Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

by Salman Rushdie

  The purpose of the ‘brothel sequence’, then, was not to ‘insult and abuse’ the Prophet’s wives, but to dramatize certain ideas about morality; and sexuality, too, because what happens in the brothel—called Hijab after the name for ‘modest’ dress as an ironic means of further highlighting the inverted echo between the two worlds—is that the men of ‘Jahilia’ are enabled to act out an ancient dream of power and possession, the dream of possessing the queen. That men should be so aroused by the great ladies’ whorish counterfeits says something about them, not the great ladies, and about the extent to which sexual relations have to do with possession.

  I must have known, my accusers say, that my use of the old devil-name ‘Mahound’, a medieval European demonization of ‘Muhammad’, would cause offence. In fact, this is an instance in which de-contextualization has created a complete reversal of meaning. A part of the relevant context is on page ninety-three of the novel. ‘To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise, our mountain-climbing, prophet-motivated solitary is to be the medieval baby-frightener, the Devil’s synonym: Mahound.’ Central to the purposes of The Satanic Verses is the process of reclaiming language from one’s opponents. (Elsewhere in the novel we find the poet Jumpy Joshi trying to reclaim Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘rivers of blood’ simile. Humanity itself can be thought of as a river of blood, he argues; the river flows in our bodies, and we, as a collectivity, are a river of blood flowing down the ages. Why abandon so potent and evocative an image to the racists?) ‘Trotsky’ was Trotsky’s jailer’s name. By taking it for his own, he symbolically conquered his captor and set himself free. Something of the same spirit lay behind my use of the name ‘Mahound’.

  The attempt at reclamation goes even further than this. When Saladin Chamcha finds himself transformed into a goatish, horned and hoofy demon, in a bizarre sanatorium full of other monstrous beings, he’s told that they are all, like him, aliens and migrants, demonized by the ‘host culture’s’ attitude to them. ‘They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.’ If migrant groups are called devils by others, that does not really make them demonic. And if devils are not necessarily devilish, angels may not necessarily be angelic … From this premise, the novel’s exploration of morality as internal and shifting (rather than external, divinely sanctioned, absolute) may be said to emerge.

  The very title, The Satanic Verses, is an aspect of this attempt at reclamation. You call us devils? it seems to ask. Very well, then, here is the devil’s version of the world, of ‘your’ world, the version written from the experience of those who have been demonized by virtue of their otherness. Just as the Asian kids in the novel wear toy devil-horns proudly, as an assertion of pride in identity, so the novel proudly wears its demonic title. The purpose is not to suggest that the Qur’an is written by the devil; it is to attempt the sort of act of affirmation that, in the United States, transformed the word black from the standard term of racist abuse into a ‘beautiful’ expression of cultural pride.

  And so on. There are times when I feel that the original intentions of The Satanic Verses have been so thoroughly scrambled by events as to be lost for ever. There are times when I feel frustrated that the terms in which the novel is discussed seem to have been set exclusively by Muslim leaders (including those, like Sher Azam of the Bradford Council of Mosques, who can blithely say on television, ‘Books are not my thing’). After all, the process of hybridization which is the novel’s most crucial dynamic means that its ideas derive from many sources other than Islamic ones.

  There is, for example, the pre-Christian belief, expressed in the Books of Amos and Deutero-Isaiah and quoted in The Satanic Verses, that God and the Devil were one and the same: ‘It isn’t until the Book of Chronicles, merely fourth century BC, that the word Satan is used to mean a being, and not only an attribute of God.’ It should also be said that the two books that were most influential on the shape this novel took do not include the Qur’an. One was William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the classic meditation on the interpenetration of good and evil; the other The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, the great Russian lyrical and comical novel in which the Devil descends upon Moscow and wreaks havoc upon the corrupt, materialist, decadent inhabitants and turns out, by the end, not to be such a bad chap after all. The Master and Margarita and its author were persecuted by Soviet totalitarianism. It is extraordinary to find my novel’s life echoing that of one of its greatest models.

