Skip to main content

Satanic Verses



“You’re lucky to have invented a god who dances to your tunes.”   The youngest and the most beloved wife of the Prophet ridicules him thus in Salman Rushdie’s most controversial novel, Satanic Verses

“Lies! Lies! Lies!” is the reaction of Jesus on reading Mathew’s gospel in Kazantzakis’s novel, The Last Temptation of Christ.  Matthew tries to justify the lies he has written by saying that an angel dictates what he writes.  It is divine revelation.  How can lies be divine revelation?  Toward the end of Kazantzakis’s novel Matthew tells Jesus, “How masterfully I matched your words and deeds with the prophets!  It was terribly difficult, but I managed.  I used to say to myself that in the synagogues of the future the faithful would open thick tomes bound in gold and say, ‘The lesson for today is from the holy Gospel according to Matthew!’  This thought gave me wings and I wrote.”

We may never know whether that was indeed the real reason why Matthew wrote the gospel.  We may never know for sure how much of what Matthew wrote was what really happened and how much was imagined by the writer.  It is the case with most scriptures.

It is the case with any writing, in fact.  “I say one thing, you write another,” Kazantzakis’s Jesus accuses Matthew, “and those who read you understand still something else! ... Each of you attaches his own suffering, interests and desires to each of these sacred words, and my words disappear, m soul is lost.”

Every writer attaches his own feelings, interests and desires to what he writes, except maybe in purely objective subjects like the sciences.  Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is as much his personal reading into his religion as is Kazantzakis’s Last Temptation.  Both the writers were trying to understand their religion in their own personal way.  They have attached their own feelings, anxieties and desires to their novels and the characters in them.

If every reader reads every text keeping this fundamental fact in mind, the text will be understood more meaningfully.  The meaning is created by the reader.  When such creation takes place, fundamentalism will disappear. 

One cause of religious fundamentalism is the belief that the scriptures contain divine truths dictated or revealed by a god or an angel or any other supernatural entity.  Novelists like Rushdie and Kazantzakis show us quite a different truth.  And the truths of fiction may be truer than the truths of life, and quite definitely are truer than the truths of religions.

Comments

  1. Matheikal, when meaning is created at the level of the individual, what we would have is Protestantism, in a sense. And, that has been found to be no anathema to fundamentalism, the way I understand. I am sure I am wrong.

    Even if not exactly inscrutable, I pulled a thick tuft of hair from my head to understand the sentence that starts, "And the truths of fiction ...", the last sentence :)))) I have not yet understood, but I will stop here before losing all my hair! :)))))

    Said in the lightest spirit, the above is.

    RE

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Knowing your aversion to literature, I choose to desist from answering you, "Raghuram. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should be silent," I shall obey Wittgenstein.

      Delete
  2. rightly mentioned, when scriptures become divine better know that religious stubborness(without reasoning ) is born.once we become submissive to the extent that we define something or someone divine,we star fearing along with ! Its human ! Fear kills curiosity and where there is no questioning,means no freedom to think-more like animals and then a herd with passing generations... none allowed to question (because the ancestors told to do so )herd fears asking question and rather inculcates aggressive behaviour when someone questions them(they never had answers). How many Hindus know why Shivling is worshiped?Goes with all religion ! Only literacy would allow you to question and when you question - the herd gets angry .. after all its a herd !
    Must say , your approach on complicated topics, the simplicity and the reasoning with which you put your point makes me wait for your posts , Sir !!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, ignorance is bliss in religion and that's the greatest problem with it. As you say, it's true of every religion - unfortunately.

      Delete
  3. Rightly said everyone has right to express his feelings .

    Travel India

    ReplyDelete
  4. I simply don't understand how the concept of religion survived and actually evolved since thousands of years, that too without any logic and without any evidence. Can we get a PHD degree only based on hypothesis and without any logic or concrete evidence.

    Regards,
    Jahid
    Flashbacks

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Religion is born when logic fails! It's a leap into the dark, as someone said. Faith. I have written pretty much about its relevance. I'm going to write yet another blog on the same issue :) Expect it to be posted in an hour from now.

      Delete
  5. Very true. I believe that we should try to discover the GOD in us through a journey of self discovery rather than through books that can be interpreted in any way.

    http://blog.innerwearmatters.com

    ReplyDelete
  6. The passage I loved the best in the The Last Temptation was the part describing how Mathew wrote the gospel when everyone else has slept...toiling till dawn on many days, writing everything down before he forgets anything...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Kazantzakis being an excellent novelist creates characters who are complex and true to life. In the hands of lesser artists Matthew would have been a mere fabricator of history.

      Delete
  7. kazantakis is master of lyrical thought , though i have given up reading diminishing eyesight diabetes ..i hold kazantakis last passion of jesus christ as an inspirational novel that has been conducive to my growth as a humanbeing.. religion was created as a one side mirror .. you end up seeing yourself through god ...

    i shoot all religion but a religion that does not pay importance to humanity is not a religion to me at all i have lived with catholics jews hindus parsis all my life and everyone added a drop that made me a good human being..
    thanks for the votes .. for a man in a leaking boat

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...