I can't understand why Queen of England give Salman Rushdie a Knight of literature status? Anyone who like to put dirty words and provoke people can easily produce such books like this!

Just like anyone who can draw can produce cartoon to mock one's religion. I wonder why is a big powerfull country like britian still uses old lame monarch system and believe in that Dumb Queen who actually like to read this so called book, that only brings a provocation after another with bad foul mouth langguage that's not even smart. (the most probable reason is that The queen never even read it in the first place)

If Rusdhie has at least some amount of humor like Southpark writers had, his foul mouth writing could sound Intelligent, but in this book is just purely lame.

Satanic Verses: A Composition

He had just finished his thirty-fourth reading of the play. The unsaid hate, the unseen events, the half-imagined wrongs; they tormented him. What could cause such evil to manifest, he just could not figure. He loved him too much to believe the simple explanation.

And then the idea starts growing on him - to explore the growth of evil just as Shakespeare showed, explored the tragic culmination of it. And because you show the growth, it can no longer be a tragedy, no, no it has to be a comedy. A tragicomedy. Yes. And he set to it. He painted Othello as an Indian actor, worshiped and adored and off on a mad canter to get his Ice Queen, his Desdemona. On his way he meets him - the poor man trying to forget his own roots and desperately reinventing himself, his Iago.

Yes Iago too was once a man. What twists of fate made him evil incarnate? He sets out his prime motif: The question that’s asked here remains as large as ever it was: which is, the nature of evil, how it’s born, why it grows, how it takes unilateral possession of a many-sided human soul.

Wait a minute, he blinks at his notes, if Iago is evil incarnate, does that not also mean that he is Satan incarnate? Chamcha then is Satan incarnate? Then Othello has to be God? A little bit more corruptible maybe? Let us make him the angel Gibreel, he decided. As an aside, as the angel, he can slip into that reality in his dreams and reenact the story (history?) of Prophet Mohammad in inflammatory fashion, maybe talk about the 'Satanic Verses' since his Satan can't help but gloat over his little jokes. Why not call the novel so too, except that it would mean something else - the verses that the real Satan of the story, Iago, sings in Othello's ear. He knows that this might be cause for misunderstanding, might ruffle a few feathers, but it is just a digression, the real story is beyond that - it is not the Event Horizon. But he can't help himself. He never could keep a story simple.

Ah, now something beyond mere Othello is taking shape is it not? If Iago is Satan, then surely it is in character to enjoy with consummate pleasure the sight of his own jealousy consuming himself - the green-eyed monster that feeds on itself. So Satan decides to narrate the story of one of his incarnations? Or rather, possessions? The questions that are to run his plot are flowing freely now. How an ordinary man when in contact with an angel inevitably had to transform into Lucifer himself. How can one exist without the other. They meet and the spiral ensues and Iago mutates and agitates and like a cancerous growth his strange fate builds until he turns his wrath square on his angel, his Othello. And how can he then not try to destroy what he is not, what he can not be. There is the moment before evil, then the moment of, then the time after; and each subsequent stride becomes progressively easier. But what about before and after the madness? It surely must be an ordinary life, with ordinary joys and pains. It is a cosmic drama, he concludes.

In the process, every insinuated implication in the play is to be played out in this story - Cassio does sleep with Iago's wife, Iago is madly lustful of Desdemona, Othello is a deserving victim of directed revenge for very real ills and Iago needs no invented or unbelievable reasons for his actions. He is justified. It was inevitable.

Salman Rushdie sets down his pen.

He has vindicated Iago, many a literature lover's favorite character.

And for that, I am eternally thankful.

"Language is courage: the ability to conceive a thought, to speak it, and by doing so to make it true."

"When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible."



My most recent reading of Salmon Rushdie's The Satanic Verses was for a book club while I was living in Morocco. This made me very sensitive to the book's perceived insult against Islam as well as the ensuing outrage. Still, as I read it, the novel felt like it was much more about the immigrant experience and transformation than it was about the infamous and frequently referenced Satanic Verses passage.

