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The Satanic Verses 195
It is easy to see how Rushdie, undoubtedly taking fictional liberty,
turns this story—a cornerstone of Islamic belief—upside down to
vex authorities. Yet, the author is not questioning the belief itself, but
the structure of dogma and its tendency to arrest the thinking of true
believers, making them the pawns of pseudo-religious gurus. Rushdie
writes of his “glaring dissent” in The Satanic Verses:
What does the novel dissent from? Certainly not from the
people’s right to faith, though I have none. It dissents most
clearly from imposed orthodoxies of all types, from the view
that the world is quite clearly This and not That. It dissents
from the end of debate, of dispute, of dissent. (1991: 396)
It is obvious, then, that Rushdie does not glorify atheism just for
the sake of it, but targets the lack of critical understanding and
the narrow-minded acceptance of dogmas on different levels and
by different social groups. Thus, for example, the narrator in The
Satanic Verses lashes freely at another modern guru, Maggie the Bitch
(269), and the Thatcherite racist regime in the UK. The treatment of
immigrants in the eighties is just as hypocritical as the treatment of
believers: the discourse of “natural right” and “obligations,” combined
with a vocabulary harkening back to Enoch Powell’s nationalistic
speeches in the House of Commons in 1969 threatening the average
Englishman with “rivers of blood,” proves equally dogmatic even for a
writer like Rushdie who is accepted—not assimilated—by the former
imperial center. The author’s critique of capitalism is also embodied
in the character of Hal Valance, the advertising executive, an exploiter
who knows an opportunity when he sees one, with no discrimination
against geographical detail or cultural bias, because, after all, money is
a universal language.
As succinctly put by the author himself, a thoughtful reading
of The Satanic Verses makes any simplistic conclusion difficult, especially
one that charges Rushdie with being against Islam and human
belief:
[ . . . ] the opposition of imagination to reality, which is also of
course the opposition of art to politics—is of great importance,
because it reminds us that we are not helpless; that to dream