The Satanic Verses

By Salman Rushdie

Our story begins as the two central characters — both Indian actors — find themselves falling out of the sky as their jetliner bound for London is blown to bits by terrorists.
Gibreel Farishta, a dashing leading man and film star in Bombay, has left his world of fame and fortune to pursue the love of his life, a woman of adventure who has climbed Mount Everest, in London.
His reluctant companion is Saladin Chamcha, a successful commercial voice-over man with a talent for impersonation.
The two middle-aged actors have an animated conversation as they hurtle toward earth. They somehow land safely, but then their troubles begin anew. Gibreel dreams himself into the persona of the archangel Gabriel; Chamcha grows horns and hooves and temporarily turns into the devil.

An extravagant cast of characters leads us from the deserts of ancient Arabia to the slums of modern London,and a tortuous plot ends on a pleasingly sentimental note.
Along the way, the author writes about his schooling and young adulthood in Britain, about his love for Bombay, and the death of his father. He explores the roots of his Muslim faith and retells some legends of the Prophet Muhammed in whimsical and outrageous ways, taking care to offer up these sequences as dreams or even dreams within dreams by characters who may or may not be mad.
Some of the most congested sequences in the book are those describing the birth of a religion that looks very much like Islam.
These events, dreamed by Gibreel in the course of a drawn-out mental breakdown, are derived form traditional accounts of Muhammed’s life, but Rushdie spins them into fantasy and embroiders them with irreverent touches of sex, humor and politics.
Rushdie’s fictional prophet is called Mahound, the name that 19th century Christian missionaries mockingly used in the medieval religious plays for a satanic version of Muhammed.
At least one of Mahound’s followers, "a bum from Persia" who shares the author’s first name, becomes convinced that Mahound is little more than a charismatic charlatan. Salman commits an unthinkable sin. His job is to write down the revelations of God as recited by Mahound, but he repeatedly changes Mahound’s words. When the prophet realizes this, he explodes: "Your blasphemy cannot be forgiven."
The punishment is death. But Mahound is merciful and finally spares the life of Salman the book character.

But the same cannot be said for Salman Rushdie.
His passages satirize a belief at the heart of Islam, that the Koran is the word of God revealed to Muhammed by the archangel Gabriel.
Another of Rushdie’s bitterly disputed passages deals with the famous Satanic Verses from which the novel takes its title.
Her Mahound is tempted by Gibreel to cut a deal with the enemies of his embryonic faith and tolerate the worship of three of their goddesses alongside the one God. Gibreel later tells Mahound the idea came from Satan and the prophet orders acceptance of the rival deities to be stricken from the holy text.
Perhaps the most sensational episode takes place in a brothel and bestows on prostitutes the names of Muhammed’s wives.
This is outrageous to Muslims since they revere their prophet’s spouses as "mothers of all believers." Rushdie does not present Mahound’s wives as fallen women, though; rather, the prostitutes borrow the names and gradually take on the identities of the wives to mock Mahound.
One Muslim, quoted in Time, likens this episode to "presenting the Virgin Mary as a whore."
Defenders of the book point out that, as in the brothel scene, scurrilous material is often not Rushdie’s own characterization of Muhammed and his followers but is instead the accusations of the idolaters whom the prophet is seeking to overthrow.

The Satanic Verses, a Review
Descriptive information compiled from articles that appeared at the time in Newsweek and Time magazines.