Before Dan Brown's
Da Vinci Code, there was another famous bestseller that got fame and created wild
controversies
on
religious matter. It's Salman Rushdie's novel titled
The Satanic Verses. The destiny of these two novels is rather similar: both have been considered sacrilegious, causing the reactions of the religious institutions. The Catholic one, in the case of Dan Brown, and the Islamic teocracy - represented in Iran by Ayatollah Khomeini - in the case of Rushdie. Of course, Rushdie had not the same luck of his american colleague.
The title refers to what are known as the satanic verses, a group of Qur'an verses that allowed for prayers of intercession to be made to three Pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Uzza, and Manat.
Rushdies's story is centred on the adventure of two immigrants of common Indian Muslim origin, both living in England. The twos, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are both actors who have controversial link with own cultural and religious root. We see them at the beginning, when they are trapped in a hijacked plane during a flight from India to England. They are the only two survivors of a dramatic accident. In that occasion, they get transformed in a strange way: Farishta turns into a god, and Chamcha turns into a devil.
We notice which are the main elements used by Rushdie in his literature: magic realism as first thing. We see how the author represents altered states of mind, when the two's speaking slips into fantastic visions related to menthal illness that the accident has caused in their personalities.
Both return to the normal life, but things are destined to change. There's a continuous fight between the twos: Chamcha wants to get revenge against Farishta, because the latter had forsaken the first one after the common fall from the hijacked plane.
The fight takes different forms. At a certain point, Farishta decides to forgive his enemy, and so he saves his own life.
But later Farishta succumbs to his menthal illness and kills his girlfriend, then committing also his own suicide. His old enemy Chamcha changes radically his own personality: very important in this process of transformation is the reconciliation with the old father. In this way, Chamcha is able to reconciliate also with his old and forgotten cultural and religious roots. So he returns to India, forwarded to absume a new and regenerated identity.
The reasons which caused hard
controversies are referred to the use made by Rushdie of some informations about Muhammad life. As everyone knows, Islam strongly opposes idolatry, polytheism, associating anything or anyone with God. Is rather comprehensible the argumentation that has brought to violent reactions against this book appearance: the accuse of blasphemy was recognized in many parts of the Islamic world, even if the Fatwa - the death sentence - pronunciated by Ayatollah Khomeini hasn't been supported in all the Islamic lands.