And if religion is the blindfold, so it is also the bedrock on which, failing any other certainty, many Americans build their sense that they are right to be, and do, as they are, and as they do.
‘In God We Trust’: this sentiment is not from the walls of any church, but on the currency of the United States: God and Mammon, in the service of the world’s most powerful nation, united at last.
1985, 1990
IN GOOD FAITH
It has been a year since I last spoke in defence of my novel The Satanic Verses. I have remained silent, though silence is against my nature, because I felt that my voice was simply not loud enough to be heard above the clamour of the voices raised against me.
I hoped that others would speak for me, and many have done so eloquently, among them an admittedly small but growing number of Muslim readers, writers and scholars. Others, including bigots and racists, have tried to exploit my case (using my name to taunt Muslim and non-Muslim Asian children and adults, for example) in a manner I have found repulsive, defiling and humiliating.
At the centre of the storm stands a novel, a work of fiction, one that aspires to the condition of literature. It has often seemed to me that people on all sides of the argument have lost sight of this simple fact. The Satanic Verses has been described, and treated, as a work of bad history, as an anti-religious pamphlet, as the product of an international capitalist-Jewish conspiracy, as an act of murder (‘he has murdered our hearts’), as the product of a person comparable to Hitler and Attila the Hun. It felt impossible, amid such a hubbub, to insist on the fictionality of fiction.
Let me be clear: I am not trying to say that The Satanic Verses is ‘only a novel’ and thus need not be taken seriously, even disputed with the utmost passion. I do not believe that novels are trivial matters. The ones I care most about are those which attempt radical reformulations of language, form and ideas, those that attempt to do what the word novel seems to insist upon: to see the world anew. I am well aware that this can be a hackle-raising, infuriating attempt.
What I have wished to say, however, is that the point of view from which I have, all my life, attempted this process of literary renewal is the result not of the self-hating, deracinated Uncle-Tomism of which some have accused me, but precisely of my determination to create a literary language and literary forms in which the experience of formerly colonized, still-disadvantaged peoples might find full expression. If The Satanic Verses is anything, it is a migrant’s-eye view of the world. It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity.
Standing at the centre of the novel is a group of characters most of whom are British Muslims, or not particularly religious persons of Muslim background, struggling with just the sort of great problems that have arisen to surround the book, problems of hybridization and ghettoization, of reconciling the old and the new. Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. The Satanic Verses is for change-by-fusion, change-by-conjoining. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves.
Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings. Like many millions of people, I am a bastard child of history. Perhaps we all are, black and brown and white, leaking into one another, as a character of mine once said, like flavours when you cook.
The argument between purity and impurity, which is also the argument between Robespierre and Danton, the argument between the monk and the roaring boy, between primness and impropriety, between the stultifications of excessive respect and the scandals of impropriety, is an old one; I say, let it continue. Human beings understand themselves and shape their futures by arguing and challenging and questioning and saying the unsayable; not by bowing the knee, whether to gods or to men.
The Satanic Verses is, I profoundly hope, a work of radical dissent and questioning and reimagining. It is not, however, the book it has been made out to be, that book containing ‘nothing but filth and insults and abuse’ that has brought people out on to the streets across the world.
That book simply does not exist.
This is what I want to say to the great mass of ordinary, decent, fair-minded Muslims, of the sort I have known all my life, and who have provided much of the inspiration for my work: to be rejected and reviled by, so to speak, one’s own characters is a shocking and painful experience for any writer. I recognize that many Muslims have felt shocked and pained, too. Perhaps a way forward might be found through the mutual recognition of that mutual pain. Let us attempt to believe in each other’s good faith.
I am aware that this is asking a good deal. There has been too much name-calling. Muslims have been called savages and barbarians and worse. I, too, have received my share of invective. Yet I still believe—perhaps I must—that understanding remains possible, and can be achieved without the suppression of the principle of free speech.
What it requires is a moment of good will; a moment in which we may all accept that the other parties are acting, have acted, in good faith.
You see, it’s my opinion that if we could only dispose of the ‘insults and abuse’ accusation, which prevents those who believe it from accepting that The Satanic Verses is a work of any serious intent or merit whatsoever, then we might be able, at the very least, to agree to differ about the book’s real themes, about the relative value of the sacred and the profane, about the merits of purity and those of hotchpotch, and about how human beings really become whole: through the love of God or through the love of their fellow men and women.
And to dispose of the argument, we must return for a moment to the actually existing book, not the book described in the various pamphlets that have been circulated to the faithful, not the ‘unreadable’ text of legend, not two chapters dragged out of the whole; not a piece of blubber, but the whole wretched whale.
Let me say this first: I have never seen this controversy as a struggle between Western freedoms and Eastern unfreedom. The freedoms of the West are rightly vaunted, but many minorities—racial, sexual, political—just as rightly feel excluded from full possession of these liberties; while, in my lifelong experience of the East, from Turkey and Iran to India and Pakistan, I have found people to be every bit as passionate for freedom as any Czech, Romanian, German, Hungarian or Pole.
