" .. إن الوغد موجود في كل مجتمع و لكنه لا يظهر على السطح إلا في فترات الإنتقال , و هو لا يرمي إلى أي غاية , و لا يسعى إلى أي هدف , و لا يملك أي فكرة , كل ما هنالك أنه يعبر عن نفاذ صبر , و يدل على اختلاط الأمور في المجتمع , و مع ذلك نرى الوغد - دون أن يدرك هو ذلك - يخضع في جميع الأحيان تقريبا لجماعة صغيرة من المتقدمين الذين لهم هدف محدد , فهم يدفعون هؤلاء الأوغاد في الإتجاه الذي يناسبهم . "



ألبير كامو

I loved Midnight’s Children and Shame but this one was an exercise in exasperation which I should have left well alone instead of becoming intrigued again by its fearsome bloody reputation as a book that kills people. There were three reasons why I very strongly disliked this book.

THE TIRESOME STRUCTURE

It could be most of this book is a meticulous account of the dreams aka visions of mostly one character. And he has dreams within dreams. The as it were real-world plot inches along like a slow bicycle race with this person’s back story and that person’s back story and the dreams jump around as dreams do so this whole cumbersome multi-layered affair seems to be going nowhere for many pages.

THE UNFUNNY COMIC VOICE

Cajoling, supercilious, sneering, mocking, silly, making constant quips, it exhausts and finally aggravates. Here he is wittering on about angels:

The human condition, but what of the angelic? Halfway between Allahgod and homosap, did they ever doubt? They did: challenging God’s will one day muttering beneath the Throne, daring to ask forbidden things: antiquestions. Is it right that. Could it not be argued. Freedom, the old antiquest. He calmed them down, naturally, employing management skills a la god. Flattered them: you will be the instruments of my will on earth, of the salvationdamnation of man, all the usual etcetera. And hey presto, end of protest, on with the haloes, back to work. Angels are easily pacified, turn them into instruments and they’ll play your harpy tune.

The above passage raises another big problem – who exactly is talking here? This narrator, is he actually The Devil as is implied early on? *

THE EARLY HISTORY OF ISLAM ACCORDING TO SALMAN RUSHDIE

A whole lot of this book is taken up with a detailed sequence of dream-narratives that dispense with the dream framework and become a comic-ironic history of the life of a religious leader who is never called Mohammed but referred to as either The Prophet or as Mahound, an insulting medieval name for Mohammed. (It came from the French Mahun which was a contraction of Mahomet. Well, so the internet tells me.) So we get the twisty tale of how Mahound eventually got rid of the polytheism of the city of Jahilia and how Islam, here called Submission, became accepted as the true religion. Well, what could possibly be offensive about that, since that is what actually happened? Only everything.

As an example of how detailed this gets, there’s a whole chapter about Mahound making a deal with the city boss to accept three of the female local gods into his religion in return for the city of Jahilia accepting him as The Prophet. The boss says you can’t just throw out all these three hundred gods, the people won’t stand for it. Well, says Mahound, how about if I say the people can keep these three gods but we’re gonna re-brand them as angels. Okay, says the city boss, that sounds like a deal.

Then of course there is the notorious section where the sex workers in the largest brothel in Jahilia pretend for their clients’ amusement to be the wives of Mahound. They are fooling around and being deliberately offensive, and gradually they take on the characters of Mahound’s wives. This is the section which earned Rushdie the famous fatwa but it is by no means the only part which might strike a Muslim as blasphemous. The scribe Salman (hmmm, same name as our author) gets the job of writing down Mahound’s words and frankly he gets fed up of it:

When he sat at The Prophet’s feet, writing down rules rules rules, he began, surreptitiously, to change things.

And strangely, the Prophet does not notice. Salman says:

So there I was, actually writing the Book, or rewriting, anyway, polluting the word of God with my own profane language. But good heavens, if my poor words could not be distinguished from the Revelation of God’s own Messenger, then what did that mean?

