The Satanic Verses
The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie's fourth novel, first published September 26, 1988 and inspired in part by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. As with his previous books, Rushdie used magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters. The title refers to the satanic verses, a group of Quranic verses that refer to three pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Uzza, and Manāt. The part of the story that deals with the "satanic verses" was based on accounts from the historians al-Waqidi and al-Tabari. In the United Kingdom, The Satanic Verses received positive reviews, was a 1988 Booker Prize finalist (losing to Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda) and won the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year.
Stats for nerds
12recommend
49mentions
46people
2010–2025years
27% recommend69% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- We do criticize them. A lot. But there are certain boundaries where people get scared.
Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses is the key example. Many refuse to translate it. It used to take courage for book stores to sell it.
It’s a bit weird how this became the cause for religious extemists. It’s not a hateful book. It received good reviews in Riyahd and Tehran when first published.
But I’m old enough to remember bookstores refusing to sell it. Multiple translators have been killed.
A similar line exists with visually depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
People get killed over this.
ChatGPT won’t show an image of the Sultan Mehmet II, but has no such qualms about the Sultan Sulieman the Magnificient.
I can’t get it to depict anyone named Muhammad, can you?
- I would say he was quite vigorously defended by liberals. Since the 1970s there pretty much hasn't been such a thing as the left, especially in Rushdie's hayday of the 80s-00s. If there was, I doubt it would've spent much time worrying about the fate of a bourgeoisie fantasist.
Nothing against Rushdie btw. I loved the Satanic Verses. But institutional journalism (which provides the fundamental model most people use to understand Anglo politics) has conflated the terms left and liberal. And while I respect the drift of language as natural and intrinsic to culture, this misplacement has created a silly situation in which hypocracy, action and in-action are misattributed. Because these are two groups (overlapping in some cases) but distinct in a fundamental way.
In fact, I would say articles such as this are entirely flawed in that they don't grasp this distinction because they take institutional journalism's political narrative way past its power to describe reality.
Edit: BTW, this affects conservatives and "the Right" as well. Most of the people that rise to the top of the Rupblican and Tory parties are effectively "liberal". Most would not abolish civil liberties, equality before the law, etc. Just about everyone elected to government in both the UK and the US in all parties sit on a spectrum of liberalism. Mostly they just disagree about what year the government needed to stop doing things to create a "liberal" society.
- 1. Master and Margarita by Bulgakov.
2. The Satanic Verses by Rushdie.
(It felt like these two books have something in common.)
- There’s nothing magical or sacred about a particular medium, but the internet doesn’t contain all human knowledge, it doesn’t contain much of past human knowledge and it rarely preserves knowledge through archival. This is concerning because future generations may give up on history and/or give up on preservation/archival.
i. Try short books at first.
ii. Take frequent breaks (short and sometimes device-free days) from glowing screens to reduce dopamine dependency.
iii. Listen to audio book versions.
iv. Read to understand, not to get to the end by skimming.
v. Try epaper ebook readers that are less stimulating and more like books. This can be an easier way to make books portable and compact.
Here’s a short one, read or listen to Smedley Butler’s book [0, 1].
0. ebook version: https://books.google.com/books?id=trl4DwAAQBAJ&printsec=fron...
1. audio book version: https://archive.org/details/war_is_a_racket_1903_librivox/wa...
Another book I would recommend is Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1542) which has been translated into English as A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. It’s a must read to know the scale of the Spanish rape, pillaging and genocide of native American and imported African slaves.
I also go to libraries to see what they have for physical and electronic checkout. And, frequent the torrent sites to look for video courses and good book / audiobook packs. It also takes curiosity and critical thinking to actively seek out, discover and evaluate works of others.
I would also recommend reading important and banned books like Mein Kampf, Das Kapital, The Bible, The Quran, The Communist Manifesto, Heart of Darkness, Brave New World, Catch-22, Crime and Punishment, Howl, Fahrenheit 451, The Satanic Verses, Ulysses, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and so on. Especially important is to re-read them every 10-20 years, because your outlook on life will change with the seasons of life, you will find these works appear different than you remembered and you will get more out of them because you have more life experiences.
- This tension and trick lies at the crux of Salman Rushdie's book "The Satanic Verses" - a global bestseller and one of my all-time favorites; the situation must not be all that uncommon. I think you'd enjoy reading it if this is the way you think.
- Salman Rushdie all the way!
My favorite is satanic verses, by far.
Midnight's children is his most popular work though.
For both books, having even a basic knowledge of Indian history would make the experience much better.
The ground beneath her feet is incredible too. Shame is intense, and if you're feeling thin on South Asian history I'd go with either.
Or if you want to go with European/world history, enchantress of Florence is a good one. Very well reviewed but I personally never read beyond the first thirty pages.
His new book 1001 nights is coming out this Sept. The short excerpt published in new yorker from it was incredible, so that might be a good option too.
East/West is a great short story collection, but has less magic than his novels.