How is freedom gained? It is taken: never given. To be free, you must first assume your right to freedom. In writing The Satanic Verses, I wrote from the assumption that I was, and am, a free man.
What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. Without the freedom to challenge, even to satirize all orthodoxies, including religious orthodoxies, it ceases to exist. Language and the imagination cannot be imprisoned, or art will die, and with it, a little of what makes us human. The Satanic Verses is, in part, a secular man’s reckoning with the religious spirit. It is by no means always hostile to faith. ‘If we write in such a way as to pre-judge such belief as in some way deluded or false, then are we not guilty of élitism, of imposing our world-view on the masses?’ asks one of its Indian characters. Yet the novel does contain doubts, uncertainties, even shocks that may well not be to the liking of the devout. Such methods have, however, long been a legitimate part even of Islamic literature.
What does the novel dissent from? Certainly not from people’s right to fait
h, though I have none. It dissents most clearly from imposed orthodoxies of all types, from the view that the world is quite clearly This and not That. It dissents from the end of debate, of dispute, of dissent. Hindu communalist sectarianism, the kind of Sikh terrorism that blows up planes, the fatuousnesses of Christian creationism are dissented from as well as the narrower definitions of Islam. But such dissent is a long way from ‘insults and abuse’. I do not believe that most of the Muslims I know would have any trouble with it.
What they have trouble with are statements like these: ‘Rushdie calls the Prophet Muhammad a homosexual.’ ‘Rushdie says the Prophet Muhammad asked God for permission to fornicate with every woman in the world.’ ‘Rushdie says the Prophet’s wives are whores.’ ‘Rushdie calls the Prophet by a devil’s name.’ ‘Rushdie calls the Companions of the Prophet scum and bums.’ ‘Rushdie says that the whole Qur’an was the Devil’s work.’ And so forth.
It has been bewildering to watch the proliferation of such statements, and to watch them acquire the authority of truth by virtue of the power of repetition. It has been bewildering to learn that people, millions upon millions of people, have been willing to judge The Satanic Verses and its author, without reading it, without finding out what manner of man this fellow might be, on the basis of such allegations as these. It has been bewildering to learn that people do not care about art. Yet the only way I can explain matters, the only way I can try and replace the non-existent novel with the one I actually wrote, is to tell you a story.
The Satanic Verses is the story of two painfully divided selves. In the case of one, Saladin Chamcha, the division is secular and societal: he is torn, to put it plainly, between Bombay and London, between East and West. For the other, Gibreel Farishta, the division is spiritual, a rift in the soul. He has lost his faith and is strung out between his immense need to believe and his new inability to do so. The novel is ‘about’ their quest for wholeness.
Why ‘Gibreel Farishta’ (Gabriel Angel)? Not to ‘insult and abuse’ the ‘real’ Archangel Gabriel. Gibreel is a movie star, and movie stars hang above us in the darkness, larger than life, halfway to the divine. To give Gibreel an angel’s name was to give him a secular equivalent of angelic half-divinity. When he loses his faith, however, this name becomes the source of all his torments.
Chamcha survives. He makes himself whole by returning to his roots and, more importantly, by facing up to, and learning to deal with, the great verities of love and death. Gibreel does not survive. He can neither return to the love of God, nor succeed in replacing it by earthly love. In the end he kills himself, unable to bear his torment any longer.
His greatest torments have come to him in the form of dreams. In these dreams he is cast in the role of his namesake, the Archangel, and witnesses and participates in the unfolding of various epic and tragic narratives dealing with the nature and consequences of revelation and belief. These dreams are not uniformly sceptical. In one, a nonbelieving landowner who has seen his entire village, and his own wife, drown in the Arabian Sea at the behest of a girl-seer who claimed the waters would open so that the pilgrims might undertake a journey to Mecca, experiences the truth of a miracle at the moment of his own death, when he opens his heart to God, and ‘sees’ the waters part. All the dreams do, however, dramatize the struggle between faith and doubt.
Gibreel’s most painful dreams, the ones at the centre of the controversy, depict the birth and growth of a religion something like Islam, in a magical city of sand named Jahilia (that is ‘ignorance’, the name given by Arabs to the period before Islam). Almost all the alleged ‘insults and abuse’ are taken from these dream sequences.
The first thing to be said about these dreams is that they are agonizingly painful to the dreamer. They are a ‘nocturnal retribution, a punishment’ for his loss of faith. This man, desperate to regain belief, is haunted, possessed, by visions of doubt, visions of scepticism and questions and faith-shaking allegations that grow more and more extreme as they go on. He tries in vain to escape them, fighting against sleep; but then the visions cross over the boundary between his waking and sleeping self, they infect his daytimes: that is, they drive him mad. The dream-city is called ‘Jahilia’ not to ‘insult and abuse’ Mecca Sharif, but because the dreamer, Gibreel, has been plunged by his broken faith back into the condition the word describes. The first purpose of these sequences is not to vilify or ‘disprove’ Islam, but to portray a soul in crisis, to show how the loss of God can destroy a man’s life.
