It's probably about 20 years since I last re-read The Satanic Verses, but I thought I'd delight you with some observations anyway.

There, isn’t that beautiful.  No, I do not mean the Comrade Officer…

I have just found a VERY cool digital mag:
sister-hood is a digital magazine and a series of live events. We create platforms for women of Muslim heritage to speak for themselves, rather than being spoken for or spoken about. sister-hood challenges stereotypes and promotes the fearless, progressive, creative voices of women of Muslim heritage.

The Satanic Verses is a highly complex, many-layered, highly intelligent fantasy, like The Saga of the Exiles, the Lord of the Rings, the Riverworld Series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. It is the creation of a world which has similarities to but is not the same as our own.

Hang on, you say.  It is ‘magical realism’, not ‘fantasy’.  And the fundamental difference is?  That may be another of those theses I’m not going to write.  I’d argue they’re all exercises in alternative realities.  They’re not telling us – gosh, how would life be if you were an American leper and found yourself in a world afflicted by the Sunbane.  Who’d want to know that? is one response.  That would make an interesting short story or short novel is another. They’re telling us about us, people, what we are, how we work.  They create alternative realities the better to explore things about us, including expanding the field of possibility in which a sentient being can function. 

Middle-earth, the Land, Riverworld are clearly elsewhere.  Except they’re not.  People breathe air and drown in water.  Trees and plants grow.  The Saga of the Exiles is set firmly on Earth, although Pleistocene Earth; any differences in geography and geology are the result of geological time.  It has been stated that Middle-earth is an imaginary period in Earth’s past but let us say the geography is unfamiliar. 

They are mind-created realities. Humans can do that.

Complex and extraordinary mind-created realities telling us about us.  Like the Bible and the Koran.

There is nothing a human cannot imagine in the Bible or the Koran.  What is different is that they were written when the bookshops were not full of products of the human imagination.

You could say the same of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

There will be a short pause while people scream.

It is as ridiculous to say The Satanic Verses is alternative history as it is to say The Sage of the Exiles is alternative history; I am reasonably sure Julian May does not think Pleistocene Earth was populated by alien beings called the Tanu who survived in the popular imagination as the all-star cast of Irish mythology, huge though her debt to Irish mythology is.  The book opens with two men falling to earth from a great height (an exploded aircraft) without mechanical means of support chatting and singing as they do so.  They land safely.  This book does not dwell in the land of the real. 
 ‘To be born again,’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won’t cry? How to win the darling’s love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again …’ Just before dawn one winter’s morning, New Year’s Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel, without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky.
 
‘I tell you, you must die, I tell you, I tell you,’ and thusly and so beneath a moon of alabaster until a loud cry crossed the night, ‘To the devil with your tunes,’ the words hanging crystalline in the iced white night, ‘in the movies you only mimed to playback singers, so spare me these infernal noises now.”
 
Gibreel, the tuneless soloist, had been cavorting in moonlight as he sang his impromptu gazal, swimming in air, butterfly-stroke, breast-stroke, bunching himself into a ball, spreadeagling himself against the almost-infinity of the almost-dawn, adopting heraldic postures, rampant, couchant, pitting levity against gravity. Now he rolled happily towards the sardonic voice. ‘Ohé, Salad baba, it’s you, too good. What-ho, old Chumch.’ At which the other, a fastidious shadow falling headfirst in a grey suit with all the jacket buttons done up, arms by his sides, taking for granted the improbability of the bowler hat on his head, pulled a nickname-hater’s face. ‘Hey, Spoono,’ Gibreel yelled, eliciting a second inverted wince, ‘Proper London, bhai! Here we come! Those bastards own there won’t know what hit them. Meteor or lightning or vengeance of God. Out of thin air, baby. Dharrraaammm! Wham, na? What an entrance, yaar. I swear: splat.’
 
