There are certain books that are very famous, but almost completely unread. One of the most notorious is The Satanic Verses: the book that cost Salman Rushdie his freedom and an eye.
Most people have never read it and have no idea what it’s about, other than some vague idea about ‘upsetting Muslims’ (which is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel, and twice as deadly). I have read it: it’s engaging, erudite and, above all, a very funny book.
So, what is all the fuss about? What are these ‘satanic verses’? And why do Muslims get so murderous about them? (Well, more so than usual.)
Because they are not Rushdie’s invention. They are Islam’s own skeleton, rattling in the cupboard of its earliest biographies. Rushdie merely waved a torch at it. Ayatollah Khomeini’s response, read out on Radio Tehran on Valentine’s Day 1989, was the usual measured theological critique:
“I am informing all brave Moslems of the world that the author of The Satanic Verses… are condemned to death. I call on all valiant Moslems wherever they may be in the world to kill them without delay.”
Thirty-three years later, Hezbollah fanboy Hadi Matar took the invitation seriously and stabbed Rushdie 10 times on a stage in upstate New York. The fatwa has never been withdrawn. Iran still wants him dead. For a dream sequence in a novel. Based on the Koran itself.
The verses themselves sit in Sura 53, An-Najm, “The Star”. Before Islam, the Arabs of Mecca were cheerfully polytheistic. Allah was one god among many: his daughters were the goddesses al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat. When Muhammad began preaching his new, rather more exclusive product, he needed the locals onside. According to the earliest accepted biographers – Ibn Ishaq, al-Tabari, Ibn Sa’d, al-Waqidi – Gibreel (who was acting as a sort of divine stenographer) dictated this:
“Have you thought about al-Lat and al-Uzza and Manat the third, the other?”
Followed immediately by:
“These are the exalted females whose intercession is to be hoped for.”
Allah, in other words, briefly admitted he had daughters who were gods like him. The Quraysh were delighted. Then Gibreel stormed back and said, oops: that was Satan talking. Cross those lines out. Replace them with:
“Are men’s children to be boys and Allah’s to be girls? That is an unfair division!”
The final proof of monotheism, apparently, is that God is too sexist to have daughters.
The problem is obvious, even to a child. If the voice in Muhammad’s head could be Satan once, how did he ever know it wasn’t Satan the rest of the time? The entire revelation rests on one man’s ability to tell the archangel from the devil when both sound exactly the same. One clerical error and the whole edifice starts to look like a very long game of Chinese whispers with a desert trader who couldn’t read.
That is why those who insist – as per orthodox Islamic doctrine – that the Koran is the inerrant, literal speech of Allah (as transmitted by Gibreel) go berserk. If the Koran is the uncreated, infallible Word, there can be no ‘whoops, Satan got in for a second, there’. On the other hand, admit that the incident was real, and every subsequent verse becomes suspect: the ones about killing apostates, taking sex slaves, cutting off fingers, beheading unbelievers. Suddenly the book is not a perfect download from heaven but a seventh-century political document that needed a hasty rewrite when the focus-group results came back.
And that tended to happen a lot: read the Hadith and Sira, and it’s rather telling how often the followers pose a thorny question or notice a contradiction, and ol’ Mo’ nips off for a quick, secret convo in his tent with Gibreel, and emerges triumphant with a solution. Muhammad begins to look less like Allah’s messenger and more like Lucy Lawless in The Simpsons: “Well, whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it!”
Hidden in all this, though, is a potential, if controversial, solution to the Koranic death-grip (literally so) on the Islamic mind. Split the damned thing in two. Publish a “Koran of Allah” containing the bits compatible with not raping, enslaving and murdering the neighbours, and a “Koran of Shaytan” for the rest. Blame the devil for the butchery and leave Muhammad and his god off the hook. Moderate Muslims could keep the poetry and the charity and quietly bin the seventh-century primitivism.
It will never happen, of course. The people who issue fatwas do not do nuance. They do knives. Easier to stab a novelist than admit that the Prophet once couldn’t tell God from Satan.
That was Rushdie’s real crime: reminding them of what they’d rather pretend isn’t in their ‘infallible’ holy book.
