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Rushdie's Dastan-e-Dilruba: The Satanic Verses As Rushdie's Love Letter to Islam

Feroza Jussawalla

Meheruban likhoon
ya dilruba likhoon
hyran hoon
ke apke khat me
kya likhoon

Ye mera prempatr padh kar
ke tum naraz na hona
ke tum meri zindagi ho
ke tum meri bandagi ho

[Should I address you as respected one
Should I address you as beloved one
I am so distraught
about how
I should address you

When you read my love letter
You should not be disappointed
Because you are my life
and you are my "life's work"]

--Popular Hindi film song from Raj Kapoor's Sangam (1964) [my translation]

Salman Rushdie has been classified as a postcolonial ¹ writer whose fiction depicts the hybrid nature of postcolonials in their migrations and movements, their merging and mixing. Rushdie has variously been called a "Third World Cosmopolitan" [Brennan, Salman Rushdie viii], a "metropolitan intellectual," and "a hybrid" but most often a [End Page 50] "postcolonial," because of his "birth" as a "Midnight's child"--a child born as India was gaining independence at midnight on 14 August 1947 ² --his subsequent education in England, and the making of his home in metropolitan London. Such a perspective is eurocentric and does not provide complete answers to Rushdie's complex works or the complicated response to his work. For the very hybridity that Rushdie manifests results from his being not only a "post-British" colonial but also a "post-Mughal" colonial.

The British were not the only colonizers of India. In fact, Indian historians have traditionally identified several waves of colonization. Journalists Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre best summarize the two major waves of colonization as follows:

Hinduism itself had been brought to India by the Indo-European hordes descending from the North to wrest the subcontinent from its ancient Dravidian inhabitants. . . . The faith of the Prophet had come much later, after the cohorts of Genghis Khan and Tamurlane had battered their way down the Khyber Pass to weaken the Hindus' hold on the great Gangetic Plain. For two centuries, the Moslem Mogul emperors had imposed their sumptuous and implacable rule over most of India, spreading in the wake of their martial legions the message of Allah, the One, the Merciful. [Freedom at Midnight 36]

While the British were actually occupying India, post-Mughal colonialism in the form of Persian poetry, literature, and the general "sumptuousness" of its art and architecture held sway. The Persian language begot Urdu, often described by linguists as a "camp language" of the Muslim invaders of the Subcontinent. However, Persian, Arabic, and Hindi had come together to create a new language for the poetry, literature, arts, and in general the "high culture" of today's Indian Muslims. Jawaharlal Nehru, in his definitive history of India entitled Discovery of India, wrote,

The Mughals were outsiders and strangers to India and yet they fitted into Indian structure with remarkable speed and began the Indo-Mughal period. . . . Their dynasties became completely Indianized with their roots in India, looking upon India as their homeland, and the rest of the world as foreign. [236]

A synthesis worked itself out: new styles of architecture arose; food and clothing changed; and life was affected and varied in many other ways. . . . The Persian language became the official court language and many Persian words crept into popular use. [237]

Persian was the lingua franca of the incoming Muslims from AD 1193 onward, and Persian literature became the favored literature of India for approximately five centuries [Ali 3-4].

It is in this tradition of post-Mughal Urdu high culture that Rushdie grew up. In a 1983 interview with Michael Kaufman, Rushdie said,

My grandfather, my father's father, was a good Urdu poet. My father is not a writer but he's a very literary and literate man, a student of both Arabic and Persian Literature and of Western Literature. At Cambridge he was quite scholarly. So I grew up in an atmosphere of books. And both my parents, in their different ways, were very gifted storytellers.

[End Page 51]

My mother, in common with most Eastern women and perhaps even women of the West, was the keeper of the family stories. . . . From my father I got more conventional fairy tales. He always claimed he was making them up, but in fact I think he was drawing quite heavily on the great storehouse of the Arabian Nights. He would tell us these stories in serial form, kind of Scheharazade episodes, but death was not the issue, just sleep. [Kaufman 22]

Thus it is that Rushdie's "imaginary homelands" lie beyond colonial Britain and contemporary India in the history to which he claims he is handcuffed [Midnight's Children 1]. They lie with his fathers and forefathers, the migrants who created Mughal India. Rushdie's tradition, together with British and European modernism, is that of Persian poetry and storytelling incorporating wordplay--a tradition so effectively recreated in Midnight's Children. Writing about Midnight's Children, Rushdie said,

When the book is discussed in the West, it seems to get discussed almost entirely in terms of a certain string of writers who always get hung around its neck like a kind of garland, which is, you know, Garcia Marquez, Gunther Grass, Rabelais, Laurence Sterne, Cervantes, Gogol, etc. So I thought that instead of talking about all that I'd try to talk about its Eastern literary ancestors and the sense in which it derives out of an Indian tradition which, to my mind, is much more important than this aforesaid list. And I suppose the main thing to talk about is the use of techniques derived from the oral narrative. It is really impossible to overstress the fact that the oral narrative is the most important literary form in India. ["Midnight's Children and Shame" 4-6; my emphasis]

To his British education and metropolitan interests, then, Rushdie urges us to add these indigenous literary qualities. His postmodernity of style--characterized by wordplay, a flashback style of narration, and "magical realism"--is usually ascribed to his Western influences, as though characteristics most identified with postcolonial writing had no counterparts in world literature before the twentieth century. ³

So, while Rushdie clarifies for us his Eastern literary ancestors, in "'In God We Trust'" he tells us how religion shapes the form of his literary output:

As for religion, my work, much of which has been concerned with India and Pakistan, has made it essential for me to confront the issue of religious faith. Even the form of my writing was affected. If one is to attempt honestly to describe reality as it is experienced by religious people, for whom God is no symbol but an everyday fact, then the conventions of what is called realism are quite inadequate. The rationalism of that form comes to seem like a judgement upon, an invalidation of, the religious faith of the characters being described. A form must be created which allows the miraculous and the mundane to co-exist at the same level--as the same order of event. [376]

[End Page 52]

The religious influence directly impacted on the form of his writing, bringing traditionally Muslim--and, in The Satanic Verses, specifically Islamic--narratives, such as those concerned with the writing of the Qur'an, to the forefront of his creativity. The story of Salman, the scribe, leaving in the "Satanic Verses" is a specifically Islamic tale told in all Muslim cultures. Without the religious need, he would not have had to turn to his Middle Eastern literary ancestors. The practice of Islam on the Subcontinent also becomes the content of his literary output. For this reason Rushdie wants us to understand his Indian-Muslim background, which shows how secular Muslims lived and practiced Islam in India:

I was brought up in an Indian Muslim household, but while both my parents were believers neither was insistent or doctrinaire. Two or three times a year, at the big Eid festivals, I would wake up to find new clothes at the foot of my bed, dress and go with my father to the great prayer-maidan outside the Friday Mosque in Bombay, and rise and fall with the multitude, mumbling my way through the uncomprehended Arabic much as Catholic children do--or used to do--with Latin. ["'In God We Trust'" 376-77]

Much of this background shapes, as Rushdie says in this essay, "the characters being described," so that the practice of Islam in India becomes not just a religious and literary influence but the content itself--a content that, if one is not aware of the context, can easily be misinterpreted. ⁴

Therefore, facts of Mughal-Islamic religion, history, culture, and literature as they were syncretized in India are important for more than a simple exegesis of The Satanic Verses. They are important in understanding Salman Rushdie's current dilemma and in pointing to new directions for theoretical interpretations of cross-cultural "hybrid" writers from the Indian Subcontinent. [End Page 53]

Rushdie is the victim not only of the condition of postmodernity, where meaning is wrenched from the author's hands to rest in the hands of readers like the Ayatollah Khomeini, but of the indeterminacy of meaning outside certain cultural contexts. For instance, in looking at The Satanic Verses as manifesting an Islamic narrative form, we also have to consider that this form is from an Indo-Islamic tradition that is not as fundamentalist as some Islamic traditions--like those of the Persian or Arab Shiites--that did not get mixed and merged with the Indian soil. ⁵ India's Islam is that of khawali (bawdy oral narrative) and of baed-bazi (debate) through the recitation of poetry, an Islam merged with Hinduism, as of the poet Kabir, an Islam whose presumptions might seem more blasphemous to the undiluted strain. Of Rushdie's use of Urdu ghazal (lyrical love poetry) in The Satanic Verses, Sara Suleri writes, "it links Rushdie to a highly wrought tradition in which a recurrent trope is the rejection of Islam for some new object of epistemological and erotic devotion" [609]. In fact, in the Indo-Mughal tradition, love for one's religion, whether Hindu or Muslim, is expressed as love for a beloved, both in lyric poetry and longer oral narratives, which is not only why the dastan-e-dilruba (a love song for a beloved) is an appropriate metaphor for The Satanic Verses but, as I will show in the latter half of the essay, the form of the dastan, a long prose narrative delivered as a complaint to the beloved, is the form or the genre of The Satanic Verses. Continuing with this metaphor of the beloved, I would say that it is not the "rejection of Islam"--the beloved--for "ironized submission to the alterities" [Suleri 609] that Rushdie represents as much as love for the Islam--the religion--of the subcontinental soil, where it flourished under the Mughals and came into question at the end of Mughal dominance, where it was and is practiced in an atmosphere of mixing and merging.

