The first part of the novel, titled The Angel Gibreel, was composed of four chapters, which were all devoted to the story of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha. They were both actors, originally from the Indian subcontinent and with Islamic roots, who otherwise had totally contrasting characters, convictions, and life experiences. From a cultural-ideological point of view, Gibreel gradually abandoned his trademark Indian eclecticism in favor of Islamic fundamentalism, and Saladin gradually abandoned his slavish will for Englishness, or his zeal for total assimilation, to make peace with his eclectic Indian identity. And their consequent antagonism, laden with symbolic or ideological import, constituted the novel’s main plot.
The name of Gibreel for one of these two protagonists was pun intended. In his dreams, which gradually took on the nature of a separate reality, Gibreel was God’s archangel. Without exception, all of the novel’s other story lines, or subplots, were Gibreel Farishta’s dreams in which he was God’s archangel, Gibreel.1 And each of these dreamy subplots included a religious coming and pilgrimage that determined the success or failure of a nascent spiritual project.
Gibreel’s unique role in connecting the novel’s separate dimensions could explain why part I was named after him. That said, the novel’s main plot on the paired adventures of Gibreel and Saladin chronicled a profane journey from India to England, which was akin to migration. This plot, too, was about rebirth in that it contemplated the shedding off of immigrants’ old identities and their painful attempts at establishing new identities in a despairingly multicultural adopted homeland. However, both the sacred and the profane narratives in The Satanic Verses contained miracles. These miracles were not eventually or categorically revealed to be shams, rhetorical symbols, or exaggerated characterizations of reality in the novel, despite some conflicting cues throughout. As such, Rushdie left the contemplation of what miracles are to be believed and what others to be rejected, or why have societies historically accepted the truth of some miracles on the basis of belief and rejected comparable others, to his readership. About The Satanic Verses, Werbner (1996, 57) wrote, “[I]t is, above all, an inquiry into the nature of religious belief and religious certainties from a humanist perspective.” Taken in this last sense, the novel broached a universal question, although its immediate concerns were largely Islamic, and it did not pretend to deliver a systematic philosophical inquiry or an approximate answer.
Chapter I.1
The opening chapter and, thereby, the very novel began with a reinterpretation of a signature Nietzchean dictum. To be reborn, one first has to die, sang Gabriel Farishta.2 This statement and its advanced variations were to be repeated throughout the novel in separate story lines and by different characters, including the narrator. Accordingly, it was Rushdie’s most conspicuous device in bringing the novel’s separate parts together. By the same token, it had to be the first and foremost key for dissecting it with an eye to its nonlinear development.
Indeed in the opening chapter, there was another—and a rather full-fledged—expression of Rushdie’s preoccupation with rebirth. The narrator mused about the origins of newness in the world, about the fusions, translations, and conjoinings that facilitated newness, about the ways and means of its survival, especially as newness was always perceived as extreme and dangerous, and about compromises, deals, and betrayals of its essential characteristics, which allowed it to escape its deadly and threatening opponents. Of great import, throughout The Satanic Verses, Rushdie measured up almost each and every character with personal aspirations or spiritual visions, immigrants and prophets alike, against this last musing about political struggle, determination, morality, and flexibility that ultimately distinguished success from failure.
Within the confines of the novel’s main plot, which concerned a secular theme, rebirth essentially referred to emergent immigrant identities. After the explosion of the jumbo jet carrying Gibreel and Saladin from India to England over the English Channel, remains of human souls, shattered memories, abandoned selves, discontinued native languages, trespassed sense of privacies, jokes meaningless outside of their original context, annihilated possibilities, unrecoverable dear ones, and neglected and hollowed out yet deep and resonant words, such as homeland, territory, attachment and fitting in hovered over the skies. This description symbolized that rebirth for immigrants was consequent to an earlier sense of being, identity, and its demise.
Miraculously, Gibreel and Saladin were the only survivors from the doomed Flight AI-420, and the narrator imposed a supernatural aura to their adventures. In this vein, the time and date of their aircraft’s explosion was portentous. It had happened almost immediately before daybreak, morning time, either the first day of the New Year or around then. Hence the narrator likened their celestial fall to rebirth on a grandiose scale. He referred to a sort of big bang and, consequently, stars dropping-down, and an all-embracing start, which resembled the beginning of everything, albeit on a much smaller scale.3 And several religious allusions in the chapter further served to furnish a supernatural aura to their fall. First, the doomed jumbo jet Bostan was named after one of the four gardens of heaven, according to the Islamic tradition. Second, the explosion took place at 29,002 feet, or at a height corresponding to that of the Himalayan Mountains. This precision made perfect sense in relation to chapter III.5. There, Gibreel’s girlfriend Alleluia Cone, a mountaineer who had made it to the Himalayan summit, described what she had seen, or the Himalayas extending underneath her, and that corresponded to the face of God. If so, Gibreel and Saladin’s flight exploded at a godly height. Third, as the two actors were falling toward London, the narrator associated their destination with references to hellishness, respectively in theater, the Bible, and cinema. He referred to Mahagonny, Babylon, and Alphaville. And Gibreel, clearly evoking his Indian background, referred to London as Vilayet’s capital. Thus allegorically, Gibreel and Saladin were jettisoned from the bosom of God in heaven to hell down below. With characteristic ambiguity, the narrator described this incident as their “angelicdevilish fall” (SV, 5).4
During their free fall, Gibreel and Saladin exposed their contrasting attitudes toward identity politics and integration. Gibreel chanted a song that emphasized his Indian eclecticism: “O, my shoes are Japanese . . . These trousers are English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart is Indian for all that” (SV, 5).5 In rebuke, Saladin sang the British patriotic song “Rule, Brittania!” which was closely associated with the Royal Navy and imperial expansionism. And as another indication of his slavish commitment to cultural self-denial, throughout his headfirst descent, Saladin was wearing a grey suit with his jacket buttons done up and a bowler hat. Yet for all the implied stiffness of his ideological positioning, central to the plot’s further development was that, both his and Gibreel’s attitudes were not meant to be static.
Unbeknownst to them, their celestial free fall marked the beginning of their supernatural transmutation, with significant influence on their identity politics, normally a secular concern. With direct reference to Lamarck’s evolutionary theory, the narrator noted, Gibreel and Saladin began to acquire environmental characteristics. They passed through series of clouds, constantly metamorphosing into different forms, gods becoming bulls, women becoming spiders, and men becoming wolves. Notably, these cloud things were described as hybrid entities. And Saladin was semi-consciously gripped by a rising awareness of his own cloudiness, metamorphosis, and hybridity. From this point onward, Saladin painfully moved toward cultural eclecticism or hybridity, initially Gibreel’s trademark Indian trait, and Gibreel eventually adopted a sort of religio-cultural dogmatism with Islamic tones, whose strictness recalled Saladin’s initial opposition to cultural eclecticism as a strategy for successful integration to England. The narrator alternately referred to their concurrent but irreconcilable change as their transmutation, mutation, and reincarnation.6
Always exuberant, Gibreel was even less aware of the political momentousness of their fall than Saladin, who was introspective. And a miracle within miracle distracted Gibreel. Before touchdown, up in the air, he saw the specter of Rekha Merchant, seated on a flying carpet. She was a married Muslim woman who had committed suicide, due to heartbreak after their illicit love affair. Gibreel repeatedly sought Saladin’s confirmation of her spectral presence,