The most controversial novel of modern times. Its admirable qualities as a work of magic realism are still overshadowed by its perceived offences against Islam and the resulting threats, injuries and deaths. Its author still has a price on his head.
Salman Rushdie (born 1947) had his first success with his second novel, Midnight’s Children, which won both the Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981. The publication of his fourth, The Satanic Verses, was eagerly anticipated.
When it appeared in the UK in February 1988, it was a monumental work – 550 pages of extraordinary magic realism. The story follows two Indian actors who survive a plane crash and are changed into an angel and a demon. Rushdie uses their different experiences of arrival in England to explore themes of immigration, racism and Indian identity.
They and several other characters undergo transformation or reincarnation, either genuinely or in the minds of others, and the author implies that illusion, delusion and dreams are as important to the human experience as reality is. Doubt about what is real makes us ask questions, and so we grow. Lack of doubt, or an excess of unquestioning faith, leads to ignorance and a corruption of personal beliefs. This is at the heart of Rushdie’s magic realism.
Throughout The Satanic Verses there is a second storyline about a religion called Submission, of which both actors are followers. Parallel narratives follow the founding of Submission and the modern-day crises of faith of the actors in secular England. Submission is a thinly veiled disguise for Islam, a word that translates as ‘submission’ in English. The book’s title and a passage within it refer to a disputed episode in the life of Muhammad (or, in the novel, Mahound). The prophet is supposed to have been fooled by the devil into including verses into the Quran that advocated worshipping three goddesses. Muhammad later realised his mistake and removed the verses. Islam worships only one god, and strict Muslims believe that the verses in question must be the work of unbelievers. For them, Rushdie’s use of the title suggested that the Quran was a devilish book.
Other elements of the book were also open to interpretation as blasphemy, and some were quick to cry heresy. India banned Rushdie’s novel in October 1988, and the first organised book-burning took place in Bolton, Lancashire, in December. In February 1989, after a large demonstration against Rushdie in Islamabad, Pakistan, Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa – a call for Muslims everywhere to kill the author and anyone knowingly associated with the book’s publication.
While a verbal battle raged between authors and religious leaders of all beliefs about the rights and limits to free speech, very real violence was conducted in the name of the fatwa. Bookshops were bombed; publishers were threatened and attacked. In 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, the translator of the Japanese edition, was stabbed to death. Rushdie himself went into hiding, guarded twenty-four hours a day by Britain’s security forces.
Although there have been several attempts to diffuse the situation, the fatwa remains in place because only the person who declared it can rescind it – and Khomeini died in June 1989. A bounty of $2.8 million is still on offer, and almost any news item about Salman Rushdie is greeted with renewed calls for his death. Sales of The Satanic Verses, which had been relatively slow by the end of 1988, soared after the declaration of the fatwa, and the book is now Viking Penguin’s all-time best-seller.
When published in 1988, The Satanic Verses met with favourable reviews, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Award. In 1989, at the height of The Satanic Verses controversy, or Rushdie Affair, a fatwa was issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie.
