The Satanic Verses

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The author covers a great many themes that are all woven together into a loose garment that will probably fit any theory you happen to have. We're presented with issues of religion (mainly Hindu and Muslim) of identity (mainly Indian and British) of diasporas, integration, intolerance, tolerance, faith, friendship, relationships, family... it goes on. So there I was, actually writing the Book, or rewriting, anyway, polluting the word of God with my own profane language. But good heavens, if my poor words could not be distinguished from the Revelation of God’s own Messenger, then what did that mean? Rushdie expressed relief at the assurances offered by Khatami’s government, and said he had no regrets over his book, even after spending a decade in hiding. Harold Bloom (2003). Introduction to Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Salman Rushdie. Chelsea House Publishers. Salman Rushdie: Author on ventilator and unable to speak, agent says". BBC News. 13 August 2022. Archived from the original on 13 August 2022 . Retrieved 13 August 2022.

Then of course there is the notorious section where the sex workers in the largest brothel in Jahilia pretend for their clients’ amusement to be the wives of Mahound. They are fooling around and being deliberately offensive, and gradually they take on the characters of Mahound’s wives. This is the section which earned Rushdie the famous fatwa but it is by no means the only part which might strike a Muslim as blasphemous. The scribe Salman (hmmm, same name as our author) gets the job of writing down Mahound’s words and frankly he gets fed up of it: A bit of a cliché, I know. But one can’t avoid the reality of what this says. Are your ideas your own, or were they placed there by society? Creativity, originality, uniqueness these things are being suppressed by a society that calls for conformity, for belongingness. What kind of idea will you be? In 1997, a reformist Iranian president, Sayyid Mohammad Khatami, took office and began signalling that he would no longer actively seek to execute the fatwa on Rushdie, or encourage anyone to kill him, as part of an opening to the west and a restoration of diplomatic relations with Britain. In 2021, the BBC broadcast a two-hour documentary by Mobeen Azhar and Chloe Hadjimatheou, interviewing many of the principal denouncers and defenders of the book from 1988–1989, concluding that campaigns against the book were amplified by minority (racial and religious) politics in England and other countries. [21]Salman Rushdie: Satanic Verses 'would not be published today' ". BBC News. BBC. 17 September 2012 . Retrieved 17 September 2012.

He's been married four times. I'm cool with that... I live in the U.S. so I know that judging someone for that it wrong. That must sting Rushdie's massive ego a bit. Maybe he just doesn’t care. A few parting shots: A] torrent of endlessly inventive prose, by turns comic and enraged, embracing life in all its contradictions.In this spectacular novel, verbal pyrotechnics barely outshine its psychological truths.” — Newsday A whole lot of this book is taken up with a detailed sequence of dream-narratives that dispense with the dream framework and become a comic-ironic history of the life of a religious leader who is never called Mohammed but referred to as either The Prophet or as Mahound, an insulting medieval name for Mohammed. (It came from the French Mahun which was a contraction of Mahomet. Well, so the internet tells me.) So we get the twisty tale of how Mahound eventually got rid of the polytheism of the city of Jahilia and how Islam, here called Submission, became accepted as the true religion. Well, what could possibly be offensive about that, since that is what actually happened? Only everything. Exhilarating, populous, loquacious, sometimes hilarious, extraordinary . . .a roller-coaster ride over a vast landscape of the imagination.” — The Guardian (London)

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My most recent reading of Salmon Rushdie's The Satanic Verses was for a book club while I was living in Morocco. This made me very sensitive to the book's perceived insult against Islam as well as the ensuing outrage. Still, as I read it, the novel felt like it was much more about the immigrant experience and transformation than it was about the infamous and frequently referenced Satanic Verses passage.

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] A third dream sequence presents the figure of a fanatic expatriate religious leader, the "Imam", in a late-20th-century setting (satirizing Khomeini himself). [9] Literary criticism and analysis [ edit ]Embedded in this story is a series of half-magic dream vision narratives, ascribed to the mind of Farishta. He had just finished his thirty-fourth reading of the play. The unsaid hate, the unseen events, the half-imagined wrongs; they tormented him. What could cause such evil to manifest, he just could not figure. He loved him too much to believe the simple explanation. The Prophet Muhammed is called 'Mahound', an alternative name for Muhammed sometimes used during the Middle Ages by Christians who considered him a devil.