Out of thin air: a big bang, followed by falling stars. A universal beginning, a miniature echo of the birth of time … the jumbo jet Bostan, Flight AI-420, blew apart without any warning, high above the great, rotting, beautiful, snow-white, illuminated city, Mahagonny, Babylon, Alphaville. But Gibreel has already named it, I mustn’t interfere: Proper London, capital of Vilayet, winked blinked nodded in the night. While at Himalayan height a brief and premature sun burst into the powdery January air, a blip vanished from radar screens, and the thin air was full of bodies, descending from the Everest of the catastrophe to the milky paleness of the sea.
 
Who am I?
 
Who else is there?
 
The aircraft cracked in half, a seed-pod giving up its spores, an egg yielding its mystery. Two actors, prancing Gibreel and buttony, pursed Mr Saladin Chamcha, fell like titbits of tobacco from a broken old cigar. Above, behind, below them in the void there hung reclining seats, stereophonic headsets, drinks trolleys, motion discomfort receptacles, disembarkation cards, duty-free video games, braided caps, paper cups, blankets, oxygen masks. Also – for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands’ genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever-reasonable doubts – mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home. Knocked a little silly by the blast, Gibreel and Saladin plummeted like bundles dropped by some carelessly open-beaked stork, and because Chamcha was going down head first, in the recommended position for babies entering the birth canal, he commenced to feel a low irritation at the other’s refusal to fall in plain fashion. Saladin nosedived while Farishta embraced air, hugging it with his arms and legs, a flailing, overwrought actor without techniques of restraint. Below, cloud-covered, awaiting their entrance, the slow congealed currents of the English Sleeve, the appointed zone of their watery reincarnation.
 
“O, my shoes are Japanese,’ Gibreel sang, translating the old song into English in semi-conscious deference to the uprushing host-nation, ‘These trousers English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart’s Indian for all that.’ The clouds were bubbling up towards them, and perhaps it was on account of that great mystification of cumulus and cumulo-nimbus, the mighty rolling thunderheads standing like hammers in the dawn, or perhaps it was the singing (the one busy performing, the other booing the performance), or their blast-delirium that spared them full foreknowledge of the imminent … but for whatever reason, the two men, Gibreelsaladin Farishtachamcha, condemned to this endless but also ending angelicdevilish fall, did not become aware of the moment at which the processes of their transmutation began.
 
Mutation?
 
Yessir, but not random. Up there in air-space, in that soft, imperceptible field which had been made possible by the century and which, thereafter, made the century possible, becoming one of its defining locations, the place of movement and of war, the planet-shrinker and power-vacuum, most insecure and transitory of zones, illusory, discontinuous, metamorphic, – because when you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible – wayupthere, at any rate, changes took place in delirious actors that would have gladdened the heart of old Mr Lamarck: under extreme environmental pressure, characteristics were acquired.
 
What characteristics which? Slow down; you think Creation happens in a rush? So then, neither does revelation … take a look at the pair of them. Notice anything unusual? Just two brown men, falling hard, nothing so new about that, you may think; climbed too high, got above themselves, flew too close to the sun, is that it?
 
That’s not it. Listen:
 
Mr Saladin Chamcha, appalled by the noises emanating from Gibreel Farishta’s mouth, fought back with verses of his own. What Farishta heard wafting across the improbable night sky was an old song, too, lyrics by Mr James Thomson, seventeen-hundred to seventeen-forty-eight. ‘ … at Heaven’s command,’ Chamcha carolled through lips turned jingoistically redwhiteblue by the cold, ‘arooooose from out the aaaazure main.’ Farishta, horrified, sang louder and louder of Japanese shoes, Russian hats, inviolately subcontinental hearts, but could not still Saladin’s wild recital: ‘And guardian aaaaangels sung the strain.’
 
Let’s face it: it was impossible for them to have heard one another, much less conversed and also competed thus in song. Accelerating towards the planet, atmosphere roaring around them, how could they? But let’s face this, too: they did.
 
Downdown they hurtled, and the winter cold frosting their eyelashes and threatening to freeze their hearts was on the point of waking them from their delirious daydream, they were about to become aware of the miracle of the singing, the rain of limbs and babies of which they were a part, and the terror of the destiny rushing at them from below, when they hit, were drenched and instantly iced by, the degree-zero boiling of the clouds.
 