The novel's language is remarkable; however, it also slows down the reading. That was a criticism of many in my book club. I feel that this is very worthwhile as there is so much humor in the language that a quick reading won't reveal. Another criticism, and one which I am more sympathetic to, is that reading The Satanic Verses can become a slog. It can be difficult to connect some of the tangential stories to our two main protagonists. I liked some of the 'side stories;' however, trying to keep track of all the characters and competing stories did turn the reading into a slog at times. Despite that, I'd still recommend the novel. I like how, from the beginning, anything seems possible!

“Have ye thought upon Al-Lat and Al-‘Uzzá
and Manāt, the third, the other?
These are the exalted gharāniq [cranes], whose intercession is hoped for.”

The above verse is from a set of verses that were temporarily included in the Qur’an by the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The three goddesses mentioned—Al-Lat, Al-‘Uzzá, and Manāt, daughters of Allah—were from the pagan religion that existed within Mecca before the spread of Islam in the seventh century. The verses concede the existence, worship, and worthiness of those three particular deities. This acted as a seductive segue for the pagans to merge their beliefs into a new, monotheistic religion. Those who had fled Mecca earlier because of religious persecution with the advent of Islam decided to return home after the persecution was rumored to be over. Eventually, Muhammad informed the people that those specific verses were of satanic origin, not coming from the angel Gabriel as Allah spoke to him, but deceptively whispered by Satan (or Shaitan). Thus, the persecution of those worshiping ostensibly false gods began again.

Seeing the irony and paradox of this historical issue, British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie was inspired to create a work of art titled The Satanic Verses. When Rushdie was working on this masterpiece, which mentally tormented him, he didn't know if he was writing one book or multiple books. “I thought of the novel as a huge monster I was wrestling with,” Rushdie told Vanity Fair. “I was often worried that I would not be able to get on top of the beast and pin it to the ground. [When it was done,] I was utterly exhausted. One holds so much of a novel in one’s head during the years of work that when it’s done and the thing in your head evaporates it’s a little like having your brain removed. I felt lobotomized.”

The complexity manifests itself not only in the prose but also the narrative, which is interlaced with three dream-like sub-narratives in different places and times. The main story features the two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, Indian emigrants living in Britain, who fall out of the sky at the beginning of the novel. Farishta is a Bollywood superstar known for portraying Hindu deities on film, while Chamcha has attempted to do away with his Indian identity and is fitfully employed as a voiceover artist in England, where the complexion of his skin is unable to betray his real identity. The novel follows them as they attempt to repair their lives after Farishta transforms into an angel and Chamcha into a devil.

The first sub-plot describes Muhammad’s life in seventh century Mecca as he gathers a following and begins to spread the word of Allah, revolving around the incident of the satanic verses. It also follows the poet Baal, who eventually goes into hiding within a brothel, where he assumes the identity of one of Muhammad’s wives.

An Indian peasant girl is the protagonist of the second sub-plot. She, like Muhammad, seems to be receiving revelations from the Archangel Gabriel (which is actually Farishta developing schizophrenia). Her revelations dictate that she must lead the entire village on a foot pilgrimage to Mecca where they will reach and subsequently walk over the Arabian Sea.

The third and final sub-plot features a character called the Imam, reminiscent of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was the supreme leader of Iran for ten years beginning in 1979. The character is sitting in exile, just as Khomeini was in exile for fifteen years due to his opposition to the preceding Shah. Through similar revelation from Farishta, the Imam goes to fight the goddess Al-Lat in order to gain control of Desh.

