Gospel & Universe 🔨 The Fiction of Doubt
The Flight of Angels: Gabriel & Allelujah
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Iago’s Tale
Throughout The Satanic Verses, Rushdie conflates the satanic verses incident (where Satan tries to fool Muhammad) and Othello, keeping in the background all the time the story of Adam and Eve and the paradigm of Attar’s Qaf. In Rushdie's reworking of Shakespeare’s play, Gibreel plays the part of the bright but falling star Othello, Allie plays the innocent and forgiving Desdemona, and Chamcha the deceptive Iago. Rushdie inserts key elements of the satanic verses incident into this Shakespearean drama when the possessed Chamcha whispers doggerel satanic verses over the telephone, thus driving Gibreel into a monstrous green-eyed jealousy. Chamcha succeeds in turning Gibreel’s Edenic garden of love into a hellish labyrinth of jealousy, thus bringing to fruition - and I use this word in its full mythic sense! - the revenge of that ancient, apple-offering, heel-biting serpent. Like Othello, the novel ends bleakly, and there’s only an echo left of the spiritual freedom represented by the murdered Alleluia, whose unwavering devotion to her Impossible Mountain of Everest gives us yet one more version of Attar’s Qaf.
At this point an important distinction between the Verses and Othello present itself: Gibreel doesn’t attain Othello’s self-knowledge, nor does he praise the virtues of the woman he has murdered. Instead of delivering an impassioned eulogy before killing himself, he stutters that Allie was a “whore” and a “bitch” but that he loved her anyway. Instead of falling on his dagger in heroic style, he puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger (SV 544-545). The anticlimax comes when Chamcha, conveniently purged of his evil by a heart by-pass, reconciles with his Bombay love-interest and with his Indian self. While on the worldly level this reconciliation suggests optimism (Said and Fanon might like it at any rate), on the otherworldly level it contains what Aravamudan calls “the slyly ironical last laugh of the devil, who has conquered by fading away into innocuous moral virtue.”[cxcvi]
The sly diabolical plan isn’t the only reason readers have difficulty figuring out what game Rushdie is playing. Another reason is that the novel is written in a slippery postmodern way. Srinivas Aravamudan comments on this serpentine strategy in “Being God’s Postman is No Fun, Yaar,” an article which employs deconstructive theory and relates elusiveness of meaning to Satan’s vagrancy. One should remember that Rushdie starts the Verses with Satan’s indefinite travels, borrowing Daniel Defoe’s version of it for his epigraph: “Satan, being thus confined to a vagabond, wandering, unsettled condition, is without any certain abode; for though he has, in consequence of his angelic nature, a kind of empire in the liquid waste or air, yet this is certainly part of his punishment, that he is … without any fixed place, or space, allowed him to rest his foot upon” (from Defoe’s Political History of the Devil, 1726). Aravamudan argues that “the slipperiness of the devil is that of the signifier itself; it is the very indeterminacy of the devil’s actions that make him truly diabolical. The desinterrance of his vagrancy, his lack of address which summarizes his delinquency, his nomadic refusal to recognize the law of settlement, is an eternal escape from the transcendental signified — God.”[cxcvii] This indeterminacy might also apply to the satanic narrator’s mode of operating, for he moves in and out of the text in order to insinuate that there’s no such thing as a single, transcendental Meaning and Unity, no Ideal toward which all beings can aspire.
By casting doubt on sacred orientation, Eliade’s hierophany, Rushdie seems to be offering us an and/or proposition that isn’t very comforting: continual doubt and/or a choice of deities, both of which seem to exist in a universe in which no irruption of the sacred can truly orient the self. One might also say that in partly replacing the God-like author with a satanic narrator, Rushdie drifts in the “rising tide of occultism,” the darker side of Kliever’s “polysymbolic polysymbolism.” Yet even here, in the most blasphemous of his writings, he manages to suggest Qaf, that transcendental signified which can neither be defined nor discarded, and which might in some desperate manner serve as an invisible nemesis to the insidious indeterminacy of the Devil.