They were in what appeared to be a long, vertical tunnel. Chamcha, prim, rigid, and still upside-down, saw Gibreel Farishta in his purple bush-shirt come swimming towards him across that cloud-walled funnel, and would have shouted, ‘Keep away, get away from me,’ except that something prevented him, the beginning of a little fluttery screamy thing in his intestines, so instead of uttering words of rejection he opened his arms and Farishta swam into them until they were embracing head-to-tail, and the force of their collision sent them tumbling end over end, performing their geminate cartwheels all the way down and along the hole that went to Wonderland; while pushing their way out of the white came a succession of cloudforms, ceaselessly metamorphosing, gods into bulls, women into spiders, men into wolves. Hybrid cloud-creatures pressed in upon them, gigantic flowers with human breasts dangling from fleshy stalks, winged cats, centaurs, and Chamcha in his semi-consciousness was seized by the notion that he, too, had acquired the quality of cloudiness, becoming metamorphic, hybrid, as if he were growing into the person whose head nestled now between his legs and whose legs were wrapped around his long, patrician neck.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/158937/the-satanic-verses-by-salman-rushdie/9780676970630/excerpt

The language takes no prisoners and I might suspect that virtually no-one fully understands it except Rushdie and others whose cultural backpack is equally English and Indian.  Can English readers  get all the Indian allusions and Indian ones all the English ones?  Thinking particularly of the Sufism which infuses it.  Culturally it is a bilingual novel, if that makes sense, which it doesn’t.  OK: it’s bi-cultural.  You could say that like any child of mixed-race parents it gets shit from both sides, duller elements of whom refuse to recognize it as one of their own.  Translation makes it tricultural.  The Japanese translator was murdered and the Italian translator was stabbed.  Even as a purely linguistic challenge, I’d think it was one even some established professional translators of literature might cheerfully have passed on.  How d’you  translate ‘the hole that went to Wonderland’ for people who didn’t grow up on Alice, ‘gods into bulls’ and ‘centaurs’ for people unfamiliar with Ancient Greece, without losing and losing and losing?  Depends what their genre was of course. Whether non-native speakers of English could have got very far with it, whether European or from the Indian sub-continent, even if fluent speakers of English and fluent readers of more formally structured works, is an interesting one. I am really not sure having read Jane Eyre at university wholly equips you for TSV.  Reading a foreign language is in part looking for sign-posts.  Sentences.  Subject verb object.  Words you know giving an indication of the meaning of words you don’t know. 

The book is context-free.  Not entirely sure I can explain that, but I’ll try.  What it is the opposite of:
Qu’en un lieu, qu’en un jour, un seul fait accompli – Tienne jusqu’à la fin le théâtre rempli. Boileau-Despréaux Nicolas
A single place, a single day, a single act keeps the theatre filled.  The unities of time, place and action dominated C17th French theatre.  Never did Racine any harm but most novels aren’t like that.  All the same you generally know, literally, where you are.  The location might change from London to Berlin or New York to Karachi but you know where you are because the writer tells you and if you know a bit of basic fact about that location that helps too because there are things the writer assumes you know that he or she isn’t going to bother to tell you, for instance that London stands on a river called the Thames and Paris stands on a river called the Seine.  If you’re reading a C19th French novel, it’s probably a good idea to know the history of France in the C19th, the July Revolution, the Second Empire, the end of the Second Empire and the birth of the Third Republic, the February Revolution, the Paris Commune, because the writer is going to assume you know all that too. 

In The Satanic Verses, where the hell are you?  Inside the characters’ heads?  In the fantastical city of Jahilia?  In London?  Or like Gibreel and Chamcha in permanent free-fall?
“The city of Jahilia is built entirely of sand, its structures formed of the desert whence it rises. It is a sight to wonder at: walled, four-gated, the whole of it a miracle worked by its citizens, who have learned the trick of transforming the fine white dune-sand of those forsaken parts, - the very stuff of inconstancy, - the quintessence of unsettlement, shifting, treachery, lack-of-form, - and have turned it, by alchemy, into the fabric of their newly invented permanence.”
Or have they? 

