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

282Demonic Texts and Textual Demonsness of being wholly known to a person one does not trust?” 103 One is remindedof Mahound’s words: “Your blasphemy, Salman, can’t be forgiven.”Only from the position of the intimate knowledge of Islam could SalmanRushdie have written so striking a rendition of a heartfelt discursive collision,a confrontation between the highest value of the secular, Western tradition(individual freedom and the value of free speech), and the Islamic(the life of the Prophet as a ‘beautiful exemplar’ for the believer aspiring toperfection 104 ). Shabbir Akhtar, in his exposition of the Muslim view on TheSatanic Verses, states that “Rushdie writes with all the knowledge of an insider,”and that the events and characters in the novel “bear so striking a resemblanceto actual events and characters in Islamic history that one hasgrounds to doubt its status as merely fictional.” 105 In this light, the sequencethat describes Baal the poet naming the twelve whores after the Prophet’swives, and living a life of carnivalesque reversal in the brothel, Jihab (‘veil’;the Islamic symbol for female chastity), acquires its full blasphemous power.Harold Bloom has argued in his study, The Anxiety of Influence, that literatureis created in demonic tension, among agonising conflicts; the writingsubject is always torn between the desire to express himself freely and thosepreconditions that the poetic predecessors pose as starting points. Bloom’stheory is openly masculinist, a sort of heroic reading of Freud’s ideas concerningthe relationship between father and son: “The stronger the man, thelarger his resentments, and the more brazen his clinamen [poetic misreadingof his predecessors].” 106 In an analogous tone, Rushdie states that “Thegreatest human beings must struggle against themselves as well as the world.I never doubted Muhammad’s greatness [...].” 107 The Satanic Verses is concernedwith the problems of the male psyche, and the conflicts in the relationshipbetween the two men, Baal and Mahound, can be seen as a metafictionalcommentary on the intertextual relationship between Rushdie’s textand the Islamic tradition. Rushdie himself has given interesting reasons forthe brothel episode:[T]hroughout the novel, I sought images that crystallized the oppositionbetween the sacred and the profane worlds. The harem and the brothel103 SV, 426-27.104 In Arabic, uswatan hasanah; Koran 33:21; see Akhtar 1989, 3. – Joel Kuortti has arguedin his study that the ‘Rushdie Affair’ points out how “sacred” reveals those categoriesthat are essential in constructing identity, in the West as well as in Islamic communities.The value attached to literature in the West has structural similarity to that of thestatus of Qur’an and the Prophet in the Islam – it is a privileged arena that should be “exemptedfrom any contamination.” He concludes, that an analysis of the “Satanic Versesaffair can help us reveal the place of the sacred in others’ and our own lives, the agencythrough which we shape our identities, the dreams we live by.” (Kuortti 1997b, 161. Cf.also the discussion on the complex roles of fictionality in Rushdie’s works in Kuortti1998.)105Akhtar 1989, 4-6.106 Bloom 1973/1975, 43.107“In Good Faith”; Rushdie 1992, 409.