I never got past page 60 in this book. I read and forgot and reread and forgot again up unto about the fifth reading when I thought to myself that I might rate Midnight's Children as one of the greatest books I've read, enjoyed the depiction of Benazir Bhutto as the Virgin Ironpants in Shame a great deal, but I also couldn't read Shalimar the Clown and thought that Grimus was excreble (not even Rushie rated this first offering of his oeuvre). So what was I doing trying so hard with the Satanic Verses? I felt that for a book to engender such a farrago of praise, death and destruction I must read it for myself and see what it was all about. But I couldn't. It bored me rigid.

However from the synopsis and reviews I have read of the book, I think it might translate into an excellent film, I just don't think there is a director alive courageous enough to make it, nor a cast who would act in it, and I don't blame any of them. But I do hate that the fundamentalists have got even that much of a victory.

Death to all those that oppose *freedom! Well not death, nah, not that, just shut up already and go and moan to your friends and family like everyone else would.

*One man's freedom is another man's murder; this is a word that changes its meaning according to the philosophy of those spouting it.

Also see Joseph Anton for what I thought of Rushdie writing the Satanic Verses.

This is a good, at times amazing work of literature that was quite possibly the hardest thing I’ve ever read. Having re-started it twice, it took me a little over two months to read. Not everyone will like it, and I suppose that’s fine; it’s pretty evident that Rushdie didn’t write the thing for it to be universally adored. It’s the kind of book you admire more than actually love or connect with emotionally.
If you’re feeling up for a challenge, I would recommend it. Otherwise, you might want to stay away.

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

Labai įdomus,  išskirtinis kūrinys. Neapleido pojūtis, kad skaitau ,,Meistro ir Margaritos" kitą dalį, ir ką, pasigilinus radau, jog Salman Rushdie romaną parašė įkvėptas būtent Bulgakovo! Netgi yra  straipsnis (Balasubramanian, R. (1995). The Similarities Between Mikahil Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses)  kuriame abu šie kūriniai lyginami! Taigi, kas žavėjosi Meistru ir Margarita  turėtų mėgautis ir Šėtoniškomis eilėmis. Abiejų žanras- magiškasis realizmas. Tik eilėse labiau susitelkta į Indijos problemas. Gvildenama amžinoji gėrio ir blogio kovos tema, supriešinti Rytai ir Vakarai, ironizuota religijų tarpusavio nesantaika.

I tried with this one. I had a great group of buddy readers on Litsy. It was so interesting the variety in responses to it. Some of us DNF, others did and panned it, others really liked it! Though it wasn't for me, I freely admit an admiration for a book that can prompt such varied reactions (the normal kind...not the murderous kind) among readers. I was horrified to learn of the fatwa on Rushdie and the time he spent in hiding, the deaths of the translators, the destruction of bookstores that sold it, and all the hate that stemmed from the response to this book. I have a rant stored up about this, but another time and another place, Goodreads friends. I'll spare you.

Why I Only Read 2/3 of the Book:
-I ran out of renewals at the library. I took that as a clear sign finishing wasn't in the cards.
-I developed a sense of apathy towards the characters. I didn't have a strong interest in where the story was going and it just seemed to be pointless to me. I tried to be a good sport and play along for awhile, but the tangents Rushdie takes became too much for me.
-The prose. Rushdie is incredibly eloquent and can craft masterful paragraphs of speech. That being said, he is so verbose at times, I think even he forgot the point he was trying to make and had to circle back. This is a book were it is so easy to get lost in the sentences that you forget the plot and lose your way in a forest of trees. I can only get lost from the plot so many times before I lose interest.
-The grandiosity of the narrator, which makes sense when you realize who the narrator is... However, I started to wonder if the lines between grandiosity of the narrator and author began to blur. Others agreed as well on this point. Rushdie is smart and talented; which he most clearly knows. After certain long winded paragraphs I began to picture Rushdie gesturing to the reader "Eh, eh, did you see what I did there. I don't think you appreciated it enough. Here's some more sentences on that same point. I still don't think you fully grasped my thoughts"

I can't rule out another Rushdie book attempt. I'd definitely want to do it with a group again as that aided quite a bit in the themes, prose, and overall reaction to his book.

