These conflicting perspectives on The Satanic Verses, ranging from its call for religious reform to its call for religious renunciation, could be bridged by hypothetically distinguishing between what Rushdie considered to be practically plausible and his ideal intentions. In this context, it should be worth noting that Rushdie’s take on religion and dogmatism in The Satanic Verses was not limited to Islam, and his views on Islam did not correspond to his final word on religion. For discovering the latter, his token reference to Friedrich Nietzsche in the butterfly prophetess Ayesha story line of the novel has to be a useful key. That is, a careful reading of The Satanic Verses would unmistakably suggest that religion is or may be false but its appeal or the need for it is irresistible, at least for the majority of mankind. Booker (1994, 252) wrote, “Rushdie is . . . not an anti-religious writer. Like Nietzsche before him, he rejects religious dogmatism while at the same time recognizing that human beings have a fundamental need for beliefs and values.” And this Nietzschean spirit, or Rushdie’s rejection of a pristine faith in human rationalism, distanced him from the Enlightenment tradition. Hence although Rushdie was widely reputed to be a postmodern due to his bizarre and erratic artistic style, his broad philosophical stance merited the very same appellation.8
Rushdie’s artistic style has repeatedly been described as a liberating device to escape from colonial patterns of domination.9 In specific, as imperial power relations of domination and subordination were justified and legitimized by the rule of the rational over the irrational, or the enlightened over the unenlightened, Rushdie, who was from the Indian subcontinent, apparently aspired for a level playing field in which he could express himself on equal—or even advantageous—terms vis-à-vis the English reading public by sidestepping modern rationalism. Khan (2005, 43) remarked, “Rushdie’s oeuvre attempts to revive the genre of myth in order to formulate a ‘viable alternative ideology’ to the deadlock of Manichean binaries that confronts the subject in postcolonial societies. These binaries accentuated by former colonial regimes included black and white, savage and civilized, silent and articulate, rational ruler and irrational ruled” (quote in quote from Afzal-Khan 1993, 173). Thus Rushdie’s novels, including The Satanic Verses, did not conform to the bounds of reason, both in terms of their enigmatically chaotic organizational structure and magical realism, and this was of symbolic significance for his postcolonial critics.10 In addition, Rushdie’s stylistic blend of Indian slang with English proper, partially referred to as Hobson-Jobson, was allegedly another postcolonial liberation strategy that sought to open the mastery of the English language to dispute.11
However, postcolonial arguments in praise of surrealism and literary chaos need not take away from The Satanic Verses’ reputation as failed art.12 So far, critics from the press corps have routinely described it to be a reputedly “‘unreadable’ book” (Wheatcroft 1994, 28), or “difficult” and “unreadable” (Ruthven 1990, 12), and “more parts than whole” (Bakshian 1989, 44). And despite comparatively more leisure, balance, and understanding of the novel, such negative impressions have intermittently been echoed by scholarly critics as well. For example Clark (2000, 147) claimed, “The novel’s postcolonial politics and cosmic politics are worlds apart. Perhaps that is why the novel is not a complete success.” But the political uproar created by The Satanic Verses has reaffirmed literature’s enduring importance, and in that way, it has been an incomparable contemporary success.13
Given Rushdie’s challenge to commonsensical reason, The Satanic Verses did not easily succumb to scholarly attempts at analysis. Its architectonic structure did not conform to a simple and clear logical pattern that allowed for systematic deconstruction.14 Consequently, its overall meaning was ambiguous.15 Due to the sensitive nature of Rushdie’s concerns, including Islam, such epistemic imprecision, if intentionally produced, could have been a protective buffer between dangerous arguments or truths, on the one hand, and public opinion, on the other. Indeed comparable textual devices have served philosophers and literary figures against persecution throughout history, especially before the advent of modern liberalism.16 Of course, Rushdie’s remarks about the original foundations of Islam and Muhammad have been so obviously critical and even insulting, it has to be an open question why he would ever have cared to spare anything else from public scrutiny. Nevertheless, the architectonic structure of The Satanic Verses has existed as an inbuilt constraint against random access. As Werbner (1996, 65) stated, “Few readers, whether religious Muslims or secular intellectuals, crack the code.”
The Satanic Verses was a coded text. And some of the motivation behind this was stylistic. But ultimately, Rushdie did not easily want to give away his concrete proposal for Islamic reform, which directly emanated from his diagnosis of a perennial Islamic flaw in the novel, or misogyny.17 Werbner’s well-defined methodological approach to cracking the novel—or decoding it—through comparing and contrasting prophetic visionaries from its main plot and various subplots, instead of vainly seeking for a progressive linear connection between them has been useful, although her conclusion derived thereof was utterly questionable: “Set against these six figures [Gibreel and Baal, Chamcha and Saladin, the Imam and Ayesha] the Prophet is the almost perfect man. He is a creative genius who transformed the world; he overcomes temptation and transcends passion; he is always a man of integrity. He is courageous in weakness, magnanimous in power. He teaches love and respect for women” (Werbner 1996, 64).18 Yet of the six comparable figures whom Werbner took into account and several others in the novel, one of them, Ayesha the butterfly prophetess, was of particular significance. Albeit a character with multiple personal flaws, prophetess Ayesha and the openness she promoted was antithetical to Islam as perennially misogynist, both in theory and practice, and in a state of arrested development. As Suleri (1992, 198) put into comparative perspective, the Ayesha episode has been an attempt “to locate an idiom for the feminization of Islam”; “Mahound’s old idea of submission is now substituted by the idea of opening” (ibid., 204).19 In parallel, Morton (2008, 80–81) remarked, “It is through the female character Ayesha that a rethinking of Islam is most clearly articulated in The Satanic Verses . . . it is Ayesha and Mirza’s pilgrimage from the Indian village of Titlipur to Mecca that offers a more progressive model of Islam.”20 If so, the imperfect future promise of prophetess Ayesha superseded the problematic brilliance of the novel’s prophet Mahound, who was closely modeled on the Islamic religion’s founder.
In addition to its architectonic structure, The Satanic Verses has been baffling due to its textual ambiguity.21 Almost each and every narrative episode in it with prophetic visionaries was perfectly fine-tuned for totally contradictory interpretations. Rushdie’s nearly unequivocal critique of the foundations of Islam, or his challenge to the veracity of its founder’s holy claims, has come close to being the most noticeable exception to this pattern. Nevertheless, Rushdie’s postcolonial critics maintained that The Satanic Verses’ textual ambiguity was part and parcel of his postcolonial liberation strategy. As stated before, Rushdie was against binary oppositions of all sorts, above all including those which have justified colonial rule in the past, such as the distinction between the rational and the irrational, and also the binary opposition between what constituted an Englishman proper and what did not, which has made it difficult for nonwhite postcolonial immigrants from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean to successfully integrate. This said, Rushdie’s ambivalence in The Satanic Verses could not be divorced from his subject matter, or religious dogmatism.22 The novel’s irresolvable textual ambiguity was essentially related to its author’s philosophical postmodernism and critique of the Enlightenment. Although Rushdie was overall dismissive of supernaturalism, he did give some credit for its appeal to ordinary people, through tacitly admitting to its theoretical possibility, in the sense that universal sources of supernaturalism either could