While the Devil slides unseen through the novel, creating a meaningless and hellish world for Chamcha and Gibreel, Rushdie also suggests that Satan’s elusiveness differs in kind from the mysticism, love and ineffability represented by Allie and her Everest/Qaf. In her spiritual intoxication Allie enters a blissful realm of angels and Deity, against which the satanic narrator sets all his powers of rhetoric. Not only does he try to convince the reader that this realm is ruled over by a tyrannical God, but he also manipulates events so that Allie can’t find a meaningful annihilation in this realm. He appears to stop her from remaining at the peak of Everest by firing a gun (which echoes the initial explosion of Bostan and anticipates Gibreel’s final gunfire), and he manipulates events so that she eventually falls from the roof of Everest Vilas. The satanic narrator’s antagonism to God, Allie and Everest underscores the fundamental cosmic division which the satanic narrator does his best to disguise when he argues that good and evil are interpenetrable, that God is mainly evil and that Satan is also good. This doesn’t, however, mean that the ideals represented by Allie are demolished. As with Desdemona in Othello, on the worldly level a character may be defeated, yet on the otherworldly level the spirit and the ideals of this character may live on in an annihilated, impossible form.
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Gibreel’s Nightmare
While Gibreel isn’t possessed in the same ruthless and direct manner as Chamcha, his fate is perhaps worse, for his mind becomes the landscape through which the narrator moves. Moreover, he becomes twice a puppet, once in the hands of the unknowing devil-puppet, Chamcha, and once in the hands of the all-too knowing satanic puppeteer.
Gibreel’s hallucinatory dreamworld initially appears to be a “fabulous world beneath” in comparison to the “dense, blinding air” above (SV 21-22), yet it soon takes on nightmarish qualities. The hidden watery bulk of this submerged world, seen in terms of hot icebergs, becomes associated with a rage and hatred directed at Allie and her symbolic ice replicas of God. The image of hot icebergs is appropriate to satanic rage since icebergs are mostly hidden (like the id) and since hell is characterized by fire. Gibreel’s hot icebergs thus constitute an effective contrast to Allie’s cold mountains, which represent God’s transcendent overworldly realm. The two realms are brought into close juxtaposition when Allie sees “the ten highest mountains in the world” as “icebergs” floating up the Thames (SV 302-303). The satanic narrator’s Iago-like scheme then comes into play when Allie’s mountains (or icebergs) become representative in Gibreel’s confused mind of a diabolism he must destroy.
Once the green-eyed monster of jealousy rises in Gibreel, he hacks to pieces Allie’s “priceless whittled memento” of Everest, and he thaws “the ice-Everest she kept in the freezer.” Given that Allie’s Everest stands for Heaven and Qaf, Gibreel’s attack is an attack on God - even though Gibreel himself doesn’t see it this way (he is hardly the one to consult about the meaning of his own visions). Gripped by a Shakespearean rage, Gibreel pulls down and rips “to shreds the parachute-silk peaks that rose above her bed” (SV 446). On the otherworldly level this act expresses Satan’s jealousy of Gabriel in a most insidious manner, that is, by having the “Archangel” destroy his own heavenly bliss. The degeneration of Gibreel’s mind is almost total, for he calls Allie a “whore” and he can’t string together a coherent sentence: “So I called down the wrath of God I pointed my finger I shot [Sisodia] in the heart but she bitch I thought bitch cool as ice … / I pointed my finger at her … / Bloody hell / I loved that girl” (SV 545). The satanic narrator’s antagonism to the cool, glacial Himalayas, and to whoever remains devoted to the God-mountain of Everest, thus plays itself out consistently in terms of Chamcha’s jealousy and hatred of Gibreel and Alleluia, and in terms of Gibreel’s increasingly violent relationship with Alleluia. The satanic narrator, playing that old Garden of Eden game, thus succeeds in taking heavenly unity and love and turning it into hellish division and hate.
