'Representing the very ethic he battled': Secularism, Islam(ism) and self-transgression in The Satanic Verses

Abstract

This essay examines the ethics of historical representation in Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses in order to probe his claim that the novel explores religious belief from a secular point of view, and is undertaken ‘in good faith’. In so doing, the essay attempts to traffic between the discrepant secular and Islamic readings of the novel using a contrapuntal methodology which brings these perspectives into a productive crisis that opens up a space for other readings of the text that do justice to both its secular and literary dimensions, as well as the Islamic materials on which the novel draws heavily. The essay subsequently addresses one of the central objections articulated by the novel's Muslim critics – that it is a work of ‘bad history’ – in order to evaluate whether or not it was indeed written ‘in good faith’. The reading of the novel that emerges suggests that it is ethically problematic in this respect because its violations of the historical record pertaining to the Prophet Muhammad and early Islam deliver an interpretation of Islamic history that is complicit with the very Islamist understandings that Rushdie professes to be challenging.