SOMETHING OF A MISCALCULATION

Speaking as an atheistic liberal, I have no desire to get anyone mad at Rushdie all over again. But there is no doubt he was playing around with the most sensitive ideas about Islam here. It’s possible he thought a brilliantly complex post-modern metanarrative aimed squarely at Booker Prize judges, London Review of Books subscribers and the like would fall outside of the purview of the Muslim world, and he could, as it were, hide his subversive fabulation in the spotlight. In this he was catastrophically mistaken.

The intricate obsessive re-telling of the early history of Islam is the main reason I had to give this up : it’s deadly boring for a non-religious reader. You don’t know if this or that name or incident is suppose to be a caricature of history or an ironical comment or a plain historical fact. Reading The Satanic Verses turns into an exercise in frustration – who is supposed to be an angel? What’s an angel anyway? Is it the Devil who is telling me this whole shaggy god story anyway? Did I care once?

Salman Rushdie is one of our greatest authors but in The Satanic Verses he was barking up the wrongest possible tree.

*

*This narrator says to the reader : “Who am I? Let’s put it this way : who has the best tunes?”

I had to give myself the whole night to think of how I was going to rate this. I really liked the book but I also found it confusing. Yes, I know it's magical realism and the confusion is normal ;)

And now, about that part where I describe the book? Yeah, I don't really know what happened in it. Two guys fall from a plane as it explodes from a terrorist bomb. They miraculously survive and over the course of the novel they take on the characteristics of an angel and devil. Or do they? I think they do. Or I did. And then I wondered. And then I thought so again. But...

The story is also about India, what it means to be Muslim in India, what it means to be Indian in England, and race relations in England. This last was difficult for me because all of the race relations issues are still things that are happening in our present day society but this book was published 30 years ago.

What ultimately decided me in favor of five stars is the fact that this is a book that will stick with me for a very long time. It's one that will make me ponder and cogitate over the years, and I think in the end it gives me added insight into what it's like to be someone other than a nearly 40 year old white American female.

Well, now it is official: Salman Rushdie is never going to be a favorite of mine. I have devoured three of his books now (at least partial) and he just isn't my cup of tea. His style is brillant, sprankling, imaginative and he is a real creative story teller, but I just doesn't resonate with me. It has nothing to do with the cultural distance (because Rushdie is a thoroughly Western writer), but uttermost with style and spirit. Sorry, Salman. Furthermore, I think that every one has the right to say what he has to say, even it is considered blasphemic by others.

Before writing anything about this book, let me tell you what I had to face to read this book.
Due to work, I lived in a sublet with a family in another city from my home. Coincidentally, I picked up this book a few days before Salman Rushdie was stabbed.

One day I had read the book and left it near the window, then someone in the house saw that I was reading a banned book. After back from the office later in the evening, some kind of judgment was placed on me about why I am reading this or from which store I bought it, and many other questions. They said that My faith will be lost because of this book. At one point I was forced to say that I will return the book that belongs to someone else.

That day, I was more hurt than angry that why should another person decide what I should read or not. Is my faith so weak that it depends on a book?

However, after calling Amma and telling her everything, she said to hide it now and read it after coming home.

The funniest thing is that I am still the same as I was before I read the book. The book could not have any influence on my faith, or thinking.

Unfortunately & Simply, I find this book only and simply a 'system of abuses' cunningly used to express his anger & frustration through his talent of magical realism. There is a difference between Free Speech and writing a system of abuses directed to humiliate and ridicule just to satisfy your anger and frustration in the name of spreading awareness. Free speech does not mean being brutal and ugly in expression. Salman Rushdie is a talented writer, but the Ayatollah made this book a bestseller. But this is a lousy book and not even worth the effort of a death threat. Obscurity is a far worthier fate for it. Most of the time I felt the story was lacking. Rushdie is an incredible writer. He is truly magic with words. But the magic here doesn’t relatable - overdone, over dramatic, over sure, and making no sense.