Gibreel’s increasingly violent mental condition can be seen as a satanic fantasy or dreamscape, one which mirrors the narrator’s imagined flood in the Arabian desert, that sadistically-dreamed “liquid catastrophe full of snapping boats and drowning arms” (SV 94). Not surprisingly, the narrator revels in Gibreel’s urban vision of a wasted “Brickhall,” a “concrete formlessness [in] the howling of a perpetual wind, and the eddying of debris” (SV 461). (Brickhall is most probably a mix of Brixton and Southall - predominantly African and South Asian parts of London). The demonic element in this cityscape is made explicit on numerous occasions. For instance, the “screaming city” mirrors “the dark fire of evil” in Chamcha’s soul (SV 463), and Gibreel sees London as “a tortured metropolis” in which the Devil is everywhere: “Gibreel with open eyes and by the light of the moon as well as the sun detected everywhere the presence of his adversary, his - to give the old word back its original meaning - shaitan.” Even with his eyes closed Gibreel “instantly see[s] clouds of minuscule demons surrounding every man and woman on earth” (SV 320-321). In the narrator’s empty apocalypse, in this Final Hour which has no genuine theophany and no convincing redemption, he portrays London as an even more violent place than the London of Hanif Kureishi’s Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, a movie which appeared just before the novel and which highlights racial tension amid the fires of immigrant London.
The narrator’s fantasy of destruction becomes ever more violent, lurid, diabolical. He revels in the flames that “are every colour of the rainbow,” in the “garden of dense intertwined chimeras,” and in the transformation of the Shaandaar Café’s doorway into “the maw of the black hole.” As fire devours Chamcha’s soul and the “screaming city,” the narrator pretends to be horrified: “Truly these are ‘most horrid, malicious, bloody flames, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire’” (SV 462, 464). The use of quotations parodies religious language, and thus inverts his point: rather than being horrified, he finds these flames delightful, suggesting as they do the sort of revenge dreamt of by Milton’s Moloch, “Armed with Hell-flames and fury.”[ccxxx]
One must remember that in Islam Satan is born of fire, he commands legions of fiery djinn, and any mention of fire betrays his presence. Iblis’ admission of his fiery origin in the Quran is seen as proof of his evil nature: “And when Iblis, in the Kur’anic text, declares himself to be ‘created from fire’ (nar) and not from light (nur), this is because God intended that, by a lapsus linguae, he should in a sense utter his own condemnation.”[ccxxxi] By suggesting that the flames devouring London are not “ordinary” and that they display “every colour of the rainbow,” the satanic narrator may be making a similar slip. This may also fit with Satan’s condescending view of angels, who are created from light; in the Verses he depicts them as airheads and spineless lackeys who could benefit from the fire of his thoughts and the fire of his rebellious acts.
Consistent with his reversed codes of morality and behaviour, the narrator claims that fire and brimstone cleanses England’s capital. The voiced spelling of London, “Ellowendeeowen,” suggests “Halloween,” which is appropriate since London becomes a town presided over by pagan spirits - the Devil, the hybrid shapes in the hospital (SV 164-171), the demons Gibreel sees everywhere (SV 321) and the ghost of Rekha Merchant (SV 323-326). The narrator ingenuously suggests that believers desire this sort of apocalyptic wasteland: Gibreel “proclaims to the riotous night, ‘that men be granted their heart’s desires, and that they be by them consumed’” (SV 461). Again, the narrator twists religious language, this time to suggest that bloody flames could be a magical way of fulfilling human desires. Yet the scene he paints is clearly one of horror, one of Hell on Earth: “In the High Street [Gibreel] sees houses built of flame, with walls of fire, and flames like gathered curtains hanging at the windows. - And there are men and women with fiery skins strolling, running, milling around him, dressed in coats of fire. The street has become red hot, molten, a river the colour of blood. - All, all is ablaze as he toots his merry horn, giving the people what they want, the hair and teeth of the citizenry are smoking and red, glass burns, and birds fly overhead on blazing wings” (SV 462). The “men and women with fiery skins” adds a hellfire element of torture to Chamcha’s nightmarish dreams of cracking glass skin (SV 34). The birds flying “overhead on blazing wings” also suggest scary djinns and afreets, as well as the three high-flying birds which hover over Mount Cone (SV 122-123).
