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

The Satanic Verses and the Demonic Text 283provide such an opposition. Both are places where women are sequestered,in the harem to keep them from all men except their husband and closefamily members, in the brothel for the use of strange males. Harem andbrothel are antithetical worlds, and the presence in the harem of theProphet, the receiver of the sacred text, is likewise contrasted with thepresence in the brothel of the clapped-out poet, Baal, the creator of profanetexts. The two struggling worlds, pure and impure, chaste and coarse,are juxtaposed by making them echoes of one another; and, finally, thepure eradicates the impure. Whores and writer (‘I see no difference here,’remarks Mahound) are executed. Whether one finds this a happy or sadconclusion depends on one’s point of view. 108The execution of Baal in the end hardly qualifies to make The SatanicVerses a pious narrative; if the pure and impure world are juxtaposed, it increasesthe reader’s awareness of the power structures that sustain the limitbetween them – the boundary that confines women in their separate domain,away from civic activities. Such parallelism also acts as an analogy, andencourages us to read the institution of the harem ‘through’ the brothel. Theintertextual and discursive heterogeneity adds its own aspects to the “blasphemouspoetics” of The Satanic Verses; as the material from the Koran iscombined with narrative techniques familiar from “magical realism” or“postmodern novels,” the Scripture is subjected to the rules of fiction, andinversely, fiction addresses the ideas of the sacred and of the religious experience.Political history is another “text” The Satanic Verses weaves into itsfabric; Ayatollah Khomeini, the Islamic revolution and multi-racial or multiculturalrelations are consumed among the “multitudes” that inhabit thispolyphonic novel. The encounter between different elements, however, isnot balanced and harmonious. Religious and political authority is not recognised;the sanctity of the Koran is violated with the Satanic Verses episode;the basis of the Islamic way of life (in imitation of the Prophet) is discreditedby the brothel sequence. The demonic features in the text seize thepower structures by disintegrating their symbols. This is not only true inconnection with religious power; the power structures of British society areattacked, as well, in the Detention Centre episode. The extreme violence andthe Satanic conspiracy that blemish the descriptions of the British police inthe novel display the demonising technique operating in a political context.109 The author-narrator’s likes and dislikes guide the production of realityinside this fiction; at the same time, fantastic and demonic characteristicsask the reader to be aware how subjective such a perception of reality is,how deeply our “truths” are rooted in our subconscious fears and desires.The blasphemous textuality of The Satanic Verses records how demonic im-108 Ibid., 401.109The police – the traditional enemy of radicalism – are accused by the narrator ofwitchcraft, and he even implies that they assassinated Jumpy Joshi and Pamela Chamcha,“both parties [...] well known for their radical views” (SV, 465).