Salman Rushdie in the Age of Reason

Julian Samuel

(This commentary was part of a debate on Rushdie at Ramjas College, University of Delhi, in January 1989, and at Giessen University, Germany, in June of the same year. It was subsequently published in "US/THEM, Transition, Transcription and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures," Edited by Gordon Collier, Amsterdam - Atlanta, GA 1992)

ONE CAN ALWAYS   overlook the political context of a book's emergence into the world, but for a meaningful look at the richness of Salman Rushdie's work it would be unwise.

There is a hidden agenda at work; there always is. With The Satanic Verses in particular, we must look at the surrounding constructions of British pluralism-who it includes and who it rejects.

There are other writers (mentioned below) in the post-colonial world who have not come under the same light-not because they are any less good than Rushdie, but because their politics and mode of addressing issues have set them apart, perhaps excluded them, from the kind movements of stylistic beauty that Rushdie has skillfully exploited in his rise into the Fabian soft folds of British literary society. Historical empires which claim to operate within democratic tenets must prove their sense of pluralism, their healthy tolerance of the Other's sense of political imperatives (the balances and imbalances needed ostensibly to compensate for British rule in India?).

The case of Rushdie is one of inclusion; the process starts with a certain collusion of classes. I am suspicious of class-bias arguments against Rushdie; however, with Rushdie's recent work (I shall except Haroon and the Sea of Stories, whose wonderful flight into fancy is a compensatory withdrawal into the classless imagination) the following argument holds water. He is from middle-class India, and his joining the educated ranks of the West at Cambridge is more a bringing together of taste and class than the development of a contestatory literature. I realize that any attempt to connect his Satanic Verses with his class background (i.e. as an expression of its failure) can be read as a feeble gesture; but it is more often true than not that writers from his class have, as their central focus, their own career in view. At times, this careerist motivation is clothed in the garb of activism, just as it is expressed in pluralism. Yet their literature is not about the larger sphere of activism. There are, of course, exceptions to this essentially weak rule -- but Rushdie is not one of them.

What we have in The Satanic Verses is an author who intimates the barest critique of liberalism, staying as near to conservatism as possible without straying too far into the realm of advocating theoretical or actual neo-Fabian violence. It is a kind of refined and erudite compromise constructed for the soft folds of a safe and international literary aristocracy which sees at least one of its aims as the production of a literature heavy, dank and resonant with slickly

manipulated surrealism, but with a great deal of it anchored in perfunctory, riskless experimentation. Tragic.

So, here we have the context of the publishing industry's attempt to publicize a particular book. Publishers and authors will use many means to get a book into the public mind. The issue of censorship is not a new method for conferring undeserved credibility upon an otherwise uncontestatory series of decorative ideas. In the West, any degree of censorship helps to establish writers, both unimportant and important; and, of course, this sells books.

If one suspends comment on the dazzling structural and Islamic formalities of The Satanic Verses, observing instead the mechanisms of another process outside the immediate functioning of the novel itself, one may come to see how Rushdie has arrived where he is.

Censorship and Islam. The issue of a simple-minded parody of Islam, with its narratively wearying associational links, is hardly worth the effort of Indian (for that matter, any) censorship-unless, of course, one was prepared for the large amount of publicity which the issue was about to generate in the first place; though it is hard to judge whether Rushdie did anticipate the literarily deconstructive tones sounding from Teheran. It has been established that drafts of the "injurious" chapter were sent to Indian magazines to foster a coordinated Islamic response.

The book is boring because the attempt to create diegetic density is fey and, often worse, unexperimental. Its echoes of-well, anything from Joyce to Faulkner and (I am told Rushdie does not like the comparison) to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magical realism are expropriative rather than transmutative, right down to Garcia Marquez's own serious embedding of thorns in the flanks of governments. The Indian government suppressed this "revolutionary" text because it censors most opposition anyway. Rushdie's book does not represent any moral high ground. And it was made accessible in India through pirating channels. So much for the prestige of a novel that so strongly questions religion that it needs to be hushed by state censorship. It ought to be no surprise that Rushdie's mild, ineffectual and paradoxical reinterpretation of Mohammed's life at Mecca and Medina has fast become a source of irritation to a country which Rushdie left when he was a child. One doesn't have to be a heavyweight to reap censorship from unprogressive Muslims. They, like their Christian counterparts in the West and the Middle East (Lebanon, for example), will try to control any opposition, however slight, however progressive, however questioning of religion.