  Nor are these the only non-Muslim influences at work. I was born an Indian, and not only an Indian, but a Bombayite—Bombay, most cosmopolitan, most hybrid, most hotchpotch of Indian cities. My writing and thought have therefore been as deeply influenced by Hindu myths and attitudes as Muslim ones (and my movie star Gibreel is also a figure of inter-religious tolerance, playing Hindu gods without causing offence, in spite of his Muslim origins). Nor is the West absent from Bombay. I was already a mongrel self, history’s bastard, before London aggravated the condition.

  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. Secularism, for India, is not simply a point of view; it is a question of survival. If what Indians call ‘communalism’, sectarian religious politics, were to be allowed to take control of the polity, the results would be too horrifying to imagine. Many Indians fear that that moment may now be very near. I have fought against communal politics all my adult life. The Labour Party in Britain would do well to look at the consequences of Indian politicians’ willingness to play the communalist card, and consider whether some Labour politicians’ apparent willingness to do the same in Britain, for the same reason (votes), is entirely wise.

  To be a Bombayite (and afterwards a Londoner) was also to fall in love with the metropolis. The city as reality and as a metaphor is at the heart of all my work. ‘The modern city,’ says a character in The Satanic Verses, ‘is the locus classicus of incompatible realities.’ Well, that turned out to be true. ‘As long as they pass in the night, it’s not so bad. But if they meet! It’s uranium and plutonium, each makes the other decompose, boom.’ It is hard to express how it feels to have attempted to portray an objective reality and then to have become its subject …

  The point is this: Muslim culture has been very important to me, but it is not by any means the only shaping factor. I am a modern, and modernist, urban man, accepting uncertainty as the only constant, change as the only sure thing. I believe in no god, and have done so since I was a young adolescent. I have spiritual needs, and my work has, I hope, a moral and spiritual dimension, but I am content to try and satisfy those needs without recourse to any idea of a Prime Mover or ultimate arbiter.

  To put it as simply as possible: I am not a Muslim. It feels bizarre, and wholly inappropriate, to be described as some sort of heretic after having lived my life as a secular, pluralist, eclectic man. I am being enveloped in, and described by, a language that does not fit me. I do not accept the charge of blasphemy, because, as somebody says in The Satanic Verses, ‘where there is no belief, there is no blasphemy.’ I do not accept the charge of apostasy, because I have never in my adult life affirmed any belief, and what one has not affirmed one cannot be said to have apostasized from. The Islam I know states clearly that ‘there can be no coercion in matters of religion’. The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that any person so born who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death.

  When I am described as an apostate Muslim, I feel as if I have been concealed behind a false self, as if a shadow has become substance while I have been relegated to the shadows. Sections of the non-Muslim British media have helped in the creation of other aspects of this false self, portraying me as egomaniacal, insolent, greedy, hypocritical and disloyal. It has been suggested that I prefer to be known by an
Anglicization of my name (‘Simon Rushton’). And, to perfect the double bind, this Salman Rushdie is also ‘thin-skinned’ and ‘paranoid’, so that any attempt by him to protest against falsifications will be seen as further proof of the reality of the false self, the golem.

  The Muslim attack against me has been greatly assisted by the creation of this false self. ‘Simon Rushton’ has featured in several Muslim portrayals of my debased, deracinated personality. My ‘greed’ fits well into the conspiracy theory, that I sold my soul to the West and wrote a carefully planned attack on Islam in return for pots of money. ‘Disloyalty’ is useful in this context, too. Jorge Luis Borges, Graham Greene and other writers have written about their sense of an Other who goes about the world bearing their name. There are moments when I worry that my Other may succeed in obliterating me.

