‘The Satanic Verses’ : Why Islam Is Outraged Over Novel

It has been banned throughout the Muslim world, and at least six people have died in riots against it. Protesters in England have burned it. And on Tuesday, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for Muslims worldwide to rise up and kill its author.

The object of this outcry, “The Satanic Verses,” is a fanciful, sprawling novel in a style critics liken to that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Thomas Pynchon. Its author, Salman Rushdie, describes the book as primarily a chronicle of the immigrant experience--hardly the sort of work that could be expected to set off a worldwide furor.

But Rushdie’s novel has struck a deep chord among a wide spectrum of Muslims--not just fundamentalists in theocratic countries but moderates and intellectuals in the West as well--who see it as a thinly disguised, blasphemous assault on their religion. Among themselves, they appear to disagree mostly on how best to respond to it.

Mockery, Derision Cited

That such a book would be written and receive widespread attention in the West, many Muslims say, is yet another instance of how they are mocked and derided by cultures that make no effort to understand or appreciate them.

“Islam is seen as something that the Western media makes fun of and distorts,” contended Yvonne Haddad, a professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “The author is Islamic, but Muslims are holding the West responsible for not censuring (the book).”

Indeed, even before protests against the book erupted in violence in Pakistan earlier this week and in Khomeini’s death threat Tuesday, the book’s publisher, Viking Penguin, had received a series of bomb threats at its New York headquarters, and a number of U.S. Muslim groups had mounted a letter-writing campaign against it.

Tour Being Reviewed

So intense was the reaction that Viking is reviewing Rushdie’s scheduled 11-city book tour, which has been due to bring him to Los Angeles on March 8 for a reading at UCLA.

A Viking spokesman, asking that his name not be published, said Tuesday that no decision has been made on whether to go ahead with the tour. But Viking issued a statement deploring the violence and death and disavowing any intention to offend. “We very much regret the distress the book has caused,” the publisher said.

Sensitivities among Muslims to their portrayal in the West have been heightened during the past two decades, beginning with depictions of greedy Arabs during the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s and continuing through the fundamentalist revolution in Iran a decade ago and continuing strife in the Middle East.

Yet, even against that backdrop, say Muslims in the United States, Rushdie’s novel stands out as insulting, and the common denominator of their ire is its characterization of the prophet Mohammed and other figures of early Islam. Many say the book reveals its true agenda by using the pejorative medieval Christian name, Mahound, first used during the Crusades, for Mohammed.

In that respect, the protest over “The Satanic Verses” is reminiscent of last year’s furor over the movie, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which was assailed by conservative Christians for its portrayal of Jesus Christ as a vulnerable human being.

To a greater degree, “The Satanic Verses” depicts Mohammed as momentarily weak--a characterization that is especially offensive to a faith in which visual images of Mohammed are not permitted and, for the most part, truths revealed by the Koran are not to be questioned.

“I think it is an attack on the miracle of the Koran itself,” said one Southern California Muslim.

‘Thought Police’

Responding to the attacks in a statement in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Rushdie contends he is the victim of “contemporary Thought Police.”

“One may not discuss Mohammed as if he were human, with human virtues and weaknesses. One may not discuss the growth of Islam as a historical phenomenon, as an ideology born out of its time,” he complained.

“These are the taboos against which ‘The Satanic Verses’ has transgressed. . . . It is for this breach of taboo that the novel is being anathematized, fulminated against and set alight.”

The controversy over “The Satanic Verses” apparently has not hampered the book’s popularity in the United States.

“It’s been selling like hot cakes,” said Julie Protze, cashier at a B. Dalton outlet in Hollywood. “Everybody is buying it--housewives, students, people who like to read. I sold one last night to a guy who looked like a guitar player from a rock ‘n’ roll band.”

The novel, which took Rushdie--an India-born British citizen--five years to write, begins as a jumbo jet explodes over England after a terrorist attack, and two passengers miraculously survive. One is a major Indian movie star, the other a radio celebrity.

Plummeting to Earth, they find their identities gradually altering. The movie star is sprouting a halo, while the radio actor is growing horns and a tail.

Moving back and forth between Bombay and London, the book tells their stories by interweaving fables, folk-tales, magic and social commentary.

Though Rushdie is much admired for such previous books as “Midnight’s Children,” published in 1981, critics were not universally kind to “The Satanic Verses.” Writing in The Times, Richard Eder found “altogether too much plot in the book” and concluded that “too many characters are drawn spectacularly but hastily.”