I think a lot of negative reviews, including the negative review, stem from this, from the determination of the reader to impose context.  It must be about Mohammed…It must be this, it must be that.  Rather like those in an endless stretch of water grasping at driftwood, grasping at what they recognize or think they recognize.  Bloody anti-Tory Lefty, doesn’t think much of Thatcher, does he.  Actually he came to think rather more of her, since she probably saved his life and further, was distinctly warm when they met. 

I am not at all sure any subsequent Labour government would have including the one in waiting, so obscene is the prostration to ‘religious offence’.

For what intelligent people said at the time, see the archives of Index on Censorship

There is not one scrap of proof the ‘holy books’  were written by God.  There can’t be: there is not one scrap of proof God exists.

Therefore…

Islam went to war against one work of fiction on the basis that another work of fiction was fact and the work of fiction they were attacking purported to be fact, but it’s a novel.  It didn’t.

All of it was in their heads.  It’s a commonplace that people will kill for fake realities that exist solely in their heads, look no further than Auschwitz.  It is not however an approved commonplace.

The Muslim protesters were up in the air, off the edge, sky high out of it on the opium of the people without so much as toehold on solid ground. 

Therefore we had to be conditioned to accept that whatever is in people’s heads counts as reality, and it’s their reality, and precious to them and should not be traduced, abused, it’s all they have.    What is in people’s heads is  not a tenable foundation for a universal proposition – what was in Hitler’s head, what was in the head of the Christchurch fucktard? 

To make it work we had to be fed all the additional stewed ape-shit for brains special pleading about religion being a different sphere of existence, not to be judged by mere humans, dealing as it does with the holy, the sacred, the numinous, we poor secularists just cannot understand the depth of feeling.  To demand the death of someone who had written a book you perceived as mocking your faith had to be incorporated into the range of normal, which was of course the precise offence of the vile Pope creature.  Yup, being faced with that contrary to one’s brain-washing is painful and believing in God means you are at root a psychotic nutter, unable to give space to the views of others.    So if the Christchurch massacre were shown to be the doing of a committed member of another faith?

All throughout the endless ages
All your Buddhas, Christs and sages
Said you lost points by spilling blood
It just wan’t being good
A killer-dude was just a dud
Who didn’t understand manhood.
To state a fact, ask what it may imply
Shut up, you fool, you want to die?

Whether de facto or de jure thou shalt not kill or at least that it’s very bad idea so to do runs through all religions.  It is a further lamentable fact that people do not on the whole mock, condemn, deride what is actually holy, sacred, numinous, other-worldly, indeed.  They might take the piss out of it in passing and certainly deride intellectually in passing but people who are not doing any harm to anyone are extremely low on the list of those to be opposed, condemned, mocked compared to those doing harm to people and most people outraged at the corruption and evil of some religious never get there.  God is not Great, or for that matter Marx and Lenin were not primarily motivated by Rumi, Hafiz, Gandhi, the Cloud of Unknowing of St John of the Cross, Kim’s holy man, a priest in the inner-city giving 24/7 to help his parishioners. 

Hate to break this to you, guys, but the issue is the filthy behaviour of religion in the here and now.  Actually the issue is you don’t see it as filthy.
 
God the explanation is history.  God is not necessary other than as possible First Cause, optional, though you can still always ask who created God.  Wars are not going to be fought, people are not going to be beaten and murdered over whether God created the first quark.  If there are multiple universes then possibly God was a phenomenon in another universe causing this one.  Some things are equally I think beyond physics and beyond theology.  Universes die.  Maybe this one is the consequence of the death-throes of another one. 
WE DO NOT KNOW was of course absent from the debate, as it is absent from all debate.

Morality comes from love or its absence and it is perfectly possible to love in what was previously denoted as the Christian sense without requiring God to have told you to - as indeed the chequered history of Christianity shows it is entirely possible not to love, despite your God having told you to.  God is not necessary, full stop. 