While such a hybridized Islam as that of the Mughals of India might seem to embody the metropolitanism of the West, despite its long tradition of satire and humor, in today's fundamentalist climate it does not. Because Rushdie was working within an Islamic tradition that does not conform to the particular strain as practiced by the late Ayatollah Khomeini, his work drew the fatwa from Iran. Rushdie, then, became a victim of cross-cultural (mis)understanding, on the one hand because the tradition he is writing out of is foreign to the majority of the Islamic societies of the Middle East, and on the other because he is writing out of an indigenous tradition that is not fully understood through Western constructs alone.

Hence it is important to locate Rushdie within the high Muslim culture of India and its Mughal/Muslim/Indian traditions to understand why he would not have fully understood the import of his narrative in an increasingly fundamentalist environment. Conversely, seeing The Satanic Verses as an exercise in European postmodernity by a hybrid metropolitan intellectual fails to show how deeply rooted it is in Muslim cultural and religious traditions. Seeing The Satanic Verses, then, as a post-Mughal Islamic colonial consciousness, rather than simply as a post-British colonial consciousness helps to understand the cross-cultural conflict in which the novel and its author are trapped. By no means, however, would my interpretation absolve the writer of his "sins" in Islamic eyes. Rushdie dwells in the land of his own creation--Peccavistan--"I have sinned!" In Shame, Rushdie changes Pakistan (Pak[holy]istan[land]) to Peccavistan, a pun on the British governor's coded telegram to London when he had conquered Sind--Peccavi, "I have sinned." [End Page 54]

Rushdie has written extensively, in various parts of his work from Midnight's Children to Imaginary Homelands, not only that an Islamic religious sensibility is central to his work but that the Muslims in their traditional "Mughalness" are central to India's history. In the introduction to Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie talks about attending an "Indo-Anglian" writers' conference in London, where he objected to "some participants' desire to describe Indian culture--which I had always thought of as a rich mixture of traditions--in exclusive, and excluding, Hindu terms" [2]. Rushdie felt that he was being told that he wasn't "really Indian." When Rushdie questioned one academic from the floor,

the professor smiled benignly and allowed that of course India contained many diverse traditions--including Buddhists, Christians and "Mughals." This characterization of Muslim culture was more than merely peculiar. It was a technique of alienation. For if Muslims were "Mughals," then they were foreign invaders, and Indian Muslim culture was both imperialist and inauthentic. At the time we made light of the gibe, but it stayed with me, pricking at me like a thorn. [2, my emphasis]

Obviously, Rushdie felt then and more so in The Satanic Verses that it was important to assert the centrality of Indian Muslims and of Muslim culture in India. From the above quotation, it would seem that Rushdie is "the marginal voice" of "minority discourse" (because the Muslims are a minority in India), as Homi Bhabha posits ["DissemiNation" 301]. But this is not so. Situating and locating Rushdie and his characters within their actual temporal history and culture rather than speculating about their "zone of occult instability" [Fanon's phrase, qtd. in Bhabha, "DissemiNation" 303] show that Rushdie is rooted in a majority and dominant culture--the Mughal Muslim culture of India. In so doing, one realizes that the histories created by a postcolonial writer such as Rushdie are not simply those of anti-European colonial struggle but rather, as Fanon has so aptly put it in Black Skin, White Masks, of the desire to become like the dominant colonizer. In Rushdie, the desire to appropriate both the British and the Mughal colonizers' sensibilities is acute; but he leans more heavily toward what he sees as Muslim high culture, what he calls "Indian Muslim Culture." ⁶ Even today, in India there is a strong desire to be assimilated into "Indian Muslim high culture" because such belonging is seen as being khandani, or "upper class." It has society's stamp of approval.

Sara Suleri, in her essay "Contraband Histories: Salman Rushdie and the Embodiment of Blasphemy," nods toward Rushdie's Muslim roots but writes them off as "the [End Page 55] structure of anachronism" [606] as she gets caught up in the paradigm of European postcoloniality. She writes, "Rushdie has written a deeply Islamic book . . . but the imperative of its narrative simultaneously allows for a devotional return to the structure of anachronism, enabling Rushdie to extend . . . his engagement with both cultural self-definition and Islamic historiography" [606]. But she concludes, "Rushdie performs a curious act of faith: he chooses disloyalty in order to dramatize his continuing obsession with the metaphors that Islam makes available to a postcolonial sensibility" [606-07]. Rushdie was not choosing disloyalty. He himself answers this charge in "Why I Have Embraced Islam." Writing of his character Gibreel, who is the embodiment of the postcolonial sensibility and the parables from the Qur'an that he draws on, Rushdie writes, "The Satanic Verses was never intended as an insult . . . the story of Gibreel is a parable of how a man can be destroyed by the loss of faith" ["Why I Have Embraced Islam" 431]. In creating the portrait of a man destroyed by his loss of faith, Rushdie is pointing to ways in which postcolonials can reclaim their religion--Islam. In fact, here again, Rushdie provides us with clarification: "such offence has been taken against my work when it was not intended--when dispute was intended, and dissent, and even, at times, satire, and criticism of intolerance and the like, but not the thing of which I'm . . . accused" ["In Good Faith" 413]. Dissent, dispute, criticism--this is the reformist agenda Rushdie was proceeding from, not blasphemy. Rushdie is here constantly reaffirming his intent. To understand Rushdie, one has to understand that he is not disloyal to Islam but that he is an Indian "Mughal postcolonial"--in the tradition of Indian Muslims as described by Nehru: "An Indian Moslem is considered an Indian in Turkey or Arabia or Iran or any other country where Islam is dominant" [50]. He is not a Muslim first but an Indian. ⁷

Rushdie's representation of Islam in The Satanic Verses is conditioned by this tradition of adapting the religion to Indian ways. And though Muslims are a minority group in India today, they were up to 1947 the dominant cultural influence and in many ways continue to be so. Hence, Rushdie is really not writing "histories of marginality," as Bhabha has called his work. If he is indulging in postcolonial self-fashioning, he is fashioning himself into the post-Islamic Muslim high culture of literature, poetry, mysticism, and even the secularism that leads to the fragmenting of Islam into peculiarly Indianized versions like those of the Khodjas and Bohras. Again, Rushdie explains to his readers that Islam in India at least is not a monolithic whole: "any examination of the facts will demonstrate the rifts, the lack of homogeneity and unity, characteristic of present-day Islam" ["'In God We Trust'" 383]. There are many forms of Islam in India that are reformist in their practice of Islam but by no means sectarian, ⁸ as the word is usually understood in the West. Even Rushdie turns to the late Prime Minister Nehru to explain [End Page 56] his Muslim secularism: "To be an Indian of my generation was also to be convinced of the vital importance of Jawaharlal Nehru's vision of a secular India" ["In Good Faith" 404]. So that those of us who grew up with Nehru's dictum of "Hindu-Mussalman bhai-bhai" (Hindu-Muslim brother-brother) grew up also with the sense of many Hindu and Muslim sects among whom different religious practices flourished secularly. This is Rushdie's Islam. In this context, questioning of the Prophet, elevating alternate prophets and saints like Ali is completely natural, as is the desire to reform Islam, as expressed by such deeply religious nineteenth-century Indian-Islamic poets as Hali. Neither they nor Rushdie anticipated the fundamentalists' response to their work as blasphemy.

Therefore, it is wrong to say as Suleri does that "Rushdie was acutely conscious of The Satanic Verses as blasphemy" [606]. Suleri extends this to say that where Rushdie creates deracinated characters he is committing cultural heresy and that those moments are equally blasphemous moments. Homi Bhabha extends this even further to say, "Blasphemy goes beyond the severance of tradition and replaces its claim to a purity of origins with a poetics of relocation and reinscription" [Bhabha, Location 225]. Both cultural critics show a lack of contextual knowledge of how squarely The Satanic Verses fits into the traditions of Islam in India--the only Islam that Rushdie knew. Rushdie's review of V. S. Naipaul's Among the Believers published in 1981 shows Rushdie's secular Muslim attitude in his impassioned defense of Islam in Iran--an Islam he really didn't know. Naively, Rushdie wrote of Naipaul's book: "The trouble is that it's a highly selective truth, a novelist's truth masquerading as objective reality. Take Iran: no hint in these pages that in the new Islam there is a good deal more than Khomeinism, or that the mullocracy's hold on the people is actually very fragile" ["Naipaul among the Believers" 374]. The irony of this statement cannot fail to escape us today. This is not someone expecting in a few years to be condemned to death for "blasphemy" by the people he thinks are his own people. His is not therefore a poetics of relocation and transcription. And it is interesting to note that Rushdie does know "his people." The fact that Rushdie is still alive shows "the fragile hold of the mullocracy."