Overall, the tale of The Satanic Verses overlaps in on itself. It all seems to fit in a ghostly, multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, exploring not only religion but racism, government tyranny, love, hope, death, fear, and finding one's self in the world, or becoming one's self, whether it's in the East or West or both. Farishta and Chamcha rain back down to earth, which is populated by others who are equally as ambitious and broken and looking to be fixed. Metaphorically speaking, this is what the satanic verses are: the verses that stick in our head and we don’t know their origin, the voices and urges within us that compel us to act, which could be from, as it were, Satan, the angel that fell, or from Allah, the god who rules with an iron fist. Farishta is perplexed by this: “All around him, he thinks as he half-dreams, half-wakes, are people hearing voices, being seduced by words. But not his; never his original material. —Then whose? Who is whispering in their ears, enabling them to move mountains, halt clocks, diagnose disease?” But, really, it is us. The Human Condition. Socrates called it the ‘inner daemon,’ the conscience. Plus all those who implicitly or explicitly influence us.

The stories are anything but disparate; they meld together to form a microcosm of allegory, and they are weeping and dripping with magic—the magic that Rushdie is known for, grounded by realism, of course, which borrows from the master: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. “I knew García Márquez’s colonels and generals,” explained Rushdie in an essay for the New York Times, “or at least their Indian and Pakistani counterparts; his bishops were my mullahs; his market streets were my bazaars. His world was mine, translated into Spanish. It’s little wonder I fell in love with it—not for its magic (although, as a writer reared on the fabulous ‘wonder tales’ of the East, that was appealing too) but for its realism.” The Satanic Verses is a combination of the magical and the real, the historic and the fictitious; Rushdie’s imagination augments reality, making metaphors and allegories into tangible truths.

When it was published in 1988, it was considered blasphemy by the Muslim community and was met with violent reaction. The genesis of this reaction comes from the Ayatollah Khomeini, who issued a fatwa (Islamic ruling) calling on the death of Salman Rushdie and all involved in the publication of the novel. Those unable to deal out the punishment were instructed to inform someone who could. Rushdie was put on constant police protection. He wrote about his eight years in hiding in his third-person memoir Joseph Anton, titled after his alias at the time (a combination of two of his favorite writers: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov). By the end of the affair the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi was stabbed to death, the Italian translator Ettore Capriolo was seriously injured in a stabbing, and the Norway publisher William Nygaard was shot three times but survived, among other incidents. For nearly thirty years the book has been and continues to be banned on religious grounds in twenty-one countries, including India, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern countries. Those who would most benefit from reading the book have not been able to; such is the goal with the suppression of ideas. The late journalist Christopher Hitchens considered the reaction to the book as the beginning of a culture war, or, to be exact, a war against culture. Not too long ago, South African author and psychologist Zainub Priya Dala was brutally beaten after she expressed admiration for Rushdie’s work at a literary festival in Durban, according to the Guardian. She was then forced into a psychiatric clinic under the guise of mental illness, but was eventually released after the international literary and human rights organization PEN started a campaign on her behalf. As Hitchens put it, “Two decades on, Salman himself is thriving mightily and living again like a free man. But the culture that sustains him, and that he helps sustain, has twisted itself into a posture of prior restraint and self-censorship in which the grim, mad edict of a dead theocrat still exerts its chilling force.”

Some have said that only esoteric Islamist theologians can discern what was so 'blasphemous' and 'offensive' in the novel. That doesn’t seem to be the case. The novel is full of religious commentary and irony and other explorations of religion, which is one of its many themes. The Muhammad-based character in the novel is called Mahound, which is a derogatory version of Muhammad’s name. But the novel intelligently explains the use of the name: “To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn.” But if one is offended, what does that mean? Well, other than a propensity to whine, someone who is constantly offended is having his or her beliefs challenged. In general, the book challenges its readers to think, like any book worth its page count. Only someone who is mentally unstable would react with violence to a piece of art or literature, which is all the more disconcerting considering that a novel doesn’t have to be opened to begin with (and probably never was in the case of those foaming at the mouth for Rushdie’s death). Allow me to sum up the viewpoint of someone who is violently offended, as demonstrated by a Muslim character in the novel: “I hate admitting that my enemies have a point. Damn sight better to kill the bastards, I've always thought. Neatest bloody solution.” One should appreciate the irony of the very last remark. This is the mindset of the Medina Muslims, a term coined by Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her latest book Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. These are not the billions of peaceful Muslims who follow Muhammad’s teachings when he was in Mecca, but the millions of violent Muslims that follow or condone the methods of Muhammad after he was exiled to Medina, where his strategy went from door-to-door preaching to the summation of convert or die, or, if you are a Christian or Jew, demotion to second class citizen status, where one is required to pay a tax called jizyah. Medina Muslims include Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Muslim Brotherhood, whose violent strategy of conversion is supported by verse 9:29 of the Qur’an: “Fight those who do not believe in Allah or in the Last Day and who do not consider unlawful what Allah and His Messenger have made unlawful and who do not adopt the religion of truth from those who were given scripture—[fight] until they give the jizyah willingly while they are humiliated.”

