The Satanic Verses Revisited
There’s a great article by Professor Samuel Fleischacker, on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses over at Normblog.
I remember the Satanic Verses furore well. It was the first time I had encountered liberals being flabby over issues of basic freedoms. I was running a student magazine and I had asked Jonathan Montgomery to write a piece on the affair: and was utterly gobsmacked to find that he had sided with the book burners against the author. I also remember a friend of mine, Andy Choudhry, getting hugely upset by what he thought was in a book which he had not read. I suspect that it was the reaction to the book which put him on the path, from an amiable left leaning stoner on the fringes of the Socialist Workers Party, to becoming the leader of Al Muhajiroun.
It was also interesting to see the reaction of those on the right wing of the political spectrum to the whole business. The book was crap, unreadable, we were told. Rushdie was an ingrate foreigner who cursed the British while poking a hornets’ nest filled with funny foreign types: and now expected us to protect his sorry hide. Dismal.
Having read the book, I was astonished by the reaction. I like magical realism, and I vex about religion: so I loved it. There’s a great tradition in English literature of books dealing with loss of faith, inability to believe, god-shaped holes, and so on, stretching right back to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and the Satanic Verses forms a part of that canon.
Anyhow, here’s an extract from Samuel Fleischacker’s article.
Rushdie does his best, I think, to try to imagine himself into Mohammed’s shoes, to try to make sense of prophecy in terms that a modern secular person can understand. He presents Mohammed as struggling to figure out what God wants, rather than as simply knowing that, but this is a view of prophecy that will be familiar to anyone acquainted with Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, or liberal Catholics and Protestants. Even if Rushdie is an agnostic or atheist (I suspect that he was an agnostic when he wrote the book but is now an atheist), he tries hard to draw from Mohammed’s teaching a message that he can endorse himself. In Rushdie’s hands, the oneness of the universe may not, ultimately, be something theological, but it is nevertheless of the highest importance that we recognize it: it means, among other things, as the whole of The Satanic Verses as well as many of Rushdie’s other writings make clear, that there is a possibility of unity, of harmony and mutual respect, among Hindus and Muslims, Muslims and Jews, secular and religious people, and traditionalists and modernists. In particular, I think, Rushdie wrote this book to help secular people like himself understand religious people better, find something to admire in religious teachings. This was his olive branch to the religion of his youth, his attempt to come to a rapprochement with it, not his rejection of it.
Why, then, was the book so reviled by religious Muslims (and religious Christians and Jews, even if they deplored the fatwa against Rushdie)? Well, for one thing, Rushdie’s critics didn’t read the book, and believed characterizations of it that were blatantly false. For another, the violence and irreverent jokes and promiscuous sex in the book are likely to irritate religious readers, whether or not a deep theological teaching lies beneath the surface. (Rushdie probably expected such people to ignore the book; he wrote it for elite Western sophisticates, for whom the shock would be that they were supposed to take religion seriously.) And for a third, the sort of radical neo-Platonism I have been describing, in which one seeks God even where He seems most emphatically to be not, has always had an air of heresy about it, has always disturbed more traditional religious people.
That said, I think the critics of The Satanic Verses made not just a moral but a strategic mistake. I found myself being much more interested in the Quran after I read it than I had ever been before, and I was not alone: sales of the Quran went up everywhere that the book was read. Looking back on the novel now, I find much of it overwrought, and Rushdie has turned out in the intervening years to be shallower and more self-indulgent than I would like. But he offered us an opening for a deep conversation on religion in 1988, which could well have led to a far greater respect for Islam in particular among Christians and Jews. The fact that that opportunity was rejected rather than welcomed was a harbinger, and partial cause, of the catastrophic religious divide in which we now find ourselves.
Read the lot
Comments
| 23 July 2008, 11:19 am |
I thought the book was clever rather than profound, but certainly not “unreadable”. There was a translation published in Romania a few months ago, with predictable results.
| 23 July 2008, 11:38 am |
Life is too short for Salman Rushdie.
| 23 July 2008, 11:41 am |
Has anyone here actually read it? What is it like? Is it an easy beach read?
| 23 July 2008, 12:18 pm |
Only if you were shipwrecked.
| 23 July 2008, 12:33 pm |
But wasn’t it “rude secular atheists” who caused all the fuss over Sir Salman’s book?
| 23 July 2008, 12:56 pm |
In West Yorks it was most definately bearded book burnings in the centre of cities and towns. Not too many white faces but a whole lot of outrage from people who, largely, had not read the book - as Look North found out back then.
Have started it - liked imagery but, as a hard core sci-fi type it didn’t grab me but as this was ten years ago I might give it another go.
| 23 July 2008, 1:05 pm |
the people who said it was crap and unreadable weren’t far off. it’s a turgid, tedious piece of writing. As has been almost all Rushdie’s output since Midnight’s Children.
| 23 July 2008, 1:16 pm |
Paul - I’m not saying that “rude secular athiests” are “the problem” as you (should) well know.
I’m making a much more limited point: that secularists, both religious and not, need to be allies against theocracy. However, if athiest secularists take every opportunity to tell religious secularists that they’re ghastly fools, it will be a bit difficult to work together, won’t it.
| 23 July 2008, 1:46 pm |
“However, if athiest secularists take every opportunity to tell religious secularists that they’re ghastly fools, it will be a bit difficult to work together, won’t it.”
David - But secular atheists don’t take every opportunity to tell religious people they’re “ghastly fools” - as you (should) well know. Far from it. That I think they should - and that it would be worth doing - is another matter.