Therefore, because of the context from which he was functioning, that of the Persian and Indian Islamic writers of the last four centuries, Rushdie would not have thought of himself as consciously blaspheming but rather would have seen himself as doing the Muslim community a favor by urging the re-examination, "dissent, dispute and criticism" which are possible for Islam in India and now in England.

This claim bears some examination. Islam in India has historically been "secularized" in ways in which it has never been secularized and reformed anywhere else. This "tradition" of reforming or secularizing Islam, which has become synonymous with the practice of Islam in India, goes back to the Mughal Emperor Akbar (1556-1606). Akbar was the first of the Muslim emperors to intermarry a Hindu woman. Though Islamic proselytization flourished under Akbar, he was discontented with the practice of Islam and sought to create a new religion, drawing on the best of all religions. This was called din-i Ilahi (Divine Faith) and was established in 1581. Akbar meant distinctly to get beyond "the sectarian Islamic law" [Wolpert 132]. For instance, he forbade cow slaughter by Muslims in his effort to bring together Islam and Hinduism, making it an offense against Divine Faith. It is ironic that the Islamic war cry "Allahu Akbar" generates from Akbar's court, where it meant not only "God is great" but "Akbar is God" and was the motto of Akbar's court's reform of Islam [Wolpert 132]. Today it is the call to jihad. It is generally accepted in Indian history that the period of stability and the establishment of Islam in India under Akbar occurred because of his openness to mixing and merging with the Hindus. He was even able to quash the rising of the mullahs of Jaunpur in 1581. But as soon as fundamentalist sectarianism reared its ugly head under Aurangzeb (1658-1707), the Muslim foothold slipped, and the British seized their opportunity. An anonymous letter sent to Aurangzeb said, "If your Majesty places any faith in those books [End Page 57] by distinction called divine, you will be there instructed that God is the God of all mankind, not the God of Mussalmans alone" [Wolpert 160; Sarkar 3: 34].

While Akbar's was an emperor's effort to reform Islam, there had been several previous efforts, the most famous that of the poet Kabir (1440-1518). While many Hindus converted to Islam to escape the caste system, Kabir, a poor Muslim weaver, chose to follow the Hindu guru Ramananda and to write poetry to Allah in the Hindu tradition of bhakti, devotional poetry in which God is addressed as a lover. The history of Islam in India is the history of the syncretism of Islam and Hinduism [Wolpert 120]. Even today, all over India there are shrines to Islamic mystics and saints--whether they be of Khwaja Sahib Chisty (said to have come to India in the twelfth century AD) or Saint Ayesha (whose pilgrimage Rushdie describes in The Satanic Verses)--who are worshipped as though they were Hindu gods, with flowers, coconuts, money offerings, and so forth. Hence the practice of Islam in India up until the new fundamentalism of today has meant living the secularized Muslim culture.

The subcontinental Indian emigrés to Britain carry with them their notion of a secularized Islam but also adherence to the faith and its beliefs without making fundamentalist public protestations. It is in this effort that Rushdie's work connects with the earlier Indian Muslim reformists. The most recent example of the subcontinental reformist attitude is embodied in Hanif Kureishi's short story "My Son, the Fanatic" and in The Black Album, where Kureishi seems to be criticizing the mullahs for "reading vegetables and burning books."

Western critics such as Timothy Brennan who are insistent upon metropolitanizing the emigrés' response do not understand Rushdie's Indian Islamic roots. Brennan writes, "Rushdie, however, is hardly Islamic in any hard sense, although he has certain emotional attachments to Sufism as Grimus and Shame both show. That reading of his work [as Islamic, expressing Islamic alienation from Hindu India] nevertheless reminds us that his intended audience is a Western one, where the full range of his satire's targets (and he leaves no one out) can be appreciated naively without sectarianism but also without fear of loss" [Salman Rushdie 109]. ⁹ In fact, the groundwork for misreading The Satanic Verses had already been laid by the "metropolitanizing" of Midnight's Children and by its established interpretation as a postcolonial's satire of his "motherland" and the subsequent libel suit brought against Rushdie by Mrs. Gandhi.

Misinterpretation of Rushdie's work results from forcing him into the paradigm of the metropolitan, marginal postcolonial: in doing so he is forced into a "subaltern space" which Rushdie does not occupy and has not occupied even during his "hiding." It is not a subaltern who defied Mrs. Gandhi or to this day the late Ayatollah Khomeini. If it is, he is carrying off a major mutiny! Homi Bhabha writes, "The postcolonial space is now 'supplementary' to the metropolitan centre; it stands in a subaltern adjunct relation that doesn't aggrandise the presence of the west but redraws its frontiers" ["DissemiNation" 318]. Rushdie's project is to redraw his frontiers backward from the West and its metropolitan space, to expand into his Islamic history in a liberatory gesture rather than a "counterhegemonic" gesture. [End Page 58] [Begin Page 60]

It is perhaps the portrayal of Rushdie's work as counterhegemonic that was possibly misinterpreted by the Islamic community and the Ayatollah as being counter to "their hegemony" which resulted in the extreme reaction to The Satanic Verses. Can one conjecture that had the New York Times Magazine of 29 January 1989 not created the brouhaha over the Muslim letters of protest and the few book burnings of Bradford that the controversy over The Satanic Verses would have ended there and not attracted the attention of the Ayatollah Khomeini, who then issued his fatwa on 14 February 1989? The West chose to portray the work as a huge "counterhegemonic" revolutionary free speech issue from a "marginalized subaltern" accompanied by dramatic portraits of immigrant Muslims (the very marginalized peoples who actually occupy subaltern spaces in the West and whose cause Rushdie was supposed to be championing) burning the book. Rushdie touring Brick Lane with Gerald Marzorati in his Saab was described as alienated from those inhabitants of Brick Lane who had brought along too much excess baggage "their old selves, old traditions" [Marzorati 44]. Rushdie is portrayed as distancing himself from the newly transplanted Islamic culture of the immigrants in Britain:

Basically, Islamic culture is the one in which I grew up--I know it well. Its narratives are my narratives.

But their Islamic culture is something new and dangerous. You have a situation where a handful of extremists are defining Islam and what makes it even sadder for me is that they are simply feeding the Western stereotype: the backward, cruel, rigid Muslim, burning books and threatening to kill the blasphemer. [Marzorati 47]

Thus, the Western press misrepresented Rushdie's counterhegemonic discourse as counter to the hegemony of Islamic fundamentalism rather than of European stereotypes. The work and its academic, intellectual contexts were unfortunately (re)contextualized and (re)defined on a different map.

Similarly, Gayatri Spivak has attempted to categorize Rushdie and The Satanic Verses as postcolonial based on her characterization of postcoloniality as (1) dislodging every metropolitan definition and (2) reinscribing and rerouting history. The theme of The Satanic Verses she sees as that of the postcolonial divided between two identities, migrant and national ["Reading The Satanic Verses" 79]. But are these in fact the characteristics of postcoloniality? I would like to venture again that this is a rather narrow, eurocentric view of postcoloniality, as it sees all colonization as stemming from Europe and in that it sees an individual like Rushdie as the effect of post-European colonization. Rushdie is the European metropolitan intellectual who does not dislodge metropolitan definitions but instead reinscribes them into his roots and his history, which are post- yet another colonization--Muslim colonization.

In contemporary academic criticism, the two main characters of The Satanic Verses, Gibreel Farishta and Salahuddin Chamcha, are seen as the essence of post-European coloniality--as hybrid migrants. But migration and hybridization are not just conditions of recent postcoloniality. They are in Rushdie's work metaphors for the Prophet, who himself was a migrant who took shelter in exile. Rushdie parallels their migration with Mohammed's emigration to Yathrib, where in exile he rethinks his sense of identity. Both these characters do so too as they find that their liberation from the monstrous states they have grown into (and here Rushdie literally depicts them as monsters), from their doubts and their distance from their faith, can be gained only through their own people, the family that owns the Shandaar cafe, actually the family with another Islamic metaphor, the family of Hind Sufayan. Though the Sufayans had originally been opposed to Mohammed, through a series of treaties, Abu Sufayan himself, a powerful campaign organizer, remained neutral in the battle against Medina. Mohammed had granted complete [End Page 60] immunity to any Medinans who took shelter in the Sufayan's home. Thus it is that Rushdie's character, the contemporary mohajir (immigrant), Saladin Chamcha, takes shelter in the Sufayan home and is liberated only through them. Rushdie is in fact saying that liberation from this "subaltern" status can only be achieved by turning to one's roots and one's religious/national group/family.