The Satanic Verses is a symbolic representation in the real world of the ironic and artful and erudite, as opposed to the literal and barbarous and close-minded. Not everyone can see that, and the character Mahound demonstrates that inability when he says, as if the novel is joining the conversation it started, “Writers and whores. I see no difference here.” With everything that has occurred in the news for the past couple of years or even decades, The Satanic Verses could not be more important and relevant today. As the novel explains, “A poet's work [is] to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep.”

People jumping into this book blindly may soon find themselves wishing they had informed themselves somewhat beforehand. I must claim an embarrassing ignorance about just about every aspect of this daunting work at the outset: I had only the faintest whisper of a memory of having heard the phrase "satanic verses" outside of a discussion of the ever-present religiously-sanctioned hit out on the author's life. I had very little knowledge of Indian culture and none regarding the cross-cultural experiences of Indian immigrants living in Great Britain, and I only knew the barest outline of the history of Islam. While reading this book, I fell head-first into every one of these gaps in my knowledge and quite a few more besides. To pigeonhole the Satanic Verses as a book solely concerned with and influenced by the above mentioned topics is to miss a great deal of what Rushdie put into it. Personally, while reading, I often found it helpful (and at times necessary) to educate myself along the way. Even still, I recognize that I have not grasped many of the story's finer points and subtler themes, and I suspect that, if ever in my life I am able and patient enough to deepen my understanding of this work, my rating will almost certainly improve.

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.

‘The Satanic Verses’ by Salman Rushdie is about the larger influence of what other people think who you are, and how your thoughts about yourself can mutate because of what other people think of you. People will treat you, and act towards you, based on what they think you are. Two different things -You vs. the image of you. Or the third thing - you having internalized their vision of you into yourself.

Identity can be a demon living inside of you. And if you try to escape the self other people created for you, you can’t, not really. Neurons seared by struggles with identity feed unwelcome self-doubt.

One’s Culture affects thinking. But Culture changes and mutates as Time passes. Since religion is culture, it mutates your image of who you are as well. People are their culture. But culture is always mutating. What was beautiful or holy or admired, or what social rules were a hundred years ago, might not be beautiful or holy or admired or what the rules are today. Also, what is beautiful or holy or admired, or what the rules are, in one culture is not beautiful or holy or admired or what the rules are in a nearby culture of another territory or country, either, something a traveler can experience in the same day. An airplane trip can change your entire image of what people used to think of you, the whole of how you are perceived by others, in an hour or two. East meets West on common ground? Not bloody likely. You are who you think you are in the West as you were thought of in the East? Not bloody likely either. Fricking mutable identity - POW. Identity is apparently a flimsy masquerade, easily knocked awry. Each of us is the last one to know who we are when, during, after, who we think we are is put to a test.

People can mutate the harmless you you desire to be into an evil monster or a saint. Celebrities know very well the mob can love you one day and hate you the next. People are thinking they know you from only the images of you but they are actually mutating your airbrushed third-hand image.

Who are you now, exactly? The image in the mirror you see? Well, mirrors reverse your image, so its a scientific fact you never really see yourself. The image you see mirrored in the eyes of other people, coming off of you in the form of photons is twisted upside down by the lens in the eyes, and lands upside down on our retinas. People actually see images upside down, which is flipped again in the brain. Then there is the question of is what I see the same as what you see? I have a headache now.

