Poor Devil
When the Ayatollah of Iran issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses almost immediately after its publication, I sensed a publicity stunt. It might have looked legitimate if the book had been published either before the Iranian Revolution, or after a change in rulership. Instead, it looked like calculated exploitation of a volatile political-diplomatic situation.
A touchy egomaniac like the Ayatollah made for an easy target. It appeared that Rushdie couldn't let the opportunity pass. I would not be surprised if, under polygraph questioning, Rushdie admitted writing The Satanic Verses with that intention. Intentional or not, the ensuing uproar made Rushdie a cause célèbre which, otherwise, he would not have been.
Rushdie was not a hostage, or otherwise personally exposed to execution of the fatwa's penalty, which gave publication of The Satanic Verses the appearance of a calculated risk. I said to myself, wait and see before passing judgment. After the recent attempt on Rushdie's life, as he was speaking at a college forum, I have revised my first opinion. I obtained a copy, and just finished reading, The Satanic Verses.
My previous cynicism appears, now, to have been unfounded. Rushdie was badly wounded in the knife attack on him by an enraged stalker. That's a consequence no reasonable person would consider "worth it," no, not for all the publicity in the world. Instead, reasonable motive for writing The Satanic Verses would seem to have been strong conviction on Rushdie's part, intended to dis-associate himself from the religious hyperbole rampant at the time he wrote The Satanic Verses.
The writing style of The Satanic Verses reminds me of the writing style of Rabelais. It is worldly satire from a modern Muslim's point of view. Saturated with allusions, scholarly, hard to read, it fits squarely within the fine, old tradition of satire. Censorship is almost a precondition for membership in the satiric writers' fraternity. The Satanic Verses certainly qualifies on that score -thanks to no less a censoring authority than the Ayatollah of Shia Islam.
I owe Rushdie a debt of gratitude for making a quote from Daniel Defoe's The Political History of the Devil the frontispiece page of The Satanic Verses. Rushdie, doubtless, idealized Defoe as a quintessential Western free thinker. Defoe also struggled with religious censure -doing prison time for conscience. Writing from before the Age of Enlightenment, Defoe is still relevant, today. Defoe remains controversial and he is cited by writers, such as Rushdie, who read him to this day.
Defoe's frontispiece page comments are like an arrow shot at the subject of homelessness (the subject of my art.) The pointedness of Defoe's comments on the vagabond induced me to read more of Defoe's Devil. The book—now in the public domain—is next on my reading list. This single paragraph, read out of context, is telling. It touches me. To be candid, when I find myself looking at a homeless man, I think poor devil.
From Daniel Defoe's The Political History of the Devil:
“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 or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is continually hovering over this inhabited globe of earth, swelling with the rage of envy at the felicity of his rival, man, and studying all the means possible to injure and ruin him; but extremely limited in power, to his unspeakable mortification: this is his present state, without any fixed abode, place, or space allowed him to rest the sole of his foot upon.”
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