Quran textual criticism series#

But in response to news that Abu Simbel may betray his pledge of loyalty to Allah, Mahound consults Gibreel again and returns with a disavowal of the previous verses as the product of Satan, 3 and replaces them with a citation from the text of the Koran itself: “Shall He have daughters and you sons? That would be a fine division! These are but names you have dreamed of…Allah vests no authority in them.” (124)ĤGibreel, however, informs us that both the first revelation and its repudiation came from him, and in each case the words were somehow forced from him by Mahound. He tempts Mahound to accept just three of the city’s three hundred and sixty idol gods as “worthy of worship.” (105) The prophet consults Gibreel and returns, citing a set of verses from the Koran called “The Star” into which is inserted the declaration that Lat, Uzza, and Manat-the three most popular pagan idol gods-are “the exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed.” (114) In other words, God would appear to be allowing the worship of idols, which is one of the fundamental prohibitions of Islam. The eponymous issue of the “Satanic verses” arises when Abu Simbel, the crafty leader of the magical desert city Jahilia (Mecca), recognizes that Mahound and his one God represent the future. 3 This scenario and the title phrase which describe it comes from an early story of questionable aut (.)ģThough much of the controversy around The Satanic Verses focused on the novel’s desacralizing portrait of Muhammad, the central focus of Rushdie’s manipulation and criticism is the text of the Koran itself.1 Therein lies the problem, for orthodox Muslims consider the Koran to be the direct and inviolable “Word of God,” 2 whereas the Old and New Testaments are not generally treated as such. In the parts of the novel that deal with this dream, Rushdie, as his contemporaries Jeanette Winterson and Julian Barnes have done with the Old Testament story of Noah and the ark, is casting doubt on religious texts by treating them not as sacred and authoritative but as akin to fictional literature. It is the content of this dream that most inflamed many Muslims’ religious sensitivities. As the angel, he interacts while dreaming with Muhammad (here called Mahound) in the desert at the time of the founding of Islam.

Quran textual criticism series#

He is forced in a series of tormenting dreams to play the role of his namesake, the archangel Gabriel/Gibreel.

2 Daniel Pipes explains: “To doubt this is to deny the validity of Muhammad’s mission and to imply t (.)ĢAt the outset of the novel, Gibreel Farishta, one of the novel’s two main characters, has lost his faith.

1 He is also, like Barnes especially, casting doubt on the reliability of commonly accepted historic (.).

One of the major things Rushdie was trying to do in The Satanic Verses was offer a challenge to that static purity of the sacred text. In contrast, its principle intertext, The Koran, is often treated as absolute and pure, a characteristic of sacred texts that Rushdie finds questionable and even dangerous: they allow no dialogue, no questioning, and therefore are rigid with regards to human development and history. The Satanic Verses, for example, features a startling cast of characters with hybrid identities in a narrative that is a startling fusion of genres including satire, magic realism, postmodern metafiction, and religious allegory.

1Early in The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie asks: “How does newness come into the world? Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?” (8) Though the answers to these questions are pursued throughout the novel, one kind of answer is already posed by the question: newness is the product of “fusions, translations, conjoinings.” Similarly, we might apply this question to the creation of texts: How do new texts come into the world? And the answer is the same: from “fusions, translations, conjoinings.” Rushdie, ever the champion of such mixing or hybridity, clearly bases his aesthetic approach on textual mixing.