If you become insane in the effort to be authentic, whatever that is, well, yeah. How could you not?

Below I have copied the book blurb:

”One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil. This is just the initial act in a magnificent odyssey that seamlessly merges the actual with the imagined. A book whose importance is eclipsed only by its quality, The Satanic Verses is a key work of our times.

~randomhousebooks.com

If you notice how the description of the book by the publisher is a bit obscure, nebulous, I think so too. But it fits the plot. This is an intellectual’s domestic fiction novel, with satirical under - and some sly overt - tones. It is a commentary about the invention of the self, but it is a self that is also curated through culture and the eyes of other people raised within a culture. It is about the perceptions of the human mind, the filtering we do with the brain, to make it all palatable to ourselves, which is in fact the dual function of the brain in interpreting reality. Reality? Wtf is that? The interplay of cells and neurons - our physical wiring - and the visions that serve us, guide us, the visions that often cannot be understood by us whether they are coming out of our dream life and what we call waking life, are they reality?

The novel is full of magical realism, and deep thoughts about culture and immigration, and our place in a culture, and the imagined self.

However, I suppose gentle reader, you actually want a plot description. From Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sat...

”The Satanic Verses consists of a frame narrative, using elements of magical realism interlaced with a series of sub-plots that are narrated as dream visions experienced by one of the protagonists. The frame narrative, like many other stories by Rushdie, involves Indian expatriates in contemporary England. The two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are both actors of Indian Muslim background. Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who specialises in playing Hindu deities (the character is partly based on Indian film stars Amitabh Bachchan and N. T. Rama Rao). Chamcha is an emigrant who has broken with his Indian identity and works as a voiceover artist in England.

At the beginning of the novel, both are trapped in a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain. The plane explodes over the English Channel, but the two are magically saved. In a miraculous transformation, Farishta takes on the personality of the archangel Gabriel and Chamcha that of a devil. Chamcha is arrested and passes through an ordeal of police abuse as a suspected illegal immigrant. Farishta's transformation can partly be read on a realistic level as the symptom of the protagonist's development of schizophrenia.[editorializing]

Both characters struggle to piece their lives back together. Farishta seeks and finds his lost love, the English mountaineer Allie Cone, but their relationship is overshadowed by his mental illness. Chamcha, having miraculously regained his human shape, wants to take revenge on Farishta for having forsaken him after their common fall from the hijacked plane. He does so by fostering Farishta's pathological jealousy and thus destroying his relationship with Allie. In another moment of crisis, Farishta realises what Chamcha has done, but forgives him and even saves his life.”.

Plus there is more and more and more…all told in wonderful writing - densely playful, full of cultural references and sideways jokes. This is a novel which needs to be read again and again.

Rushdie was raised in the Islam religion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salman_...) which intersects in a number of its basic beliefs with Christianity. Angels and devils are the same characters in both religions. But the image of angels and devils, which might look the same to both a Christian and Muslim, are defined as representing quite different Good and Evils culturally, imho. Image/belief interpretation is in the eye of the beholder, the major theme of The Satanic Verses’ imho, in all of its permutations.

(I am going to use food as an example: food available in India, used for a religion-based meal, cannot be found in England sometimes. So meal preparers use alternative foods, sometimes they start using the foods English Christians use for their meals, making them their own. But does that make an evolving Muslim-Hindu believer Evil to other Muslims/Hindus still living in their homelands? If an Englishman sees an Indian Muslim or Hindu and sees Evil because of religion, skin color and accent, does that make the Muslim/Hindu believer actually Evil - or does it result sometimes in that he only sees himself evil in his own eyes on some subconscious level? Who has the right to define whom? Another case and type of co-opting - many Japanese are Buddhists, but many Japanese Buddhists have wholeheartedly co-opted some Christmas rituals. I read a magazine by an author who talked to Japanese who were shopping for Christmas trees, decorations and gifts. These Japanese Buddhists were mystified by the Christian stories behind our evolved Christian holidays and the forms of Christmas they too were happily embracing, further evolving, co-opting, in a completely harmless manner. Is this natural or against nature? It is natural. Is it Evil? No, imho. )

