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

light, the postcolonial and cosmic politics of The Satanic Verses were in full accord, as they both rejected dogmatism and exclusionary paradigms.

      NOTES

      1. For The Satanic Verses as religious blasphemy and secular blasphemy, the latter corresponding to cultural heresy, see Suleri (1992, 189–94), Bhabha (1994, 225–26), and Sanga (2001, 7). In parallel, Kimmich (2008, 167) wrote, The Satanic Verses subverted dominant discourses on race and religion, and it was a blasphemous novel (ibid., 162). Said (1994, 260) wrote, The Satanic Verses “overturns not just religious orthodoxies, but national and cultural ones as well.” As such, what Rushdie did was to “speak out against power” (ibid., 261). Phillips (1989, 344) claimed, “There is no doubt that it is an attack on Islam. It is also not very friendly toward the social norms of the Thatcher government in Great Britain.” In contrast, Mazrui (1990, 133, 136–38) claimed, The Satanic Verses was racist hate literature against Muslims, comparable to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

      2. Accordingly, Brennan (1989, 146–47) characterized The Satanic Verses as a novel on both England and Muhammad. Ruthven’s (1990, 20) perspective bridged The Satanic Verses’ thematic divide by claiming that it presented religion as cultural baggage for immigrants.

      3. See Fisher and Abedi (1990, 108) and Werber (1996, 55), who considered The Satanic Verses’ publication “a historic ‘event.’”

      4. See Morton (2008, 80) and Easterman (1992, 119–20).

      5. See Morton (2008, 80). In contrast, Hitchens (2003) argued that lack of a religious hierarchy made the possibility of Islamic reformation unlikely.

      6. See Al-Azm (1994, 257) and Almond (2003, 1140). Yet for Trousdale (2013, 154), Rushdie’s engagement with serious religious doubt rendered him more like St. Augustine than Voltaire. Al-Azm (1994, 261) likened Rushdie to Voltaire, Joyce, and Rabelias. Like Rabelias, his “healthy cyncism” did not degenerate “into fashionable pessimism and/or nihilism.” Werber (1996, 57) likened Rushdie’s cause to “the same battles against dogma fought by writers and philosophers of the Enlightenment.” In parallel, Sanga (2001, 125) argued, The Satanic Verses’ juxtaposed Western Enlightenment against Eastern dogmatism.

      7. For comparisons between The Satanic Verses and Ulysses, see Harris (1998), Kane (2006, 434), Majumdar (2010), Booker (1991, 196), and Sanga (2001, 124). For comparisons to Finnegan’s Wake mainly as a critique of patriarchy through religious myth, see Booker (1991, 199) and Harris (1998). For broader comparison to Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake, see Majumdar (2010, 99–118).

      8. Fischer and Abedi (1990, 110) described Rushdie as the first postmodern comic novelist from the Muslim world. For Almond (2003, 1142), The Satanic Verses was the first postmodern Islamic novel. For a comparable view, see Grant (1999, 23). However, apart from Booker (1994), Rushdie’s philosophical affinity to Nietzsche in The Satanic Verses was by and large ignored. For a passing reference to Nietzsche and The Satanic Verses, see Fischer and Abedi (1990, 147).

      9. See Nyla Ali Khan (2000, 88, 91, 94) and Sanga (2001, 63).

      10. Concerning Rushdie’s postmodern artistic technique and postcolonial liberation, Mishra (2009, 407) observed “a recognition of a colonial inheritance, as well as a transcendence over it.” For a wider commentary on artistic technique and postcolonial liberation, see Teverson (2007, 44), Mann (1995, 282), Mishra (2009, 387, 407), and Brennan (1989, 66). In addition, Afzal-Khan (1998, 138–39) noted, Rushdie’s characteristic combination of different novel genres, such as comic, mythic, and surreal, was another postmodern liberation strategy. Engblom too, took note of different narrative styles and liberation in The Satanic Verses: “[C]arnivalization and dialogicality . . . ” (1994, 295), “to break of the imperial containments of official, metropolitan, monologic versions of the Western novel” (1994, 303). For another account of contrasting narrative modes in The Satanic Verses, see Majumdar (2010, 109).

