The Self-Transgressions of Salman Rushdie: Re-Reading The Satanic Verses

Abstract

Almost a year after Ayatollah Khomeini’s ‘unfunny Valentine’ propelled him into hiding, Salman Rushdie published a defence of himself and his novel, The Satanic Verses, entitled ‘In Good Faith’.1 By turns morose and melancholic, proud and defiant, at times prickly and defensive, and at others aggressively on the offensive, the essay provides eloquent testimony to a life being lived under extreme pressure. Yet it is more than just a window into the beleaguered author’s frame of mind, for in its wide-ranging discussion of the issues raised by the controversy — the respective limits of freedom of expression and religious freedom, the role of the imagination and the writer in speaking truth to power, and the respective value of secular and sacred texts to name a few — this essay (and, subsequently, the Herbert Read Memorial Lecture later published as ‘Is Nothing Sacred?’) can be seen as a mirror which reflects those concerns back upon the novel itself.2 It has therefore provoked much comment in the voluminous archive of academic and journalistic responses to The Satanic Verses controversy. Significantly, the essay’s central claim — that The Satanic Verses is ‘a secular man’s reckoning with the religious spirit’, that is written ‘in good faith’3 — has not received the critical attention it deserves, a lack that speaks to the problematic which I seek to address here, namely the divergence and incommensurability of secular and non-secular interpretations of the novel.KeywordsGood FaithReligious FaithReligious DiscourseRacial SymbolEthical FailureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.