Thus, Gibreel Farishta and Salahuddin Chamcha reject their categorization as half-breed bowler-hatted Englishmen and stretch backward into their Islamic history which they reclaim in a celebration of their heritage--a celebration that has been misunderstood largely by contemporary critics such as Homi Bhabha, who classifies these fictional characters and their real-world counterparts as subalterns in a marginalized space. It is this interpretation of the work that those who actually occupy the marginal spaces in metropolitan London--the Muslims of Bradford and Brick Lane--have been deceived by. They have been led by all the Western press's interpretations, which are largely dependent on academic interpretations, to see Rushdie's fictional characters as caricatures of themselves. They therefore attempt to reject this caricature of themselves as violently as they can through book burnings and so on.

Hanif Kureishi's Black Album (1995) is a portrait of the way in which the "Cockney Asians" came to believe that "the book" ought to be burned. The East London Asians, already feeling embattled by British racism, by the British National Party, then began to feel that "He insulted us all--the prophet, the prophet's wives, his whole family" [140]. The young man who has never read the book but heard about it is named Muhammed Shahabuddin, after Syed Shababuddin, who started the original movement to ban The Satanic Verses. The book is burned in the name of "the standard argument about the crimes committed by whites against blacks and Asians in the name of freedom" [187]. Ironically also, the Muslim students at the college where "the book is burned" discover that their Cultural Studies professor Dee Dee Osgood, who they believe is in solidarity with them, betrays them by sending for the police when they burn the book. Kureishi's student characters interestingly express their bewilderment over "postmodernist truth." "She is against authority yet tried to have us arrested," they say. Or again, "She believes in equality, all right, but only if we forget that we are different. . . . If we assert our individuality, we are inferior because we believe foolishness." "And today she has prevented us from free expression. Isn't that racist censorship, Shahid?" [190-91]. Kureishi is showing very clearly here that contemporary academic interpretations led the Asian students at "the college" to see themselves as subalterns and therefore to feel further embattled when Rushdie supposedly satirized "the Asians" and their religion.

Therefore, I would like to posit that had Rushdie's characters in The Satanic Verses not been depicted by contemporary criticism and consequently the book reviewers and so on, as though they had walked out of a Magritte painting with green apples for faces, and had this interpretation not been presented widely, the outcome of the Rushdie affair would have been different. In selling Rushdie's book to an audience interested in postcoloniality and postmodernity, the advance publicity and reviews misdirected the audience and consequently misshaped the response. What for instance was the purpose of portraying Rushdie in the pose of "Fiction's Embattled Infidel" haughty against a background of graffiti [see Marzorati]? Was it simply a misdirected guess that such a gesture would sell more books among the politically correct of the US? Or was it simply that the intellectuals who surrounded Rushdie, his agents and reviewers, being so much a part of the climate of postmodernity, postcoloniality, and hybridity, misdirected their notion of resistance, attacking not the hegemony of recent colonizers but those already feeling embattled, the Islamic immigrants and the Islamic nations?

Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha need to be seen not only as homoerotic [Suleri 606] Bombay-talkie Englishmen and metropolitan migrants but also as characters looking backward at a liberatory history of Islamic struggle with affection (dilruba) and respect [End Page 61] (meheruban). Explaining Islam with affection and respect was Rushdie's bandagi, or "binding life's work," or original purpose, which seems to have been perverted in the heady atmosphere of the condition of postmodernity only to be returned to in "Why I have Embraced Islam."

Rushdie's complex relationship with Islam, it must be remembered, is colored by his being Indian. It is interesting that in Midnight's Children he has identified himself in part with his narrator Saleem Sinai ["Author from Three Countries" 23] and with the whole Indian generation that had come to be called Midnight's Children. Pakistan and India both obtained their independence at midnight, a time chosen by astrologers for India. Hence Midnight's Children make up the generation of Indians and Pakistanis born after independence was granted to India at midnight of 14 August 1947: "The first pangs hit her just as hundreds of miles away, M. A. Jinnah announced the midnight birth of a Muslim nation [Pakistan was created twenty-four hours before India]" [Midnight's Children 111]. New citizens were born in both countries immediately after those midnight hours. These were of course the first citizens of a new nation. Of the moment of his birth, the first baby born in independent India, Saleem Sinai waxes lyrical:

and this year--there was an extra festival on the calendar, a new myth to celebrate, because a nation which had never previously existed was about to win its freedom, catapulting us into a world which, although it had five thousand years of history, although it had invented the game of chess and traded with Middle Kingdom Egypt, was nevertheless quite imaginary; into a mythical land, a country which would never exist except by the efforts of a phenomenal collective will--except in a dream we all agreed to dream; it was a mass fantasy shared in varying degrees by Bengali and Punjabi, Madrasi and Jat and would periodically need the sanctification and renewal which can only be provided by rituals of blood. India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible. . . .

I have been, in my time, the living proof of the fabulous nature of the collective dream. [Midnight's Children 111]

Being intensely Indian therefore also means being intensely disparate. The characters that Rushdie creates both in Midnight's Children and in The Satanic Verses are proof of the collective hybridization of many colonialisms and many cultures, which makes for the divided loyalties and the irreverence that characterizes their hybridity. Yet Rushdie, like Ahmed Sinai, his fictional father in Midnight's Children, claims his heritage thus: "Mughal blood, as a matter of fact." "Wrong side of the blanket, of course; but Mughal certainly" [Midnight's Children 109]. And while the Mughal and the Islamic are emphasized, a further complication is the factor of being Kashmiri, because the Kashmiris themselves felt pulled between Islamic Pakistan and Hindu India. Tai, the fictional boatman that Rushdie created in his short story "The Prophet's Hair," dies in Midnight's Children in 1947 when he walks to Chhamb [37] to stand before the two opposing forces to cry, "Kashmir for the Kashmiris," and is shot. Similarly, Rushdie seems to defend his fictional and nonfictional heritage: "Thirty-two years before the transfer of power, my grandfather bumped his nose against Kashmiri earth. . . . On that day, my inheritance began to form--the blue of Kashmiri sky which dripped into my grandfather's eyes [Midnight's Children 106]. The two heritages are immediately established--the Islamic "immigrant" bumping against the Indian earth by virtue of genuflection. Later, he tells us his grandfather had a permanent bruise on his forehead from praying. The image is repeated in Shame: "Who bore upon his forehead the gatta or permanent bruise which revealed him to be a religious fanatic who pressed brow to prayer mat on at least five occasions per diem, and probably the sixth, optional time as well" [Shame 38]. So you [End Page 62] have the Islamic and the Indian merging immediately. Saleem Sinai says of his family, and this could be Rushdie himself: "we throw our lot in with India, but the alienness of blue eyes remains" [107]. So as these Muslims are beginning to see themselves as Indian, the distancing from Islam begins.

What becomes the prophetic foretelling of the project of The Satanic Verses is the telltale idea "And my father's dream of rearranging the Quran has its place" [Midnight's Children 108]. The Satanic Verses should have been no surprise to those who studied Midnight's Children, in which Rushdie gives us many hints that he is about to embark on a reformist retelling of the history of Islam, but particularly what it meant to Indians. Again, Rushdie says of his fictional father, Ahmed Sinai:

perhaps he wished that . . . he had had the strength to pursue his original ambition, the rearrangement of the Quran in accurately chronological order. (He once told me: "When Muhammed prophesied, people wrote down what he said on palm leaves, which were kept any old how in a box. After he died, Abubakr and the others tried to remember the correct sequence, but they didn't have very good memories." Another wrong turning: instead of rewriting a sacred book, my father lurked in a ruin awaiting demons. It's no wonder he wasn't happy. . . .) [Midnight's Children 82]

And so it is that Rushdie undertakes the rewriting of a sacred book not to target and satirize, not to create a counterhegemonic discourse, but to correct a wrong out of the love for his religion and his forefathers. Unfortunately, due to misinterpretation, he finds himself "lurking in the ruins awaiting demons."

This idea of retelling the story of Islam was the project of the many Indian Islamic groups--such as the Ismailis, the Aga Khanis, the Khodjas, and Bohra--predominant among the Muslim community in India, particularly in Bombay, where Salman Rushdie, Saleem Sinai, Gibreel Farishta, and Salahuddin Chamcha all originate. Their effect on Islam was a secularizing or broadening one, since many of them as converts to Islam from Hinduism brought their traditions and in a sense "Hinduized" Indian Islam. Each of these sects chose their favorite martyr and recreated the story of the Prophet to make their martyrs, in Hindu fashion, saints.

