The Satanic Verses is the fourth novel from the Indian-British writer Salman Rushdie. First published in September 1988, the book was inspired by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie used magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters. 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. In 1989, Supreme Leader of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against Rushdie, 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, in which he lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand.
Plot
thumb|[[Salman Rushdie in 2014|left]]
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 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, an Anglophile emigrant who has cut himself off from his Indian heritage, works as a voiceover artist in England.
At the beginning of the novel, both are trapped in a plane hijacked by Sikh separatists, flying from India to Britain. The plane explodes over the English Channel. While everyone else on board perishes, Farishta and Chamcha are magically saved. In a miraculous transformation, Farishta takes on the personality of the archangel Gabriel (referred to as Gibreel) and Chamcha that of a devil, complete with horns and goatlike legs. Chamcha is arrested and passes through an ordeal of police brutality as a suspected illegal immigrant.
Both characters struggle to piece their lives back together. Farishta seeks and finds his lost love, the English mountaineer Alleluia "Allie" Cone. However, their relationship is overshadowed by his pathological jealousy and growing sense that he is the Angel Gibreel and other symptoms of schizophrenia. Farishta meets movie producer S.S. Sisodia, who proposes a plan to revitalise his movie career and bring him back to stardom. Meanwhile, Chamcha's devil-like appearance intensifies until he recognizes his anger at Farishta for not defending him from arrest and abandoning him after the plane crash; he is then transformed back into his human shape.
Chamcha wants to take revenge on Farishta. Using his skills as a voice actor, he harasses Farishta and Allie over the phone with messages that foster Farishta's pathological jealousy, ultimately destroying their relationship.
While London is engulfed in escalating political and communal conflict between the conservative government and the immigrant population, Farishta and Chamcha meet again in another moment of crisis. Farishta realizes what Chamcha has done, but instead of enacting revenge saves his life.
Both return to India. Farishta kills Allie in another outbreak of jealousy and then commits suicide. Chamcha, who has found not only forgiveness from Farishta but also reconciliation with his father and his own Indian identity, decides to remain in India.
Dream sequences
Embedded in this story is a series of half-magic dream vision narratives, ascribed to the mind of Farishta.
One of the sequences is a fictionalised narration of the life of Muhammad (called "Mahound" or "the Messenger" in the novel) in Mecca (called Jahilia in the novel). At its centre is the episode of the so-called satanic verses, in which the prophet first proclaims a revelation requiring the adoption of three of the old polytheistic deities, but later renounces this as an error induced by the Devil. There are also two opponents of the "Messenger": a priestess, Hind, and a sceptic and satirical poet, Baal. When the prophet returns to Mecca in triumph, Baal goes into hiding in an underground brothel, where the prostitutes assume the identities of the prophet's wives. Also, one of the prophet's companions claims that he, doubting the authenticity of the "Messenger," has subtly altered portions of the Quran as they were dictated to him.
The second sequence tells the story of Ayesha, an Indian peasant girl who claims to be receiving revelations from the Archangel Gibreel. She lures all her village community to embark on a foot pilgrimage to Mecca, claiming that they will be able to walk across the Arabian Sea. The pilgrimage ends in a catastrophic climax as the believers all walk into the water and disappear, amid disturbingly conflicting testimonies from observers about whether they simply drowned or were in fact miraculously able to cross the sea.
A third dream sequence presents the figure of a fanatic expatriate religious leader, the "Imam", in a late-20th-century setting, an allusion to Ruhollah Khomeini in his exile in Paris.
Literary criticism and analysis
Overall, the book received favourable reviews from literary critics. In a 2003 volume of criticism of Rushdie's career, the influential critic Harold Bloom named The Satanic Verses "Rushdie's largest aesthetic achievement".
Timothy Brennan called the work "the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain" that captures the immigrants' dream-like disorientation and their process of "union-by-hybridization". The book is seen as "fundamentally a study in alienation".
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". He said the manifestations of the controversy in Britain: