IndiaStar--A Literary-Art Magazine
Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses
by Julian Samuel
ONE CAN ALWAYS overlook the political context of a book's emergence into
the world, but for a meaningful look at the richness of Salman Rushdie's
work it would be unwise.
There is a hidden agenda at work; there always is. With The Satanic Verses
in particular, we must look at the surrounding constructions of British
pluralism-who it includes and who it rejects.
There are other writers (mentioned below) in the post-colonial world who
have not come under the same light-not because they are any less good than
Rushdie, but because their politics and mode of addressing issues have set
them apart, perhaps excluded them, from the kind movements of stylistic
beauty that Rushdie has skillfully exploited in his rise into the Fabian
soft folds of British literary society. Historical empires which claim to
operate within democratic tenets must prove their sense of pluralism, their
healthy tolerance of the Other's sense of political imperatives (the
balances and imbalances needed ostensibly to compensate for British rule
in
India?).
The case of Rushdie is one of inclusion; the process starts with a certain
collusion of classes. I am suspicious of class-bias arguments against
Rushdie; however, with Rushdie's recent work (I shall except Haroon and
the
Sea of Stories, whose wonderful flight into fancy is a compensatory
withdrawal into the classless imagination) the following argument holds
water. He is from middle-class India, and his joining the educated ranks
of
the West at Cambridge is more a bringing together of taste and class than
the development of a contestatory literature. I realize that any attempt
to
connect his Satanic Verses with his class background (i.e. as an expression
of its failure) can be read as a feeble gesture; but it is more often true
than not that writers from his class have, as their central focus, their
own
career in view. At times, this careerist motivation is clothed in the garb
of activism, just as it is expressed in pluralism. Yet their literature
is
not about the larger sphere of activism. There are, of course, exceptions
to
this essentially weak rule -- but Rushdie is not one of them.
What we have in The Satanic Verses is an author who intimates the
barest
critique of liberalism, staying as near to conservatism as possible without
straying too far into the realm of advocating theoretical or actual
neo-Fabian violence. It is a kind of refined and erudite compromise
constructed for the soft folds of a safe and international literary
aristocracy which sees at least one of its aims as the production of a
literature heavy, dank and resonant with slickly manipulated surrealism,
but with a great deal of it anchored in perfunctory,
riskless experimentation. Tragic.
So, here we have the context of the publishing industry's attempt to
publicize a particular book. Publishers and authors will use many means
to
get a book into the public mind. The issue of censorship is not a new method
for conferring undeserved credibility upon an otherwise uncontestatory
series of decorative ideas. In the West, any degree of censorship helps
to
establish writers, both unimportant and important; and, of course, this
sells books.
If one suspends comment on the dazzling structural and Islamic formalities
of The Satanic Verses, observing instead the mechanisms of another
process
outside the immediate functioning of the novel itself, one may come to see
how Rushdie has arrived where he is.
Censorship and Islam. The issue of a simple-minded parody of Islam, with
its
narratively wearying associational links, is hardly worth the effort of
Indian (for that matter, any) censorship-unless, of course, one was prepared
for the large amount of publicity which the issue was about to generate
in
the first place; though it is hard to judge whether Rushdie did anticipate
the literarily deconstructive tones sounding from Teheran. It has been
established that drafts of the "injurious" chapter were sent to
Indian
magazines to foster a coordinated Islamic response.
The book is boring because the attempt to create diegetic density is fey
and, often worse, unexperimental. Its echoes of-well, anything from Joyce
to
Faulkner and (I am told Rushdie does not like the comparison) to Gabriel
Garcia Marquez's magical realism are expropriative rather than
transmutative, right down to Garcia Marquez's own serious embedding of
thorns in the flanks of governments. The Indian government suppressed this
"revolutionary" text because it censors most opposition anyway.
Rushdie's
---------------------------------------------------
The Satanic Verses is a pretty ordinary book
by an occasionally stimulating writer ...
--------------------------------------------------
book does not represent any moral high ground. And it was made accessible
in
India through pirating channels. So much for the prestige of a novel that
so
strongly questions religion that it needs to be hushed by state censorship.
It ought to be no surprise that Rushdie's mild, ineffectual and paradoxical
reinterpretation of Mohammed's life at Mecca and Medina has fast become
a
source of irritation to a country which Rushdie left when he was a child.
One doesn't have to be a heavyweight to reap censorship from unprogressive
Muslims. They, like their Christian counterparts in the West and the Middle
East (Lebanon, for example), will try to control any opposition, however
slight, however progressive, however questioning of religion.