For instance, Major Zulfikar is the son-in-law in the Sinai family in Midnight's Children. Rushdie writes, "Zulfikar is a famous name amongst Muslims. It was the name of the two-pronged sword carried by Ali, the nephew of the Prophet Muhammed. It was a weapon such as the world had never seen" [Midnight's Children 61]. Ali married Mohammed's daughter Fatima, was greatly trusted by the Prophet, and "was the intermediary between him and the discontented" [Gibb and Kramers 30]. Ali often protected Mohammed. According to the Sunnis, Ali is only the transmitter of the law. But for the Shiites, Ali is "the friend of God," the true Saint, while Mohammed is only the nabi, or the prophet of God [Gibb and Kramers 31]. Therefore, while it is true that Rushdie's death sentence for blasphemy was issued by the Shiite Ayatollahs, it is also almost natural that Rushdie embodies the irreverence toward Mohammed the Prophet himself. After all, he was raised among and surrounded by the Indianized Shiite sects, for whom Ali is more important than Mohammed. Among the Indian Shiites, Ali is treated almost like any other Indian saint, with shrines and flowers and stories of the martyrdom, all of which would be idolatrous and strictly forbidden by Islamic law. V. S. Naipaul in Among the Believers talks about visiting Sind: "Sind was full of the shrines of Muslim saints. Islam had long ago taken over the old holy places of Buddhists and Hindus; but memories of old religious attitudes adhered, and Islamic purists didn't always approve of the mystical or ascetic or near-idolatrous practices of some of these places" [Among the Believers 143]. There is therefore a fair amount of confusion of doctrine and practice, which makes for the Indians' [End Page 63] and Pakistanis' distance from a strictly followed Islam and makes the current politicized Islamicization so foreign to ordinary middle-class Muslims in these countries. Whenever Adam Aziz, the patriarch in Midnight's Children, doubts or breaks away from practice, his wife rails against him for being godless: "Who had spent his life offending God Whatsitsname and on whose head was this a judgement?" [Midnight's Children 61]. And Adam Aziz says, "I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on my chest that turned me into an Indian. I'm still not much of a Muslim" [Midnight's Children 40].

In similar fashion, post-Mughal colonials expressed their love for the colonizer's culture by adopting the literature and the cultural practices. This is best described by Salman Rushdie in Shame, the work that comes between the establishing of the post-Mughal colonial's identity in Midnight's Children and the challenging and reinscribing of the Islamic colonizer's culture in The Satanic Verses. In Shame, we see the education of the author as embodied in his fictional counterpart Omar Khayyam Shakil:

by the time he left "Nishapur" he had learned classical Arabic and Persian; also Latin, French and German; all with the aid of leather-bound dictionaries and the unused texts of his grandfather's deceptive vanity. . . . Illuminated manuscripts of the poetry of Ghalib; volumes of letters written by Mughal emperors to their sons, the Burton translation of the Alflaylahwalaylah [1001 Nights or Arabian Nights] and the travels of Ibn Batuta and the Qissa or tales of the legendary Hatim Tai. . . . And one day the three mothers sent a servant into the study to remove from their lives an exquisitely carved walnut screen on which was portrayed the mythical circular mountain of Qaf, complete with thirty birds playing God thereupon the flight of the bird parliament revealed to Omar Khayyam a little bookcase stuffed with volumes on the theory and practice of hypnosis: Sanskrit mantras, compendiums of the lore of the Persian magi. . . . [Shame 28-29, my emphasis]

All of these elements make up the culture of post-Mughal Islam in India. The love for the Arabian Nights and the qissa and mystical Sufi Islam all merge with Sanskrit mantras. And they go into the making of Rushdie's work--particularly The Satanic Verses. The qissa, or tales of legendary adventure, particularly as developed in the form called the dastan, become the dominant form of The Satanic Verses, which is therefore less of a novel and more of a qissa. Qissa is a very particular form, somewhat like an oral picaresque using a "legendary" hero, and should not be translated simply as "story." A dastan is a loosely constructed prose "epic," a long-winded story that goes on and on. In the appendix to Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Rushdie translates kahani simply as "story" but not qissa. All three are separate forms of the genre of prose storytelling.

Even before The Satanic Verses, Rushdie defined his form as follows:

An Oral narrative does not go from the beginning to the middle to the end of the story. It goes in great swoops, it goes in spirals or in loops, it every so often reiterates something that happened earlier to remind you, and then takes you off again, sometimes summarizes itself, it frequently digresses off into something that the story-teller appears just to have thought of, then it comes back to the main thrust of the narrative. Sometimes it steps sideways and tells you about another, related story which is like the story that he's been telling you, and then it goes back to the main story. Sometimes there are Chinese boxes where there is a story inside a story inside a story inside a story, then they all come back, you see, so it's a very bizarre and pyrotechnical shape. ["Midnight's Children and Shame" 7]

[End Page 64]

With this evidence behind us, I would like to venture that the qissa of The Satanic Verses is created in the form of the dastan-e-dilruba, a love story created for the beloved, as in Scheherazade's thousand and one stories, precisely because the form manifests: (1) Rushdie's postcolonial love for Muslim high culture; ¹⁰ (2) Rushdie's Indianized Muslim's secular attitude toward Islam; and (3) the project of rearranging the Qur'an. In doing so, Rushdie's postcolonial experiences must be placed squarely in a post-Islamic colonial heritage. He is in the tradition of poets like Farid ud-din Attar, the Sufi who created The Conference of the Birds (1177), which refutes the idea of a God outside the individual, ¹¹ or Firdausi Tusi, or the narrator of the Arabian Nights.

Rushdie is also in the long tradition of Indian Islamic writers who both criticized Islam and yet were deeply part of the post-Mughal literary/religious tradition: Ghalib and his student Altaf Husain Hali, Bahadur Shah Zafar, ¹² and Dagh. They lived in nineteenth-century British India, but for them it was almost as though the British were a relief; they took over governing of the country, freeing the Muslim princes to play chess, recite poetry, and generally indulge in what Rushdie in Haroun and the Sea of Stories calls "guppa maro," telling tall tales. Laurel Steele notes, "While Sir Saiyid was visiting England [1870] and attempting at home to arouse Islamic India through essays modelled on those of Addison and Steele, the poet Dagh was reciting his verses in a wealthy court and leading a life comparable to that of a literary figure of the seventeenth century" [1]. Under the influence of Sir Saiyyid Ahmed ¹³ and his return from England, these poets were more preoccupied with satirizing and reforming Islam in India. Altaf Husain Hali's work Musaddas is very similar to The Satanic Verses in that it traces the rise and fall of Islam and he too was debunked. But there is a more significant parallel. Musaddas examines the Muslim failure in the 1857 mutiny as a result of Muslim degeneration and expresses shame at what pre-1857 Islam had become in Lucknow. Rushdie seems to be doing the same thing in The Satanic Verses, as he examines the degeneration of Indian-British Muslims. Both works urge changes in their contemporary Islamic society. Both writers were chastised. Similarly, in criticizing the mohajir Muslims, that is, the immigrants to England, Rushdie's purpose could be seen as being very similar to that of the fundamentalist [End Page 65] Muslims. He is telling them to reaffirm their Islamic sensibility and reject the condition of Europeanization which leads to the degeneration of character, as in Gibreel Farishta. Like Hali, Rushdie uses the martyrdom as a metaphor for present-day griefs. This in itself is the form of the traditional marsiyah (elegy).

Amir Hamza, the narrator and principal character of the Dastan-e-Hamza, a much older work, is criticized for his policy of conversion by the sword. ¹⁴ Even Amir Hamza complains to the hazrat, or master, "O Hazrat! Killing and killing my two arms have grown weak [Pritchett 14]. This was a complaint against Islam's refusal to accept any other religion and meant through satire and humor to ask for changes in such policies.

It was, however, the Angare group, four upper-class Muslim short story writers in the 1930s, who found thugs with daggers waiting for them because they portrayed not just the Prophet but Allah himself as a sexual being [Coppola 58]. Coppola quotes from Sajjad Zaheer's story:

A prophet found escape through migration. No one knew what the poor prophet did on this occasion. Women had also made his life hell. Then what am I? . . . How can a poor, weak person bear the burden of this trust on his shoulders? And I know what will happen on Judgement Day. These same women will create turmoil there too, will show such coquetry and will wink in such a way that poor Allah himself will start to scratch his beard. [Coppola 58]

Now this is with full knowledge of the Qur'anic verse: "Those who speak ill of Allah and his apostle shall be cursed by Allah in this life and in the life to come" [sura 33, verse 57]. Yet to banter like this had also become a tradition. This is very much like what Rushdie has created rather extensively in The Satanic Verses. It has the same sense of humor rather than satire. Sajjad Zaheer also showed that the Prophet had various encounters with women. It is, however, true that Rushdie embellishes this sort of humor and extends it unendingly, weaving it into the present-day characters' lives. Perhaps the mullahs found this offensive, but this is exactly what characterizes the Urdu/Persian dastan. Daniel Pipes, in The Rushdie Affair, details other Persian poets who criticized Islam and were censored though not threatened. The Indian Urdu writers, however, establish Rushdie squarely in the post-Mughal colonial literary tradition, and it is their form, particularly Hali's form of the dastan, that Rushdie picks up on in his search for the "new form" in which everyday religiosity is treated in an everyday manner.

