Object of Rage

...Rushdie's premise for the novel is a fantastic one, and at least superficially it places him squarely in the tradition of Giinter Grass and Gabriel Garcia Mar-quez...

...As the gang's leader hurls obscenities at the two men, Gibreel "was wearing an expression that said, loud and clear: so this is what the British, that great nation of conquerors, have become in the end...

...As the stuttering film producer character, Sisodia, puts it, what the English really like are "cow corpses in bubloodbaths, mad barbers, etc...

...Both allegations, neither of which is true, occur in one chapter, "Return to Jahilia," one of two dream sequences in the book in which a modern-day Indian actor named Gibreel Farishta dreams he is the archangel Gabriel in the days of the birth of a religion named Submission (the English translation of Islam...

...Otherwise, those who read The Satanic Verses may miss the frightening resonance of one of the novel's most recurrent themes: "To be born again, first you must die...

...The Prime Minister's goal is simple: "literally to invent a whole goddamn new middle class in this country...

...Unharmed but not unaltered...

...the scribe he chooses to dictate the holy word to is a man named Salman...

...As the book opens, Farishta and Chamcha are plummeting earthward from 30,000 feet—singing the entire way...

...More important, like the townspeople flimflammed by the Duke and the Dauphin in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, people who acAndrew Welsh-Huggins is a free-lance writer in Providence, Rhode Island...

...Understanding this rage, which is as political as it is religious, may be the most important issue of all, even beyond that of free speech...

...The official explanation for the death in prison of Dr...

...by Andrew Welsh-Huggins Fantasy can be stronger than fact," says a minor character early in Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, and in the wake of the bizarre international uproar over the book it's hard to disagree...

...that Rushdie, whose novel contains several scathing attacks on the British treatment of Asian immigrants, is now in hiding, protected by the very same police he previously excoriated...

...Soon after an Englishwoman takes them into her home, Gibreel is transformed: "And around the edges of Gibreel Farishta's head, as he stood with his back to the dawn, it seemed to Rosa Diamond that she discerned a faint, but distinctly golden, glow Meanwhile, out of Chamcha's temples, "growing longer by the moment, and sharp enough to draw blood, were two new, goaty, unarguable horns...

...If Mahound recited a verse in which God was described as all-hearing, all-knowing, I would write, all-knowing, all-wise...

...Because the focus of the controversy has been on the book's allegedly blasphemous passages, anathema to the Muslim world, Rushdie's true intent, to wipe out the old images of England in favor of post-colonial realities, is completely overshadowed...

...Two Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are returning to London from India when their plane is hijacked and later blown up over the English channel...

...These are the hard passages—real-seeming dreams draped in allegory—and especially difficult for Western readers not familiar with the history of Islam...

...tually saw the movie were impressed not so much by its controversial approach to the subject as its lack of cinematic interest...

...He flees, fearing for his life, knowing that the prophet's "power has grown too great for me to unmake him now...

...They will find it to be a complicated work of art which, though it may not deserve the consideration which a bounty on the author's life has afforded it, is nevertheless a fine addition to what the author himself has termed the "psychological realist" style...

...What has enraged members of the Muslim world are passages in the novel which they say portray Mohammed as having written the Koran instead of merely dietating God's word, and in which the prophet's twelve wives are depicted as prostitutes...

...Those pundits who feel the novel's true intent has been ignored would do well to recall last summer's controversy over Martin Scorsese's film The Last Temptation of Christ...

...Uhuru Simba, a black activist arrested for a series of Jack the Ripper-style murders, leads people to wonder whether "a nightmare was by no means the only possible explanation for the screams of a black man in the hands of the custodial authorities...

...In Rushdie's book Mahound—like Mohammed—is a businessman turned prophet...

...That the real-life Salman has now been forced to flee an equally powerful prophet is an irony that should not be lost on anyone...

...In short, many found it dull...

...For the author, an English citizen born in Bombay, England is no longer "warm beer, mince pies, common-sense" (if it ever was...

...Just as Rushdie's 1983 novel Shame was set in a country that is "not Pakistan, or not quite," however, the religion which Gibreel dreams into "existence" is not literally Islam...

...some sort of bum from Persia...

...Short of settling for a constricting label—"neo-colonial epic"?— it's difficult to tell what Rushdie hopes to accomplish in leading us through a thicket of verbiage at times hilarious, at times moving, at times downright confusing...

...One day, suspicious of the truly divine nature of Mahound's revelations, Salman "decided to test him...

...People who take time to read Rushdie's novel will not find it dull, but they may find it confusing, recondite, and at times excessive...

...Minor leads to major: soon Salman is substituting Jew for Christian, then composing entire lines on his own...

...Scathing stuff—but enough to vault Rushdie from "mere" literary fame to several days running on NBC News...

...Yet as the Ayatollah Khomeini's execution order made headlines around the world and publishers and writers debate the issue of free speech, no one bothered to say much about the biggest irony of all...

...It works...

...The book's title refers to passages dictated to Mohammed by the Devil which the prophet later repudiated...

...The Western world's continued suspicion toward Moslems, coupled with a shameful lack of knowledge about their religion and culture, has only increased the rage of zealots who believe they still have excellent reasons to regard America as the Great Satan...

...Their pay papers full of kinky sex and death...

...Eventually, Salman realizes the prophet is on to him...

...The sheer opaqueness of such scenes makes it obvious that Rushdie is offering an alternative, skeptical version of the founding of Islam, a view meant not so much to injure as to question, though this is probably small comfort to the Ayatollah...

...The Ayatollah Khomeini, unnerved by the end of the war in the Persian Gulf and the prospect of freer relations with the West, found in The Satanic Verses an opportunity to revive, if only briefly, the flames of his Islamic revolution...

...What was clear in the days following the first riots over the book is that ultimately it's power, not blasphemy, that's at stake...

...Here's the point: Mahound did not notice the alterations...

...The mistaken belief that Mohammed's wives are portrayed as prostitutes is another example of skepticism, not blasphemy: In actuality, twelve prostitutes in a brothel decide to take on the names and demeanors of the prophet's twelve wives in order to boost business...

...people who really want, and who know that with her, they can bloody well get" In London, Gibreel and Chamcha are taunted by a white gang...

...Oscar Wilde said it was life that imitated art, and not the other way around: One wonders what that Englishman, condemned for his sexual opinions, would have to say about this latter-day compatriot, condemned for a set of artistic opinions which prefigured reality much more closely than anyone could have predicted...

...Through it all, however, Rushdie reserves his sharpest barbs not for Islam but for Margaret Thatcher's England...

...The capture of the real murderer by a group of Sikh youths sparks a fierce riot not unlike those waged in protest against Rushdie's book...

...Over several weeks, Scorsese's critics proved conclusively—at least to themselves—that familiarity with a disputed work of art is not necessarily a requirement for opposing it...

...The riots, book burnings, and death threats which Rushdie's novel has incited resemble certain events in the novel itself...

...Unfortunately, the rest of the book—in many ways written in defense of expatriated Asians, Moslems among them—goes largely unnoticed...

...The Satanic Verses lacks the seamless weave of such books as Garcia Mar-quez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, and its multitude of characters, settings, and language shifts, all of which evoke some kind of strange Dickens-Warhol hybrid, is hard going in spots...

...Not really...

...They land, apparently unharmed, on an English beach...

...The name of Submission's prophet, "Mahound," is actually a term for the Devil...

...Like a single flash of genitals in an otherwise chaste film, however, these brief passages are the ones causing so much trouble...