Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

The Satanic Verses and the Demonic Text 257“free West”), Mecca reincarnated as ‘Jahilia’ (ignorance), etc. – are not neutralmodifications. They all have distinctly pejorative traits. David Lawtonfollows Jonathan Dollimore as he writes that “organised religion encountersin a blaspheming rival ‘a proximity rooted in their differences’.” 27 Rushdie’stext displays openly its proximity to Islam, using it to stir discussion aboutthe different interpretations of “community.” The justification for stigmatisedterms is overtly political; furthermore, “whigs, tories, Blacks” are partof the Western (British and American) political past and the polyculturalpresent. They suggest a history of political debate and dialogue, as well as ofone governed by colonialism; the narrator also alludes to the struggle of minoritiesin the postcolonial situation. Name-calling has a different status inthis context; the horizon of immutable truths and sanctity is interlaced inthis brief section with the perspective of conflicting human interests, whichmakes all claims for one, holy and privileged view appear as dubious. Thereis subtle irony in the words the young immigrant girl, Mishal, speaks toSaladin Chamcha, who has metamorphosed into the shape of Satan: “I mean,people can really identify with you. It’s an image white society has rejectedfor so long that we can really take it, you know, occupy it, inhabit it, reclaimit and make it our own.” 28The opposition and mixing of the religious and the political points towardstwo ways of perceiving language and writing: static and dynamic.Whereas Koran denies all authority from “names you have dreamed of, youand your fathers,” the situation and characters as presented in The SatanicVerses cannot adopt any truths as preordained, or God-given. Other people’sbeliefs, the sphere of human invention, and therefore, of change – all theseare combined with the question of language. As we read from the stream-ofconsciousnessof Jumpy Joshi, a character with poetic aspirations: “The reallanguage problem: how to bend it shape it, how to let it be our freedom, how torepossess its poisoned wells, how to master the river of words of time of blood[…].” 29 The main characters of The Satanic Verses are living among many religions,between conflicting cultures and values. This heterogeneity isheightened by the fact that most of them are immigrants, people of Indianorigin in Britain. Any meanings cannot be taken as given, because the sharedlanguage, English, is not “their” language, originally. Every word of it is alienbecause of its Western heritage; it is steeped in the history of colonialism.Hami K. Bhabha has written aptly: “Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses attemptsto redefine the boundaries of the western nation, so that ‘foreignnessof languages’ becomes the inescapable cultural condition for the enunciationof the mother-tongue.” 30 This can be compared with Rushdie’s own formulation(as quoted above) that it is “the migrant condition” from which“could be derived a metaphor for all humanity.” Basically, The Satanic Verses27 Lawton 1993, 144-45; Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence (1991, 18).28SV, 287.29 SV, 281. Italics in the original.30Bhabha 1994, 166 (also 1990, 317; and quoted in Lawton 1993, 186).