A Summary Of The Satanic Verses Essay

The Satanic Verses tumulted to success, once it was published in 1988, winning the Whitbread Award for the novel of the year. In Islamic communities, the novel became instantly controversial. Rushdie was accused of misusing freedom of speech. By October 1988, letters and phone calls arrived at Viking Penguin from Muslims, who were infuriated with the book and wanted it to be withdrawn. Thus within the month, the book was banned from being imported in India, although possession of the book is not a criminal offence. In November 1988, it was also banned in Bangladesh, Sudan, and South Africa. By December 1988, it was also banned in Sri Lanka. March 1989 saw it banned in Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Singapore and Venezuela.

In early March 1989, the United States FBI was notified of 78 threats to bookstores selling the book. In New York, the office of the community newspaper, The Riverdale Press, was destroyed by bombing, in retaliation for an editorial defending the right to read the novel. Violence against the bookstores continued the longest in the UK. Two large bookstores in Charring Cross Road, London were blown up, explosions went off in the town of High Wycombe and again in London, on Kings Road, among other bombings.

However, the most extreme response was the fatwā issued by the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, , on 14 February 1989. The fatwā called for the death of Rushdie and his publishers. Although Khomeini did not give the legal reasoning for this judgment, it was said to be based on the ninth chapter of the Qur'an, At-Tawba, verse 61:

"Some of them hurt the prophet by saying, 'He is all ears!' Say, 'It is better for you that he listens to you. He believes in God, and trusts the bel...

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...r from history could one get?

[Rushdie 1988b:A27]

To read such a powerful text in merely terms of religious blasphemy is an injustice to literature. Rushdie has elucidated how Fiction, though it may take ideas and roots from canons like religion, it spirals off with the novelists’ imagination, and what is produced must not be condemned, but viewed in terms of the creativity of the novelist. In an age of freedom of speech and a modern, liberalized society, the novelist should not be fettered by bounds of religion. For literature and science fill the pools that religion leaves unfilled. Pitiably, Rushdie’s Verses will be remembered more for the controversy and uproar it caused, than the pure genius of magical realism that this work is. However, this very reaction exemplifies the magnamity of the novel, and the sheer genius of the notoriously evasive Salman Rushdie.