The Satanic Verses

Novel by Salman Rushdie. First published in 1988.

Vague Summary without Spoilers

After a terrorist bomb explodes in an airplane, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta are falling down, down, down. And land in England. The Satanic Verses deals with the postcolonial topics of Indian identity, cultural hybridity, exploitation, reincarnation, mental illness, faith and doubts, and racism. It clearly reveals that multiple and frequently divergent discourses have emerged out of the postcolonial diaspora. In this way, the novel illustrates the migrants' problems of self-contextualisation (of being both located and dislocated) (Cundy, 66). It is as much about changing identities as loss of religious faith; many of its devices – such as the use of the same names by more than one character – add emphasis to this central preoccupation. The migrant’s dilemma (to change, risking loss of faith and identity, or to try to hold on to a consistent idea of selfhood) lies at the novel’s heart, and provides its unexpected denouement. It is written out of the very experience of uprootedness, disjunction, and metamorphosis that characterises the migrant condition, and that condition can itself serve as a metaphor for humanity at large (Erickson, 133).

Salman Rushdie in Big Trouble

Rushdie was perceived to be directly attacking the foundations of a world religion in The Satanic Verses. With this novel, Salman Rushdie is said to offend Muslims (and Christians), who called the book blasphemous and arranged book burning events. Furthermore, Ayatollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran at that time, proclaimed a fatwā condoning and actively approving of a possible execution of the author on 14 February 1989. Nevertheless, “95% of what has been written about the book in India has been by those who have not read it” (Smale 28). Though protesters against the novel received no satisfaction from British law, The Satanic Verses was banned in India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. The immediate response of the British media to this was somewhat muted, though Thatcher is part of the book's satire (Ball 116). When the novel was banned in India in October 1988, for example, The Times dedicated just five lines, and The Guardian a mere four lines, to reporting the event. Furthermore, before the publication of The Satanic Verses, Rushdie had been at the forefront of anti-racist debates in Britain. He frequently made use of his high media profile to support the cause of ethnic minorities by attacking the policies of the then-Conservative government.