fatwa on his head, thereby ensuring fame and fortune for them both by the sheer magnitude of the ensuring notoriety.

Good book and interesting.haven't read any of his books before but will certainly read more of them.interesting but difficult to follow.

I finally got around to The Satanic Verses. You just have to read a book which got a death sentence for the author. Really, after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa calling for Salmon Rushdie's death, Rushdie's Japanese translator was killed, his Italian translator and his Norwegian publisher were both stabbed (didn't die) and his Turkish translator ducked, but the miscreants burned down his hotel and killed 37 non-fatwa folks. So I sort of had to see what it was all about. I assumed it was culturally rich and I attended two lecture series on Islam to help me catch at least some of the obscurities. I'm sure I missed a bunch, though. It is culturally rich, alright, but more in Indian culture than Islamic and I did not attend any Indian lectures.There are two major characters in the book: Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. Both are more or less self made guys who have each attained some success in entertainment fields. Gibreel in movies, a regular heartthrob, and Saladin in voiceover work where his speciality is upper class English diction. Saladin hates being Indian and has decided that his heart belongs to England and to his ultimately and callously unfaithful wife, wait for it, Pamela (is that English or what?). The two (Saladin and Gibreel) find themselves on a flight from India to England which is first hijacked and then blown up at cruising altitude where the two, during the long trip to Earth, have a discussion which is interrupted by, of all things, their survival from the fall (it is instructive to note that during the plummet, Saladin chooses to use up some of his apparently limited time by singing Rule Britannia). Things change, one might say.Fourteen or so centuries earlier we are introduced to Mahound (I am given to understand that referring to The Prophet Muhammed in that fashion is disrespectful) who is in the process of attempting to convert the polytheistic Arabs of Jahilia. What? I thought it was Mecca. Well, it's deep, see? Jahilia is apparently an Arabic term meaning "ignorance of the will of God", which describes the pre conversion state of the Meccans, I assume. Things are not going well. Muhammed is in the process of receiving the Holy Quran from God through the angel Gabriel (Arabic "Gibreel". See where this is going?), while at the same time preaching monotheism with only limited success. Temptation arises when the head Sultan (or something) asks Muhammed to just spare a few, only three, of the three hundred sixty gods to please the ruler's wife whose family is in charge of the temples of the three female gods and gets money during the pilgrimages. Muhammed goes to the mountain cave, enters his trance and comes back down the hill and permits the three female gods to be honored. There is a hoo-hah among the followers of Muhammed because they have bought into monotheism and are disappointed. Muhammed goes back up the mountain, into the cave, back down the mountain into Jahilia and announces that the verses allowing the three gods were from Satan, not God, and withdraws them. Get it? The Satanic Verses. They're the real deal, actually existing in some ancient Islamic texts, but fervently denied currently.That's it. That's the story which got people stabbed and burned up. Muhammed was misled by Satan, caught on, rectified the mistake and continued to receive valid revelation from God through Gabriel so that ultimately the Quran was the direct and pure word of God. I don't get it. Seems to me like the God who created the entire Cosmos would have enough horsepower to deal with an errant author on His own. It even seems to me that it wasn't all that nasty in the first place - most Muslims assiduously avoid deification of Muhammed. I think they are just grouchy. I oversimplify somewhat. It can be said that the general tone of the episodes concerning the revelations to the Prophet can fairly be said to call into question whether maybe some of the revelations were Muhammed dealing with ad hoc situations in his personal life. Was there a disagreement with his favorite wife? Up comes a revelation setting her straight on the issue. So some Muslims got angry with Salmon.Here I must digress and impose a hiatus while I read Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation of Christ, a book which had a similar effect in the Christian community, although I do not think anyone was stabbed or burned. Also, not atypically, the reaction was not to the book, which is sort of fat and not likely to be read by our Christian lot, but rather to the movie made from the book. I shall choose the book as the basis for my comparison knowing full well that I am opting for twelve hours or so as opposed to two, a significant sacrifice to the blogger's muse.I will get back to this when I complete Last Temptation and can think more clearly about the rather common, but to me inexplicable, violent response to perceived blasphemy.Okay, now I am better informed. The Last Temptation of Christ is a book from the 1950's and is afflicted with theology even older than that. I suspect that Kazantzakis wrote it as a sort of Midrash, a riff on Jesus' humanity, which seems a legitimate and loyal-Christian kind of thing to do. There are distractions, of course, which seize the attention (Mary Magdalene is nowhere in the Bible described as a whore), but all in all the attempt is nicely done to make the point, which seems to be that Jesus is an example of how the most attractive and intense temptations of life can be overcome. The point is made with rather extreme examples: Jesus waiting in line at a whorehouse, Jesus sucking up to Romans by making crosses for their executions, Jesus trying to make God hate Jesus so that the load of Messiah-ship may be taken off, but it all comes out alright in the end, good triumphs, evil is defeated. So what's wrong with that? What on Earth about the book prompted such vituperative rants from offended believers?It's fundamentalism, that's what it is. Not exactly a spoiler. Those who struggle with a subconsciously held worry that their beliefs are fragile, puny, ephemeral and subject to destruction by countervailing views will always react with violence to any description of their orthodoxy which strays from the company line. And so it is with Satanic Verses. The true believer must leap to the defense of God, who by reason of frailty one supposes, is insufficiently strong to handle the defense himself. Apparently God exhausts himself with the first iteration of the revelation and must rely on believers to keep the revelation pure and unsullied by those who would vary the storyline. It's sort of silly, although the silliness is somewhat blunted by the firebombs and terrorism with which believers often make their point.The Satanic Verses is beautifully written, funny and marvelously inventive. Saladin, for instance, does not quite get the angelic treatment of Gibreel in that Saladin morphs into a faun, Pan, some sort of goat-legged horned-head Priapic sulfur stinking denizen of Hell with the personality of a complete sissy. It is a delightful read, and I wholeheartedly recommend it - just don't read it looking for some hardcore blasphemy. Beats me if it's in there anywhere.