Controversial Words: Why You Should Read The Satanic Verses

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure to take part in an event at the University of Warwick's annual Warwick Student Arts Festival in which the goal was to take a book and convince the audience that they should read it – the winner being voted on by the participants of the competition. While most of the books have drifted into memory now, I remember snatching second place to a friend of mine who was attempting to sell Conan the Barbarian, by Robert E. Howard. What I do remember vividly are the reasons for choosing the book I attempted to sell, which was 'The Satanic Verses' by Salman Rushdie. Furthermore, I found the book incredibly difficult to sell on the basis that many people were put off by the controversy surrounding it.

The book, hopefully, is familiar, but unfortunately the numbers that have read it are dwarfed by those who are aware of the huge controversy that surrounded the book, leading to the Ayatollah Khomeini's issuing of a fatwa for the death of Rushdie, and his subsequent disapearance from public life. The issue surrounded Rushdie's portrayal of a character in the book, who resembled Mohammed, as a secular and base character, quite apart from the privileges bestowed upon him by Islam as a whole. It is far from the only controversy that Rushdie has courted, the second most memorable being his portrayal of Indira Gandhi in his (to my mind) opus, Midnight's Children.

My choice of book was guided largely by my belief that many who had criticised and discussed the book, in much the same way as the discussion that surrounded the infamous Danish cartoons of Mohammed, had not read the book, much less have a grip upon the substantive ideas that it presented.

I will admit to being a huge fan of magic realism, from Marquez and Llosa through to Bulgakov and Kundera, and believe that Rushdie is a master of the form. His novel inverts the usual relationship of the spiritual and magical to the mundane, with key religious events approached with a secular, human sobriety, and everyday life examined through a lens seemingly smothered in fairy dust. Indeed, the twist that facilitates the interlocking narratives of the Satanic Verses is nothing if not an entirely human foible, drawing attention to the strange mix of lofty ambition and day to day struggle that puts humans somewhere between angels and insects.

This, quite apart from the offence caused, is a topic of great pertinence at the moment, with the Christian equivalents perhaps being portrayed in the 2005 film Son of Man, that depicted Jesus as a political figure, and the recent novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ by Phillip Pullman, that demonstrated the fundamental weaknesses of whatever is human. However, it should not be the existence of such works that provokes controversy – religions have never had a problem finding suitable heretics – but rather the content of the ideas themselves. The debate surrounding the Satanic Verses seemed to contain little debate as to the ideas, but rather the political issue of the fatwa, when the opposite should have been the case.

While The Satanic Verses is hardly a textbook on Islamic thought, it is most definitely worth a read as a way of approaching the debate concerning the representation of Mohammed and Allah in Islam – a debate which goes back to the Ottoman Empire and before (for another fantastic book on the subject, set in Istanbul, check out My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk). Indeed, not reading it because of the controversy is doing the spirit of public debate a disservice. Above that, though, it is a masterful piece of fiction, and shouldn't that be reason enough?