Well over a year ago, I made a commitment to read a number of books: St. Augustine’s autobiography, The Art of War (Sun Tzu), Rules for Radicals (Saul Alinsky), The Prince (Machiavelli), Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), Mein Kampf (Hitler) and The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie). Four of those books – the first four – made for relatively quick reading. Atlas Shrugged was not quick, but held my attention and I invested in the characters. Mein Kampf was painful, both at the literary and the philosophical level. I felt stupider just for the reading of it. I was about ready to start reading The Satanic Verses, then I read some online critiques which indicated that an understanding of the Qur’an was a necessity if I wanted to understand the nuances of Rushdie’s book.
Being ignorant in Islam – well, at least ignorant about what was not conveyed by the left and the right in normal American media news outlets – I decided to take the plunge. I went online, researched what I needed to do, then purchased one of the better-critiqued English translations of the Qur’an. Then, I took a good portion of time to pore over it. At times, it was painful; at other times, enlightening. I learned a lot I had not known before, but had a good bit of my preconceived notions verified, especially about Islam’s thoughts on women (see Sura 4). I learned about the notions of abrogation and taqiyya. (If you don’t know what these are, I would strongly recommend going here and here to learn about taqiyya. Regarding abrogation, here is an interesting take from a Muslim, and then here is Robert Spencer’s take.)
This post is not specifically about the Qur’an, Mohammed, or the whole model of civic government and society set up in the Qur’an and the Sahih Hadith of Bukhari (which, at points, abrogates portions of the Qur’an), but I thought it was necessary to read the Qur’an and a good number of supporting documents as my initiation to The Satanic Verses.
Finally, after about six months of dealing with work, bands, business and family stuff, I finally had time to dive into The Satanic Verses. Okay, I really did not dive into it. I struggled through the first couple chapters, trying to work through what I disliked about Rushdie’s writing style and ultimately invest myself in the main characters. I learned to deal with the writing style – Rushdie says in 100 words what most authors would say in 50, and some would say in 20 – but never did truly invest myself in the characters. Over a shorter period of time than I originally expected, I was able to finish the book. I never ingratiated myself to Rushdie’s method of turning every action into a story of its own, or his post-modern, mostly “I can do without religion” worldview (he sounds like an over-educated contemporary American professor, in my opinion). My purpose for reading the book was not to agree or disagree with Rushdie’s thoughts on politics or religion, or to critique his writing style. It was to answer, to my own satisfaction, one question:
Why, because of this book, do Muslims want to kill Rushdie?
From my reading, it was obvious that Islam is not foreign to Rushdie. His descriptions of Islam society, his parallels of fictional events to the life of Mohammed, and implementation of particular facets of the Qur’an within the story, all show that this isn’t some lily-white, North American author trying to project their understanding of Islam into a post-modern story. The thing is, he treats Islam like practically every other religion. I say “practically every other” because, a week or so after I finished reading the book, I realized he did not invoke Christianity much at all. It was virtually immaterial to him. He left most of his sarcasm, satire and parody for Islam, although he did whack Hinduism and Judaism at times. My impression is that Rushdie is a guy who gets around, jet-setting and observing cultures as though that was his calling, then merely writing stories that reflect what he has observed.
I think that is where Rushdie got into problems with the Mullahs. His story-telling is very matter-of-fact. There is no embellishing of the good, and no whitewashing of the bad as it relates to Islam. The religion is not put in a good light; however, it is not put in a bad light, either. He merely uses a very odd and confusing story to pepper in his observances of Islam society, without regard of whether those observances put the best light on Islam or not. He shows the potential hypocrisy of rigidly religious Muslim males to engage in adultery without concern, and pokes fun The Prophet’s extended family through a story that had me cracking up and saying, “I can’t believe he wrote that”. In other words, he wrote a story that incorporated Islam about the way that I would like to see American writers write about Christianity: matter-of-fact, but from a point of knowledge and experience, not from one of bitterness and spite. The problem for strict Islams is that The Satanic Verses is not necessarily written for Muslims, but for a general audience. And, through his experiences, he brings to light aspects of life under Islam that the tightly wound, tightly controlling Mullahcracy would not like the rest of the world to see.
Ultimately, what I learned from reading this book is what I already knew or expected:
- Americans know very little about Islam, and are happy about their ignorance.
- Rushdie weaves very strange tales, and I don’t need to read any of his other books.
- It does not take very much to offend a fundamentalist Muslim.
Had a similar story been written about Christians – never mind, much worse has already been written – no Christian organization or leader would have been calling for Rushdie’s head.