The story vehicle Rushdie uses in ‘The Satanic Verses as a foundation is the divisions created by immigration and Indian/Islam culture. What can one do to foster acceptance or reduce rejection by people? Can people grok/accept the differing personal mental visions developed/expressed by culture, if filtered by immigrants and White English people who live in or aspire to life in England in this case? Some immigrants completely reject their previous heritage, but they are in turn sometimes rejected by the people of their chosen cultural replacement, the new culture they now love and admire. Other immigrants remain in the bubble of their original culture trying to maintain their homeland inside of another, very different, homeland. The result, at least in ‘The Satanic Verses’ is a cultural chaos. There is immigrant evolution and devolution, described in Rushdie’s vision with deep intellectual amusement, amazement and confusion.

The book is a delirious and hysterical confection of wild hilarity encapsulated in a tale of amazed rage-based misery. The two main characters remind me of the character Candide by Voltaire. Rushdie also kicks around Western consumerism in a major way. I was reminded of Animal Farm ironically - about evil pigs) and 1984 by George Orwell, and Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Lee Harper, and The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Saga, Volume 1 by Brian Vaughan, and The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon… and even The Book of Enoch. (The Book of Enoch includes the biblical tale of those angels, naming them, who were cast out of heaven because of their desire for human women.) And many more…which apparently have been printed and distributed and read in vain.

People are silly, no matter what the culture, religion, or belief system. I see the silliness of people much the same as Rushdie describes in ‘The Satanic Verses’. But it’s a very deadly silliness to some.

It is the most ironic silliness of all that the author Rushdie had a death sentence passed on him by Iran’s Supreme Leader of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 because of this book. For real. He called for Rushdie's death which has resulted in several unsuccessful assassination attempts. So far.

From the article in Wikipedia, a plot analysis with which I agree with completely:

”Muhammad Mashuq ibn Ally wrote that "The Satanic Verses is about identity, alienation, rootlessness, brutality, compromise, and conformity. These concepts confront all migrants, disillusioned with both cultures: the one they are in and the one they join. Yet knowing they cannot live a life of anonymity, they mediate between them both. The Satanic Verses is a reflection of the author’s dilemmas." The work is an "albeit surreal, record of its own author's continuing identity crisis."Ally said that the book reveals the author ultimately as "the victim of nineteenth-century British colonialism." Rushdie himself spoke confirming this interpretation of his book, saying that it was not about Islam, "but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay." He has also said "It's a novel which happened to contain a castigation of Western materialism. The tone is comic."

But. However. From Wikipedia:

”The title refers to the Satanic Verses, a group of Quranic verses about three pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Al-Uzza, and Manāt. The part of the story that deals with the "satanic verses" was based on accounts from the historians al-Waqidi and al-Tabari.”

“The book and its perceived blasphemy motivated Islamic extremist bombings, killings, and riots and sparked a debate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. Fearing unrest, the Rajiv Gandhi government banned the importation of the book into India. In 1989, Supreme Leader of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini called for Rushdie's death, resulting in several failed assassination attempts on the author, who was granted police protection by the UK government, and attacks on connected individuals, including the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi, who was stabbed to death in 1991. Assassination attempts against Rushdie continued, including an attempt on his life in August 2022.”

”After the Satanic Verses controversy developed, some scholars familiar with the book and the whole of Rushdie's work, like M. D. Fletcher, saw the reaction as ironic. Fletcher wrote "It is perhaps a relevant irony that some of the major expressions of hostility toward Rushdie came from those about whom and (in some sense) for whom he wrote." He said the manifestations of the controversy in Britain:

“”embodied an anger arising in part from the frustrations of the migrant experience and generally reflected failures of multicultural integration, both significant Rushdie themes. Clearly, Rushdie's interests centrally include explorations of how migration heightens one's awareness that perceptions of reality are relative and fragile, and of the nature of religious faith and revelation, not to mention the political manipulation of religion. Rushdie's own assumptions about the importance of literature parallel the literal value accorded the written word in Islamic tradition to some degree. But Rushdie seems to have assumed that diverse communities and cultures share some degree of common moral ground on the basis of which dialogue can be pieced together, and it is perhaps for this reason that he underestimated the implacable nature of the hostility evoked by The Satanic Verses, even though a major theme of that novel is the dangerous nature of closed, absolutist belief systems.””