A dastan in Urdu and Persian literature is simply a long-winded stream-of-consciousness tale that incorporates many related and sometimes loosely strung-together frame tales and assorted humorous anecdotes--like the Chinese boxes. Frances W. Pritchett tells us, "Professional narrators demonstrated their fluency, virtuosity and power to hold an audience by prolonging the dastan: a longer dastan narration, like a longer tight-rope walk, was inherently superior to a shorter one" [4]. In Urdu someone wishing to say that a person is creating a long-winded "cock and bull" story would say "Are bap! voh dastan laga raha hay"! Dastans, while embodying humor, particularly slapstick humor, often have tragic results, in that a beloved cannot be had or the beloved is disappointed [End Page 66] or a kingdom is lost, and so forth. A dastan-e-dilruba is a story created for a beloved that tells of a beloved who cannot be had.

The dastan is essentially Persian. The stories of the Arabian Nights are Arabic in tradition. While the Arabic counterpart of dastan is qissa, and it is qissas that make up the Arabian Nights, the words have different implications. The dastan is long-winded, tedious; it is in the nature of a complaint. When a woman has her menstrual period, she has her dastan in colloquial language. The implication is therefore of a burden. Qissa is suspenseful, shorter, full of excitement--but if you have a long night to fill, to enchant a beloved, you need more than a qissa; you need a dastan.

Ralph Russel, a Reader in Urdu at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, defines dastan as follows: "Urdu prose narrative cycles of medieval Islamic romance, which assumed their present form perhaps in the 18th century and were transmitted orally by professional reciters until in the second half of the nineteenth century they were written down at their dictation" [qtd. in Pritchett 43]. But William L. Hanaway, Jr., further defines the characteristics of the dastan, which are all explicit in The Satanic Verses.

The action covering a broad geographical area including most of the world known to the medieval geographers, takes place in an indefinite time, generally said to be long in the past. The storyteller's geography is shaky at best. It is not unusual for the hero to march his army from Persia to China, from there to Arabia and India, and finally back to Byzantium. Space is highly compressed and seldom are we given details of the journey; in the same manner, time is generally foreshortened. We never know how long these journeys take; time is clearly defined only when some event, such as a battle, is presented in great detail. [141]

I believe that the dastan-e-dilruba is the perfect metaphor for Rushdie's Satanic Verses. It was a story he created for a beloved, his religion, which he could not "have," because of both his ambivalent postcolonial relationship and his Indianized secular Muslim attitudes, a beloved who was going to be disappointed by the tale and yet for whom and out of his love for whom he creates the particular dastan.

As we have already seen at the beginning of this paper, the Islamic storytelling background that Rushdie claimed in interviews, essays, and in his previous fiction makes him partial to Islamic narrative forms. Even in The Satanic Verses, Saladin Chamcha, visiting his father, finds "A ten volume set of the Arabian Nights which was being slowly devoured by mildew and bookworm . . . " [36]. The Arabian Nights is present in every work he writes. In Haroun and the Sea of Stories, he even sees himself as evolving into a version of Haroun-al-Rashid. Ironically, "Rushdie" simply means "diminutive Rashid" or "son-of-Rashid." Is Rushdie then a son of Haroun-al-Rashid of the Arabian Nights? The answer is a resounding yes. The stories and the tales of the Arabian Nights seem to flow through his veins and flow out of the "tap" of stories, as is witnessed by the layer upon layer of stories of the Prophet's life and adventures Rushdie tells in The Satanic Verses. Unfortunately, he finds himself as a storyteller who is in the land of gupchup, quiet (censorship), ready to be made khatm shud, finished. And though there is humor, the tediousness of the complaint in Rushdie's dastan (The Satanic Verses) is probably what the Iranian mullahs found so burdensome. It belabors over and over again the Prophet's faults.

What is interesting to see is that as Rushdie delivers his dastan he is fairly and squarely in Islamic tradition and delivering his complaint like Firdausi Tusi when denied the proper remuneration for writing the Shahnameh. Both conveyed their complaint via a literary work. And as has already been noted, a more recent counterpart to Rushdie is [End Page 67] the late nineteenth-century Urdu poet Hali, whose dastan was written to criticize the shape and form Islam had taken. In fact, what is said of Hali's Musaddas is true of The Satanic Verses: "It traces the rise and fall of Islam, beginning with preMuslim Arabia, talking about the prophet, the Arab triumph and then the gradual decline" [Steele 13]. Like Hali, Rushdie in The Satanic Verses seemed to be warning that if Islam in its contemporary decadence, especially in the migration to Britain, didn't take stock of itself, "Neither you nor your friends will be saved. If the boat sinks all will be drowned" [Hali, qtd. in Steele 14]. In fact, this was Hali's message to the mohajir, or migrant Persian Muslims in India. Rushdie, aware as all literary Indian Muslims are of the tradition of Ghalib, Hali, and Mir therefore follows in their footsteps, both echoing the complaint and using the form. In fact, this is what Rushdie has already told us: that through his character Gibreel, he meant to show the importance of retaining faith. What happens to a religion when it is preoccupied with stricture and not with faith? Farishta and Chamcha had begun what the Reverend Mother in Midnight's Children criticized--eating pork, educating the children into disbelief and greater secularism, and so forth. When Adam Aziz throws out the maulvi, the religious tutor to the children, because he taught the children intolerance, he is chastised by his wife, and this exchange takes place:

"He was teaching them to hate, wife. He tells them to hate Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and such, and who knows what other vegetarians. Will you have hateful children, woman?"

"Will you have godless ones? Reverend Mother envisages the legions of the Archangel Gabriel descending at night to carry her heathen brood to hell." [Midnight's Children 43]

For Rushdie, retaining one's Islamic sensibility is just as important as being secular and open-minded. It is important to have the mullah educate the children but not to fill them with hate. The reformist agenda has always been to make Islam more tolerant, less "hate-filled" and less practice-oriented.

Following the characteristics of a traditional dastan in The Satanic Verses, Rushdie gives us detailed catalogues of the sins of those who are becoming infidels:

He got out of the limousine at the Taj hotel and without looking left or right went directly into the great dining-room with its buffet table groaning under the weight of forbidden foods, and he loaded his plate with all of it, . . . he began to eat as fast as possible, stuffing the dead pigs into his face so rapidly that bacon rashers hung out of the sides of his mouth.

During his illness he had spent every minute of consciousness calling upon God, every second of every minute. Ya Allah whose servant lies bleeding do not abandon me now after watching over me so long. [Satanic Verses 30]

But when Gibreel regained his strength, it became clear that he had changed, and to a startling degree, because he had lost his faith. [29]

Here again Rushdie is questioning simply the rigor of practice. In "'In God We Trust'" he talks about losing faith and immediately thereafter eating a ham sandwich [377]. Is faith simply a matter of not eating ham? Has Islam, then, become simply a matter of practice and of bargaining with God? It is this superfluity that Rushdie is questioning and seeking to reform.

Like Hali, though, he was speaking out of a love of Islam, seeking reforms that would reinstill faith in the practitioners. One of the features of the dastan-e-dilruba is that the dilruba, or sweetheart, is naraz, or disappointed, by the dastan. And the effect of The [End Page 68] Satanic Verses was in fact to cause such a disappointment among those wooed--the Muslims; this only causes the narrator of the dastan to hold his dilruba in greater reverence, and she becomes meheruban, the revered. The dastan-e-dilruba is so named not only because through the tale the narrator wishes to win his beloved but also because the tale itself reflects the pursuit of a beloved. In Rushdie's Satanic Verses Gibreel Farishta is and remains in pursuit of the elusive Rekha Merchant, who, despite her suicide, appears to him frequently on magic carpets. She is interestingly very much like the Meccan goddesses that Mohammed intended to worship, which caused him to utter the "Satanic Verses" which he had to retract.

All three of Rushdie's novels follow the dastan pattern. Space and geography are compacted in Midnight's Children, as Saleem Sinai moves all around the continent. In Shame he moves all over Pakistan and Afghanistan with a narrator coming to visit from England. In The Satanic Verses, this feature is much enhanced, of course, not only by the sudden arrival, via the explosion of an Air India flight, of Gibreel and Saladin Chamcha in England but by the sudden switches in time into the Arabia of the Prophet Mohammed. Though the other two novels had compacted geography in that form, The Satanic Verses perhaps most exaggerates the movement of the narrative from India to England to the Arabia of Mohammed to England, and so forth. Seldom are we given details of time and space but are left to figure out the various Sufayans and whether Hind is the wife of the contemporary cafe owner or the wife of the Prophet. Then there is the necessary battle over Farishta's monsterlike state, and he is transformed into a human again after the battle of wax statues in a discotheque.

Two characteristics of the dastan are predominant in Rushdie's work: (1) the form of the narration; (2) the use of the magical/supernatural or fabulous. As we have already seen, both of these characteristics are usually assigned to the condition of his post-British coloniality and his subsequent interest in postmodernism. But as we have also seen, they are predominantly rooted in Rushdie's post-Mughal consciousness.

