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Those Satanic Verses
Aug. 15th, 2022 04:49 pmThe stabbing attack on author Salman Rushdie has been met with outrage. It seems increasingly certain that this attack was motivated by the fatwa issued against him for his award-winning novel "The Satanic Verses", itself based on a legitimate historical claim by scholars of Islam, that Muhammad mistook certain whisperings for "divine revelation". The book is firmly in the genre of magical realism with several subplots, schizophrenic delusions, dream sequences, and the like whilst being set in a late twentieth-century setting concerning the life of Indian actors and immigration. It rollicks along at a very readable pace despite its massive size, and I am fortunate enough to have a signed copy of the first edition which I treasure and which I am now reading in a sort of quiet protest (I have changed my literary opinion on the novel over the years). For what it's worth, my preferred Rushdie novel is "The Moor's Last Sigh", which is thematically similar and features a great piece of cover art by original Ultravox front-man, John Foxx.
A personal memory of the novel dates back to around 1989 or so, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (who seemingly didn't like the fact the book mocks a fanatical religious leader) called for Rushdie's death, resulting in several failed assignations, riots, bombings, and killings. Disingenuously, the Iranian government has said that the fatwa remains as the only person who can rescind is the person who issued it (a bit hard, given that Ruhollah Khomeini is now dead). I was on the Guild Secretariat at the time, and I remember that PEN International made a request from the Guild to support Rushie on the basis of literary freedom. I thought this was an open-and-shut case, but it was not to be. The Liberal Party Guild President, Paul Stevenage, along with his conservative cohorts and, distributing, members of the overseas student council, voted down the motion among some utterly bizarre claims that the book was "racist" (I do recall my old friend and comrade, Dilum D., who was of a darker tone than everyone else in the room, pointing out that when raised in a racist society everyone is racist). The reality was that the book upset some religious sensitivities.
Ultimately, what the issue comes down to is that religious dogmatists are intellectually and spiritually weak people. So lacking in confidence of the strength of their faith, incapable of nuance and flexibility in interpretation, they declare those who stray from their pre-determined path as "apostates" (for what it's worth, I am an apostate) a "crime" that is subject to the death penalty in ten countries. The weakness comes from a loss of a sense of wonder of the universe in favour of adopting a fantastical confusion between the map and territory, and is always tied to shoring up political and economic elites who are easily able to manipulate those subjects to the "opium of the people". It's a curious combination that a more egalitarian political and economic system needs to be correlated with freedom of religious criticism; "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness". Most importantly, however, is the secular position (a sacred task for pantheists!) where state and religion are decoupled.
A personal memory of the novel dates back to around 1989 or so, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (who seemingly didn't like the fact the book mocks a fanatical religious leader) called for Rushdie's death, resulting in several failed assignations, riots, bombings, and killings. Disingenuously, the Iranian government has said that the fatwa remains as the only person who can rescind is the person who issued it (a bit hard, given that Ruhollah Khomeini is now dead). I was on the Guild Secretariat at the time, and I remember that PEN International made a request from the Guild to support Rushie on the basis of literary freedom. I thought this was an open-and-shut case, but it was not to be. The Liberal Party Guild President, Paul Stevenage, along with his conservative cohorts and, distributing, members of the overseas student council, voted down the motion among some utterly bizarre claims that the book was "racist" (I do recall my old friend and comrade, Dilum D., who was of a darker tone than everyone else in the room, pointing out that when raised in a racist society everyone is racist). The reality was that the book upset some religious sensitivities.
Ultimately, what the issue comes down to is that religious dogmatists are intellectually and spiritually weak people. So lacking in confidence of the strength of their faith, incapable of nuance and flexibility in interpretation, they declare those who stray from their pre-determined path as "apostates" (for what it's worth, I am an apostate) a "crime" that is subject to the death penalty in ten countries. The weakness comes from a loss of a sense of wonder of the universe in favour of adopting a fantastical confusion between the map and territory, and is always tied to shoring up political and economic elites who are easily able to manipulate those subjects to the "opium of the people". It's a curious combination that a more egalitarian political and economic system needs to be correlated with freedom of religious criticism; "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness". Most importantly, however, is the secular position (a sacred task for pantheists!) where state and religion are decoupled.
