Rushdie and Satire

The irony about satire (if you catch my drift) is that most satirists actually seem to take themselves quite seriously. On the surface, they appear to be poking fun at someone (or something), taking it down a few notches, subverting its worth. But underneath the cocky swagger and irreverence, there is often a pointed agenda. Can satirists have it both ways? Can they be both agitprop realists and comic escape artists at the same time?

Salman Rushdie knows what it's like when the two roles get confused. The publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses, in 1988 practically launched a war of words, with him at the very center of it all. Why? Because he had the intellectual courage or foolish audacity (depending on how you look at it), to "take on" the sanctity of the Qur'an by undermining, through a series of elaborately described dream sequences, the Word of Allah.  Into the novel he introduces a character (also called Salman, not by accident) who, on a whim, changes the verses of the Holy Book into satanic verses. Asked why he performs such a blasphemous act thereby risking the wrath of the ruling Ayatollah, the character Salman calmly (with a trace of arrogance) replies: "It's his Word against mine."

Of course, there is much more to the novel than just this.  In fact, The Satanic Verses is as much a harsh satire on Thatcherite England in the early 1980's as it is about the foundations of Islam. Nevertheless, given a 1,000 year troubled history between the Cross and the Crescent, it was perhaps inevitable that the book would offend and inflame the passions of Muslims around the world who saw it as "the latest battle in a long history of religious and cultural tension" (Richard Webster, A Brief History of Blasphemy, p. 37). Far from being seen as an innocent satire, then, the novel suddenly became a catalyst for violent reactions. In Islamabad (Pakistan), an anti-Rushdie riot resulted in the deaths of 5 demonstrators and 50 serious injuries.  In 1991, the Japanese translator of the book was stabbed to death in Tokyo; in 1993, the Norwegian publisher of the book was shot dead outside his home.  Rushdie himself lived with a fatwa imposed against him (including a $5 million bounty on his head) for over a decade.           

In self-defense, Rushdie claimed that the novel was not a satirical attack on Islam but, rather, a serious attempt to examine the conflict between secular and religious views of the world: "I set out to explore, through the process of fiction, the nature of revelation and the power of faith" ("In Good Faith" in Imaginary Homelands, p. 408). If you take me seriously, he seemed to be saying, then you can forgive me for my blasphemous satire.         

It's a strategy that might have worked, except for one problem.

In Rushdie's earlier novel, Shame (a sort of dress-rehearsal for The Satanic Verses), his narrator employs a similar double strategy. He is both satirical and deadly serious in his portrayal of post-Independence Pakistan and its gallery of movers and shakers. "The country in this story is not Pakistan, or not quite," the narrator reveals. "There are two countries, real and fictional, occupying the same space, or almost the same space" (23).  Later, he says: "I am only telling a sort of modern fairy-tale, so that's all right; nobody need get upset, or take anything I say too seriously" (72).

So there you have it. Deep down, the satirist wants to be taken seriously, but when  it suits him, he'll hide under the cloak of humor.  No need to get upset, he says. After all, it's just a joke.

But jokes can often invoke the wrath of powerful people.

Just ask  the Fool in  Shakespeare's  King Lear.