The Satanic Verses

Product Information

Weatherby, W. J. Salman Rushdie: Sentenced to Death. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers Inc., 1990, p. 126.

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. For most of the book I was engaged almost entirely through intellectual curiosity and morbid fascination. I didn't particularly like the characters, I wasn't emotionally bound to them. It's not that kind of book. For many Muslims, Rushdie, in his fictional retelling of the birth of Islam’s key events, implies that, rather than God, the Prophet Muhammed is himself the source of revealed truths. Society was orchestrated by what she called ‘grand narratives’: history, economics, ethics. In India, the development of a corrupt and closed state apparatus had ‘excluded the masses of the people from the ethical project’. As a result, they sought ethical satisfactions in the oldest of the grand narratives, that is, religious faith. But these narratives are being manipulated by the theocracy and various political elements in an entirely retrogressive way.”Rushdie is a storyteller of prodigious powers, able to conjure up wholegeographies, causalities, climates, creatures, customs, out of thin air.” — The New York Times Book Review If I see one comment about how I shouldn't like this book as a Muslim, or people complementing me for standing up to my faith or some nonsense like that, I AM GOING TO LOOSE IT!!! The controversy from the writing is in Girbreel's dream sequences are the strong references to Islam: The Satanic Verses: 30 Years On review – what an astonishing fallout". the Guardian. 27 February 2019 . Retrieved 11 November 2022.

One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil. This is just the initial act in a magnificent odyssey that seamlessly merges the actual with the imagined. A book whose importance is eclipsed only by its quality, The Satanic Verses is a key work of our times. But towards the end the reunion of one character with a dying parent did hit me hard, and proved that if Rushdie wants to pull on your emotional strings, he knows how to do it. Rushdie’s works in general are masterpieces, and this one is one of those at the top, only behind “Midnight’s Children”. Hence, it should be thoroughly read an explored. Have fun!The rest of this review has very little to do with The Satanic Verses but it does have to do with Rushdie:

The above passage raises another big problem – who exactly is talking here? This narrator, is he actually The Devil as is implied early on? * Salman Rushdie is a storyteller of prodigious powers, able to conjure up whole geographies, causalities, climates, creatures, customs, out of thin air.” — The New York Times Book Review As an example of how detailed this gets, there’s a whole chapter about Mahound making a deal with the city boss to accept three of the female local gods into his religion in return for the city of Jahilia accepting him as The Prophet. The boss says you can’t just throw out all these three hundred gods, the people won’t stand for it. Well, says Mahound, how about if I say the people can keep these three gods but we’re gonna re-brand them as angels. Okay, says the city boss, that sounds like a deal. If you believe that Gabriel did not speak Allah's divine words to Mohammad, I bet you also don't think that Mohammad received false words from Satan, do you?From a readability standpoint, Salman Rushdie's writing is very disjointed, wordy, and scattered in thought. There were many times when I was lost and felt like giving up. The writing style was tedious because almost all of it mimics conversation. embodied an anger arising in part from the frustrations of the migrant experience and generally reflected failures of multicultural integration, both significant Rushdie themes. Clearly, Rushdie's interests centrally include explorations of how migration heightens one's awareness that perceptions of reality are relative and fragile, and of the nature of religious faith and revelation, not to mention the political manipulation of religion. Rushdie's own assumptions about the importance of literature parallel the literal value accorded the written word in Islamic tradition to some degree. But Rushdie seems to have assumed that diverse communities and cultures share some degree of common moral ground on the basis of which dialogue can be pieced together, and it is perhaps for this reason that he underestimated the implacable nature of the hostility evoked by The Satanic Verses, even though a major theme of that novel is the dangerous nature of closed, absolutist belief systems. [11] Both return to India. Farishta throws Allie off a high rise in another outbreak of jealousy and then dies by suicide. Chamcha, who has found not only forgiveness from Farishta but also reconciliation with his estranged father and his own Indian identity, decides to remain in India. One survivor takes on the attributes of the angel Gabriel, the other the devil Saladin and we follow their escapades, lives and loves and their reversion to more human form. The story is constantly interwoven with actual and imagined historical events. Another off-putting device is his making his two major characters famous actors. If each had had a less glamorous and different profession than the other it wouldn’t feel like he was just trying to get attention.