Can’t we all get along? Apparently not.

I highly recommend this book, but it is a dense literary and satirical read. If it were not for the controversy, I suspect the novel would not be on many bookshelves. It is extremely literary, a high-end modern allegory. It is a not very disguised commentary that describes Western and Eastern societal myths in an unfavorable light. I see what Rushdie saw, I agree with his vision of the chaos and hurtfulness of human cultures and clashes.

All cultures form because of the human need to formulate a paradigm to make sense of reality, a comfortable nest to live within. These cultural formulations, brought into the world in isolation in different parts of the world, showcase the variety of human adaptation. Unfortunately, they also showcase human maladaptivity, too.

This is a banned book in many Middle-Eastern countries, of which most are dictatorial theocracies, who have laws to kill anyone with diverse lifestyles and thinking. Many of these countries have a death penalty for atheists on the books. Many of these Islamic countries have the death penalty for any Muslim who changes to another religion. Many of these countries, depending on what kind of Islam they demand of their citizens, have the death penalty for Muslims of a different religious sect of Islam. Don’t feed this theocratic insanity, gentle reader, wherever you are from. Diversity of ideas and public discussion of many ideas is a good thing! I admire flexible minds and flexible multicultural societies and I try to feel tolerance for harmless religious beliefs, if not exactly respectful, sorry. I hate, yes, hate, censorship and all organized religions. All organized religions censor and murder people with different ideas today, some more than others, full stop.

Considering the many many many many books published about these very same themes - about religious and racial hatreds, gender prejudices, politically-based hatreds, history - which are mostly all about the immoral killing off of The Other for no good reasons other than they are different - why do those who ban books bother? Banned books become bestsellers, sure enough, because they got banned. For millennia. Rushdie is in a long distinguished blockchain of authors whom small-minded evil people have tried to silence. The bad news is every generation births small-minded evil book banners and burners. Humans don’t pass down instinctual memories to their offspring. Unfortunately, every generation repeats the errors of prejudice again and again. Thankfully, we have books. Rushdie’s books will be around forever, somewhere, even if hidden in closets or passed down in the manner of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.

The Truth is hard for many to face. We shit in our own nests. We murder others for the motes we see in their eyes ignoring that it looks exactly like the one in our own eyes. How many great humans were almost murdered because of religion (Albert Einstein, for one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_...) and how many genius humans have we murdered or stifled (including a lot of genius women) who could have maybe made it possible for us to have a Mars habitat right now?

It's always interesting returning to a book read years before and gaining a different perspective. I first read this my final year of highschool and it blew my mind at the time; I don't think I stopped talking about it for months. A few months ago I returned to the book and, while I still think it's great, and I probably got a lot more of the references, it's not as amazing to me as it was over ten years ago. Rushdie's style is occasionally flowing and lyrical, but then he'll throw in all sorts of references to pop culture or some obscure Indian films that go right over my head and occasionally even put a big, barely digestable lump in the narrative. Still, when this book is good, it's really poignant, tragic, and sometimes full of mirth.