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.

Glad I finally came to read this book. Still not really sure why this was such a controversial one. It is just a beautiful novel full of imagination and truth.

NOTE: I was literally in college when I read this book and wrote this review. I've been on this site for decades now, and you can see the date on a review when you read it, so maybe keep that in mind before leaving me a snarky comment. Eventually I will reread this and write a different (better) review, but until then...

Here's the thing about this book that you will immediately grasp from what everyone says: it's a beast. I do not mean this in a bad sense. I mean this in the sense that it's overwhelming. It's long, complex (storylines that involve overlapping characters and storylines that don't overlap in time or space at all), dense and occasionally slow. It is not for the reader with ADD. No matter how quickly you think you might read, reading this book will slow you down. No matter how determined you are to catch every single detail and nuance of this book and what it means, you will not.

I can generally blaze through a book in a matter of days. It took me an entire year to read this book, and was almost certainly my longest read. I often had to go back and refer to other parts of the book to keep names and events straight. but you know what? it was worth every minute.

Rushdie is a master writer, and I can't tell you how much I took away from this book. I would have liked to taken a class on it while reading it so that I could have understood more of it, but even without one, I enjoyed every second of it. reading it is a labor of love, but it's a highly rewarding one.

This case of this novel shows us that we still have a long way to go, until we truly understand the literature.

In my point of view, it is a proof of a total ignorance to criticize this book, classifying it only based on the meaning of the word " satanic" .
The so-called " verses" - refer to the verses removed from Qu'ran, considered a false revelation that the prophet Mahomed had.
Beyond any interpretation that Rushdie's novel can arouse, this is a novel that should heal, not hurt.
The prophet is not described as depreciating, but only subdued to the same duality good- bad, - like all the characters in the book, Mahomed ( Mahouna) - being a man with doubts and weakness.
In fact, the attention is drawn to the danger posed by the power of only one person.
The whole novel raises the question if it really possible to get out of what was brought to you by the family and environment, including religion. Beyond political allusions, Rushdie wrote a novel, so - a Fiction .
Umberto Eco said, that the essential rule for to approach a narrative, is to tacitly accept a fictional-pact with the author .
I mean, you - as a reader, accept that what is told to you is imaginary, but you pretend your self it is true. The emphasis, here, is ( should be) - on " you pretend".

If the charm of any narrative is that it closes us between the borders of a world, and it makes us to take it seriously, this charm also contains the risk of no longer perceiving the border between this world, and reality.

برای تحلیل و نقد یک اثر، می‌شه اول اون رو به لحاظ محتوایی بررسی کرد؛ این که چه حرف‌هایی می‌خواد بزنه و در نهایت چه پیامی رو می‌رسونه.

در وهله بعد، می‌شه به سراغ بحث‌های تکنیکی و فنی رفت و فرم اثر رو بررسی کرد. ساده‌ترین تعریفی که می‌شه از فرم ارائه داد، اینه که چطور اثر مذکور قراره محتوای مورد بحثش رو به مخاطب عرضه کنه.

در کتاب آیات شیطانی هیچ محتوایی برای ارائه وجود نداره؛ به لحاظ ادبی با یک فاجعه طرفیم و در نهایت به جای این‌که نویسنده به صورت ریشه‌ای
نقدهای خودش رو به دین وارد کنه، به توهین و تمسخر روی آورده که اینا برای نگارش یک اثر خوب، کافی نیستن

در مجموع فکر می‌کنم که اگه این همه حاشیه برای این کتاب ایجاد نمی‌کردن، خیلی از ماها حتی اسمش رو هم هیچ‌وقت نمی‌شنیدیم؛ ولی متاسفانه کلا کار زمامداران ما در تمامی زمینه‌ها پرداختن به فرعه نه به اصل

David Lodge observed somewhere that there are books you read and books you'd rather read about – I’ve often wondered during my lecture whether it’s the second rule that applies to Rushdie’s novel, with all the scandal and the death threats around the religious issues that went with.