Other things are.  Love and a foothold on reality spring to mind.  As I actually do not tire of repeating:
Liberty is a function of love.  Control is a function of self-will.  The withdrawal of love consists in - look it up - those of us who can still read are able to read Fowler - how far one may treat another as if he or she were one's property, an object with neither will nor thoughts nor feelings of his - or of course her - own, no personality, no individuality, no being of his - or of course her - own, no regard for another as distinct, separate, equal, different, but only as an extension of oneself, at one's disposal for the fulfilment of one's desires, no matter how depraved those desires be, the sorry perverted justification being that since one has asserted independence of being, one is evil and thus anything may be done to one.

You are not self-forgetting by definition if you are forcing others to obey you. Grace is paramountly not forcing oneself on others other than to restrain them from forcing themselves on others. To love one's neighbour as oneself is not to inflict beliefs he or she finds questionable on him or her. People are and have to be free to go wherever they might be going. Society's business is limited to demanding they behave tolerably to each other and ensuring they are free to travel.

Minorities left behind history try to muscle in on everyone’s lives, make themselves and their garbage out to be important to everyone, demand everyone has to take account of it.  Demand they are to be respected.   Why?  When they respect others, give other people space to be ourselves, when they respect the rights and freedoms of others, when they uphold the sovereign liberty of the individual, when they acknowledge others are not extensions of their sick selves, but running on separate tracks; treat everyone else with total contempt and people find you contemptible.

Now go and read History of the Universe.com

Or just take the ultimate trip - no, not that one.  Why the hell I or anyone else is being bothered by Stone Age Man, etc etc, sick monkeys from the land that time forgot, how 'the ruling classes' actually dare foist them on us and demand their bloody ape-shit be taken seriously, etc etc.   Why have we been bored by this garbage ?

Mais il vient toujours une heure dans l’histoire où celui qui ose dire que deux et deux font quatre est puni de mort. L’instituteur le sait bien. Et la question n’est pas de savoir quelle est la récompense ou la punition qui attend ce raisonnement. La question est de savoir si deux et deux, oui ou non, font quatre. Pour ceux de nos concitoyens qui risquaient alors leur vie, ils avaient à décider si, oui ou non, ils étaient dans la peste et si, oui ou non, il fallait lutter contre elle.
Albert Camus, La Peste

Mais ce qui est vrai des maux de ce monde est vrai aussi pour la peste. Cela peut servir a grandir quelques-uns.  Cependant, quand on voit la misere et la douleur qu'elle apporte, il faut etre fou, aveugle ou lache pour se resigner a la peste.

- Naturellement, vous savez ce que c'est, Rieux ?
- J'attends le résultat des analyses.
- Moi, je le sais. Et je n'ai pas besoin d'analyses. J'ai fait une partie de ma carrière en Chine, et j'ai vu quelques cas à Paris, il y a une vingtaine d'années. Seulement, on n'a pas osé leur donner un nom, sur le moment... Et puis, comme disait un confrère : " C'est impossible, tout le monde sait qu'elle a disparu de l'Occident." Oui, tout le monde le savait, sauf les morts. Allons, Rieux, vous savez aussi bien que moi ce que c'est...
- Oui, Castel, dit-il, c'est à peine croyable. Mais il semble bien que ce soit la peste.

At the risk of repeating myself, how does any politician or priest bloody dare bring this shit back to the West, why is it not universally opposed?
Ah well, I guess MI5 know about your bank accounts even if no-one else does. 