Traditionally, the dastan, as it was narrated in Persia and later brought to India by the late Mughal emperors (particularly Jehangir, who had his own storyteller), was an oral narrative form. As it turned into an Urdu literary form, its orality was emphasized even more, because Urdu was the language of the illiterate people whereas Persian was the language of the literati of high culture. It wasn't until the late nineteenth century that the Indian entrepreneur Nawal Kishore thought of publishing the orally transmitted dastans. So they retain(ed) the characteristics of oral transmission. However, William Hanaway makes a distinction that is particularly applicable to Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses:

The stories begin at the beginning and proceed in a fairly straight line to the end. There are, with one minor exception in Samak-i-Ayyar, no flashbacks. The stories are never begun in medias res or work backwards and forward as they are in Modern Literature. The open-endedness and flexibility of the form result in a lack of internal cohesion. The integrated progression of the modern plot is absent. In its place we find a loose stringing together of episodes which in their lack of organic connection seem at times almost random. [142]

While Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha's fall can be construed as an in medias res beginning, the story of both those characters does begin there, and their story unfolds almost in an episodic, picaresque fashion. While Rushdie does give us glimpses of their childhood, the story of their immigration as also the story of the Prophet's immigration progresses from beginning to end. In fact, the beginning of The Satanic Verses is very similar to that of Midnight's Children. It is almost as though there is an ayah (maidservant) telling a little boy the story of Gibreel and Saladin. "Baba, if you want to get born again" [End Page 69] [3, my emphasis], she seems to say, listen to this story. "It was so and it was not so." The "born again" metaphor is interesting. Is Rushdie applying to Islam a metaphor from contemporary America? From his long discussion in "'In God We Trust'" [387-92] of "born again" Christianity in America, it would seem so.

From there we go to the story of the Prophet Mohammed. This is not a flashback, but a story within a story, a frame tale. The narrative voice is like that of the ayah Padma in Midnight's Children, who says, "Once upon a time it was so and not so as the old stories say" [35]. There is therefore no attention to "structural matters," as Hanaway calls such strategies as pacing, the laying out of climaxes or the setting up of flashbacks. Rushdie, like the dastan narrators of yore, brings these together in loosely knit episodic form, a rambling story always going forward. Hanaway also writes, "Much of the length of the Dastan comes from exhaustive catalogues of people and places as also from elaborate plays on words and multiple repetition" [142].

What Frances Pritchett says of the classical Urdu dastan, the Dastan-e Amir Hamza, is true of Rushdie's work: "The language is rhythmic, repetitive, almost hypnotic, and gives the narrator's vision a dream-like power and authority" [6]. Pritchett adds, "The classical Urdu dastan became so inconceivably long and so elaborately fantastic that it exhausted its own possibilities" [6].

With Rushdie's novels, the fantastic is often attributed to postmodernism. But it is in looking at the form of the dastan that one finally understands the origins of Rushdie's fantastic and what he calls "fantabulous." Dastans are peopled by "paris," usually fairies or winged creatures. The hundreds of yellow butterflies that clothe the visionary Ayesha in The Satanic Verses, which have been attributed to Garcia Marquez's yellow butterflies, are characteristic of this supernatural element. Ayesha herself may be considered a "pari"--Mohammed had always called his favorite wife an "angel." There are magically animated puppets--Saladin Chamcha turns into one, as does his penis, and like a true dastan hero he lives in a world full of "marvellous events--mysterious inexplicable and magical" [Pritchett 9]. Ironically, much of this is controlled by black magic, which in the eyes of a good Muslim is always evil. Saladin thinks the Welsh policemen who captured him practiced some black magic, and English black magic causes the migrant mohajir to sprout horns and turn into an evil character. Here Rushdie develops a post-European colonialization metaphor: he seems expressly to disapprove of the postcolonial who turns European. He is asserting that transmogrification into the foreign culture is dangerous, which in itself can be taken as a call to retain one's religious and cultural identity.

Moreover, it is those who are rooted in their own culture who provide deliverance for Saladin Chamcha. Therefore the clever spies and secret agents, the ayyar, so vital to the dastan hero are, in The Satanic Verses, the Indians and Muslims of Bradford and Brick Lane like Mishal and Hind Sufayan, who eventually transform the dastan hero Saladin from a cross-cultural monstrosity in suit and tie and bowler hat with long penis into a human being. Read in this way the fantastic, one of the characteristics of the dastan, is meant to be liberatory for the Muslims of Bradford and Brick Lane. This does not mean that Rushdie is satirizing these Muslim immigrants as "fantastic and unbelievable," as the Western press had made it seem he had. He is simply deploying one of the techniques of his chosen genre. Dastan narrators make "so much use of marvellous events that in a sense such events lose their marvellousness and become the 'normal'" [Pritchett 11]. And, in showing how the fantastic has become normal, Rushdie meant not to be criticizing the uprooted Muslims but urging them both into secularizing reform of strictures and into greater "faith," as Hali and Sir Sayed Ahmed Khan meant to in the nineteenth century. In fact, it was Sir Sayed Ahmed's travel to England that turned him deeper toward Islam, yet he brought back a sense of British secularism and was able to merge the two.

Islam has not been a stranger to criticism or satire. While panegyric was part of maqamas (eloquence), so was hija (satire), a form that came to the Islamic poets from the [End Page 70] pre-Mohammedan meccans. When the Persian poet Firdausi Tusi was paid only in silver for the Shahnameh, the complaint he registered through satire was rewarded by the gold he should have received. A complaint or a satire was not always punished. Like a modern-day Hali, Rushdie genuinely meant his satire to be reformist, not a target satire but a satire that was actually delivered out of love for his religion, fraught as it is with contemporary cross-cultural problems not only in Bradford and Brick Lane but in international diplomacy and policy. The use of the dastan is "the ancient Arab story-tellers' formula," which Rushdie tells us in his essay "In Good Faith" he had used in The Satanic Verses [409].

What I hope will emerge from this analysis is a recognition of the need for new ways of looking at literatures from around the world in English. Specifically, localized interpretations that study the history and the context of the texts need to be created by perhaps an intermediary interpretive community--one that can study a work in the specific locale in which it is situated and provide such clues to an understanding of the work that can be picked up and used by academic and intellectual communities across disciplinary and interest boundaries. Timothy Brennan writes, "the nation-centered origins of literary studies distorts the coverage of the vast realm of experience arising from imperial contacts" ["National Longing" 61]. Indeed, I hope I have shown that instead it provides deeper understanding of the work and of various "imperial contacts." It can also be argued that claiming that only those who know the localized contexts can find meaning in a work is lapsing into essentialist universals or ghettoizing the work. I hope I have convincingly argued for the failure of the current eurocentric theories' approach to The Satanic Verses. The African-American critic Barbara Christian has pointed to the failure of the contemporary "race for theory" in approaching Afro-American and West Indian literature. But she rejects the challenge to provide alternatives, dismissing them as "harassment" to "invent wholescale theories regardless of the complexity of the literature we study" [39]. On the contrary, I believe that it is important to develop alternatives such as nation-centered and context-based criticism which can in turn provide important insights into imperial contacts, particularly those contacts often ignored because of a lack of historical or contextual knowledge. Claiming such a position is not an anti-theory argument but one that shows how theory can be complemented.

Therefore, to dismiss "cosmopolitan commentators on the third world who offer an inside view of formerly submerged peoples for target reading publics" [Brennan, "National Longing" 63] is merely a defensive gesture. I would say that any critic in order to establish his or her ethos has a responsibility to inform himself/herself about every aspect of the work's history, its literature, and its metaphoric import before offering theorizations about the work. In doing so, one can cut across essentialist boundaries that say that only an "insider" can provide the key to understanding a work or that only a reader informed in particular theories can read appropriately. In this sense, therefore, we need to return responsibility and accessibility to literary criticism. Literary studies per se have a long history of allowing texts to be approached by all who would come to study them thoroughly. If an "insider" critic can facilitate a text's accessibility, then his/her work should be used to understand the work better because such interpretations can lead to newer and more "catholic" understanding--the sort that can lead to current discussions of lifting the fatwa [see Reid]. Postmodern indeterminacy can, as has been shown here, result in dangerous misinterpretation when authority is wrested from both the author and his/her cultural location.

Feroza Jussawalla teaches in the English department at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Notes

1. The question of the term postcolonial and of the label postcolonial literature is increasingly problematic. Literatures in English from ex-British colonies are of course the direct result of the British colonialism that taught "English" to the colonials. But Urdu literatures and Sanskrit literatures are also the direct result of colonialism. Contemporary "postcolonial writers" espoused English as their medium of creative expression just as their forefathers had espoused Sanskrit or Persian. Raja Rao points out in his preface to Kanthapura that both Sanskrit and Persian were colonizers' languages and that Indians absorbed them and created a vast body of literature in each of these languages.

Do R. K. Narayan, V. S. Naipaul, and Rushdie all share a blanket "postcoloniality"? Rushdie himself has rejected these labels in his essay "'Commonwealth Literature' Does Not Exist," at times quite sarcastically: "As for myself, I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial--or is it post-colonial?--cudgels against English" [64].

