ABSTRACT
It is now more than 20 years since the fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, transmitted globally from Tehran, was pronounced by the Ayatollah Khomeini. The Satanic Verses, the book that evoked the wrath of the Ayatollah, was written by an Indian-born Pakistani postcolonial novelist; a Cambridge graduate living in London and writing in English. The book was an open and explicit attack on all ‘fundamentalist’ pretences to purity, whether Islamic, Hindu or neoliberal, and it responded to the threat posed by the Iranian Islamic revolution, President Zia’s Islamizing military dictatorship in Pakistan, the rise of the Hindu nationalist Right in India and the emergence of Thatcherite Britain with its doctrinaire neoliberal philosophy. Against all those ‘pure’ fundamentalisms, the book extolled an ‘impure’ culture and religion imbued with popular and global aesthetics: of poetry, music, cinema, art. It portrayed an alternative society – a multicultural Britain, a tolerant peaceful India, an open, universal Sufi Islam. Its very language was hybrid – English mixed with Urdu words and expressions – and one of its anti-heroes, Gabriel, was a famous Indian cinema actor in religious ‘mythologicals’. In the novel, the Prophet Muhammad was depicted as a poet in spite of himself. But, as many scholars recognize (e.g. Fischer and Abedi 1990, see Werbner 2002), to understand the book’s message a reader would have to be familiar with the central paradigmatic myths and intellectual writings of a wide range of intellectual traditions: the Koran, the Hindu Mahabarata, Gramsci, Fanon, Blake, Shakespeare, Persian satirical poetry. Whatever the novelist’s intentions, this very diversity of mythological and epic sources makes it inaccessible to Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The world-embracing fusion of Indian, Islamic and English literary epic traditions allegorized in The Satanic Verses is lost, in other words, on most readers. Diaspora South Asian Muslims – and indeed Muslims worldwide – could not be blamed thus for thinking that The Satanic Verses was a deliberate, iconoclastic, 108offensive, even blasphemous vilification of the Prophet of Islam, the ‘Perfect Man’ of Sufi tradition.
