The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
"The Satanic Verses" is a novel by Salman Rushdie that intertwines the lives of two main characters, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, who survive a terrorist attack on an airplane. Their contrasting experiences upon arriving in England highlight themes of identity, transformation, and cultural conflict. Gibreel, an Indian film star, navigates a life of fame, while Saladin, an Anglophile, faces racism and personal crises that force him to confront his roots. The narrative also delves into profound religious and philosophical questions, reflecting on the nature of faith and the complexities of belief systems, particularly within the context of Islam and its pre-Islamic past. The novel's exploration of these themes has generated significant controversy, leading to widespread backlash and a fatwa against Rushdie. This backdrop of societal tensions, combined with the personal struggles of the protagonists, raises critical questions about assimilation, alienation, and the impact of cultural heritage in a globalized world. "The Satanic Verses" ultimately serves as both a rich literary work and a provocative commentary on religion and identity.
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The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
First published: 1988
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Fantasy
Time of plot: Late twentieth and early seventh centuries
Locale: London, India, and Jahilia
Principal characters
Gibreel Farishta , an Indian film starSaladin Chamcha , an English actor, the man of a thousand and one voicesPamela Lovelace , his wifeAlleluia Cone , a mountain climber, Gibreel’s loverMahound , a pejorative Christian name for the Prophet MuḥammadHind , queen of JahiliaThe Imam , an exiled religious figureAyesha , a young woman who leads her followers on a fatal pilgrimage to MeccaZeeny Vikal , a medical doctor, art critic, and political activistSalman , Mahound’s scribeBaal , a satirist
The Story:
Odd-numbered chapters. Around New Year’s Day, just before dawn, Sikh terrorists destroy an Air India jumbo jet in flight. Two passengers miraculously, or fantastically, fall safely into the English Channel, one flapping his arms and singing, the other desperately, doubtfully, clinging to his companion. Forty-year-old Gibreel Farishta, née Ismail Najruddin, is a poor orphan who has grown up to become India’s biggest film star. “Fortyish” Saladin Chamcha, née Salahuddin Chamchawala, the estranged Anglophile son of a prominent Bombay businessman, is also an actor; a master mimic, he is the costar of the popular English television series The Aliens. The two men interpret their salvation differently, and, once ashore, they experience very different receptions. Unable to prove his identity and having begun to assume a goatlike appearance and smell, Chamcha is arrested and verbally and physically abused by racist police officers. Gibreel, dressed in the clothes of his host’s (Rosa Diamond’s) late husband, is allowed to go free.
Chamcha’s situation worsens. Escaping from a migrants-only ward of the mental hospital, where he was committed once the police discovered that he was what he claimed to be, a British citizen, he returns home to find his very proper-sounding and proper-looking English wife, Pamela Lovelace, in bed with another man, Jamsheed Joshi. He also finds he is without a job, the role of Maxim Alien having been cut by the show’s Thatcherite producer, Hal Valence. With “Jumpy” Joshi’s help, he secures temporary lodgings in the kind of immigrant neighborhood that he has spent much of his life trying to avoid. As his anger and helplessness grow, so does Chamcha. Local activists transform the satanic-looking eight-foot-tall satyr into an immigrant hero. Not until he vents his rage in a local nightspot where Asians, West Indians, and others dance alongside wax effigies of developing world heroes and their English oppressors (including Margaret Thatcher) is he able to resume his earlier form.
Gibreel, meanwhile, fares much better. Transformed into his namesake, the Angel of the Recitation, he seeks refuge in the bed of his English lover, the fair-skinned climber of Mount Everest Alleluia Cone (originally Cohen), whom he had met immediately after his near-fatal illness several months earlier and before his mysterious disappearance from Bombay. Spurned by England and his English wife alike, Chamcha, transmogrified into Shaitan as well as the angel Azraeel, avenges his fall from grace by destroying Gibreel’s happiness, undermining his faith in Alleluia Cone, and thus pushing Gibreel one step closer to madness.