Here is what Mr S. Shahabuddin, President of the All-India Muslim Majlis
Mushvarat, told me about the book (I am told he has made these remarks often):
The book is blasphemous, injurious and makes indecent remarks about the
Prophet's wife that violate the Indian penal code, which prohibits any
writing which may hurt the religious sentiments of the people, and that
are
in bad taste. If the importers of the book want to contest the ban, they
have the democratic right to do so. [interview, New Delhi, 18 January, 1989]
Mahmood Ahmed Mirpuri, secretary of the Islamic Sharia Council in Britain,
said that the book was "a blatant insult to Islam" (New Statesman,
15
October, 1988). Obviously, the Muslim reaction to the book is an orthodox,
reactionary one. Rushdie's manipulative brilliance did not motivate much
else. The fundamentalist government of Iran used the book to deflect
criticism from itself; with the end of the Iraq-Iran war, the potential
for
internal dissent and a second revolution must have been an awful strain
on
this grey clerical regime. Hence the more than incidental political value
to
the ayatollahs of their renewal of the universal death-sentence on Rushdie.
The remarks that the international media have projected (and I am thinking
especially of the state-run CBC in Canada) are stereotypically and
informationally dead-ended; few Third World intellectuals have been
interviewed. The Muslim world is deeply sensitive to the plot of
international racism mounted against it (in the case of Palestine, Iran,
etc.), and to anything that attacks it, from American and Israeli F-1 8s
to
the various other Arab regimes themselves. The kind of attack sustained
by a
trendy, cultured Indian-British writer will be taken as an attack not only
on the hermeneutic intricacies of Islam, but also on the code of living
which has historically always been manipulated by the West for the latter's
benefit. Edward Said, in Covering Islam, has exposed this structuration
of
Western bias against Islam as it is shaped in our print and electronic media.
Rushdie could have gone on and on about how the rise of Islamic
fundamentalism is in fact an historical reaction to imperialism -- how,
in
fact, the hundreds of years of occidental colonialism and imperialism have
smashed the social fabric of Muslim life to the extent that the social
critique of religion as an instrument of social control is beyond the pale
in most Islamic societies and the institutions of higher learning within
it.
Hence the current reaction.
It is a moral good to parody religion in all its evil forms; but to choose
such an already wounded target for the delectation of Western civilization
at large is certainly too easy and too aesthetically simple-minded a way
to
attempt irony. The irony, of course, is that The Satanic Verses is
a pretty
ordinary book by an occasionally stimulating writer who has become better
known through his homing in on soft targets. (It is obvious that Rushdie's
predictive sense could have helped him fabricate a more effective way of
injecting the Muslim world with questions on this religion's current
transformations.) His use of Islam is surely not so devastating a literary
deed when one recalls that, just a few years ago, jets zoomed into Tripoli
and Benghazi under the guise of demolishing Arab (Islamic) terrorists; not
so devastating a deed in the light of Israel's assistance to Lebanese forces
(who are seen as Islamic, therefore Arabs, therefore terrorists) in
perpetrating the massacre of Palestinians at Chatila and Sabra. The task
of
making the world laugh at religion is a good one; but when it is performed
with facileness rather than facility-with so much of the general irony
depending on the media-code of prefabricated Western opinion-then the whole
project founders in its own shallows.
This is not the place to survey the book's progress in India or elsewhere;
enough to say that, in India, the book has generally had a very
tongue-in-cheek reception. Intellectuals of both Islamic and non-Islamic
persuasion have come out to condemn and laugh at Rushdie's Islamic
pre-calculation. Saeed Naqvi has said: "The most annoying thing about
the
controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses is that it makes
Indian Muslims out to be a bunch of humourless touch-me-nots, intolerant
of
elegant verse or an irreverent idea"; and: "describe the Battle
of Boyne as
a piece of fiction. The Orange Order will take your pants off and give you
three hundred not lashes, but John Lobbs on your bare bottoms. Try producing
The Merchant of Venice in Jerusalem or even on Broadway and the publishers
of The Satanic Verses will break the contract" (Illustrated
Weekly of India,
6 November, 1988).
In several of his short stories, the late Pakistani novelist Saadat Hassan
Manto shatters reactionary aspects of Islamic thought and application. And,
I might add, at far greater personal risk than Rushdie; Manto wrote his
fiery exposés during the holocaustic Partition-period when British
India was
bifurcated into the Western and Eastern wings. Rushdie is writing within
fortress London. Aldous Huxley, for one, made a greater and more imaginative
indictment of the Church and its paraphernalia in The Devils of Loudun,
where his irony, directed at the whole epoch of Cardinal Richelieu, is finer
and more contestatory. The list of better and more combative writers on
religion could be extended indefinitely.
