In 1988, Indian-born
British author Salman Rushdie publishing his bombshell novel The
Satanic Verses. The response to
the allegedly blasphemous book was swift, loud, and hostile. People
in western countries, while defending Rushdie’s right to freedom of
speech, were mostly quite confused by the extreme reaction it
provoked overseas. While the protests and debates have largely died
down, the conflict over the right to free speech vs. condemnation for
heresy remains unresolved.
The Satanic
Verses is a satirical novel
written in the magical
realism style, a method that
places ordinary people in
surrealistic events and settings.
The plot revolved around an Indian Bollywood movie star, Gibreel
Farishta, who makes it big in
London and insists on becoming British. The conflict between his
Western and Eastern
identities is symbolized by his mental breakdown and descent into
schizophrenic delusion in which he, often humorously, believes
himself to literally be the archangel Gibreel. In several sequences
in the book, the man Gibreel Farishta has vivid dreams, while
sleeping, about being sent by Allah to communicate his
wishes to Mahound, an umistakable representation of Mohammad, the
prophet of Islam.
Some
details of the story were deemed offensive to Muslims. There are
several characters who speak
out against Mahound, declaring him to be a fraud and a charlatan. It
has often been pointed out that these characters were not portrayed
as heroes in Rushdie’s depiction; they were parts of subplots that
exemplified the opponents of Islam during Mohammad’s life and they
did not represent Rushdie’s personal views on Islam. Another
problematic subplot involves
an Indian cult leader who takes
her followers on a suicide mission to drown themselves in the sea in
order to reach paradise; the cult leader’s name was Ayeesha, the
name of Mohammad’s wife who he married when she was at the age of
four. The most controversial
detail involves
twelve prostitutes in Arabia, each one taking a name of one of the
prophet’s wives. It must be noted that these prostitutes were not
actually portrayed as Mohammad’s wives but merely as whores who
tried to capitalize off his popularity during his
lifetime.
Before
the novel was released to the public, its publisher, Viking –
Penguin, began receiving requests from Muslim leaders to halt its
publication. The publishers went through with their plans and The
Satanic Verses was first
released in the United Kingdom in 1988. It
was an instantaneous controversy and several countries around the
world passed laws banning it on grounds of blasphemy. The first
protest against the book took place in London, early in 1989. The
demonstration was peaceful and was limited to a small group of
Muslims who burned one copy of the novel. In 1989, the first American
edition was released to wild critical acclaim.
At
that time, street protests in England began to grow bigger and
angrier. Mobs gathered to burn piles of Rushdie’s books and the
protests spread to several other Islamic countries around the world.
Book stores and publisher’s offices started getting threatened,
ransacked and bombed. Approximately a third of all bookstores in the
US refused to even carry the book while some stores
stocked it hidden away under the counter with their selections of
pornography. Despite all the uproar, it was obvious that very few
Muslims had ever read the book. At that time it was only available in
English and in translation to a few other languages like French,
German, and Japanese; it was mostly
unavailable outside Western countries. The subject matter was also
dense and complicated
and required a vast amount of background knowledge to be fully
comprehended. It seemed that Muslims around the world had been
infected with the false
notion that the book was a
Satanist’s polemic against the Islamic religion, being published
and propagated by Western conspirators who wished to destabilize the
Muslim world to make invasion and conquest easy.
The
situation got worse when the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, leader of
the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and then president of the country,
went on the radio and, in Farsi, issued a fatwa against Salman
Rushdie. The fatwa declared it a religious duty for all Muslims to
hunt down and kill Rushdie for the crime of blasphemy and apostasy,
for speaking out against the prophet Mohammad. Rushdie immediately
went into hiding with armed bodyguards. He soon issued a public
apology and begged for forgiveness. Khomeini was not impressed; he
doubled down on his attack against Rushdie and the Western countries
who supposedly sought to degrade the religion of Islam. Khomeini
claimed there could never be forgiveness for apostasy. The six
million dollar price tag on Rushdie’s corpse remained in place.
The
UK immediately ended all diplomatic relations with Iran, citing human
rights and international goodwill as its reasons. Other countries did
as well, saying that no member of one country had the right to
declare a death
sentence on a citizen of another country, especially without due
process of law. Muslims throughout the world not only voiced support
for the fatwa but many also tried to hunt down and assassinate the
unfortunate author. Western
intellectuals continued to defend the work of fiction on the ground
of free speech. A small number of Islamic scholars also cited the
fiqh, the Muslim doctrine of jurisprudence, to condemn the fatwa on
the ground that the death penalty could not be administered in the
absence of a fair trial. Other conservative religious leaders in the
West regrettably
took sides with Khomeini, saying that freedom of speech did not
extend to the freedom to criticize religion.
With
hindsight it appears that the Ayatollah Khomeini had some ulterior
political motives to issuing the fatwa. One is that he saw himself as
being the world’s leading Muslim cleric
and he wanted to gain an upper hand over Saudi Arabia in taking
charge of the Islamic world. He wanted Muslims to rally to the
anti-imperialist cause of his Iranian Revolution. He also wanted to
drive a wedge between the West and the Muslim world, claiming that
too many Muslims were embracing Western ideas of democracy, freedom
and secularism. There was also the issue of The Satanic
Verses’s depiction of Khomeini
himself. One passage of the novel clearly depicted the Iranian leader
as a demagogue using the cause of Islam to enslave his followers for
his own egotistical gains.
Khomeini
soon died and the Revolutionary Guard of Iran contacted Rushdie to
tell him they were no longer encouraging his execution. They did,
however, refuse to end the fatwa by stating that only the man who
issues the fatwa can cancel it. Salman Rushdie stayed in hiding for nine
years. His wife, unable to stand the strain of living under cover,
divorced him. He was forced to live with
an assumed name and had to change locations every three days. Now
no longer in hiding, Rushdie still receives death threats from Muslims about once a year.
He is said to have made over $2 million dollars from the sale of his
book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Satanic_Verses_controversy
