In Salman Rushdies The Satanic Verses a disembodied voice asks, does newness come into the world? How is it born? (8). The question, as subsequent events make clear, is as much about the novel itself and what Rushdie had to do to enter the world, to make headlines, attract attention, and mobilize masses, as it is about the world. Of the two most common answers to the question of newness given by critics, one reads with the text and the other against it. Postcolonial critics Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Simon Gikandi identify the newness that the novel refers to with the immigrants from South Asia and the Caribbean in London, those who, in the process of reinventing themselves, are also reinventing what it means to be British. According to the postcolonial reading, antiauthoritarian social progress arises as a function of mimicry, repeating the colonizer but with a difference, and of hybridity, the liminal position between the culture of origin and the host culture, which affords the migrant a stereoscopic view that encompasses both. The second, more cynical, answer, offered by Andrew Wernick, is that newness is a question of strategic positioning in the market for high literature, which obeys the laws of other capitalist markets. Rushdie is able to promote himself and his product by making the product seem like other trusted commodities but with a desirable distinctness of its own. The new Britons and the relentless novelty demanded by the marketplace are not, however, the only new things in the novel. Other forms of being, equally new, perhaps equally modern, are also competing for hegemony: the militant Islam of the Imam, the Sikh nationalism of the terrorist hijackers, and the radical aesthetic of popular music and culture. Some in the novel feel that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher represents Newness coming into this country (270): pace Bhabha, no one ever said that the emergent new had to be something we wanted! As Fatima Mernissi points out and Rushdie implicitly recognizes, the reign of the Ayatollah Khomeini, on whom the character of the Imam is based, is itself a twentieth-century innovation (24). And meanwhile, in a remote backwater in India, a young woman is promising to lead converts through the sea on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Ignored by television cameras and ignorant of modern science and politics, will Ayesha, not the global movements of peoples, consumer spectacle, or the neoliberal politicians and fundamentalist terrorists who fill the news, be the new thing that takes over the world? After all, such a thing happened before, 1300 years ago, when a businessman received a revelation from God and changed the world. Gikandi reads Salman the Persian, who in the novel is a disciple of the Prophet who loses his faith, as defining the author's critical stance toward both empire and nation (211), as if Rushdie's interest in seventh-century Arabia were solely as an allegory of contemporary postcolonialism. Gikandi and Bhabha assume that because the Prophet stands for the one opposed to the many, the pure as opposed to the mixed, he also represents the old against which the new must define itself. The Prophet, however, is better understood as the novel's premier example of newness successfully entering the world. Mahound, Rushdie's Prophet figure, is one of those who hear a voice in their ear asking, What kind of idea are you? (Satanic 95). According to Maxime Rodinson, whose biography was a direct source for Rushdie's novel, (1) the historical Prophet was able to identify himself with the victims of society and make their suffering his own; and he rounded on the men of the existing establishment to call them to account and break down the ideology which served as the justification for their position. (82) The novel admires the challenge that Mahound poses to the corrupt status quo of his time even as it abhors his intolerance and misogyny. Rushdie assumes that any emerging idea, including his own, that seeks to enter the world would do well to study how rival ideas, even inimical ones, have done so before. …