Today is the 30th anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing the novel The Satanic Verses. In the run-up to this anniversary there has as usual been much discussion of the controversy, but very little about the novel itself. This is consistent with the pattern of the last three decades. Of the two Satanic Verses that exist – the controversy and the novel – people were always familiar with the former and deeply unclear about the latter. To this day very few people seem interested in what is between the covers of the book that stirred the Ayatollah's ire. A default presumption has been arrived at, which is that there was some misunderstanding about which the Ayatollah took advantage to make a religious and geo-strategic power grab. And while this contains a portion of the truth it still lies quite some distance from the truth itself.
The novel is a dense and multi-layered narrative stretching to around a quarter-of-a-million-words. For the general reader a failure to get through it is forgivable. There are significant portions of the work which anyone unfamiliar with Islamic history would find it hard to make sense of. Happily or otherwise, there are more readers familiar with that history in the West today than there were in 1989, and so perhaps with time the reputation of The Satanic Verses as a novel, rather than as a controversy, will grow. For anyone who gets the references the work is packed with deep humor and perception.
This starts from the novel's opening scene in which a plane is hijacked in the sky and the novel's main characters magically descend to earth. From there on the narrative is laced with dream-sequences about the early days of Islam, and both these historical sections and the contemporary ones abound in references to Mohammed, his wives and the origins of the religion. In one of the least remarked-upon aspects of the novel, there is even a section in which Rushdie writes of the man who would attempt to end his life.
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