By the way - “religious secularists”? Please, spare us….
| 23 July 2008, 1:52 pm |
As for rudeness from “secular atheists” - don’t you think it’s interesting that the rudest, nastiest piece of bile on that other thread came from a self-confessed Christian? Really, these religious types are something else.
| 23 July 2008, 1:56 pm |
David T
Quite. The goal should be secularism atheism has nothing to do with it.
The freedom of that institutional and intellectual, secular space is the very freedom of thought, conscience and belief itself.
Socrates was tried and sentenced (whatever the political motivations) for blaspheming the gods (and thus morality) even though by that point in Athenian deliberative democracy no-one was really sure what that might have mean’t (Socrates ‘daimon’ his creative muse or inner conscience was seized upon as heresy)
| 23 July 2008, 2:07 pm |
I’ve read ‘The Satanic Verses’ and I liked it - well most of it (except the really long boring bits where Rushdie seems to be sharing an in-joke with Bruce Chatwin about the Argentine pampas).
Not as good as ‘Midnights Children’ certainly, but better than Shame and I would say ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’ (haven’t read any of Rushdie’s other work).
| 23 July 2008, 3:28 pm |
“Secular atheists don’t take every opportunity to tell religious people they’re “ghastly fools” - as you (should) well know. Far from it. That I think they should - and that it would be worth doing - is another matter.”
Atheists are hilarious. They can be as dogmatic as the maddest religious person – for such small stakes.
| 23 July 2008, 3:45 pm |
I re-read it recently and was surprised by how well it had aged. There’s a lot in it that is serious and thoughtful albeit inflammatory, but overwhelmingly it is a funny book. It could quite easily be made into the Muslim Life of Brian.
| 23 July 2008, 4:09 pm |
He’s not the Prophet, he’s a very naughty goy
| 23 July 2008, 4:38 pm |
“By the way - “religious secularists”? Please, spare us….”
Politically, I’m a religious secularist. In fact, any orthodox Jew or Hassid is.
| 23 July 2008, 4:39 pm |
Definitely my least favourite Rushdie book.
It goes without saying that almost all the people burning the book hadn’t read it, but I wonder how many of those dismissing it at the time as badly written had read it?.
| 23 July 2008, 4:45 pm |
Did religious Christians and Jews chime in against the book, as asserted above? What was their point?
| 23 July 2008, 5:04 pm |
What is a moderate secularist religious person? is it on par with the theocrats and all other true believers that believe that there is a supernatural being that created the universe and have communicated some guidelines with privileged humans and they only differ in their interpretation of the message. Or sort of its OK to believe in supernatural beings guidelines as long as you don’t take it seriously, then you is a moderate secularist.
Come to think of Dawkins appeal that the children should be spared religious indoctrination, such a nonsense. If I did believe that my children would end up in gehenna if they didn’t believed in the right God I would do any thing in my power to spare my children from such a faith. If there was means to stop parents from impose religion on their children wouldn’t that be equal to pure torture if the parent are true believers, to watch your children destined to hell and you couldn’t do anything to stop it. And if the parents are true believers and not wishy-washy moderate secularists should the lie and falsely act to their children.
| 23 July 2008, 5:14 pm |
Never mind Jahweh, this feller doesn’t even believe in syntax.
| 23 July 2008, 6:28 pm |
I remember the Satanic Verses furore well. It was the first time I had encountered liberals being flabby over issues of basic freedoms.
The Satanic Verses furore started in 1989. Prior to then, in relation to Northern Ireland, there was very many examples of ‘liberals being flappy’; especially over Irish Republican Terrorism. I rather noticed this, as I served in the province as a young subaltern in the early 80s and it was sort of difficult not to.
I’m not sure whether you didn’t notice this, didn’t think there was much ‘liberal flappyness’ over Sein Fein and Republican Terrorism or this has simply slipped your mind. Care to clarify?
| 23 July 2008, 7:08 pm |
Seymour Paine:
My memory is a little foggy and events were rather geographically removed from me (I live in Canada), but I believe the religous Christians and Jews who protested the publishing of the Satanic Verses were operating out of the “attack one faith and you attack us all” play book.
Although it seems counter-intuitive on the face, religious leaders from the “three Abrahamic faiths” will get together on certain things, whether it’s to prohibit the holding of Gay Pride events in Jerusalem or supporting public funding of “faith based” elementary and secondary schools here in Ontario.
| 23 July 2008, 7:32 pm |
Lynne T: Thanks. I thought it might have been because of that phony notion that “The Three Great Abrahamic Faiths” have something in common.
| 23 July 2008, 9:34 pm |
Wonder if David T is interested in this article
The Contrasting Media Treatment of Israeli and Islamic Death Threats
http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0195/9501017.htm
Th JDL of course regularly issue death threats against “enemies of the Jews”
| 23 July 2008, 11:48 pm |
You got to be joking.
I’d say that the average non-Muslim is absolutely shocked when they discover what’s in the Koran, especially if they know it is held to be literally true and moral by the vast majority of Muslims.
| 24 July 2008, 12:39 am |
I suppose if you’d never read Marquez then your reaction would have been different, but my reaction was that this had been done before.
Still, it doesn’t matter if it is derivative. The reaction was cowardly.
| 24 July 2008, 10:31 am |
What is remarkable is that most critics of Satanic Verses and the Quran (of course not putting them on the same level) have something in common.
neither have read the books or certainly not understood them.
| 24 July 2008, 9:59 pm |
me
Good stuff. You’ve found a 15 year old article about the JDL/Kahane Chai etc.
You clearly haven’t been paying attention: because Kahane Chai is my key example of a Jewish terrorist group which is rightly outlawed, and whose members would never be feted as progressive by left wingers.
Unlike Hamas/MB, of course.
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