The story of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, two actors who both have Indian Muslim backgrounds. The former is a celebrated Bollywood superstar renowned for playing Hindu deities while the latter emigrated to England and works as a voiceover artist. Their stories converged on their flight from India to Britain. Their plane was hijacked and exploded over the English Channel. Farishta and Chamcha, however, were magically saved. As they fall back into the ground, a radical transformation took place – Farishta took on the personality resembling archangel Gabriel (Jibril) while Chamcha turned into a devil.

Coming to the controversy as such, I have read several reviews where some have claimed that it was offensive and others have said there was nothing to take offense to and things were blown out of proportion. In this book, with Rushdie’s subtle yet direct approach, the attack on Islam was apparent and anyone with a broad knowledge of the religion and its practices (which you are likely to have if you have at least one Muslim friend in your circles) would figure out what he is referring to in his allusions. With that said, he never took the name of Islam even though, the name he chose made it obvious – which was a translation of the word from Arabic to English. Thus, I can fully imagine why even a semi-devout Muslim might be offended by this book; but my personal view on this topic has always been that people have rights, but the ideologies that they hold do not. And religion is just another ideology and can be criticized like how political ideologies like mocking or making a satire on communism or nationalism. There is every reason why people can feel offended about the book, write bad reviews and urge everyone to boycott the book if the content offends them but the rights stop there; nobody has the right to issue threats even Islam doesn't permit that.

One thing I have found most funny( not about the book about the author) is that Rushdie wrote about this subject knowingly, he knew what could or would happen after publishing it. But why he apologized to Muslims? Hepicracy

However, it was really difficult to read. Sometimes I had a feeling that Rushdie was deliberately trying to make things hard for the reader.

I have been trying to read this book day by day by day and just cannot get into it. I tried when it was published, put it aside for another day. Tried again many years later. This will have to be my pen-ultimate effort, I hope.

The writing is well done. Eloquent. Impressive. But apart from that there's nothing else gripping me to a point where I want to leave everything else and bed down with this book. The subject simply does not mesmerize me enough.

Will try again later.

This is so brilliant, I don't even understand why it is a masterpiece, but I know it is...

I have decided that it's time for me to leave this book. I have tried to stick with it. It jumps around way to much, has too many moments of abstract non-sensical story inserts and I often feel as though I have ADD when I pick it up. I always have to read the last few pages I read the time before in hopes of refreshing myself for the current reading session. Unfortunately because the book is so abstract, new characters constantly appear as if they have been there all along, causing immediate disorientation and confusion in this reader. There is just not enough continuity to make it satisfying. After I cheated on this book and read another instead I finally realized it is time for me to give it up. I am a typically faithful reader. It is not giving me what I need and I must move on. I do have a tinge of regret and a bit of a "you should give it one more try" lingering, but I am going to listen to my gut on this one and find something more fulfilling.

This is a funny entry into the magical realism genre, because maybe nothing magical happens. Ayesha's followers die. Gibreel is insane. Rushdie uses this misty method to expose the ugliness of belief in magic, the rot of blind faith. It's a religious book, but not a superstitious one.

But also: does it matter if Ayesha's followers drown or not, as long as they believed they didn't? So it's magical after all? It's about faith.

Satanic Verses is about faith, and about Islam, and about Muslims living in England. Although I know some about some of that, none of it applies to my life, so it doesn't speak to me. Infinite Jest, by comparison, is about bored, fucked up white kids, so it totally speaks to me. That might be why Jest is one of my favorite books and Verses is not. Both are huge, complicated, post-modern, surreal epics; both, I think, deserve love and demand devotion.

None of what happens in Verses or Jest happens, maybe. They're cousins, these books.