Qu'est-ce qu'un homme révolté? Un homme qui dit non. Mais s'il refuse, il ne renonce pas: c'est aussi un homme qui dit oui, dès son premier mouvement.   Un esclave, qui a reçu des ordres toute sa vie, juge soudain inacceptable un nouveau commandement. Quel est le contenu de ce "non" ? Il signifie, par exemple, "les choses ont trop duré", "jusque-là oui, au-delà non", "vous allez trop loin", et encore "il y a une limite que vous ne dépasserez pas". En somme, ce non affirme l'existence d'une frontière. On retrouve la même idée de la limite dans ce sentiment du révolté que l'autre "exagère", qu'il étend son droit au-delà de la frontière à partir de laquelle un autre droit lui fait face et le limite. Ainsi, le mouvement de révolte s'appuie, en même temps, sur le refus catégorique d'une intrusion jugée intolérable et sur la certitude confuse d'un bon droit, plus exactement l'impression, chez le révolté, qu'il est "en droit de...". La révolte ne va pas sans le sentiment d'avoir soi-même, en quelque façon, et quelque part, raison. C'est en cela que l'esclave révolté dit à la fois oui et non. Il affirme, en même temps que la frontière, tout ce qu'il soupçonne et veut préserver en deçà de la frontière. Il démontre, avec entêtement, qu'il y a en lui quelque chose qui "vaut la peine de...F", qui demande qu'on y prenne garde. D'une certaine manière, il oppose à l'ordre qui l'opprime une sorte de droit à ne pas être opprimé au-delà de ce qu'il peut admettre.
En même temps que la répulsion à l'égard de l'intrus, il y a dans toute révolte une adhésion entière et instantanée de l'homme à une certaine part de lui-même. Il fait donc intervenir implicitement un jugement de valeur, et si peu gratuit, qu'il le maintient au milieu des périls. Jusque-là, il se taisait au moins, abandonné à ce désespoir où une condition, même si on la juge injuste, est acceptée. Se taire, c'est laisser croire qu'on ne juge et ne désire rien, et, dans certains cas, c'est ne désirer tout, en général, et rien, ne particulier. Le silence le traduit bien. Mais à partir du moment où il parle, même en disant non, il désire et juge. Le révolté, au sens étymologique, fait volte-face. Il marchait sous le fouet du maître. Le voilà qui fait face. Il oppose ce qui est préférable à ce qui ne l'est pas. Toute valeur n'entraîne pas la révolte, mais tout mouvement de révolte invoque tacitement une valeur. S'agit-il au moins d'une valeur ? Si confusément que ce soit, une prise de conscience naît du mouvement de révolte : la perception, soudain éclatante, qu'il y a dans l'homme quelque chose à quoi l'homme peut s'identifier, fût-ce pour un temps. Cette identification jusqu'ici n'était pas sentie réellement. Cette identification jusqu'ici n'était pas sentie réellement. Toutes les exactions antérieures au mouvement d'insurrection, l'esclave les souffrait. Souvent même, il avait reçu dans réagir des ordres plus révoltants que celui qui déclenche son refus. Il y apportait de la patience, les rejetant peut-être en lui-même, mais, puisqu'il se taisait, plus soucieux de son intérêt immédiat que conscient encore de son droit. Avec la perte de la patience, avec l'impatience, commence au contraire un mouvement qui peut s'étendre à tout ce qui, auparavant, était accepté. Cet élan est presque toujours rétroactif. L'esclave, à l'instant où il rejette l'ordre humiliant de son supérieur, rejette en même temps l'état d'esclave lui-même. Le mouvement de révolte le porte plus loin qu'il n'était dans le simple refus. Il dépasse même la limite qu'il fixait à son adversaire, demandant maintenant à être traité en égal. Ce qui était d'abord une résistance irréductible de l'homme devient l'homme tout entier qui s'identifie à elle et s'y résume. Cette part de lui-même qu'il voulait faire respecter, il la met alors au-dessus du reste et la proclame préférable à tout, même à la vie. Elle devient pour lui le bien suprême. Installé auparavant dans un compromis, l'esclave se jette d'un coup ("puisque c'est ainsi...") dans le Tout ou Rien. La conscience vient au jour avec la révolte.
Albert Camus: L'Homme revolte
Dear groveller slave-apes, cock-sucker traitor vermin, filthy lovers of other filth, lovers of everything dirty and vile and dishonest and irrational and cowardly and sly, you crossed that line when you crippled me, government crossed that line by leaving you free to cripple me and attempt to destroy me.  Fuckers, you are so far over the line, it's funny.