In the aftermath of the ‘Satanic Verses’, much has been said and written about its author, as well as about the bitter controversy caused by this novel. Salman Rushdie, the Indian-born English writer who has recently moved to the United States, would perhaps be best defined by the phrase ‘migrant from the past’ for, as he argues, ‘the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, […] its loss is part of our common humanity’.

Most of his works reflect in a myriad ways the experience of pitting levity against gravity, as Tymothy Bremman would call such displacement and relocation. ‘Grimus’ (1975), ‘Midnight’s Children’ (1981), ‘Shame’ (1983), ‘The Satanic Verses’ (1989), ‘Haronn and the Sea of Stories’ (1990), ‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’ (1995), ‘The Ground Beneath Her Feet’ (1999), and ‘Fury’ (2001) are the result of a marvelously protean imagination fusing reality and fantasy in full awareness of the unreliability of story telling as of the interplay between plausible past events and incredible present ones. His collection of critical essays, ‘Imagination Handouts: essays and criticism’ (1981-1991) contains reflections on politics, history, and literature in a world driven by centripetal forces, exposed to the uncertainties of contemporaneity.

It has been argued that with the ‘Satanic Verses’ Rushdie, who knew the pressure points of his culture very well, went on pressuring them. If so, he based his enterprise on the assumption that it is the privilege of literature to speak frrely not because the writer needs to do so, but because no man should be deprived of the right to ‘hear voices talking about everything in every possible way’. As such, the novel looks upon the problem of forging oneself an identity from the perspective of disenfranchised minorities. Deeply ironical as it may be, the voice of the storyteller claims no loyalty to the truth, but rather creates a surreal realm of fantasy, blasphemous and dangerously subversive for people’s shared sense of mystification. Against a background of realism – the rejection of monotheist religion, the life of Muhammad, the mercantile society of both Meccan and London – Rushdie sets a city of exotic essences, a Prophet ready to accept a compromise for the future glory of the religion he preaches.

Problems of identity arise under apparently contrary forms as his Indian-born English actor Saladin Chamcha illustrates the self-effacing entry into the discourse of the colonizing Other while the runaway actor Gibreel Farishta embodies a schizophrenic new conqueror of Britain who assumes a backward movement of ‘tropicalizing’ London. Chamcha has chosen exile and lives in the shadow of a traumatizing past as well as in the light of a most deceitful and self-deceiving present. He is the outcome of a cosmopolitan, policultural view of the nation as he thinks of himself as a ‘goodandproper Englishman’. After his visit to India, he experiences what Hami Bhabha termed as ‘unhomeliness’ – not willing to return to his deeply hated homeland, he is brutalized and rejected in the country he has adopted as his own. His is the fate of the fallen angel, Shaitan/Satan. The trauma of being trapped in the confusion between home and the world may be otherwise expressed as ‘having come unstuck from more than land’, as ‘having floated upwards from history, from memory’. As for Gibreel Farishta, he too has performed the act of Icarus and Dedalus in a flight from his own land and past, assuming the role of the Angel of Revelation. If Saladin mysteriously grows into the goatish image of Satan – repository of the collective fury –, Gibreel’s halo alludes to his angelic mission.

Rushdie’s fantastic realism merges the mundane and the imaginary in an attempt at reinforcing the feeling of conflicting identities within a single self and imbues the story with a sense of fluidity between reality and myth. Terrorism, self-assumed exile with its predicament flow into dreams of Satan confronting the Angel Gabriel, of a suicidal pilgrimage – an echo of the Exodus. Such fusion is announced by the very motto of the novel which aims to relate postcolonial reality to religious episodes and thus bring together the historical and religious components of identity:

‘Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode, for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste of our, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is… without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon’. (Daniel Defoe, ‘The History of the Devil’)

The impact of the novel has much to do with its religious component. The book has been qualified as a blasphemous attack against Islamic taboos, but the true reason for the violent reaction it arose all over the world lies with Rushdie’s position as a writer. Blasphemous verses have been directed against Allah by other writers among whom the great Urdu poet Muhammad Iqbal. Nonetheless, nothing could equal the fierce reaction to Rushdie’s novel. His was a position of authority from which he wrote: his earlier novels ‘Grimus’ and ‘Midnight’s Children’ had been acclaimed by the literary world. Rushdie’s statements were considered to weigh in the eyes of the reading public, hence ‘The Satanic Verses’ was perceived as a grievous attack against the entire Muslim community. In spite of Edward Said’s condemnation of the bigoted violence against Rushdie and his book, it was precisely the writer’s position as an insider/outsider that mattered and which dislocated him from what could be termed as reality only to relocate him into a bad dream of his own life. His principle of satiric ‘equal time’ which spares nothing and nobody proved of little importance when set against the growing spectre of blasphemy or the fierce reactions against what was termed as an attempt at unraveling religion.