Verses Satanic, Verses Tragic

The Satanic Verses (1988 ) did not encourage me to believe in an all-powerful, all-merciful God, but there were many times when reading it, when I was said to myself, 'Lord, when is this book going to end?' It was a slog to read, and even before the end I knew it was a disappointment. The book has become a tragedy of monumental proportions, when in reality it never deserved such a reputation.

That said, Salman Rushdie is a brilliant writer (I lived near him in Kentish Town in the 1970s), if you like that kind of style where the author repeatedly interposes himself between you and his made-up story. He does conjure up a world which is real and not real at the same time, but in my view fails to shift boundaries of time and place with the subtlety of Conrad, one of Rushdie's literary 'heroes'. Most problematic, he has put a post-modern spin on religion in which the act of writing is simultaneously pure and perverse, raising questions about the authenticity of 'the Text', and in lighting on a controversy in the history and theology of Islam most Muslims are/were unaware of (in the late 1980s). And he sparked off a sequence of outrageous events that have led to him being stabbed in New York, not as gargantuan a failure of religion as 9/11, but still a failure. Rushdie is alive, not dead. His book will be read by more people now than was true of the last 10 years, the commitment we must make to Free Speech even stronger, in a world -and for that matter the USA- where religious people seem determined to choose the books they want our children to read, and ban the rest.

There are so many ways of approaching this.

The first would be to point out that in Islam a 'fatwa' is an opinion not an instruction, so the language Ayatollah Khomeini used in 1989 underlines the extent to which he misrepresented his own religion for political purposes, something he had been doing his entire life, and a distortion of Islam which continues to undermine Iran as a country, and its religion along with it. Plenty of Muslims have either denounced the Fatwa or just sought to ignore it, as indeed did Iran some years ago, as if embarrassed by Khomeini but unable to say so explicitly.

Second, at the time I was if not astonished, dismayed by those supposedly intelligent people, some but not all Muslims, who cherry-picked their way through The Satanic Verses for the simple reason they couldn't be bothered to read all of it, but in doing so, failed to understand - or refused in this unique case- to understand Satire as a literary tool, and condemned the book for its alleged intolerance, merely exposing their own. But these are people who at one time were happy to ban books whether it was in the US, or the UK, a dismal history that only makes freedom of expression a convenience rather than a right.

Last, I think Rushdie's treatment of women in The Satanic Verses is problematic, from the Bengali girls in East London with 'stiff nipples' to the White girlfriend who is also an alcoholic, or the holy Muslim savant in Titlipur who leads her villagers on a Pilgrimage to Mecca, on the way enduring the kind of violence and abuse that Muslims in India today are being subjected to by citizen and State.

Links-
An Indian view of the 'Fatwa'-
What is a fatwa, and who is it for? | Explained News,The Indian Express

A review of the book which emphasizes its shifts between dreams and reality-
Book review: “The Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie | Patrick T Reardon | Writer, Essayist, Poet, Chicago Historian

A useful retrospective with regard to Geoffrey Robertson's rebuttal of claims made about the book-
Looking back at Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses | Salman Rushdie | The Guardian