  On 14 February 1989, within hours of the dread news from Iran, I received a telephone call from Keith Vaz, MP, during which he vehemently expressed his full support for me and my work, and his horror at the threat against my life. A few weeks later, this same gentleman was to be found addressing a demonstration full of men demanding my death, and of children festooned with murderous placards. By now Mr Vaz wanted my work banned, and threats against my life seemed not to trouble him any longer.

  It has been that sort of year. Twelve months ago, the Guardian’s esteemed columnist, Hugo Young, teetered on the edge of racism when he told all British Muslims that if they didn’t like the way things were in Britain, they could always leave (‘if not Dagenham, why not Tehran?’); now this same Mr Young prefers to lay the blame for the controversy at my door. (I have, after all, fewer battalions at my disposal.) No doubt, Mr Young would now be relieved if I went back where I came from.

  And, and, and. Lord Dacre thought it might be a good idea if I were beaten up in a dark alley. Rana Kabbani announced with perfect Stalinist fervour that writers should be ‘accountable’ to the community. Brian Clark (the author, ironically enough, of Whose Life Is It Anyway?), claiming to be on my side, wrote an execrable play which, mercifully, nobody has yet agreed to produce, entitled Who Killed Salman Rushdie?, and sent it along in case I needed something to read.

  And Britain witnessed a brutalization of public debate that seemed hard to believe. Incitement to murder was tolerated on the nation’s streets. (In Europe and the United States, swift government action prevented such incitement at a very early stage.) On TV shows, studio audiences were asked for a show of hands on the question of whether I should live or die. A man’s murder (mine) became a legitimate subject for a national opinion poll. And slowly, slowly, a point of view grew up, and was given voice by mountebanks and bishops, fundamentalists and Mr John le Carré, which held that I knew exactly what I was doing. I must have known what would happen; therefore, did it on purpose, to profit by the notoriety that would result. This accusation is, today, in fairly wide circulation, and so I must defend myself against it, too.

  I find myself wanting to ask questions: when Osip Mandelstam wrote his poem against Stalin, did he ‘know what he was doing’ and so deserve his death? When the students filled Tiananmen Square to ask for freedom, were they not also, and knowingly, asking for the murderous repression that resulted? When Terry Waite was taken hostage, hadn’t he been ‘asking for it’? I find myself thinking of Jodie Foster in her Oscar-winning role in The Accused. Even if I were to concede (and I do not concede it) that what I did in The Satanic Verses was the literary equivalent of flaunting oneself shamelessly before the eyes of aroused men, is that really a justification for being, so to speak, gang-banged? Is any provocation a justification for rape?

  Threats of violence ought not to coerce us into believing the victims of intimidation to be responsible for the violence threatened. I am aware, however, that rhetoric is an insufficient response. Nor is it enough to point out that nothing on the scale of this controversy has, to my knowledge, ever happened in the history of literature. If I had told anyone before publication that such events would occur as a result of my book, I would instantly have proved the truth of the accusations of egomania …

  It’s true that some passages in The Satanic Verses have now acquired a prophetic quality that alarms even me. ‘Your blasphemy, Salman, can’t be forgiven … To set your words against the Word of God.’ Et cetera. But to write a dream based around events that took place in the seventh century of the Christian era, and to create metaphors of the conflict between different sorts of ‘author’ and different types of ‘text’—to say that literature and religion, like literature and politics, fight for the same territory—is very different from somehow knowing, in advance, that your dream is about to come true, that the metaphor is about to be made flesh, that the conflict your work seeks to explore is about to engulf it, and its publishers and booksellers; and you.

  At least (small comfort) I wasn’t wrong.

  Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one. But this, as honestly as I can set it down, is, in respect of the novel’s treatment of religion, what ‘I knew I was doing’.