The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley called it “an odd, uninvolving book that shows only intermittent flashes of its author’s considerable gifts.”

The title refers to an incident in the life of Mohammed reported by two Arab historians of the 9th and 10th centuries but later discredited by commentators on the Koran.

Controversial Incident

According to the story, Mohammed, meeting with resistance from the merchants of Mecca to his new monotheistic faith, makes a pact to accept three local deities as angels, or “daughters of Allah.” But then he withdraws this concession, saying Satan had put words in his mouth.

Rushdie revives this story, which Muslims view as blasphemous, by having Mohammed appear as “Mahound” to one of the novel’s characters in a dream sequence.

Other passages in the book are also “very obscene,” according to Muzammil Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Society of Orange County. Under what Siddiqi called “a thin veil of fiction,” Rushdie describes the patriarch Abraham (a patriarch in Islam as well as Judaism and Christianity) as a “bastard” and labels the wives of the prophets “whores.”

The African Bilal

One of the followers of Mohammed, the African Bilal, and a figure much admired by black American Muslims, is called an “enormous black monster.”

The book is not available in the Muslim world. In the United States, there are as many as 3 million to 4 million believers. In interviews Tuesday, American Islamic leaders uniformly characterized Rushdie’s novel as “insulting,” but disagreed widely over what the appropriate response should be.

Some key U.S. Muslim leaders are urging restraint, saying that Islam is capable of withstanding vicious attacks. Others say they simply would like to see the book ignored.

Some denounce the reaction of Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader, to “The Satanic Verses.” Others point out, however, that Islamic law can be interpreted as calling for severe punishment--even death--for anyone who defames the Prophet Mohammed.

“There is a sort of perception by Muslims that if this book was anti-Semitic, it would have been censured in this country but because it is anti-Muslim, it is being distributed freely,” said Haddad, organizer of a major conference on Muslims in America last year.

The Orange County center joined many American Muslims--as many as 100,000, Siddiqi claimed--in writing letters of protest to Viking late last year. “It is not right to keep silent,” regardless of the publicity generated, he said.

Ammar Abdulhamid, manager of the Islamic Center of South Bay-L.A. in Lomita, also took part in the letter-writing campaign. Publication of the book is “a new step taken by the Western media to attack our religion,” he said.

A more passive response was recommended by Dr. Maher Hathout, a physician who is spokesman for the Los Angeles Islamic Center, who said he has almost finished reading Rushdie’s book.

“I don’t feel very threatened by the fact that someone is attacking Islam,” Hathout said. “Islam has and does tolerate vicious attacks. Our Arabic literature is full of opinions--those of some philosophers, for instance--that some consider blasphemous but they were never confiscated.

“So I don’t think the (Rushdie) book deserves that big fuss. It only helps in advertising a book which is not really worthy of that widespread attention,” Hathout said.

Similarly, M. T. Mehdi, president of the New York-based National Council on Islamic Affairs, said the book “should be ignored--to ban it or commit violent acts is counterproductive.”

Rushdie is not the first writer to have a work banned in a Muslim country. For example, “Children of Gebalawi,” a novel by Naguib Mahfouz of Egypt, the 1988 Nobel laureate in literature, is considered sacrilegious for its allegorical treatment of the history of monotheism. The Egyptian publishing house that has exclusive rights to his works omits mention of this 1959 novel in its catalogue.

As for Khomeini’s threat, some Islamic leaders were reluctant to comment directly. But Abdulhamid, despite his strong feelings about the book, remarked: “To say that he (Rushdie) should be killed is ridiculous. That is stretching the matter too far.”

Meanwhile, booksellers in the Los Angeles area reported no complaints for carrying the book.

“We haven’t received any political or negative reactions to the book,” said Nola Butler, co-owner of Butler/Gabriel Books in Westwood, where the book was sold out Tuesday. “Maybe that’s to come,” she said. “I don’t plan to stop selling it.”

Even before the recent riots in Pakistan, “The Satanic Verses” had been selling consistently well, according to Viking’s publicity department and local booksellers.

But now, said Ed Conklin, manager of Dutton Books in Brentwood, “There is a frenzy to get the book. We ordered 40, I think there is one copy left.”

Gary Pierson of Book Soup in West Hollywood said he sold his last copy at 2 p.m. and planned to order more.

“We are going to continue sales of the book, and if there are any threats, we are still going to continue selling it,” Pierson said. “I suspect we are just seeing the beginning of interest in the book.”

Staff writers John H. Lee and Hector Tobar contributed to this article.