Question 1

Why was The Satanic Verses so controversial?

Accepted Answer

The Satanic Verses caused international controversy because of two sections in particular: the 'Mahound' chapters, in which a prophet whose name and story recall Muhammad receives verses from an angelic figure but also verses from a satanic impersonation, and a brothel scene in which twelve prostitutes take on the names and personalities of Muhammad's wives. Many Muslims interpreted these sections as blasphemous mockery of the Prophet and of Islam; shortly after the novel's publication, the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on February 14, 1989, calling for Rushdie's death on the grounds that he had insulted Islam. Rushdie was placed under British police protection and spent nearly a decade in hiding. Translators and publishers were attacked, and the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was murdered. The controversy shaped the subsequent history of debates about free speech, religious offense, and the rights of artists in Western liberal democracies. The novel itself, which Rushdie has said is partly about his own experience as an Indian immigrant in Britain and about the nature of revelation and doubt, was understood by many as a serious literary engagement with Islamic scripture rather than an attack on Islam, but this distinction was not accepted by those who called for Rushdie's death.

Question 2

What is The Satanic Verses actually about?

Accepted Answer

The Satanic Verses is a novel about transformation, identity, and the immigrant experience in Britain, framed within a magical-realist engagement with religious history and the nature of revelation. Its two protagonists — Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood star who becomes associated with the divine, and Saladin Chamcha, a voice actor who has remade himself as an Englishman and who becomes associated with the devilish — represent two different responses to the immigrant's experience of being expected to transform himself: Gibreel resists transformation and goes mad, while Saladin embraces it and discovers its cost. The novel's 'satanic verses' are Rushdie's version of a historical controversy in Islamic tradition about verses received by Muhammad that may have been satanic rather than divine; Rushdie uses this controversy to explore the more general question of how we know that any revelation is authentic and how revelation relates to the person who receives it. The novel is as much about the difficulties of faith — particularly the faith of a secular person in his own cultural identity — as it is about Islam specifically.

Question 3

Is The Satanic Verses difficult to read?

Accepted Answer

The Satanic Verses is demanding in its range and density but rewards patient, attentive reading. Rushdie's prose is exuberant, allusive, and digressive — he moves between the historical sections about the Prophet, the contemporary London sections, the Bombay film-industry sections, and various dream and hallucination sequences without transition or apology. Readers who come to it expecting a conventional realist novel will be disoriented; readers who approach it as a magical-realist picaresque in the tradition of Rabelais and García Márquez will find it one of the most alive and pleasurable novels of the twentieth century. The historical sections about Mahound and Jahilia are the most demanding, because they require some familiarity with Islamic history and Quranic tradition to be fully legible; the London immigrant sections are the most accessible and the most politically direct about the experience of South Asian immigrants in 1980s Britain.

The Satanic Verses Reading Order

Complete The Satanic Verses Book List