The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
Plot Summary
The Satanic Verses begins in spectacular fashion: Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood superstar, and Saladin Chamcha, a voiceover artist with an English accent and Anglophile sensibilities, fall from a hijacked airplane that explodes over the English Channel. Miraculously surviving, the two men are “reborn” in symbolic and surreal ways. Gibreel assumes angelic qualities and begins to experience visionary dreams; Saladin takes on the appearance of a devil, growing horns and hoofs. These transformations set the tone for a novel that straddles reality, mythology, and magical realism.
The novel proceeds to intertwine three central narrative threads:
- The Modern Storyline: This follows Gibreel and Saladin’s reintegration into society after their fall. Saladin faces racial prejudice and personal humiliation, including wrongful imprisonment and a Kafkaesque metamorphosis. Gibreel, meanwhile, suffers from mental instability and begins to lose touch with reality, eventually culminating in a descent into paranoia and violence.
- The Dream Visions: Gibreel experiences a series of dreams in which he takes on the role of the archangel Gibreel. These dreams serve as a meta-commentary on religious texts and are the most controversial parts of the novel. They include the story of Mahound (a fictionalized version of the Prophet Muhammad), who founds a new religion in the city of Jahilia, and a subplot about a peasant girl named Ayesha who leads villagers on a pilgrimage to Mecca, believing they will walk across the Arabian Sea.
- The Satirical Interludes: There are also digressions that parody and criticize fundamentalism, colonialism, celebrity culture, and identity politics. These serve to broaden the novel’s scope and reinforce its postmodern sensibility.
Together, these strands create a tapestry of transformation, exile, faith, and identity crisis.
Themes
1. Identity and Transformation
The protagonists’ physical and psychological metamorphoses mirror their inner struggles. Gibreel’s angelic delusions and Saladin’s devilish appearance highlight conflicts between faith, culture, and personal identity. This theme explores what it means to “become” someone else, willingly or otherwise, especially as immigrants in a post-colonial world.
2. Religion and Blasphemy
Rushdie delves into the power of religious belief and its role in shaping societies. The novel does not aim to blaspheme but to question the nature of revelation, the human aspects of religion, and the dangers of dogma. The infamous “satanic verses” episode, a disputed passage in early Islamic tradition, is used as a metaphor for the fallibility and humanity of religious leaders.
3. Exile and Displacement
The immigrant experience—caught between homeland and adopted country—is central. Saladin and Gibreel both deal with cultural dislocation, alienation, and the pain of assimilation or rejection. Rushdie, himself a product of colonial and diasporic realities, infuses this theme with authenticity and urgency.
4. Language and Power
Rushdie uses language as both weapon and shield. The novel plays with linguistic registers—Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, and English—highlighting how language constructs identity and exerts control over narrative, history, and personal experience.
Style and Structure
Rushdie’s style in The Satanic Verses is exuberant, lyrical, digressive, and unapologetically maximalist. The prose is dense, filled with allusions (religious, literary, pop-cultural), puns, and intertextual references. The structure is non-linear and episodic, with stories nested within stories—reminiscent of The Arabian Nights and other postmodern metafictions.
The narrative voice shifts between omniscient narrator and free indirect discourse, sometimes even addressing the reader directly. The blending of realism with fantastical elements—typical of magical realism—allows Rushdie to juxtapose myth and reality, faith and skepticism, in powerful ways.
The tone ranges from comic to tragic, from farcical to deadly serious, mirroring the novel’s thematic and structural complexity.
Historical and Literary Context
Published in 1988, The Satanic Verses quickly became one of the most controversial books in modern literature. The novel drew global attention when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa against Rushdie in 1989, calling for his execution due to perceived blasphemy against Islam. The fallout included riots, book burnings, and even violent attacks against those associated with its publication.
Beyond the controversy, The Satanic Verses must be seen within the context of postcolonial literature. Rushdie was already acclaimed for Midnight’s Children (1981), which explored India’s independence and its aftermath. The Satanic Verses continues his exploration of postcolonial identity but shifts the setting to Britain and engages directly with the immigrant experience in the West.
Literarily, it draws from a wide range of traditions: the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez, the modernist techniques of Joyce and Woolf, and the narrative playfulness of Italo Calvino and Milan Kundera. It is also deeply influenced by Islamic historiography and Indian oral storytelling traditions.
The Satanic Verses is a monumental work of literary fiction—ambitious, challenging, and richly layered. It defies easy categorization, combining political satire, religious commentary, magical realism, and postcolonial critique in a single, sprawling narrative. While the novel is notoriously difficult—both in language and subject—it rewards the patient reader with profound insights into the human condition, especially in times of cultural and spiritual upheaval.
Its legacy has been shaped as much by its artistic merit as by the international uproar it caused, making it a symbol of the ongoing debate over freedom of expression, religious sensitivity, and the place of literature in public discourse.
Rushdie’s boldness in confronting sacred narratives through fiction makes The Satanic Verses not only an essential literary text but also a vital cultural artifact—one that continues to provoke, inspire, and challenge readers decades after its publication.