The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses Review

The Satanic Verses opens with one of the most extraordinary first sentences in contemporary fiction: two men, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, falling from the sky over the English Channel after the explosion of a hijacked Boeing 747 called Bostan. They survive, singing, tumbling, arguing. They are impossible. And from that opening impossibility, Salman Rushdie constructs a novel that is as wide as the history of faith and as specific as the experience of being an Indian immigrant in Thatcher’s Britain.

Gibreel, a Bollywood superstar who has recovered from a near-fatal illness believing God is dead, begins to dream. His dreams are the novel’s most incendiary material: he becomes the Archangel Gabriel to a prophet named Mahound, who is building a new religion called Submission in a city called Jahilia. These sequences are Rushdie’s direct engagement with the origins of Islam — fictional, satirical, and obviously intended as such — and they are what triggered the fatwa. They are also, read on their own terms, extraordinary: visionary narrative in the mode of Blake or Dante, not mockery but inquiry.

Saladin, who has spent his life erasing his Indianness in favor of a precisely cultivated English identity — voice coach, theatrical background, the whole apparatus of self-reinvention — becomes literally demonic during his transformation. He grows hooves, horns, and a monstrous body. The British police, encountering him after the crash, treat this not as a miraculous event but as confirmation of what they already believe: he is foreign, threatening, other. The supernatural transformation is Rushdie’s most precise image of how racism works — the Other is made monstrous by the gaze of the majority, and eventually begins to believe in the monstrousness himself.

Reading The Satanic Verses in the shadow of the fatwa — which is the only way it can now be read — requires a conscious effort to see the novel rather than its circumstances. It is a demanding but ultimately generous work, full of Rushdie’s characteristic linguistic excess, his love of Bombay and London, his deep engagement with the history of faith as a human rather than divine creation. The political circumstances surrounding it are part of its meaning but not all of it. It is the work of a novelist at the height of his powers, asking the questions that fiction is uniquely positioned to ask about the sacred, the profane, and the impossible.

The Fatwa and Its Consequences

The fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on February 14, 1989 — Valentine’s Day — calling for Rushdie’s death and offering a financial reward to anyone who killed him, was unprecedented in the history of literary censorship. Rushdie was immediately taken into police protection by the British government and spent the next nine years in hiding, moving between safe houses, living under the name Joseph Anton (taken from the first names of Conrad and Chekhov), and conducting a clandestine existence that he described in his 2012 memoir Joseph Anton.

The consequences extended beyond Rushdie himself. His Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi, was stabbed to death in July 1991. His Italian translator, Ettore Capriolo, survived a knife attack the same month. His Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, survived being shot three times in 1993. Bookshops were bombed. Dozens of people were killed in protests around the world. The fatwa was not formally rescinded by Iran until 1998, and the bounty was periodically increased by hardline Iranian organisations even after that.

The Novel Itself

It is worth insisting, in the context of all this, that The Satanic Verses is a novel — one of the most formally ambitious in contemporary English fiction — and not a political act or a theological statement. Rushdie has always maintained that the dream sequences involving the founding of Islam were clearly framed as the delusions of a sick man, not as historical claims. The controversy, which began with organised protest in Muslim communities before the fatwa, was driven almost entirely by people who had not read the book.

Reading it as a novel — which it rewards — reveals a work of genuine complexity: about the experience of migration, about the construction and dissolution of identity, about faith and doubt, about Bombay and London. Gibreel and Saladin are among Rushdie’s most fully realised characters, and their diverging transformations — one toward the angelic, one toward the demonic — trace the full range of what it means to arrive in a country that has decided what you are before you speak.

The 2022 Stabbing

On August 12, 2022, Rushdie was attacked on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York by a man who stabbed him repeatedly before being subdued by members of the audience. Rushdie survived, but lost the sight in his right eye and sustained serious damage to his liver and right hand. The attack came thirty-three years after the fatwa and demonstrated that the threat had never fully lifted. He published his memoir of the attack, Knife, in 2024.

Migration and Metamorphosis

For all the controversy that followed the 1989 fatwa, The Satanic Verses (1988) is at root a novel about migration and transformation. Two Indian actors, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, fall from an exploded jumbo jet over the English Channel and survive, one sprouting a halo and the other goat’s horns — angel and devil reassigned to émigrés remaking themselves in a hostile London. The dream-sequences that reimagine the early history of a desert religion drew the wrath that overshadowed everything else, but the book’s enduring subject is the immigrant’s double consciousness: the self that is shed and the self that is grown in its place. It won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel the year it appeared.