Leaving Alleluia does not mean Gibreel can leave behind the dreams that have been troubling him since his recovery from the Phantom Bug. From her home, he walks straight into a nightmarish London beset by racial strife and police cover-ups that leave several people dead, including Pamela Lovelace and her lover. Chamcha nearly dies trying to save the Bangladeshi couple with whom he stayed earlier, but he is saved by Gibreel, despite the fact that Gibreel realizes that it is Chamcha who scripted his breakup with Alleluia.
Chamcha’s life improves. He survives a heart attack, returns to Bombay, and becomes reconciled not only with his dying father but also with India, to the point of taking an interest in local politics, or at least in one political activist, Zeeny Vikal. Gibreel’s fortunes, meanwhile, take a downward turn. His films are unsuccessful; his cynicism grows. A chance encounter ends with Gibreel shooting Whisky Sisodia, the stuttering film producer and erstwhile Good Samaritan, and then throwing Alleluia Cone off a high-rise roof in a virtual replay of the suicide of his former mistress Rekha Merchant two years earlier. After telling his tale, Gibreel kills himself as Chamcha looks helplessly on.
Even-numbered chapters. The angel Gibreel has troubling dreams. In the first, Abu Simbel, leader of Jahilia (pre-Islamic Arabia), offers to make a deal with Mahound: He will accept the new monotheistic religion if Mahound will grant subordinate but still divine status to three local goddesses. After consulting the angel Gibreel, Mahound accepts the offer. Later, however, after the number of his followers has grown, Mahound claims that the concession was the work of Shaitan and that the verses in the revelation conceding semidivine status to the three goddesses are satanic in origin and effect and therefore must be corrected. In Gibreel’s second dream, an exiled Imam returns to Desh (Iran) and commands Gibreel to defeat Ayesha (a version of the whore of Babylon, or, alternately, the Great Satan, the United States). In the third dream, Mahound completes his conquest of Jahilia, ordering the closing of its most famous brothel and the executions of its prostitutes, who have adopted the names of Mahound’s twelve wives. In the fourth, Gibreel orders a young woman, Ayesha, to lead a group of pilgrims to the sea and on to Mecca. When the sea fails to part as the angel told her it would, all but a few of the pilgrims drown.
Bibliography
Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Discusses both the strengths and weaknesses of Rushdie’s cosmopolitanism and the ways in which his fiction draws on materials from the developing world but does not adequately represent the concerns of developing nations.
Gurnah, Abdulrazak, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Collection of essays presents assessment of Rushdie’s importance for postcolonial literature and analysis of specific works. Two of the essays focus on The Satanic Verses: “The Fatwa and Its Aftermath,” by Ruvani Ranasinha, and “The Satanic Verses: ’To Be Born Again, First You Have to Die,’” by Joel Kuortti.
Harrison, James. Salman Rushdie. New York: Twayne, 1992. Provides a good general introduction to the author’s work. Includes biographical material, background on India, and chapters devoted to individual novels.
Hassumani, Sabrina. Salman Rushdie: A Postmodern Reading of His Major Works. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Presents a close reading of The Satanic Verses as well as analyses of four other of Rushdie’s major novels.
Kimmich, Matt. Offspring Fictions: Salman Rushdie’s Family Novels. New York: Rodopi, 2008. Examines the depiction of families and the parent-child relationship in The Satanic Verses and three other novels. Argues that Rushdie’s concepts of the family are variations on the ideas of Sigmund Freud; describes how his portrayals of children and parents reflect his concern with nationalism, religion, history, and authorship.
MacDonogh, Steve, ed. The Rushdie Letters: Freedom to Speak, Freedom to Write. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Collection features the letters written to Rushdie by twenty-seven prominent writers concerning the fatwa as well as essays by Rushdie and Tom Stoppard and Carmel Bedford’s compilation, “Fiction, Fact, and the Fatwa.”
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Offers several essays that deal specifically with The Satanic Verses and the fatwa.
Teverson, Andrew. Salman Rushdie. New York: Manchester University Press, 2007. Examines the intellectual, biographical, literary, and cultural contexts of Rushdie’s novels. One chapter is devoted to satire in The Satanic Verses.