The Satanic Verses

physically fit as I am and four times as knowledgeable, minimum, we may both have taught ourselves by listening a lot but as is plaintosee he’s even a better listener than me; so we roll kick scratch, he’s getting cut up quite a bit but of course my skin stays smooth as a baby, you can’t snag an angel on a bloody thorn-bush, you can’t bruise him on a rock. And they have an audience, there are djinns and afreets and all sorts of spooks sitting on the boulders to watch the fight, and in the sky are the three winged creatures, looking like herons or swans or just women depending on the tricks of the light … Mahound finishes it. He throws the fight.
    After they had wrestled for hours or even weeks Mahound was pinned down beneath the angel, it’s what he wanted, it was his will filling me up and giving me the strength to hold him down, because archangels can’t lose such fights, it wouldn’t be right, it’s only devils who get beaten in such circs, so the moment I got on top he started weeping for joy and then he did his old trick, forcing my mouth open and making the voice, the Voice, pour out of me once again, made it pour all over him, like sick.

    At the end of his wrestling match with the Archangel Gibreel, the Prophet Mahound falls into his customary, exhausted, post-revelatory sleep, but on this occasion he revives more quickly than usual. When he comes to his senses in that high wilderness there is nobody to be seen, no winged creatures crouch on rocks, and he jumps to his feet, filled with the urgency of his news. ‘It was the Devil,’ he says aloud to the empty air, making it true by giving itvoice. ‘The last time, it was Shaitan.’ This is what he has
heard
in his
listening
, that he has been tricked, that the Devil came to him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorized, the ones he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing but its diabolic opposite, not godly, but satanic. He returns to the city as quickly as he can, to expunge the foul verses that reek of brimstone and sulphur, to strike them from the record for ever and ever, so that they will survive in just one or two unreliable collections of old traditions and orthodox interpreters will try and unwrite their story, but Gibreel, hovering-watching from his highest camera angle, knows one small detail, just one tiny thing that’s a bit of a problem here, namely that
it was me both times, baba, me first and second also me
. From my mouth, both the statement and the repudiation, verses and converses, universes and reverses, the whole thing, and we all know how my mouth got worked.
    ‘First it was the Devil,’ Mahound mutters as he rushes to Jahilia. ‘But this time, the angel, no question. He wrestled me to the ground.’

    The disciples stop him in the ravines near the foot of Mount Cone to warn him of the fury of Hind, who is wearing white mourning garments and has loosened her black hair, letting it fly about her like a storm, or trail in the dust, erasing her footsteps so that she seems like an incarnation of the spirit of vengeance itself. They have all fled the city, and Hamza, too, is lying low; but the word is that Abu Simbel has not, as yet, acceded to his wife’s pleas for the blood that washes away blood. He is still calculating the odds in the matter of Mahound and the goddesses … Mahound, against his followers’ advice, returns to Jahilia, going straight to the House of the Black Stone. The disciples follow him in spite of their fear. A crowd gathers in the hope of further scandal or dismemberment or some such entertainment. Mahound does not disappoint them.
    He stands in front of the statues of the Three and announces theabrogation of the verses which Shaitan whispered in his ear. These verses are banished from the true recitation,
al-qur’an
. New verses are thundered in their place.
    ‘Shall He have daughters and you sons?’ Mahound recites. ‘That would be a fine division!
    ‘These are but names you have dreamed of, you and your fathers. Allah vests no authority in them.’
    He leaves the dumbfounded House before it occurs to anybody to pick up, or throw, the first stone.

    After the repudiation of the Satanic verses, the Prophet Mahound returns home to find a kind of punishment awaiting him. A kind of vengeance – whose? Light or dark? Goodguy badguy? – wrought, as is not unusual, upon the innocent. The Prophet’s wife, seventy years old, sits by the foot of a stone-latticed