See the ‘offensive’ chapters through this lens, and many things may seem clearer. The use of the so-called ‘incident of the satanic verses’, the quasi-historical tale of how Muhammad’s revelation seemed briefly to flirt with the possibility of admitting three pagan and female deities into the pantheon, at the semi-divine, intercessory level of the archangels, and of how he then repudiated these verses as being satanically inspired—is, first of all, a key moment of doubt in dreams which persecute a dreamer by making vivid the doubts he loathes but can no longer escape.
The most extreme passage of doubting in the novel is when the character ‘Salman the Persian’—named not to ‘insult and abuse’ Muhammad’s companion Salman al-Farisi, but more as an ironic reference to the novel’s author—voices his many scepticisms. It is quite true that the language here is forceful, satirical, and strong meat for some tastes, but it must be remembered that the waking Gibreel is a coarse-mouthed fellow, and it would be surprising if the dream-figures he conjures up did not sometimes speak as rough and even obscene a language as their dreamer. It must also be remembered that this sequence happens late in the dream, when the dreamer’s mind is crumbling along with his certainties, and when his derangement, to which these violently expressed doubts contribute, is well advanced.
Let me not be disingenuous, however. The rejection of the three goddesses in the novel’s dream-version of the ‘satanic verses’ story is also intended to make other points, for example about the religion’s attitude to women. ‘Shall He [God] have daughters while you have sons? That would be an unjust division,’ read the verses still to be found in the Qur’an. I thought it was at least worth pointing out that one of the reasons for rejecting these goddesses was that they were female. The rejection has implications that are worth thinking about. I suggest that such highlighting is a proper function of literature.
Or again, when Salman the Persian, Gibreel’s dream-figment, fulminates against the dream-religion’s aim of providing ‘rules for every damn thing’, he is not only tormenting the dreamer, but asking the reader to think about the validity of religion’s rules. To those participants in the controversy who have felt able to justify the most extreme Muslim threats towards me and others by saying that I have broken an Islamic rule, I would ask the following question: are all the rules laid down at a religion’s origin immutable for ever? How about the penalties for prostitution (stoning to death) or thieving (mutilation)? How about the prohibition of homosexuality? How about the Islamic law of inheritance, which allows a widow to inherit only an eighth share, and which gives to sons twice as much as it does to daughters? What of the Islamic law of evidence, which makes a woman’s testimony worth only half that of a man? Are these, too, to be given unquestioning respect: or may writers and intellectuals ask the awkward questions that are a part of their reason for being what they are?
Let no one suppose that such disputes about rules do not take place daily throughout the Muslim world. Muslim religious leaders may wish female children of Muslim households to be educated in segregated schools, but the girls, as they say every time anybody asks them, do not wish to go. (The Labour Party doesn’t ask them, and plans to deliver them into the hands of the mullahs.) Likewise, Muslim divines may insist that women dress ‘modestly’, according to the Hijab code, covering more of their bodies than men because they possess what one Muslim recently and absurdly described on television as ‘more adorable parts’; but the Muslim world is full of women who reject such strictures
. Islam may teach that women should be confined to the home and to child-rearing, but Muslim women everywhere insist on leaving the home to work. If Muslim society questions its own rules daily—and make no mistake, Muslims are as accustomed to satire as anyone else—why must a novel be proscribed for doing the same?
But to return to the text. Certain supposed ‘insults’ need specific rebuttals. For example, the scene in which the Prophet’s companions are called ‘scum’ and ‘bums’ is a depiction of the early persecution of the believers, and the insults quoted are clearly not mine but those hurled at the faithful by the ungodly. How, one wonders, could a book portray persecution without allowing the persecutors to be seen persecuting? (Or again: how could a book portray doubt without allowing the uncertain to articulate their uncertainties?)
As to the matter of the Prophet’s wives: what happens in Gibreel’s dreams is that the whores of a brothel take the names of the wives of the Prophet Mahound in order to arouse their customers. The ‘real’ wives are clearly stated to be ‘living chastely’ in their harem. But why introduce so shocking an image? For this reason: throughout the novel, I sought images that crystallized the opposition between the sacred and profane worlds. The harem and the brothel provide such an opposition. Both are places where women are sequestered, in the harem to keep them from all men except their husband and close family members, in the brothel for the use of strange males. Harem and brothel are antithetical worlds, and the presence in the harem of the Prophet, the receiver of a sacred text, is likewise contrasted with the presence in the brothel of the clapped-out poet, Baal, the creator of profane texts. The two struggling worlds, pure and impure, chaste and coarse, are juxtaposed by making them echoes of one another; and, finally, the pure eradicates the impure. Whores and writer (‘I see no difference here,’ remarks Mahound) are executed. Whether one finds this a happy or sad conclusion depends on one’s point of view.