This past Friday people may have heard that there was an assassination attempt on India-born author Salman Rushdie during a lecture in New York. People not familiar with the history may ask “why?” and I suppose you had to be there to understand the controversy surrounding Rushdie, particularly in the context of the Iranian revolution. Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, was first published in 1988, and was generally well-received in the West and damned in the Muslim world where it was banned in countries like Iran, and the Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa on Rushdie, basically a “hit” that could be carried out by any true believer.
However, it was announced in 1998 following the death of Khomeini that the fatwa was withdrawn, thus it came as a “surprise” that all these years later someone still wanted to kill Rushdie; perhaps maybe this shouldn’t be a surprise, since there are many fundamentalist clerics who regard Rushdie as the “devil” who needs to be extinguished by a member of the faithful:
There had been several attempts on Rushdie’s life when the fatwa was still in effect, including a bomb attack in the UK, and for a while he was kept in hiding in the UK. But the attack by a man of Lebanese extraction on Friday appeared “out of nowhere,” as even the state trooper on hand to provide security wasn’t “prepared” for any attack. Perhaps the assassin was just some nobody who was delusional and needed to do something "profound" to validate his life in the eyes if his "god" or his local cleric; but whatever motivated him it just seems a little late in the day. Rushdie was stabbed numerous times on the stage before some in the audience rushed forward to stop the attack. Rushdie was reported to be on a ventilator, likely blinded in one eye, the nerves of one arm sliced, as was his liver.
Just how “controversial” is the novel and its author that it would “inspire” such an attack? Unless you are Muslim or a scholar in religion, probably not very. The Satanic Verses contains a bit of the “magical realism” of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, mixing reality with fantasy, and its offensiveness would be harder to understand from the Western perspective. I was in college at the time and I recall that some “intellectual” types thought it was “significant” without actually knowing precisely why, except that it gave an “alternative” version of Muhammad, much like how The Last Temptation of Christ did in regard to Jesus.
I recall thumbing through the book, but it really wasn’t my cup-of-tea. The parts that were “controversial” were not even really the central element of the story, but a dream sequence involving one of the characters who—taking the “personality” of the angel Gabriel who supposedly spoke to Muhammad as God’s messenger—was imagining that it was the other way around, that Muhammad was just some megalomaniac who cons the angel into reciting what he tells him to say, to make it appear that what is known as the Koran actually has a “divine” inspiration, and not in “fact” of human creation.
Well, I suppose it is easy to see that as “controversial,”
since, after all, many claim that the Bible was also more inspired by “man”
than by “God,” and some people might be upset by that. But for Islam, the "suggestion" would be that sharia law isn't really "God's law," but laws invented by men with an extreme idea of how society should be structured and maintained.
There is more to it than that, but the point is obvious, although it is also obvious that “Gabriel” in the novel has mental health issues and probably schizophrenic—thus putting the “verses” in the realm of satire and simply questioning Islam’s lack of “openness” to new ideas and modernity; after all, Christianity adapted to the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. Although the “Satanic Verses” is a real thing and was accepted by early Islamic scholars in the way the story about Jesus spending 40 days in the desert being tempted by the devil was, it has been rejected by “modern” Islamic scholars as being too “heretical” for people to be exposed to.
Despite all of this, The Satanic Verses is really meant to address the Indian immigrant experience in Britain. A couple of Muslim Indian expatriates go to Britain via plane to make their home, the plane explodes but they are somehow “magically” transformed, one who takes on the personality of Gabriel, and the other taking the form of the devil, which for the latter causes him problems with immigration services. The “Gabriel” character who is suffering from mental illness was a film star in India but finds himself a nobody in Britain, eventually kills his British girlfriend out of jealousy before killing himself. The other character is apparently angry that he was abandoned when he had that trouble with immigration and “mixing in” with British society, and tries to ruin the other man’s life. But the “devil” eventually resumes human form and he decides to give up immigrant life and returns to India. The End.
It is truly unfortunate that there are religious fanatics who probably never even read the book but are brainwashed by fundamentalist “teachers” and clerics who apparently are so megalomaniacal that any interpretation that deviates from the exact meaning of the printed word in the Koran without regard to a modern context amounts to apostasy; in Iran and Saudi Arabia there is still the death penalty for the “crime” of deviating from the “meaning” of the text, and those who choose to convert to another religion, which is the direct definition of apostasy, would appear to be committing the worst crime a Muslim can commit.
To be fair, in most Muslim nations death is not automatically meted out for “religious” crimes, but as we saw this past Friday, it only takes one fanatic for people to question just what is the place of religion in the “modern” world.
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