The Satanic Verses

sand. As you climb you hear the desert doves calling your name, and the rocks greet you, too, in your own language, crying
Mahound, Mahound
. When you reach the cave you are tired, you lie down, you fall asleep.

    But when he has rested he enters a different sort of sleep, a sort of not-sleep, the condition that he calls his
listening
, and he feels a dragging pain in the gut, like something trying to be born, and now Gibreel, who has been hovering-above-looking-down, feels a confusion,
whom am I
, in these moments it begins to seem that the archangel is actually
inside the Prophet
, I am the dragging in the gut, I am the angel being extruded from the sleeper’s navel, I emerge, Gibreel Farishta, while my other self, Mahound, lies
listening
, entranced, I am bound to him, navel to navel, by a shining cord of light, not possible to say which of us is dreaming the other. We flow in both directions along the umbilical cord.
    Today, as well as the overwhelming intensity of Mahound, Gibreel feels his despair: his doubts. Also, that he is in great need, but Gibreel still doesn’t know his lines … he listens to the listening-which-is-also-an-asking. Mahound
asks
: They were shown miracles but they didn’t believe. They saw you come to me, in full view of the city, and open my breast, they saw you wash my heart in the waters of Zamzam and replace it inside my body. Many of them saw this, but still they worship stones. And when you came at night and flew me to Jerusalem and I hovered abovethe holy city, didn’t I return and describe it exactly as it is, accurate down to the last detail? So that there could be no doubting the miracle, and still they went to Lat. Haven’t I already done my best to make things simple for them? When you carried me up to the Throne itself, and Allah laid upon the faithful the great burden of forty prayers a day. On the return journey I met Moses and he said, the burden is too heavy, go back and plead for less. Four times I went back, four times Moses said, still too many, go back again. But by the fourth time Allah had reduced the duty to five prayers and I refused to return. I felt ashamed to beg any more. In his bounty he asks for five instead of forty, and still they love Manat, they want Uzza. What can I do? What shall I recite?
    Gibreel remains silent, empty of answers, for Pete’s sake, bhai, don’t go asking me. Mahound’s anguish is awful. He
asks
: is it possible that they
are
angels? Lat, Manat, Uzza … can I call them angelic? Gibreel, have you got sisters? Are these the daughters of God? And he castigates himself, O my vanity, I am an arrogant man, is this weakness, is it just a dream of power? Must I betray myself for a seat on the council? Is this sensible and wise or is it hollow and self-loving? I don’t even know if the Grandee is sincere. Does he know? Perhaps not even he. I am weak and he’s strong, the offer gives him many ways of ruining me. But I, too, have much to gain. The souls of the city, of the world, surely they are worth three angels? Is Allah so unbending that he will not embrace three more to save the human race? – I don’t know anything. – Should God be proud or humble, majestic or simple, yielding or un-?
What kind of idea is he? What kind am I
?

    Halfway into sleep, or halfway back to wakefulness, Gibreel Farishta is often filled with resentment by the non-appearance, in his persecuting visions, of the One who is supposed to have the answers,
He
never turns up, the one who kept away when I was dying, when I needed needed him. The one it’s all about, Allah Ishvar God. Absent as ever while we writhe and suffer in his name.
    The Supreme Being keeps away; what keeps returning is this scene, the entranced Prophet, the extrusion, the cord of light, and then Gibreel in his dual role is both above-looking-down and below-staring-up. And both of them scared out of their minds by the transcendence of it. Gibreel feels paralysed by the presence of the Prophet, by his greatness, thinks I can’t make a sound I’d seem such a goddamn fool. Hamza’s advice: never show your fear: archangels need such advice as well as water-carriers. An archangel must look composed, what would the Prophet think if God’s Exalted began to gibber with stage fright?
    It happens: revelation. Like this: Mahound, still in his notsleep, becomes rigid, veins bulge in his neck, he clutches at his centre. No, no, nothing like an epileptic fit, it can’t be explained away that