Here is what Mr S. Shahabuddin, President of the All-India Muslim Majlis Mushvarat, told me about the book (I am told he has made these remarks often):

The book is blasphemous, injurious and makes indecent remarks about the Prophet's wife that violate the Indian penal code, which prohibits any writing which may hurt the religious sentiments of the people, and that are in bad taste. If the importers of the book want to contest the ban, they have the democratic right to do so. [interview, New Delhi, 18 January, 1989]

Mahmood Ahmed Mirpuri, secretary of the Islamic Sharia Council in Britain, said that the book was "a blatant insult to Islam" (New Statesman, 15 October, 1988). Obviously, the Muslim reaction to the book is an orthodox, reactionary one. Rushdie's manipulative brilliance did not motivate much else. The fundamentalist government of Iran used the book to deflect criticism from itself; with the end of the Iraq-Iran war, the potential for internal dissent and a second revolution must have been an awful strain on this grey clerical regime. Hence the more than incidental political value to the ayatollahs of their renewal of the universal death-sentence on Rushdie.

The remarks that the international media have projected (and I am thinking especially of the state-run CBC in Canada) are stereotypically and informationally dead-ended; few Third World intellectuals have been interviewed. The Muslim world is deeply sensitive to the plot of international racism mounted against it (in the case of Palestine, Iran, etc.), and to anything that attacks it, from American and Israeli F-1 8s to the various other Arab regimes themselves. The kind of attack sustained by a trendy, cultured Indian-British writer will be taken as an attack not only on the hermeneutic intricacies of Islam, but also on the code of living which has historically always been manipulated by the West for the latter's benefit. Edward Said, in Covering Islam, has exposed this structuration of Western bias against Islam as it is shaped in our print and electronic media.

Rushdie could have gone on and on about how the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is in fact an historical reaction to imperialism -- how, in fact, the hundreds of years of occidental colonialism and imperialism have smashed the social fabric of Muslim life to the extent that the social critique of religion as an instrument of social control is beyond the pale in most Islamic societies and the institutions of higher learning within it. Hence the current reaction.

It is a moral good to parody religion in all its evil forms; but to choose such an already wounded target for the delectation of Western civilization at large is certainly too easy and too aesthetically simple-minded a way to attempt irony. The irony, of course, is that The Satanic Verses is a pretty ordinary book by an occasionally stimulating writer who has become better known through his homing in on soft targets. (It is obvious that Rushdie's predictive sense could have helped him fabricate a more effective way of injecting the Muslim world with questions on this religion's current transformations.) His use of Islam is surely not so devastating a literary deed when one recalls that, just a few years ago, jets zoomed into Tripoli and Benghazi under the guise of demolishing Arab (Islamic) terrorists; not so devastating a deed in the light of Israel's assistance to Lebanese forces (who are seen as Islamic, therefore Arabs, therefore terrorists) in perpetrating the massacre of Palestinians at Chatila and Sabra. The task of making the world laugh at religion is a good one; but when it is performed with facileness rather than facility-with so much of the general irony depending on the media-code of prefabricated Western opinion-then the whole project founders in its own shallows.

This is not the place to survey the book's progress in India or elsewhere; enough to say that, in India, the book has generally had a very tongue-in-cheek reception. Intellectuals of both Islamic and non-Islamic persuasion have come out to condemn and laugh at Rushdie's Islamic pre-calculation. Saeed Naqvi has said: "The most annoying thing about the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses is that it makes Indian Muslims out to be a bunch of humourless touch-me-nots, intolerant of elegant verse or an irreverent idea"; and: "describe the Battle of Boyne as a piece of fiction. The Orange Order will take your pants off and give you three hundred not lashes, but John Lobbs on your bare bottoms. Try producing The Merchant of Venice in Jerusalem or even on Broadway and the publishers of The Satanic Verses will break the contract" (Illustrated Weekly of India, 6 November, 1988).

