The Unknown Satanic Verses Controversy on Race and Religion. Üner Daglier

      

      As stated before, chapter I.4 also included Rushdie’s attack against Western irrationalism and religious bigotry, with particular reference to American Christianity. Although Rushdie’s primary Western target in The Satanic Verses was racism and xenophobia in England, or a variety of social conservatism, in chapter I.4 he launched a mini frontal-attack on American Christianity through his depiction of Saladin’s seat neighbor Eugene Dumsday, a ridiculous American evangelist, who was leaving India, where he had campaigned against Charles Darwin and evolutionism. Dumsday wore a neon-green shirt with luminous golden dragons, and he had huge red hands and the voice of an innocent ox. According to Dumsday, the belief that humans evolved from a chimpanzee had depressed American youth and made them turn to drugs and premarital sex. Saladin mused, in India, a nation of passionate believers, Dumsday’s case against science as God’s adversary was bound to be quite appealing, but the American had failed to connect with his audience. And in the aftermath, he had been solicited by drug dealers, an incident that struck Saladin as the revenge of Darwin. However, Rushdie concocted an even worse revenge for this ridiculous American religious fundamentalist. Somewhat accidentally, Tavleen cut his tongue off.¹⁷

      Chapter I.4 ended with the trials and tribulations of prophetic lives, most notably including Tavleen and Gibreel. In the 110th day of the hijack, just before takeoff from Al-Zamzam, Tavleen sacrificed a cut-sird, meaning a Sikh who had abandoned the turban and cut his hair, or a religious renegade. The hijackers had already released all but fifty passengers, including women, children, Sikhs, Saladin’s fellow actors, and eventually Dumsday who complained too much. Then, traveling incognito and in need of company, Gibreel took Dumsday’s former seat next to Saladin. Saladin noticed Gibreel’s remarkably bad breath and painstaking efforts to stay awake, among other things by studying Dumsday’s pamphlet on contemporary academic attempts to reconcile science and religion. Dumsday had written that dry scientific characterizations were no match for the old-fashioned notion of a Supreme Creator. Finally, Gibreel fell asleep, woke up after four days, and urinated for eleven minutes. Saladin learned, Gibreel shunned sleep to escape dreams that had begun the very night he had eaten pork and always continued from where they had last stopped. In these dreams, which exacted a heavy toll on his nerves, Gibreel consistently embodied God’s archangel Gibreel. Avowedly, he was not acting. He was truly and unmistakably embodying Gibreel, the very archangel. Saladin took these confessions for egomania, although Gibreel was genuinely disturbed. Meanwhile, in the desert heat and feeling abandoned, some of the other passengers were seeing and hearing specters outside. In time, as was befitting a prophetic leader, Gibreel animatedly lectured his co-hostages on reincarnation, death, and rebirth, and likened their captivity to a process of regeneration: the day of their release would be the day of their rebirth. Thereby, he became a source of both their annoyance and optimism. Privately, however, his highest thought and ultimate obsession remained a woman, albeit named Alleluia.

      NOTES

      1. As Bardolph (1994, 216) noted, these dreams do not purport to be truth and, therefore, should not be considered blasphemous. And Hussain (2002, 10) informed of the exalted status of dreams in the Islamic tradition, notwithstanding the subversive nature of The Satanic Verses’ dreams.

      2. Nietzsche was unacknowledged in the passage. Among the many comparable Nietzschean formulations in Thus Spoke Zarathustra was, “And whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative” (Nietzsche 1978 [1883–1891], 116).

      3. For Brennan (1989, 154), Gibreel and Saladin’s fall from the skies combined rebirth in the biblical tradition and the Hindu notion of reincarnation. Kimmich (2008, 166) evoked Miltonic fall.

