When lunatics run the asylum

 

I had just been two years into my career as a teacher when Salman Rushdie’s most controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, was published. Now 34 years later, two years after my official retirement from the job, Rushdie has been punished savagely for writing that book. Punished by a person who never read the book. The punishment was ordered by a religious leader who, I’m sure, had also not cared to read the book. Ignorance and hatred are the fundamental driving forces of popular religion.

The Satanic Verses explores faith and doubt with a kind of ingenuity that only Rushdie possessed. The novel looked at the validity of divine revelation and scriptures with incisive humour as well as irrepressible agony of the soul. It makes use of dream sequences and fantasy and melodrama to tell the story of Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood movie star with a conflicted soul torn between faith and doubt. There are a few equally captivating characters in the novel like Saladin Chamcha, a voice actor, and Salman the Persian, a dissenter. As the last of these says about dissent in religion: “It’s his Word against mine.”

The conflicts and agonies that the characters of this novel experience belong to Rushdie himself, I have always thought. Where else do your characters emerge from but your own inner conflicts and agonies? A writer must have the liberty to dramatize his inner conflicts and agonies. What else is literature meant for? People like Hadi Matar, blinded by the subjacent shades of religion, will never understand those higher truths of human culture. This is one of the most painful truths about human life and particularly religion.

The Satanic Verses has killed many people. Its Japanese translator was killed in 1991. In that same year, the Italian translator was stabbed. Two years later, its Norwegian publisher was shot three times and left for dead. Now the author himself has been stabbed inhumanly. Decades could not heal the hatred of these religious killers! What does such religion mean? The above paragraphs have the answer to that question.

In a 2015 article of his, Rushdie said that “the lunatics are running the asylum.” People who claim to be God’s representatives on earth are the most vicious creatures and they need to heal themselves of their hatred and vindictiveness and other incarnations of malice before teaching the world about God and goodness. This is true of today’s India’s religious leaders too. The asylum is not confined to the Arab world and its descendants.

His Word against mine. Salman the Persian’s conviction is profound. The revealed Word [scripture] will not make sense to everybody. Those whose convictions, innermost selves, rebel against those revealed truths must be given the right to question them, probe them, and write about those experiences. Such writings can be some of the best lessons for the believers for self-examination and assessing the worth of their beliefs. If your religious belief buckles before an authentic seeker’s questions, the culprit is not the seeker but your faith. You need treatment before you start running the asylum.  

PS. I am of the firm opinion that India should revoke the ban on The Satanic Verses. Anyway, the novel is accessible online to anyone in the world. Bans are absurd in the digital world.