In several of his short stories, the late Pakistani novelist Saadat Hassan Manto shatters reactionary aspects of Islamic thought and application. And, I might add, at far greater personal risk than Rushdie; Manto wrote his fiery exposés during the holocaustic Partition-period when British India was bifurcated into the Western and Eastern wings. Rushdie is writing within fortress London. Aldous Huxley, for one, made a greater and more imaginative indictment of the Church and its paraphernalia in The Devils of Loudun, where his irony, directed at the whole epoch of Cardinal Richelieu, is finer and more contestatory. The list of better and more combative writers on religion could be extended indefinitely.

The Islam bit is just an attempt to get the trivial narrative mess on the world map: to maintain Rushdie's reputation, in the wake of Midnight's Children, as a writer of substantive importance. The tactic does not work; the approach is diaphanous, moribund. However, Rushdie is momentarily triumphing on the arc of imperial culture. British society (and American, and German . . .) has to demonstrate its admirable pluralism, and Indian society must show its petty intolerance by protecting its Muslims from the cruel barbs of The Satanic Verses. For the Empire, the task of accepting and containing the polite pinpricks of Rushdie is no problem (Booker Prize to boot), especially when it is embedded in so erudite and inconsequential an attack on imperial discourse. Besides, what has the book produced to date in terms of bringing about any creative debate on Islam or post-colonial fiction? All one hears of is angry Muslims burning the book without having read it. And this is Rushdie's fault. We ought not to forget that he is a trained orientalist (Cambridge). With his expertise, perhaps a more lasting, more heretical debate could have been projected on the Muslim world. He might well have known what the reaction would have been. Increased sales?

Rushdie's novel seems to be innovative. It is not. The Satanic Verses is perfunctorily a complex work from which the hard world of experimentation and the testing of ethical, ideological or philosophical narratives is absent. There is the urge to impress the reader with swirly, protracted arabesques, but to little end. Even on its own terms, the book is lame, inconsequential; dramaturgically, it produces nothing memorable. The discursive ruptures in the narrative flow are too often there for their own sake; it is for the softness of his attack on structures in general that Rushdie is so readily accepted. Rushdie gives British pluralism what it wants-what other reason for placing him on the Nelson's Column of post-colonial literature? This is the world of cheque-book fiction. More effective non-dreamers like Tariq Mehmood (Hand on the Sun) and, in France, Mehedi Cahref (Le Thé au harem d'Archi Ahmed) produce characters who loom large in the mind after the pages have stopped turning. There are consequences from knowing them.

In The Satanic Verses, one has to rest content with characters who are dropped in and plucked back out again without any challengingly blasphemous integration or disintegration. One cannot take as a serious challenge an orthodox Muslim community's reaction to the book on any level except that of a media event. It would take another kind of adaptation of the Koran to tease out a response in terms of intrinsic questions of consequence-questions that might make Islamic Ulema look hard at itself. For example, the WAF (Women's Action Forum) continually used the Koran to mirror back and fight off General Zia ul-Haq's very special understanding of religion.

In January of 1987 Rushdie attacked London's Black Audio Film Collective for their experimental film on the Handsworth riots. As expressed in the Guardian, Rushdie's objection was basically that Handsworth Songs presented the problem in and around the riots; that it was not really up to par aesthetically and experimentally; and that the film was not innovative on a number of levels. According to Rushdie, it failed to commingle histories of oppressed Blacks in the UK with other stories. More importantly, he also claimed that the film was okayed by the critics because it was a "Black" production, and thought that British journalists had gone soft in the head when it came to Black concerns. It would be truer to say that Handsworth Songs succeeds in bringing together theories of representation, archival mediation, and the power of counter-history; and does so without any self-flagellation. It would be a more apposite exercise to transfer Rushdie's criticisms of Handsworth Songs to his own Satanic Verses.