      11. For Rushdie and Hobson-Jobson, see Mishra (2009, 385–90).

      12. For the novel’s alleged failure, see Kuortti (2007, 128). For a broad statement on Rushdie’s art, containing too much, and its failure therefore, see Afzal-Khan (1998, 138).

      13. According to Gray (1989, 82), the international attention and controversy evinced “that some people still care about serious fiction after all.” For Al-Azm (1994, 255) too, The Satanic Verses controversy proved that literature still mattered.

      14. For a comparable view, see Clark (2000, 4), Brad Leithauser quoted in Ruthven (1990, 15), Grant (1999, 19), and Morton (2008, 67).

      15. For a comparable view, see Kimmich (2008, 176), Morton (2008, 76), and Assad (1990, 240).

      16. See Strauss (1959, 221–32).

      17. Booker (1994, 252) noted, “Rushdie is an apostle of freedom . . . he has become more and more concerned with the oppression of women in Islamic society. After all, the male-female distinction is among the most important of the dual oppositions that Rushdie consistently attacks, and as long as women are oppressed, men cannot have true freedom either.” For Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, and his critique of patriarchy and support for feminism, also see Booker (1994, 199), Mann (1995, 292), Bhabha (1994, 228), Ruthven (1990, 25), Hussain (2002, 12), and Hassumani (2002, 68). And for a remark on support from women for the author of The Satanic Verses in the Muslim world, see Fischer and Abedi (1990, 115).

      18. For the broad principles of a comparable methodological approach, see Bardolph (1994, 215–17) who remarked that the novel lacked a logical linear structure, it was a puzzle with similar bits and no mode d’emploi, and it demanded active reader participation. Suleri (1992, 194–95) argued, the novel was a divisible subcontinental narrative with convolutions of several autonomous stories. And Engblom (1994, 295, 303) remarked, The Satanic Verses responded to the imperial containments of monologic Western novel through carnivalization and dialogicality.

      19. Accordingly, Grant (1999, 86) argued, The Satanic Verses was not anti-Islam but anti-closure. For a comparable view, see Afzal-Khan (1993, 168).

      20. For a similar reformist-feminist recommendation for Islam in the novel, see Afzal-Khan (1993, 168–69), Sanga (2001, 115), and Harris (1998, 387–88).

      21. As such, according to Teverson (2007, 148), Rushdie promoted a third way against extremes. For a comparable assessment, see Kuortti (1997a). Afzal-Khan (1993, 166–73) claimed, Rushdie was against binary oppositions and categories, including those that sustained colonial patterns of domination and impeded freethinking, such as race and religion. Kortenaar (2008, 343) regarded Rushdie’s postcolonial hybridity as a challenge to categories. For Sanga (2001, 7, 94–96), the author celebrated hybridity.

      22. According to Kimmich (2008, 171), Islam’s dominant principle, singularity, was in discord with Rushdie’s preference for ambiguity and hybridity. For a comparable view, see Ranasinha (2007, 54). For Hassumani (2002, 88), Rushdie rejected binaries for hybridity, but (2002, 72) Islam was problematic because its singularity contradicted Rushdie’s principle of hybridity. Mann (1995, 301–02) too remarked on the incompatibility of postmodern indeterminism and grand Islamic narrative. Whereas Morton (2008, 67) argued, “The Satanic Verses also seeks to interrogate this reductive dichotomy between the civilisations of the West and the so-called Islamic world by exploring the experience of the postcolonial migrant in the Western metropolis.” In contrast, Mondal (2013, 432–33) claimed, for all his reputation, Rushdie imposed orthodoxies on Islam, and he blamed Rushdie for his secular fundamentalism. Elsewhere Mondal (2013b, 70–71) claimed, The Satanic Verses corresponded to a secularism that rejected an accommodation with religion and it was, therefore, an ethical failure; Rushdie’s characterization of Islam as unhybrid precluded a third way. It imposed “a secularist orthodoxy” (ibid., 67–71). In parallel, Booker (1994, 249) noted, Islam is “a symbol of monologic thought” in Rushdie’s fiction; “Islam is the religion of one God, a monotheism that forms a particularly striking symbol in the context of heteroglossic, polytheistic India.”

      23. Kortenaar (2008, 341) observed, there was more magic in Britain than in Jahilia. Khan (2005, 67) noted, the novel is “a mix of contemporary-historical and mythical-religious concepts”; it “melds fiction and history, the magical