  I set out to explore, through the process of fiction, the nature of revelation and the power of faith. The mystical, revelatory experience is quite clearly a genuine one. This statement poses a problem to the non-believer: if we accept that the mystic, the prophet, is sincerely undergoing some sort of transcendent experience, but we cannot believe in a supernatural world, then what is going on? To answer this question, among others, I began work on the story of ‘Mahound’. I was aware that the ‘satanic verses’ incident is much disputed by Muslim theologians; that the life of Muhammad has become the object of a kind of veneration that some would consider un-Islamic, since Muhammad himself always insisted that he was merely a messenger, an ordinary man; and that, therefore, great sensitivities were involved. I genuinely believed that my overt use of fabulation would make it clear to any reader that I was not attempting to falsify history, but to allow a fiction to take off from history. The use of dreams, fantasy, etc. was intended to say: the point is not whether this is ‘really’ supposed to be Muhammad, or whether the satanic verses incident ‘really’ happened; the point is to examine what such an incident might reveal about what revelation is, about the extent to which the mystic’s conscious personality informs and interacts with the mystical event; the point is to try and understand the human event of revelation. The use of fiction was a way of creating the sort of distance from actuality that I felt would prevent offence from being taken. I was wrong.

  Jahilia, to use once again the ancient Arab story-tellers’ formula I used often in The Satanic Verses, both ‘is and is not’ Mecca. Many of the details of its social life are drawn from historical research; but it is also a dream of an Indian city (its concentric street-plan deliberately recalls New Delhi), and, as Gibreel spends time in England, it becomes a dream of London, too. Likewise, the religion of ‘Submission’ both is and is not Islam. Fiction uses facts as a starting-place and then spirals away to explore its real concerns, which are only tangentially historical. Not to see this, to treat fiction as if it were fact, is to make a serious mistake of categories. The case of The Satanic Verses may be one of the biggest category mistakes in literary history.

  Here is more of what I knew: I knew that stories of Muhammad’s doubts, uncertainties, errors, fondness for women abound in and around Muslim tradition. To me, they seemed to make him more vivid, more human, and therefore more interesting, even more worthy of admiration. The greatest human beings must struggle against themselves as well as the world. I never doubted Muhammad’s greatness, nor, I believe, is the ‘Mahound’ of my novel belittled by being portrayed as human.

  I knew that Islam is by no means homogeneous, or as absolutist as some of its champions make it out to be. Islam contains the doubts of Iqbal, Ghazali, Khayyám as well as the narrow certainties of Shabbir Akhtar of the Bradford Council of Mosques and Kalim Siddiqui, director of the pro-Iranian Muslim Institute. Islam contains ribaldry as well
as solemnity, irreverence as well as absolutism. I knew much about Islam that I admired, and still admire, immensely; I also knew that Islam, like all the world’s great religions, had seen terrible things done in its name.

  The original incident on which the dream of the villagers who drown in the Arabian Sea is based is also a part of what I ‘knew’. The story awed me, because of what it told me about the huge power of faith. I wrote this part of the novel to see if I could understand, by getting inside their skins, people for whom devotion was as great as this.

  He did it on purpose is one of the strangest accusations ever levelled at a writer. Of course I did it on purpose. The question is, and it is what I have tried to answer: what is the ‘it’ that I did?

  What I did not do was conspire against Islam; or write—after years and years of anti-racist work and writing—a text of incitement to racial hatred; or anything of the sort. My golem, my false Other, may be capable of such deeds, but I am not.

  Would I have written differently if I had known what would happen? Truthfully, I don’t know. Would I change any of the text now? I would not. It’s too late. As Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote in The Physicists: ‘What has once been thought cannot be unthought.’

  The controversy over The Satanic Verses needs to be looked at as a political event, not purely a theological one. In India, where the trouble started, the Muslim fundamentalist MP Syed Shahabuddin used my novel as a stick with which to threaten the wobbling Rajiv Gandhi government. The demand for the book’s banning was a power-play to demonstrate the strength of the Muslim vote, on which Congress has traditionally relied and which it could ill afford to lose. (In spite of the ban, Congress lost the Muslims and the election anyway. Put not your trust in Shahabuddins.)