The Islam bit is just an attempt to get the trivial narrative mess on the
world map: to maintain Rushdie's reputation, in the wake of Midnight's
Children, as a writer of substantive importance. The tactic does not work;
the approach is diaphanous, moribund. However, Rushdie is momentarily
triumphing on the arc of imperial culture. British society (and American,
and German . . .) has to demonstrate its admirable pluralism, and Indian
society must show its petty intolerance by protecting its Muslims from the
cruel barbs of The Satanic Verses. For the Empire, the task of accepting
and
containing the polite pinpricks of Rushdie is no problem (Booker Prize to
boot), especially when it is embedded in so erudite and inconsequential
an
attack on imperial discourse. Besides, what has the book produced to date
in
terms of bringing about any creative debate on Islam or post-colonial
fiction? All one hears of is angry Muslims burning the book without having
read it. And this is Rushdie's fault. We ought not to forget that he is
a
trained orientalist (Cambridge). With his expertise, perhaps a more lasting,
more heretical debate could have been projected on the Muslim world. He
might well have known what the reaction would have been. Increased sales?
Rushdie's novel seems to be innovative. It is not. The Satanic Verses
is
perfunctorily a complex work from which the hard world of experimentation
and the testing of ethical, ideological or philosophical narratives is
absent. There is the urge to impress the reader with swirly, protracted
arabesques, but to little end. Even on its own terms, the book is lame,
inconsequential; dramaturgically, it produces nothing memorable. The
discursive ruptures in the narrative flow are too often there for their
own
sake; it is for the softness of his attack on structures in general that
Rushdie is so readily accepted. Rushdie gives British pluralism what it
wants-what other reason for placing him on the Nelson's Column of
post-colonial literature? This is the world of cheque-book fiction. More
effective non-dreamers like Tariq Mehmood (Hand on the Sun) and, in France,
Mehedi Cahref (Le Thé au harem d'Archi Ahmed) produce characters
who loom
large in the mind after the pages have stopped turning. There are
consequences from knowing them.
In The Satanic Verses, one has to rest content with characters who are
dropped in and plucked back out again without any challengingly blasphemous
integration or disintegration. One cannot take as a serious challenge an
orthodox Muslim community's reaction to the book on any level except that
of
a media event. It would take another kind of adaptation of the Koran to
tease out a response in terms of intrinsic questions of
consequence-questions that might make Islamic Ulema look hard at itself.
For
example, the WAF (Women's Action Forum) continually used the Koran to mirror
back and fight off General Zia ul-Haq's very special understanding of religion.
In January of 1987 Rushdie attacked London's Black Audio Film Collective
for
their experimental film on the Handsworth riots. As expressed in the
Guardian, Rushdie's objection was basically that Handsworth Songs presented
the problem in and around the riots; that it was not really up to par
aesthetically and experimentally; and that the film was not innovative on
a
number of levels. According to Rushdie, it failed to commingle histories
of
oppressed Blacks in the UK with other stories. More importantly, he also
claimed that the film was okayed by the critics because it was a "Black"
production, and thought that British journalists had gone soft in the head
when it came to Black concerns. It would be truer to say that Handsworth
Songs succeeds in bringing together theories of representation, archival
mediation, and the power of counter-history; and does so without any
self-flagellation. It would be a more apposite exercise to transfer
Rushdie's criticisms of Handsworth Songs to his own Satanic Verses.
On the subject of Black people and their struggle for justice in Britain,
Rushdie, it would be fair to say, has a Naipaulesque attitude-all the more
dishonest because it is masked in a finer style than Naipaul's, whose
observations more readily betray his unnecessarily brahminical attitude
of
superiority. What, then, does Rushdie think of popular Black political
movements and their quest for change in racist Britain? The facts speak
for
themselves: he continually mocks and derides disadvantaged Black resistance
movements in the UK (not everyone can be as prosperous as Rushdie-from
Bombay to Cambridge, Booker Prize winner, but this, like the Indian
government's prestige-generating ban on the book, must not be held against
him; I make this observation merely to indicate class collusion and the
self-
interest of the publishing world). Blacks are subjected to Rushdie's scorn
and, possibly, his condescension. Notice the Naipaul in Rushdie:
Now-mi-feel-indignation-when-dem-talk-immigration-when-make-insinuation-how-
we-no-part-a-nation-an-make-proclamation-a-de-true-situation-how-we-make-con
tribution-since-de-Rome-0ccupation. [p. 292]
Or: "The symbol of the Goatman, his fist raised in might, began to
crop up
on banners at demonstrations, Save the Six, Free the Four, Eat the Heinz
fifty-seven" (286). There is here the cheapness of observation that
perhaps
only a rich immigrant might make who has been accepted into the role of
major world writer. Rushdie tries to enter the thick of Black oppositional
debate, but from far too lofty a perspective. His class origins save him;
but his rigid adherence to the way his class has always talked about the
poor and their struggle is not very different from the cold detachment of
a
Punjabi landlord in Sind. The condescension could have been more
entertaining, more powerful, had it actually pushed ideas in the form of
a
confrontational expose' of grass-roots politics and activism. But all we
get
is the ability of a narrative structure to mimic experimentation, a dull
exercise in montage posing as an aesthetic of newness.
