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The Veil of Belonging: Rushdie as Spokesperson for Islam
Silence the subaltern by talking too much. Describe, account, print.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Acting Bits/Identity Talk”
Though Salman Rushdie has twice won the Booker Prize for his Midnight’s Children
(1980), 1 the majority of the world knows him for the infamous fatwa 2 he incurred over his
novel, The Satanic Verses (1988). The latter novel’s title refers to an unauthenticated legend
that the Prophet Muhammad recited false verses legitimating the Meccans’ polytheistic
worship of idols, which he later recanted as the work of Satan. The Satanic Verses as a
whole treats Islam irreverently and, in certain key chapters, not only satirizes the Muslim
belief in Muhammad’s divine inspiration, but also openly insults the Prophet, referring to
him as “Mahound” (an epithet many of the Meccans used to slur the Prophet during his
time). On February 14, 1989, just a few months after The Satanic Verses was published,
Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims worldwide to execute, not only Rushdie, but
all those involved in the publication of the novel. In the years that followed, Muslim
extremists wounded or killed several of the novel’s translators, and a number of people died
in anti-Rushdie riots. 3
The violence and uproar over the novel as a result of the Muslim
world’s response to its publication led to Rushdie’s public image as the martyr of secularism.
Rushdie reinforces this image of himself in the media, playing on the public’s
recognition of his name in connection with Islam and Postcolonialism, so that he represents
the spokesperson on the “Third-World” to a Western audience that eagerly accepts the
Orientalist sentiments promoted by what they consider a “legitimate” source. The elitist
manner in which Salman Rushdie constructs his public identity only further marginalizes the
Third-World “other,” thereby undermining the author’s professedly cosmopolitan principles.