2. Midnight was chosen by the late Prime Minister Nehru as the astrologically auspicious hour for India to obtain independence from the British. Midnight's Children, the title of Rushdie's second book, indicates the generation of Indians who were born in independent India. Rushdie's actual date of birth is 19 June 1947.

3. "magical realism" is born of the new form created to allow "the miraculous and the mundane to co-exist" ["'In God We Trust'" 376]. Much discussion has focused on "the form" of The Satanic Verses. Homi Bhabha, relying on Yunus Samad's reading of blasphemy, argues that Rushdie, by "casting his revisionary narrative in the form of the novel--largely unknown to traditional Islamic literature . . . violates the poetic license granted to critics" [Location of Culture 226]. Of the postcolonial writer's use of the novel form, Timothy Brennan writes that "the constraints are real" and refers to the "crippling subaltern status implied by having to follow an imaginative form of another and oppressive culture" ["National Longing" 58]. But Rushdie is not trying to write in the form of the novel. These (mis)representations make it all the more important to see the Indo-Mughal form Rushdie is working in.

4. "'In God We Trust'" tells us how Rushdie had to change the form of his writing to accommodate the reality that religion is not a "symbol" but a daily magical component in the lives of the characters he is creating. More importantly, he says, "perhaps I write, in part, to fill up that emptied God-chamber with other dreams" ["'In God We Trust'" 377]. Rushdie without the usual nuancing and hedging tells us that he is his characters. Of the role of the author, he writes, "we can dream versions of ourselves, new selves for old. . . . We live in our pictures, our ideas. I mean this literally. We first construct pictures of the world and then we step inside the frames. We come to equate the picture with the world" [377-78]. Now all of this is very problematic in terms of contemporary theorizing about the author and his/her intentionality. In a previous essay on The Satanic Verses, "Resurrecting the Prophet," I had claimed, "Rushdie has become a victim not of the Muslim world so much as of the indeterminacy which is the condition of post-modernism, whereby authority has been completely wrested from the author and in his absence has been placed in the hands of warring factions of readers" [107]. Rushdie, who seems never to have meant to relinquish authority over his text, stepped in after the fatwa, Prufrocklike, to say, "That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all." In "Why I Have Embraced Islam," Rushdie writes of his intention: "For over two years I have been trying to explain that The Satanic Verses was never intended as an insult" [431]. He elaborates that the "insults" occur as "portraits of . . . disintegration." In fact, these religious figures are simply manifestations of the author. He adds that "The Satanic Verses itself, with its portrait of the conflict between the material and spiritual worlds, is a mirror of the conflict within myself" [430, my emphasis]. So it is that despite our understanding about the role of the author and his/her intentionality, Rushdie not only attempts to maintain control over his text but infuses his characters with his "visions" or injects himself into his creations. Even as The Moor's Last Sigh went to press, there was rumor and speculation about Rushdie's intentions. With this publication event and in making his first "unguarded" public appearance in The Times/Dillon's Debate in Westminister Central Hall on 7 September 1995, Rushdie again attempted to assert not only his intentions but that "the author is not dead."

5. Islam's growth in the Indian soil was very different from the roots it lay down in Africa, for instance. The Somali writer Nuruddin Farah, who has also lived in India, describes his context in Interviews with Writers of the Post-colonial World: "The reason why Islam appears to be more relentless is twofold. One is that for everything Muslims do, they resort to the holy book, from which they seek divine approval. The second is that Islamic societies have not been secularized [in Africa] in the same way as Christian societies have been" [56].

6. "Islamic high culture," characterized by ornateness in architecture, for example, and Indian Muslim culture are alike not only because of the sumptuousness and richness of their poetry, art, clothing, and food but because of their intense religiosity even in their secularism. Daily discourse for instance is punctuated with words like inshallah (God willing), marshah allah (God forbid), and l'illhauallah (praise God). Purdah, along with other Qur'anic laws, is practiced in the most secular of households, those perfectly willing to educate their daughters, mingle with Hindus, and so forth. The distinction Rushdie himself makes is useful here: Islam in India and Pakistan is represented by a secular Muslim culture quintessentially embodied for instance in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto or even in a Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Western-educated, married to a Parsi woman, and so on. What Rushdie calls "Islamization" is "a means of shoring up . . . unpopular regime[s]" in the name of religion ["Naipaul among the Believers" 374]. Rushdie adds, "Terrible things are being done today in the name of Islam" [375]. When Karsten Prager of Time asked Rushdie why he had "embraced Islam," Rushdie said, "I believe there needs to be a secular way of being a Muslim. There are plenty of people in the Muslim world who feel exactly like that--an identity with culture and values--but who are not believers in the theology. That was what I was trying to say, or I would've said it if anybody had listened hard enough. But immediately I was called either a traitor to my own cause or a hypocrite" [Prager 50].

7. In the ongoing Hindu-Muslim debate, the Global Hindu Electronic Network quotes from Shri Padgaonkar's "Men in Dark Times": "there has emerged in the world Islamic community a European Islam, an Arab Islam, an Iranian Islam, an Indonesian Islam and so on. Indeed it is Indian Islam which has the greatest potential to emerge as a model where faith and culture and nationalism form a harmonious continuum" [GHEN, World Wide Web: 25 Nov. 1995].

8. Sect, as defined by the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910-11), gives us an insight into how that term can be used to label the various Hindu and Muslim religious groups and how it is applied by scholars of Indian religions:

Sect, a body of persons holding distinctive or separate doctrines or opinions, especially in matters of religion; thus there are various sects among the Jews, the Mahommedans, and the Buddhists, etc. In the Christian Church, it has usually a hostile or depreciatory sense and is applied like "sectary," to all religious bodies outside the one to which the user of the term belongs.

Rushdie writes in "Why I Have Embraced Islam" that "most Indian Muslims affirm the value of the secular principle" [430].

9. Brennan here seems to be using Islamic in the Middle Eastern scholars' sense, in a more narrowly religious way than it is used in India. This could contribute to his misunderstanding of Rushdie's audience. Certainly, Indian Muslims would understand, though perhaps not all would fully appreciate, the full range of Rushdie's satire. In the sense in which I am showing Rushdie as deeply rooted in Muslim culture, there is a definite alienation from Hindu India. In Midnight's Children, the patriarch is described as having the blue eyes typical of Kashmiri Muslims. Jammu-Kashmir is the only state in predominantly Hindu India with a Muslim majority and hence the move toward Kashmiri separatism. Brennan, unaware of such contextual facts, guesses from the earlier work that Rushdie is not Islamic, although the later Satanic Verses shows Rushdie as deeply knowledgeable about Islamic history and theology.

10. It is true that the Arabian Nights would not be considered "high culture" in the Middle East, as they were popular, oral folk tales. However, when Muslim culture came into India as a colonizing force, all things Muslim became "culture" to be aspired to. It is interesting to note that the project of the first Mughal emperor, Babar, was very similar to that of T. B. Macaulay's famous 1832 memorandum introducing English to India as a means of civilizing the natives. Babar too looked around him and found the Indians uncultured despite thousands of years of art and civilization. Here is what he wrote:

Hindustan is a country that has few pleasures to recommend it. The people are not handsome. They have no idea of the charms of friendly society, of frankly mixing together, or of familiar intercourse. They have no genius, no comprehension of mind, no politeness of manner, no kindness or fellow-feeling, no ingenuity or mechanical invention in planning or executing their handicraft works, no skill or knowledge in design or architecture; they have no horses, no good flesh, no grapes or musk-melons, no good fruits, no ice or cold water, no good food or bread in their bazars, no baths or colleges, no candles, no torches, not a candlestick. [qtd. in Schimmel and Welch 14]

11. He refers to this in "Why I Have Embraced Islam" [430].

12. Bahadur Shah Zafar is the archetype of the Indo-Mughal Muslim degenerate who, preoccupied with drink, chess, and religious devotion, lost the Mughal Empire totally. The British sought to use him after the Mutiny of 1857 to reassert a central power in Delhi, especially since the Mutiny centered on a Muslim issue, the supposed use of pig fat to grease the Enfield rifles.

13. Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817-98) founded the Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh (now Aligarh Muslim University).

14. Apparently, during a hunting expedition of 1564, Akbar asked to listen to the story of Amir Hamza, "whose character was based upon the mistaken unification of two personages of the same name, an uncle of the Prophet and a popular Iranian hero from Sistan. The fantastic stories perfectly suited the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the dynamic young emperor's court from about 1566 until 1580" [Schimmel and Welch 43]. Akbar had 2-1/2-by-2-foot paintings done of this dastan. It seems to have perfectly suited his secularizing project. "The text was intended to be read aloud from the back while the illustrations were held up to an audience" [42]. It is interesting to note that the British edition of The Satanic Verses has part of a Persian miniature drawn from another such dastan of Rustum on the cover.

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