I’m sure you’re right, but there was one character who ran a brothel where all the whores named themselves after Muhammed’s wives. I believe this sequence was set in Medina when Muhammed was still alive and Islam was just taking off. All the newly-Muslim men in town found the fantasy of having sex with one of the Prophet’s wives incredibly titillating.
Also, there was a suggestion that Muhammed was not receiving the Koran from the Angel Jibril, but from the all-too-human main character, Jibril. And the depiction of the Prophet deciding to edit out the “Satanic Verses” - which referred to two local Meccan goddesses as if they were real deities - was bound to offend some fundie mullahs, the way pointing out contradictions in the Bible pisses off some fundie Christians.
So there really was some stuff in the book to offend the mullahs and imams in Iran.
Really? YMMV, of course, but I found it fantastic. Rushdie is a bit florid in his prose, it’s true, but I get why he’s a great writer. Reading him is like eating a really rich chocolate truffle cake - small doses are called for.
The human character Gibreel doesn’t give the verses to Mahound. The bit that mattered, at least to me, was a paragraph where Gibreel (as the angel) says that he was responsible for both the “Satanic” verses and the “real” verses. There is a notion in there that angels don’t have free will of their own. They are bound to people and the people make the angels do what they want. So the idea was that Gibreel gave Mahound the good and bad verses (because Mahound really was torn by the dilemma he found himself in: endorse the local goddesses and end the persecution, or remain incorruptible?).
Yes, there is. I’m not arguing that there is nothing in the book a Muslim couldn’t get offended by: I said earlier that the Ayatollah was not responsible for all the outrage. But you have to know that upwards of 99 percent of the people who protested the book and said Rushdie needed to die hadn’t read it. There’s just no way. That’s not how people operate. Most people won’t deliberately read or watch something that they have been told is personally offensive to their beliefs.
I liked it, too. I thought Midnight’s Children was better, but I’d only heard people say the book wasn’t that good and was mostly notable because of the theological uproar. It turns out that’s not the case.
The obvious here being that violence works and makes later threats of violence credible. That was obviously effective, so we’ve seen more of it. Whatever gets rewarded gets repeated.
Or as many leftists who claimed the movie would lead to a rise in anti-Semitism.