This above-the-other-immigrants attitude towards the orthodox and
Black-British Left applies only so much reason and tactical ingenuity as
one
could expect from an immigrant who has absorbed the mannerisms of
Cantabridgian superciliousness and added them to his upper-caste world-view.
Rushdie's is indeed the highest fiction in the land. The risks have not
paid
off, though; what one gets is a histrionic, often super-associational
narrative (complete with Marquezian butterflies-cf. p. 492), for whose
characters we are not encouraged to care much. We are asked to put up with
it all in the name of a thought-provoking post-colonial literature, and
with
the pre-orchestrated extra incentive of a reputation ennobled through
censorship. Joyce's Ulysses may have had greater difficulty getting
published, but the writing is worth it; with Joyce, there's also a lasting
suspicion of religion that is persuasively mediated. Rushdie exposes racism
and its systemic violence politely. He pokes fun entertainingly at the
fawning attitude of some Muslims to authority. But no more than that. When
one has exposed racism and the reactionary aspects of Islam (of Judaism
and
Christianity, for that matter), it is not worth doing it again in book after
book. One must tell other stories-as Rushdie himself says of the Black Audio
group. However, if the project includes the dull tales of an innovative
novelist, then I would prefer that risks had been taken that involved
rearticulating the dream of a world in which literature can do its bit to
effect change.
There are moments of beauty in the book-- the beauty of its internal
collusions; desultory, early postmodernist contortions and subversions.
Yet
the polished magnificence of Rushdie's mirroring, associative innovations
is
dashed into inconsequence by having nothing inside, behind or around it.
The
transitional sections are merely little bits of literary biology suspended
in the thin, smoggy air of British pluralism. The book is empty. The
precalculated anti-Islamic propaganda is a sales-pitch, nothing more. To
further get credit for having produced a book that an oligarchic democracy
like Mother India has banned is clear evidence that reconstitutions of the
Koran in a Muslim world terrorized by the West will not find it difficult
to
come under censorship. The Iranian use of the book is obvious; the Indian
use of the book is obvious. And Rushdie's use of the Koran is obvious. The
towering complexity of The Satanic Verses and the pseudo-erudition of the
novel's ten hip literary allusions per page are a sure sign that, this time
around, Rushdie is trying too, too hard to overcome his Empire-inflicted
Naipaulism
(This commentary was part of a debate on Rushdie at Ramjas College,
University of Delhi, in January 1989, and at Giessen University, Germany,
in
June of the same year. It was subsequently published in "US/THEM,
Transition, Transcription and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures,"
edited by Gordon Collier, Amsterdam - Atlanta, GA, 1992.)
Editor's note:
Julian Samuel is a Pakistani-Canadian writer and filmmaker.
His most recent publication is Passage to Lahore, Stratford, Ontario,
Canada, (1995).
He has produced and directed short and medium
length films and videos: Black Skin; White Masks (1973-79), Dictators
(1982), Resisting The Pharaohs (1984; on the Montréal arms-export
industry),
and Red Star over the Western Press: Archive; Algeria, 1954-62 (1987).
Red
Star is the first attempt to dramatize the work of Frantz Fanon; the
tape
which was also shown at the London Filmmakers co-op to also led to his being
invited to participate in a international conference in Algeria in 1987.
His
work is represented in Canadian national and provincial collections, and
has
been exhibited and screened in Canada, Cairo, Havana and London and New
York. His articles have been published in Arab World Review, Canadian
Literature, Fuse, Serai, Ba-zzar.
Julian Samuel has published a book of poems Lone Ranger in Pakistan,
(1986),
The Raft of the Medusa (with Joceylne Doray); a novel, Passage
to Lahore;
which weaves together autobiographical reflections on Britain, Lahore,
Karachi (Mercury Press, 1995).
He has completed The Raft of the Medusa: five voices on colonies nations
and histories (1993)- a work on the construction of occidental history
and
Into the European Mirror, (1994) which discusses Arab history and
the
expulsions which transpired in Spain in the fourteen hundreds, and City
of
the Dead and the World Exhibitions (1995) -- about architecture, Islamic
history and the rise of fundamentalism. He was artist in residence at The
Banff Centre - Media Arts, 1993..