On the subject of Black people and their struggle for justice in Britain, Rushdie, it would be fair to say, has a Naipaulesque attitude-all the more dishonest because it is masked in a finer style than Naipaul's, whose observations more readily betray his unnecessarily brahminical attitude of superiority. What, then, does Rushdie think of popular Black political movements and their quest for change in racist Britain? The facts speak for themselves: he continually mocks and derides disadvantaged Black resistance movements in the UK (not everyone can be as prosperous as Rushdie-from Bombay to Cambridge, Booker Prize winner, but this, like the Indian government's prestige-generating ban on the book, must not be held against him; I make this observation merely to indicate class collusion and the self-

interest of the publishing world). Blacks are subjected to Rushdie's scorn and, possibly, his condescension. Notice the Naipaul in Rushdie:

Now-mi-feel-indignation-when-dem-talk-immigration-when-make-insinuation-how-we-no-part-a-nation-an-make-proclamation-a-de-true-situation-how-we-make-contribution-since-de-Rome-0ccupation. [p. 292]

Or: "The symbol of the Goatman, his fist raised in might, began to crop up on banners at demonstrations, Save the Six, Free the Four, Eat the Heinz fifty-seven" (286). There is here the cheapness of observation that perhaps only a rich immigrant might make who has been accepted into the role of major world writer. Rushdie tries to enter the thick of Black oppositional debate, but from far too lofty a perspective. His class origins save him; but his rigid adherence to the way his class has always talked about the poor and their struggle is not very different from the cold detachment of a Punjabi landlord in Sind. The condescension could have been more entertaining, more powerful, had it actually pushed ideas in the form of a confrontational expose' of grass-roots politics and activism. But all we get is the ability of a narrative structure to mimic experimentation, a dull exercise in montage posing as an aesthetic of newness.

This above-the-other-immigrants attitude towards the orthodox and Black-British Left applies only so much reason and tactical ingenuity as one could expect from an immigrant who has absorbed the mannerisms of Cantabridgian superciliousness and added them to his upper-caste world-view. Rushdie's is indeed the highest fiction in the land. The risks have not paid off, though; what one gets is a histrionic, often super-associational narrative (complete with Marquezian butterflies-cf. p. 492), for whose characters we are not encouraged to care much. We are asked to put up with it all in the name of a thought-provoking post-colonial literature, and with the pre-orchestrated extra incentive of a reputation ennobled through censorship. Joyce's Ulysses may have had greater difficulty getting published, but the writing is worth it; with Joyce, there's also a lasting suspicion of religion that is persuasively mediated. Rushdie exposes racism and its systemic violence politely. He pokes fun entertainingly at the fawning attitude of some Muslims to authority. But no more than that. When one has exposed racism and the reactionary aspects of Islam (of Judaism and Christianity, for that matter), it is not worth doing it again in book after book. One must tell other stories-as Rushdie himself says of the Black Audio group. However, if the project includes the dull tales of an innovative novelist, then I would prefer that risks had been taken that involved rearticulating the dream of a world in which literature can do its bit to effect change.

There are moments of beauty in the book-the beauty of its internal collusions; desultory, early postmodernist contortions and subversions. Yet the polished magnificence of Rushdie's mirroring, associative innovations is dashed into inconsequence by having nothing inside, behind or around it. The transitional sections are merely little bits of literary biology suspended in the thin, smoggy air of British pluralism. The book is empty. The precalculated anti-Islamic propaganda is a sales-pitch, nothing more. To further get credit for having produced a book that an oligarchic democracy like Mother India has banned is clear evidence that reconstitutions of the Koran in a Muslim world terrorized by the West will not find it difficult to come under censorship. The Iranian use of the book is obvious; the Indian use of the book is obvious. And Rushdie's use of the Koran is obvious. The towering complexity of The Satanic Verses and the pseudo-erudition of the novel's ten hip literary allusions per page are a sure sign that, this time round, Rushdie is trying too, too hard to overcome his Empire-inflicted Naipaulism.

*