I never liked the term "magic realism" much, but I suppose it can be applied to this novel. I do think it probably fits better with Midnight's Children though, as parts of The Satanic Verses are outright, unashamed fantasy (though fairly allegorical of course) and quite good at that. The premise of the book is that an Indian movie star and an expatriate Indian voice artist living in London meet on a plane that gets hijacked and blows up, and for some reason they survive their fall to earth, but become angelic beings in the process. Gibreel, the flamboyant, pompous film star, walks around with a big glowing halo (even if you can't always see it) and seems to be unable to do any wrong, except to his sometime lover, the mountain-climber Aleluia Cone, , whereas Saladin Chamcha looks like a goat-man, smells horrible and, until over halfway through the book, can only speak in animal noises. I understand better what Rushdie was trying to do with this parable in 2012, whereas in 1999 I just thought it was a crazy and awesome story, although I did grasp the moral implications well enough. Salman has a lot to say about prestige, what it means to be outcast, what it means to have a country, or be an alien in a country that you really wish was your own. Sometimes he's quite subtle with this, but at other times the heavy hand of symbolism causes a slight flinch.

In between the chapters telling the story of Gibreel and Saladin are historical stories running through about three separate narratives. Much of this has to do with the birth of islam, or pilgrims on the Haj, and these may be my favourite sections of the book. Rushdie brings the setting of ancient Jahilia to a strange, distant sort of life, and portrays the dealings and political machinations and religious fervour with a good deal of subtlety. It is, I think, these chapters that got Rushdie into so much trouble, as they do indeed appear quite blasphemous and make the prophet Mohammad out to be a bit of a huckster and a charlatan. I like a big helping of irreverent mockery and this book does deliver on that count. It's interesting to observe, too, how these "side narratives" end up weaving into the main story in a way and tackling similar themes in different ways. I think that brings me finally to the greatest strength of the book: It's not just a simple, clear-cut tale that you can distill to a single statement or fragment of moral. There are many, many layers, and many things Rushdie wants to bring out into the open. Some of his messages even appear slightly contradictory, and yet that's part of the pleasure of the experience; this book will have you thinking and asking questions about your perceptions of the world around you, the home you live in and the people with whom you share it.

Desisto. Realismo demasiado mágico para mim. Sei que se fizesse o esforço de ultrapassar a barreira da fantasia encontraria aqui ideias interessantíssimas e bem laboradas. Contudo, depois de tentar voltar ao livro mais de 5 ou 6 vezes, ao longo de um ano, nunca me prendeu, por mais que avançasse tudo me fazia sentir tédio, fazendo perder toda a minha capacidade de concentração. Por outro lado, se com "Midnight's Children" tinha conhecimento sobre a relação entre a Índia e Inglaterra, aqui falta-me conhecimento sobre o Corão para poder chegar a muitas das metáforas e simbolismos.

I read this book to show solidarity with the author after he was banned by Rajiv Gandhi’s government and forced to apologies. Even some group issued fatwah calling for Rushdie's death. The result was several failed assassination attempts on Rushdie. So this was my statement for freedom of expression. I am against banning any book.

The Satanic Verses consists of a frame narrative, using elements of magical realism, interlaced with a series of sub-plots that are narrated as dream visions experienced by one of the protagonists. The book takes a moment to grasp Rushdie's complex storyline and sort through the British and Indian slang, but the effort is worth the time to both expand one's vocabulary and see his logic. His writing is extremely clever and humorous. It is a bit difficult to get started following the completely non-linear narrative.

I did find it rather long and a little disjointed, but maybe that is my shortfall, being far from a literary genius. Overall, I liked it and am glad I found out what it was all about.

I can't really review Rushdie's work. I don't understand everything he writes about. But I do love him because his language and his prose and his stories are just so Indian.

He writes lushly, extravagantly, with story tripping over story, subplot over sub sub plot. Characters tromp through with no regard for their antecedents. The colors are candy pink, good luck red, and Aegean blue, and everything is crashing and tumbling into each other.

And on top, his stories are amusing, mischievous, clever, full of naughtiness and frank stupidity. And if someone rides his ass backwards through parliament, no one blinks, and Bollywood is even more bollyish and saints ride rats in homespun, and then all of sudden, his stories are so sharp, so smart, quick to cut and they leave you, well, feeling awed. Do I need to say more....

It is taxing to read Rushdie and you need time, "Verses" took me a month of straight reading; but Rushdie is a big beautiful genie of a writer and the ride is fantastic.