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

As such, leading prophetic visionaries in the novel were more often cynically false or mentally deluded but, in one way or another, struck audiences as factually credible. At the least, there was always a special occasion to contradict their otherwise obvious disingenuousness.

      Paradoxically, as Rushdie by and large sought to demystify supernatural beliefs and traditions and, thereby, undo religious dogmatism in The Satanic Verses, he advanced the novel’s very worldly concern with immigrant woes and racism in England with a mystical plot that made heavy use of supernatural tricks, or miracles and the like.²³ The prophet of English racism and his trademark verses in the novel were possibly chosen somewhat randomly, but nevertheless there were repeated allusions to former Tory politician Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech, in which he had powerfully decried postcolonial immigration to Great Britain and called for urgent repatriation.²⁴ “It led to him being sacked from the shadow cabinet, ending his hopes of a post in a future Conservative government. However, thousands of workers staged strikes and marches in support of his views and he was inundated with letters from well wishers” (BBC (n.d.)).²⁵

      Again paradoxically, this aspect of The Satanic Verses, or its case against racism, xenophobia, and bigotry, has by and large been hidden from public view, due to the influence of the very postcolonial immigrants whose cause Rushdie sought to champion.²⁶

      Public protests by Islamic immigrants against The Satanic Verses which initially developed with book burning in Bradford, England, and led to convulsions in Islamic countries worldwide and Ayatollah Khomeini’s notorious fatwa against its author, calling for his death, eliminated the chances for a wholesome understanding of the novel, at least in the short-term. Reputedly, The Satanic Verses survived as a much talked about but mostly unread book, barring few photocopied passages that were distributed by religious interests to bolster rage.²⁷ More often than not, hostile critics, including Muslim immigrants in the European diaspora, claimed to have not read it and, in fact, having not read it at all was a source of pride to them.²⁸ For its supporters too, just to buy the novel, as distinct from reading it, largely sufficed, as it was supposedly unreadable.²⁹ And unfortunately, politicization of the debate from early on had a narrowing influence on scholarship too. An overwhelming portion of early studies on The Satanic Verses were enquiries as to whether it was insulting to Islam, Muhammad, or Muslims, and concomitantly, whether it should have been banned from publication.³⁰ In Kimmich’s (2008, 141) words, this was “a discussion which largely focused on the allegations of blasphemy and on ideological issues such as freedom of speech, but which, more often than not, gave the literary dimension of the work itself rather short shrift.”³¹ Remarkably, some academic critics went so far as to suggest that The Satanic Verses could not have been interpreted at all without regard to the public controversy it generated.³²

      

      Fortunately, it would not be reasonable anymore to talk of a dearth of insightful studies on the text of The Satanic Verses. In hindsight, the public controversy around it must have been a blessing. For without it, given its limited artistic appeal, The Satanic Verses could have remained in an eternal state of neglect and obscurity. Even so, untranslated and banned, its impact on Islamic societies throughout the world has thus far been infinitesimal. Therefore, Brennan (1989, 165) characterized Rushdie as a novelist with next to no influence on the third world, as someone whose audience was “the cloistered West and its book market.” However, a more accurate judgment on Rushdie’s potential religiopolitical impact should necessarily have to take strict limits against free expression in contemporary Islamic societies into account and compare English, Rushdie’s literary medium, to Greek and Latin in the Middle Ages, as a secluded language of higher learning and philosophy. Such a view would certainly be in accord with Rushdie’s coded disclosure of his proposal for reform, most probably targeting an elite audience rather than the public at-large and, thereby, hoping to generate trickle-down change for unsuspecting and unresisting throngs of Islamic believers. Indeed despite Rushdie’s shattering take on the founding and founders of Islam, The Satanic Verses has repeatedly been described as an Islamic or deeply Islamic novel,³³ a representative of Islamic secularism,³⁴ an agent of Islamic reform or modernization,³⁵ and an example of historically tolerant Islamic traditions.³⁶

      In sum, The Satanic Verses was a novel of eclectic concerns. It has often been characterized as primarily about migration, with Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina—a symbolic moment that marked the beginning of the Islamic calendar, justifying his inclusion in the novel’s migrant fold. Yet to the extent that The Satanic Verses was also about religious beliefs, as it undeniably was, a rich variety of academic scholars have acknowledged it to be about both Islam and white racism, or about two separate dogmatisms, worldly and otherworldly.

      With regards to the most appropriate methodology for interpreting The Satanic Verses, scholars have pointed at the problems associated with an analytical breakdown: either such a comprehensive analytical argument was utterly implausible or, inevitably, it came at the cost of gross omissions, given the multilayered and ambivalent nature of the work, its multivocal and multifocal narration, and its nonlinear development.³⁷ Brad Leithauser (1989, 127) wrote, The Satanic Verses “is so dense a layering of dreams and hallucinations that any attempt to extract an unalloyed line of argument is false to its intention.” And Clark (2000, 131) related the novel’s epistemic ambivalence to the confusion over its narrator’s identity: “This indeterminacy might also apply to the satanic narrator’s mode of operation, for he moves in and out of the text in order to insinuate that there is no such thing as a single, transcendental Meaning and Unity, no Ideal toward which all beings can aspire.”³⁸ By the same token, when it came to The Satanic Verses’ occupation with religious dogma and supernaturalism, whether in the context of its critical treatment of religious phenomena or magical realist take on race and migration in England, nearly each and every scene was open to contradictory interpretations. Hence both the chaotic organizational structure of The Satanic Verses and its almost total ambivalence on the nature of supernatural phenomena ruled out an analytical interpretation of its treatment of religion or dogmatism in this study and, instead, called for a chapter-by-chapter approach, which was bound to be comprehensive but uneconomical. This is not meant to suggest, no extensive argument could be derived of the novel, but one had to be aware of limitations that imposed moderation. As Bardolph (1994, 215–17) forewarned, The Satanic Verses’ “coherence is provided by analogy,” and it therefore demanded active reader participation and “an alert eye to the presence of oblique meanings.”

      The present monograph has been unique in its attempt to interpret The Satanic Verses through detailed attention to the entirety of its text. Indeed each of its nine parts has exactly corresponded to the parts of the novel, which in total critically examined nineteen chapters, in their original order. And it has separately concluded with a discussion of the comparative linkages between different parts and characters of the novel that, in any case, have been less systematically brought up throughout the analysis until then.

      Due to expressions of Salman Rushdie’s impressively rich cultural background in The Satanic Verses, its challenging thematic diversity, intentionally cultivated epistemic ambiguities, and tricky structure, the nine parts of the present monograph that constitute its body necessarily aspired to bring forward textual intricacies and other relevant details for a better understanding of the novel that could not be suitably included elsewhere.

      And all said, textual analysis in the present monograph began with a look at The Satanic Verses’ epigraph, a short passage taken from Daniel Defoe’s (1819 [1726]) The Political History of the Devil, which signaled the novel’s ambition to unite notions of rebirth, immigration, and blasphemy, by reminding that Satan was a wanderer.

      In due order, part I of The Satanic Verses was titled The Angel Gibreel, and it was devoted to the novel’s two protagonists, Gibreel and Saladin. They were two wealthy Bombayites with distinctly contrasting characters and Islamic roots. Their concurrent passage to London was not strictly treated as a secular story line with racial and cultural undertones. Instead, as the very nature of migration corresponded to cultural and psychological rebirth, they were related to the novel’s other main characters, both worldly and spiritual, who were in pursuit of rebirth, renewal, or a new