Fatwa Day

Twenty years ago today a doddery old Ayatollah with only a few months to live issued a death sentence against a novelist he had never met, for writing a book he had never read. And so began one of the defining political and philosophical crises of our age. It still remains unresolved, though it's unlikely that The Satanic Verses would get published in its current form today. To a great extent, fear of the ugly mob has been internalised, even justified as sensitivity. The dying man's curse has not been exorcised; indeed, it has grown more potent with time. Only last year, a saccharine and (by all accounts) cringingly respectful historical romance about one of Mohammed's wives is withdrawn by a publisher fearing violence, or lost business, or both.

Yet Satanic Verses itself remains in print, and Salman Rushdie, once he emerged from some years in hiding, resumed a high-profile life of parties, writing, and divorces. You can buy a copy in any branch of Waterstone's, and you won't have to fight your way past demonstrators on the way out. Proof, surely, that facing down bullies works.

But what of the book itself? At around the time of the Fatwa, it was smart in some circles to dismiss it as unreadable, pretentious, not worth the trouble. "He should be killed for writing a rubbish novel", was a typical tear-him-for-his-bad-verses harrumph. It's an uneven book, to be sure: not a perfect work, like Rushdie's acknowledged masterpiece Midnight's Children; it has its longeurs. But in its depiction of the alienating experience of immigration it has seldom been matched. It is certainly superior to anything he has written since, with the possible exception of his miniature gem Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the child of his captivity.

And it has grown with time. There are passages and phrases that resound with pre-echoes of what was to come, as though the spirit of prophecy was upon him. Rushdie has always denied that he anticipated the fuss The Satanic Verses would cause. Yet it is impossible to read it today without feeling that, at some level, Rushdie knew exactly what would happen.

Take, for example, this.

The Grandee, vaguely, nods. "You like the taste of blood," he says. The boy shrugs. "A poet's work," he answers. "To name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep." And if rivers of blood flow from the cuts his verses inflict, then they will nourish him. He is the satirist. Baal.

Or this, that now seems terribly resonant:

"Things are ending," he told her. "This civilisation; things are closing in on it. It has been quite a culture, brilliant and foul, cannibal and Christian, the glory of the world. We should celebrate it while we can; until night falls."

And was it blasphemy? Was it truly offensive? The passages concerning things sacred to Muslims are not central to the book, though they give it its name: they are dream sequences, in which one of the characters imagines himself to be the Archangel Gabriel, delivering the Koran to Mohammed (here called Mahound). It satirises - or rather riffs upon - the origins of Islam. It tells a story that is not the official one, that is a work of imagination, but that scpetics might find all too plausible. There follows one of the most contentious passages.

Return to Jahilia

'I know you,' Baal said.
'Yes.'
'The way you speak. You're a foreigner.'
' "A revolution of water-carriers, immigrants and slaves,"' the stranger quoted. 'Your words.'
'You're the immigrant,' Baal remembered. 'The Persian. Sulaiman.' The Persian smiled his crooked smile. 'Salman,' he corrected. 'Not wise, but peaceful.'
'You were one of the closest to him,' Baal said, perplexed.
'The closer you are to a conjurer,' Salman bitterly replied, 'the easier to spot the trick.'


And Gibreel dreamed this:

At the oasis of Yathrib the followers of the new faith of Submission found themselves landless, and therefore poor. For many years they financed themselves by acts of brigandage, attacking the rich camel-trains on their way to and from Jahilia. Mahound had no time for scruples, Salman told Baal, no qualms about ends and means. The faithful lived by lawlessness, but in those years Mahound - or should one say the Archangel Gibreel? — should one say Al-Lah? — became obsessed by law. Amid the palm-trees of the oasis Gibreel appeared to the Prophet and found himself spouting rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelation, Salman said, rules about every damn thing, if a man farts let him turn his face to the wind, a rule about which hand to use for the purpose of cleaning one's behind. It was as if no aspect of human existence was to be left unregulated, free. The revelation — the recitation — told the faithful how much to eat, how deeply they should sleep, and which sexual positions had received divine sanction, so that they learned that sodomy and the missionary position were approved of by the archangel, whereas the forbidden postures included all those in which the female was on top.

Gibreel further listed the permitted and forbidden subjects of conversation, and earmarked the parts of the body which could not be scratched no matter how unbearably they might itch. He vetoed the consumption of prawns, those bizarre other-worldly creatures which no member of the faithful had ever seen, and required animals to be killed slowly, by bleeding, so that by experiencing their deaths to the full they might arrive at an understanding of the meaning of their lives, for it is only at the moment of death that living creatures understand that life has been real, and not a sort of dream. And Gibreel the archangel specified the manner in which a man should be buried, and how his property should be divided, so that Salman the Persian got to wondering what manner of God this was that sounded so much like a businessman.

This was when he had the idea that destroyed his faith, because he recalled that of course Mahound himself had been a businessman, and a damned successful one at that, a person to whom organization and rules came naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should have come up with such a very businesslike archangel, who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if non-corporeal, God.

After that Salman began to notice how useful and well timed the angel's revelations tended to be, so that when the faithful were disputing Mahound's views on any subject, from the possibility of space travel to the permanence of Hell, the angel would turn up with an answer, and he always supported Mahound, stating beyond any shadow of a doubt that it was impossible that a man should ever walk upon the moon, and being equally positive on the transient nature of damnation: even the most evil of doers would eventually be cleansed by hellfire and find their way into the perfumed gardens, Gulistan and Bostan. It would have been different, Salman complained to Baal, if Mahound took up his positions after receiving the revelation from Gibreel; but no, he just laid down the law and the angel would confirm it afterwards; so I began to get a bad smell in my nose, and I thought, this must be the odour of those fabled and legendary unclean creatures, what's their name, prawns.