Verses is an achievement. It does what it says it's going to do, which is to summarize the birth of Islam (in an irreverent / blasphemous way) and then update it to the present day in England. That's a tall order and it's a magnificent achievement. I respect it.

If you want some info on Islam coming into this, I can suggest After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam, which is crazy readable, and No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, a liberal argument for Islam that also includes its origin.

Satanic Verses is cool. It's not my book, but for those it's for, I bet it might be Infinite Jest. I get what it's doing and it's doing it well. I'm glad I read it.

قيء ....

Salman Rushdie uses excessive language to cloud discordant plots, has a part-time occupation of scouring the news to write op-eds about evil Muslim organizations he reads about, and is obsessed with celebrity.

Rushdie strangles his plot in The Satanic Verses by hitching every development to a forced and unnecessarily long description or metaphor. His overwriting prevents the development of narrative flow. He even returns to more metaphors about the same topic sometimes, like when he writes about stuff falling out of the plane in the first chapter again and again. It's not hard to read but it is distracting and he uses ingratiating language. He doesn't sound confident in his writing.

"Yaaaaaa! I'm falling out of an aeroplane! Wa-waaajaaaa!" The annoyance you now feel is the same feeling I felt when I started reading The Satanic Verses a couple of days ago. I don't oppose metaphors and I don't even oppose varied styles and formats of writing, so long as they are effective. There is a difference between figurative language and purple prose. Look at this punctuation, pg. 15: "Oh: don't forget: she saw her after she died." Ok: Thanks: I won't forget. Oh: and Rushdie: I don't like kitschy conversational prose.

"It was the death of God." pg. 16. What a way to start a paragraph! God just died? Aw man, false alarm, it's just more crap like: "It was part of his magic persona that he succeeded in crossing religious boundaries without giving offence." Oh it was? I'll keep that in mind about the character from now on. Nah, I'll probably forget it. It doesn't matter though because it didn't mean anything to begin with. At least he threw in a book recommendation, Akbar and Birbal, in that paragraph to make it worth something. It's out-of-place. He's certainly proven to me that he's a master of the Orient at this point, though. (Someone told me not to use the term "orientalist" because it was "stale" so I'll use master of the Orient instead.) He also gives a shout-out to Hinduism and Buddhism in this paragraph. Just name-drop those religions as fast as you can and move on, I guess. No Satanic influence there.

Rushdie also relies on intentionally jumbled (what'sitcalledwhenyoudothisstupidthing?) words and run-on sentences. This sucks. I remember writing words like that in elementary school because I thought it was funny. It's not funny. It's cutesy at best. I don't like reading over 500 pages worth of giddy and bubbly writing just to get through a stupid plot.

His realism is magical because he relies on controversial fairy tales to carry themes he is either too lazy or too incompetent to create through reality. His magical realism makes me feel like I'm watching what I imagine an Enya music video would look like. He's hiding a spastic plot behind mysticism. He fails to employ that mysticism to do anything more interesting than a competent author could do with the real and concrete.

According to RUSHDORK, I mean Rushdie, Satan interrupted the divine dictation of the Koran. It was supposed to go from the Archangel Gabriel's mouth to Mohammad's ear and then to he People. Satan stepped in like the jackass in a game of Telephone who gets the message wrong on purpose. Later, Islamic ninjas covered up Satan's interference and Mohammad's mistake. This is the plot hook of The Satanic Verses. Mohammad was influenced by the Devil even though the Koran has no trace of the two goddesses introduced by Zoroaster. How the hell does that work? Was Mohammad like "My utterances at dawn: t'was Satan. Sorry, guys." Maybe that happened -- but Rushdie never explains this. But it was probably, as a huge amount of speculative western scholarship has "uncovered" in the years since Rushdie's inflammatory book was published, just a fight amongst a few Muslims who accused a few other Muslims of attempting, in compiling What the Prophet Said, to add their own idols, who they wanted to be included in religious scripture. THAT HAPPENED COUNTLESS TIMES DURING THE FORMATION OF THE KORAN and western historians, in all their ignorance of Islam, got involved, so when they saw Muslims accusing each other, they took the chance to say "they're fighting about Satan's influence." It was a few phrases that got chopped in the cutting room of the Koran, but were scooped off the floor. MAYBE. Someone called them "satanic," probably a westerner, as Daniel Pipes speculates, and it was on. Rushdie was ready to write.