By the way, I doubt the author didn’t suspect his book would create controversies. Even if I don’t know much about Muslim religion I do know about fanaticism and you can find, if you want to, some pretty blasphemous allusions in the book, like the name Mahound, which was the derogatory name the English used for the prophet Mohammad during the crusades, or the devilish (in the book) image of Saladin, whose name is similar to the name of another great Muslim hero during the same crusades, or the arguable Ayesha character, etc.

It was interesting to learn (via Wikipedia, of course) what are the Satanic Verses: it is said that Mohammad thought that some verses, in which he was permitted prayer to three Meccan goddesses, were sent to him by God as part of the Qur’an, instead of Satan. Even more interesting was to know that the phrase Satanic Verses was coined by western academies, the Muslims calling them Bird Verses.

I have to say I’ve had mixed feelings about this book right from the beginning. Many years ago, irritated by the awful (I thought then) truism of the first sentence, “To be born again, first you have to die!”, I decided not to read it but eventually (and obviously!) I reconsidered and here I am, trying to make sense of this love-hate relationship I developed all along my reading.

What really annoyed me was that everything in this book is over-ornate – as oriental carpets are and it is so tiring to follow such an intricate pattern sometimes! Indian immigrants, film industry, London noise, mystic revelations, religious pilgrimages, and so forth, in a jumble that turns your head, building a colourful world in a frenetic, incessant to and fro movement similar to a tireless fair.

The alienation through immigration and loss of religion is an interesting subject should it not miss some sort of equilibrium, composition equilibrium that is – for example I found the religious layer was too emphasized and overall that there were too many themes that in the end remained undeveloped: it leaves you with the sensation of unfinished and overstuffed at the same time.

And yet. And yet. I don’t think I’ve ever read something more beautiful than the chapter “The Parting of the Arabian Sea”. And to suggest in the next chapter that it was only a scenario for a movie – absolutely brilliant! Also, I don’t think I’ve encountered a more suggestive rendering of the sound of the city, deafening, shrilling, exhausting, contributing to the alienation of the characters. The death of Saladin’s father is also an interesting example of sublimation of complicated relationships, whereas Gibreel’s death is somehow burlesque.

I closed the book, I finished browsing my reading notes and I’m still not sure how I should feel about it. And I'm looking at Midnight Children on my shelf wondering whether I will read it or not. Maybe. Sometime.

يقول المفكر البريطانى رولد ديهل
ان هذا النمط من اثارة الحساسية قد اوصل كتبا غير متميزة على الاطلاق الى قمة الكتب الاكثر مبيعا فى العالم ولكن فى نظرى هذه طريقة رخيصة للوصول للهدف وفى نظرى انه انتهازى خطير
ديلى نيوز مارس 1989

كتاب ايات شيطانية يدل على احد امرين اما الجهل المطبق بالاسلام والمسلمين او تعمد تشويهه بغير حق

فى اعلان عن كنيسة كانتربرى فى انكلترا يقول الدكتور روبرت رونسى

ان فاقد القدرة على تمييز الحق هو وحده الذى يخفق فى ان يرى ان نشر هذا الكتاب قد اساء للمسلمين فى كل انحاء العالم واعتقد ان الاساءة للمسلمين او اى دين هى اساءة الى المسيحية

ادلى كبير حاخامات اليهود فى انجلترا اللورد جاكوبقيتش
هذا الكتاب ما كان ينبغى ان ينشر
وانه عملية تشويه مقصودة

هناك فرق بين محاولة مناقشة اى دين وبين قلب الحقائق والتشويه المتعمد

هى رواية مقززة تحتوى احط و ارخص العبارات
سخرية من الميسلمين بالفاظ اقل ما يقال عنها انها قذرة

اى انسان يقرا هذه الرواية يتاكد انها ليست صدفة ولا من خيال المؤلف بل
تشويه متعمد

وليس هذا فقط ولكنها رواية عنصرية الى اقصى درجة
ضد الديانات الهندية وذوو البشرة السوداء