      4. The Satanic Verses, hereafter referred to as SV.

      5. For the song and its origins in Indian film Shree 420, see Stadtler (2014, 89–93). Stadtler informed, Shree 420 was a film about journeying and identity in postcolonial India. For another study on Shree 420 and allusions to it in The Satanic Verses, see Aravamudan (1989, 6–10).

      6. Kuortti (2007, 132–33) argued, Saladin first realized his becoming hybrid during his celestial fall, and his demonic turn afterward suggested a link between blasphemy and identity construction.

      7. For Saladin and demonic possession during the fall, see Clark (2000, 145). Demon-possessed Saladin’s order to angel Gibreel to fly and sing and the latter’s subservience marked a shift in the cosmic order: “Satan usurps God’s position in the cosmic chain of command.”

      8. Brennan (1989, 153) informed, in Indian cinema the theological genre was actually called “mythologicals.” He added, the Gibreel character was inspired by actor Amitabh Bachan, who had fallen ill and been visited in hospital by Indira Gandhi. Aravamudan (1989, 10) claimed, Gibreel was a composite of N. T. Rama Rao and Amitabh Bachan.

      9. For a similar view, see Brennan (1989, 127).

      10. In the ultimate chapter of the novel, Changez will be strictly presented as a secular.

      11. According to Goontellike (1998, 73), Changez’s conflict with his son paralleled Salman Rushdie’s conflict with his father.

      12. Clark (2000, 148) informed, Salahuddin was “the romanticized enemy of Richard the Lionheart in the Crusades.”

      13. Ruthven (1990, 21) observed a broad parallel between Pamela and Salman Rushdie’s first wife Clarissa Luard; also see Kortenaar (2008, 344). Sanga (2001, 34) informed of Rushdie’s possible debt to Frantz Fanon’s discussion of being loved by a white woman as an assumed strategy for becoming white for the colonial man. In this context, Kuortti (2007, 131) reminded of “the worst fears of colonialists: the native violating a woman.” Also see Fanon’s (2008 [1952]) Black Skin, White Masks.

      14. The novel’s hijacking incident was based on a real event, or the explosion of an Air India Boeing 747 off Ireland by Sikh terrorists in 1985. See Goontelllleke (1998, 74) and Fischer and Abedi (1990, 136).

      15. As Afzal-Khan (1993, 172) noted, the novel suggested that those who were flexible survived. And according to Cavanaugh (2004, 398), Tavleen’s core flaw was lack of mercy.

      16. For a broad literature review of feminist critics of Rushdie’s alleged feminism in The Satanic Verses, see note 9 in the conclusion.

      17. Brennan (1989, 162) pointed out, the Dumsday character was a device to show the backwardness of the West.

Part II

       Mahound

      The second part of the novel, in a single chapter, critiqued the foundations of Islam, through a reinterpretation of the satanic verses incident, which was recorded in some traditional Islamic histories.¹ In these traditional histories, later in time deemed heterodox, the apparent goal was not to discredit the Islamic prophet but to chronicle a human journey, in which he gradually unraveled satanic deception. Rushdie however, like contemporary orthodox Islamic scholarship that sought to suppress the memory of the satanic verses incident, saw an opportunity to cast doubt on the authenticity of the Islamic revelation and subtly reject its divine origin. Nevertheless, some critics have argued that Rushdie’s goal, like traditional chroniclers of the incident, was to humanize the Islamic prophet, as a fallible person in triumphal pursuit of moral truth. This was not altogether implausible because Rushdie’s alleged attempt to reform Islam, as a practical response to social needs, and his existential challenge to it, as an intellectual statement with an eye to the long-term development of humanity, were not mutually exclusive.

      For all the hostility against Rushdie’s fictional take on the Islamic religion’s foundations and Muhammad, part II provided a serious and remarkably well-written account of the times, circumstances, and personages surrounding the birth of a great world religion. Thus far, however, largely passed unnoticed in academic circles and public debate, throughout part II Rushdie consistently characterized the Islamic religion as misogynistic to the core. Yet this