Misappropriating history with such lazy disregard for truth or context, with such an ignorance that turns condescending by transmission -- this is the hallmark of Dan Browns, not great authors. It's as though Brown seized on some of the more inflammatory screeds from the Arian Heresy and wrote a book that went like, "Aha! The Knights Templar were time travelers!" It's not good fiction. That this intentionally inflammatory claptrap rose to the level of world-renowned Great Art speaks more to the global prejudice against Islamic theology than to to the Satanic Verses' literary worth!

If you believe that Gabriel spoke Allah's divine words to Mohammad, I bet you don't also think that Mohammad received false words from Satan, do you?

If you believe that Gabriel did not speak Allah's divine words to Mohammad, I bet you also don't think that Mohammad received false words from Satan, do you?
Anyone?

The rest of this review has very little to do with The Satanic Verses but it does have to do with Rushdie:

Rushdie lives a pampered celebrity life now that he's no longer hunted by hundreds of assassins. He's an English knight, so maybe he'll fulfill his fantasy and go to the Holy Land to vanquish Muslims, just the bad ones though, as he is so adept at finding. Another review on Goodreads said that he had a cameo in Bridget Jones's Diary. That's lame. Sir Rushdie came out of hiding by walking on stage at a U2 concert. I didn't know he was a rock star, wow. We get it, you really like attention. He teaches English now at Emory University, far away from where the following treacherous Islamists lurk. Here are some thoughtful articles he's written:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/peo...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/opi...
http://www.faithfreedom.org/Articles/...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comm...

Someone email Sean Hannity and just set up the interview already! Islam can't take this informed and logical onslaught much longer, Salman! Let it live!

He's been married four times. I'm cool with that... I live in the U.S. so I know that judging someone for that it wrong. That must sting Rushdie's massive ego a bit. Maybe he just doesn’t care. A few parting shots:

He was most recently married to a model who poses nude, is decades younger than him, sits interviews covering how she loves certain parts of her body, repeatedly proclaims that she isn't boastful, and is a judge on a cooking show. Spare me the whole "EVERYONE would want that in his life!" Here's some hubris on display from her steroidal celebrity Facebooky page:

"'Being married to a giant cultural figure like Salman Rushdie, I want
to earn my seat at the table,' she says."

Why stop at Rushdie's table? Why not surpass him and become The Greatest Human Being to Ever Live? Her authorship includes a cookbook called Easy Exotic. Too many jokes there.

Actually,I have marked it as not to read.I never intend to read it,but it is somehow showing up as read.

Anyway,I wanted to write a few lines about it.It brought a fatwa on Rushdie's head,from Khomeini.Rushdi went away into hiding for years and years.

He set out to be delibertely provocative and very offensive,on a very sensitive subject.Coming from a Muslim background himself,he must have been aware that this was going to create big time trouble and controversy,and he succeeded in doing that.

I remember it was 1989.Massive rioting erupted in Pakistan against the book.10,000 people took part,six protesters were killed.Islamabad became a battle ground.

The irony is that Rushdie stayed alive,others were actually killed because of his book.And there was rioting and protest in several Muslim countries.He became a hated figure among Muslims.

Rushdie was all over the papers,and not for the right reasons.He asked for trouble and got it.However,it was still a lot of publicity and it made him famous worldwide.

Booker Prize judges still loved it,though it lost to another book in the final round.

So,this one is not to read.Nor am I interested in any of his other books,no matter how clever a writer he is supposed to be.