Modern Mind

teeming, tumbling narrative, juxtaposing day-to-day politics and private obsessions (one figure works on a documentary about life in a pickle factory), all intertwined with ever more fabulous metaphors and jokes and language constructions. The best and most terrible joke comes in the central scene where the two main characters discover that they have been swapped as babies. Rushdie is challenging the meaning of the most basic ideas – innocence, enchantment, nation, self, community. And, in so doing, independence. All this is done with an ‘elephantiasis’ of style that emulates the Indian oral storytellers of old, yet is as modern as it is reminiscent of Günther Grass and Gabriel García Márquez.
Midnight’s Children
is neither eastern nor western. That is the point, and the measure of its success. 25
    The theme of
The Satanic Verses
is migration, emigration, and the loss of faith it often brings about in the emigrant/immigrant. 26 Faith, its loss, and the relation of faith to the secular life, the hole – the ‘God-shaped hole’ – at the centre of the once-faithful person, is the issue that, Rushdie has admitted, underpins the book. 27 He deals with the issue also in a fabulous way. The book begins when two Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, formerly Salahuddin Chamchawal, fall to earth after an Air India jumbo jet explodes 30,000 feet above the English Channel. This naturally evokes the memory of an actual explosion, of an Air India Boeing 747 off Ireland in 1985, blown up, it is believed, by Sikh terrorists in Canada. 28 Farishta is the star of several Bombay ‘theological’ films and is so popular that for many an Indian he
is
divine. Saladin, on the other hand, is an Anglophile who has rejected India and lives in Britain doing voiceovers for television commercials, ‘impersonatingpackets of crisps, frozen peas, Ketchup bottles.’ 29 These two fall to earth in the company of airplane seats, drink carts, headsets, but land safely enough on a British beach. From then on, the book follows a series of interwoven plots, each more fantastic than the last. These episodes are never out of control, however, and Rushdie’s references make the book very rich for those who can decipher them. For example, Gibreel Farishta, in Urdu, means Gabriel Angel, making him in effect the archangel whom Islamic tradition regards as ‘“bringing down” the Qur’an from God to Muhammad.’ Saladin was also the great defender of mediaeval Islam against the Crusaders, who restored Sunni Islam to Egypt. Gibreel, learning Islam from his mother, encounters the notion of the Satanic Verses, in which the devil is understood to have inserted a sentence in the Qur’an, later withdrawn, but which nonetheless insinuates a sliver of religious doubt. Religious doubt, then, is at the very heart of Rushdie’s book. One may even say that it plays with the very idea of the devil, of the secular
being
the devil, certainly so far as the faithful are concerned. Essentially, throughout the interlocking narratives, Saladin is a sort of Iago to Gibreel’s Othello, ‘using the thousand and one voices of his advertising days.’ Under this onslaught, Gibreel is led astray, notably to a brothel, the ‘anti-Mosque’ in Malise Ruthven’s apt phrase, falling among people who blaspheme, not just in swear-words but in their criticisms of the Prophet’s actual behaviour (for example, Muhammad had more wives than strict Islamic law allowed). At every opportunity, therefore,
The Satanic Verses
skirts danger. It is certainly a challenging book. But can a book that explores blasphemy actually pursue that theme without
being
blasphemous? In exploring faith, Rushdie knew he had to deliberately provoke the faithful. At one point in the book, the Prophet issues a
fatwa
against an impious poet. 30
    Perhaps it was this above all which provoked the Islamic authorities. On 14 February 1989, Ruhollah Al-Musavi Al-Khomeini – better known as Ayatollah Khomeini, of Iran – issued a
fatwa
against the ‘apostasian’ book
Satanic Verses:
‘In the name of God Almighty; there is only one God, to whom we shall all return; I would like to inform all the intrepid Muslims in the world that the author of the book entitled
The Satanic Verses
which has been compiled, printed and published against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, as well as those publishers who were aware of its contents, have been sentenced to death. I call on all zealous