The Satanic Verses

something in common. We are both afraid of him.’
    ‘I know you,’ Baal said.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘The way you speak. You’re a foreigner.’
    ‘ “A revolution of water-carriers, immigrants and slaves,” ’ the stranger quoted. ‘Your words.’
    ‘You’re the immigrant,’ Baal remarked. ‘The Persian. Sulaiman.’ The Persian smiled his crooked smile. ‘Salman,’ he corrected. ‘Not wise, but peaceful.’
    ‘You were one of the closest to him,’ Baal said, perplexed.
    ‘The closer you are to a conjurer,’ Salman bitterly replied, ‘the easier to spot the trick.’
    And Gibreel dreamed this:
    At the oasis of Yathrib the followers of the new faith of Submission found themselves landless, and therefore poor. For many years they financed themselves by acts of brigandage, attacking the rich camel-trains on their way to and from Jahilia. Mahound had no time for scruples, Salman told Baal, no qualms about ends andmeans. The faithful lived by lawlessness, but in those years Mahound – or should one say the Archangel Gibreel? – should one say Al-Lah? – became obsessed by law. Amid the palm-trees of the oasis Gibreel appeared to the Prophet and found himself spouting rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelation, Salman said, rules about every damn thing, if a man farts let him turn his face to the wind, a rule about which hand to use for the purpose of cleaning one’s behind. It was as if no aspect of human existence was to be left unregulated, free. The revelation – the
recitation –
told the faithful how much to eat, how deeply they should sleep, and which sexual positions had received divine sanction, so that they learned that sodomy and the missionary position were approved of by the archangel, whereas the forbidden postures included all those in which the female was on top. Gibreel further listed the permitted and forbidden subjects of conversation, and earmarked the parts of the body which could not be scratched no matter how unbearably they might itch. He vetoed the consumption of prawns, those bizarre other-worldly creatures which no member of the faithful had ever seen, and required animals to be killed slowly, by bleeding, so that by experiencing their deaths to the full they might arrive at an understanding of the meaning of their lives, for it is only at the moment of death that living creatures understand that life has been real, and not a sort of dream. And Gibreel the archangel specified the manner in which a man should be buried, and how his property should be divided, so that Salman the Persian got to wondering what manner of God this was that sounded so much like a businessman. This was when he had the idea that destroyed his faith, because he recalled that of course Mahound himself had been a businessman, and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom organization and rules came naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should have come up with such a very businesslike archangel, who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if non-corporeal, God.
    After that Salman began to notice how useful and well timedthe angel’s revelations tended to be, so that when the faithful were disputing Mahound’s views on any subject, from the possibility of space travel to the permanence of Hell, the angel would turn up with an answer, and he always supported Mahound, stating beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was impossible that a man should ever walk upon the moon, and being equally positive on the transient nature of damnation: even the most evil of doers would eventually be cleansed by hellfire and find their way into the perfumed gardens, Gulistan and Bostan. It would have been different, Salman complained to Baal, if Mahound took up his positions after receiving the revelation from Gibreel; but no, he just laid down the law and the angel would confirm it afterwards; so I began to get a bad smell in my nose, and I thought, this must be the odour of those fabled and legendary unclean creatures, what’s their name, prawns.
    The fishy smell began to obsess Salman, who was the most highly educated of Mahound’s intimates owing to the superior educational system then on offer in Persia. On account of his scholastic advancement Salman was made Mahound’s official scribe, so that it fell to him to write down the endlessly proliferating rules. All those revelations of convenience, he told Baal, and the