In addition to inundating Chamcha’s body with his black water and engulfing Gibreel’s vision in flames, the narrator steers his two puppets into a spiritual world which is characterized by vengeance and violence. Gibreel acknowledges “this world and another that was also right there, visible but unseen” and he feels that “the splitting [of these two worlds] was not in him, but in the universe” (SV 351). Two pages later he interprets the devil horns below him on the Earls Court stage as “the adversary’s sign” and then “in that instant when he saw the adversary’s sign he felt the universe fork and he stepped down the left-hand path” (SV 352). Chamcha also perceives a split in the universe, and he too chooses the “left-hand path.” In the Brickhall community centre he feels “the kind of blurring associated with double vision,” and he seems “to look into two worlds at once; one was the brightly lit, no-smoking-allowed meeting hall, but the other was a world of phantoms, in which Azraeel, the exterminating angel, was swooping towards him, and a girl’s forehead could burn with ominous flames” (SV 416). Three pages later we find Chamcha in a taxi cab, insanely jealous of Gibreel and ready to embark on his satanic revenge: “A new, dark world had opened up for him (or: within him) when he fell from the sky; no matter how assiduously he attempted to re-create his old existence, this was, he now saw, a fact that could not be unmade. He seemed to see a road before him, forking to left and right. Closing his eyes, settling back against taxicab upholstery, he chose the left-hand path” (SV 418-419).
The implication behind these left-handed paths, this dual or forked version of the via sinistra, becomes less obscure when one sees that not only the Devil (Chamcha) but also the Archangel (Gibreel) choose the sinister path of destructive violence over the right path of justice and constructive love. This is of course similar to the opening scene, where both the good and the bad angels fall from heavenly heights. Rushdie further links the choices of the two by having Gibreel opt for the left-handed path at the moment he decides he’s Azraeel, the Angel of Doom, and by having Chamcha opt at the moment he accepts his transformation into an agent of darkness, an agent that willingly tortures his friend Gibreel.
The satanic narrator has parallel yet nevertheless distinct strategies in dealing with Chamcha and Gibreel: while he possesses Chamcha and transforms him into a confused version of his demonic self, he creates gaps in Gibreel’s consciousness and takes advantage of what transpires during these gaps. While both become puppets, Gibreel is most puppet-like in that he often appears empty-headed and without a will of his own. Gibreel first lacks volition when he stands at the top of Rosa Diamond’s stairs and says nothing while Chamcha (who is growing horns) is taken away by the police. On the otherworldly level, this scene suggests that the angel Gabriel collaborates with the tyrannical Powers That Be, that he demonstrates no solidarity with the “rebel hero” Satan. The narrator prepares us for this conclusion earlier on, when he interrupts Gibreel with his “devil’s talk,” arguing that angels are merely God’s lackeys, without the gumption and free will to dissent (SV 92-93). Such a view of angels goes some way in explaining why Gibreel is so easily manipulated: his malleability and empty-headedness express in parodic form the disdain of the rebellious fallen angel.
It’s crucial to note who benefits from what transpires when Gibreel evinces no will of his own. At Rosa’s, Gibreel’s blank-mindedness and subsequent inaction thrust Chamcha into the role of the forsaken, unjustly accused angel, a role which makes Satan appear justified in his resentment to Gabriel and God. Chamcha is of course ignorant of his rebellious stature; he even tells the officers that he has a “lovely, white, English wife” (SV 141). This superimposition of a power struggle between cosmic figures onto a power struggle between worldly characters anticipates the same during the party at Shepperton Studios, where Chamcha bitterly resents “the great injustice of the division” between Gibreel (with his stardom and his “glacial” English Alleluia) and himself, who has lost both job and wife (SV 425). Chamcha sees Gibreel’s “celebrity, and the great injustice of the division” (SV 425), yet he doesn’t see that Gibreel and Alleluia are also in pain. He fails to see that “Gibreel the embodiment of all the good fortune that the Fury-haunted Chamcha so signally lacked, was as much the creature of his fancy, as much a fiction, as his invented-resented Allie” (SV 429).
Chamcha and Gibreel aren’t aware that they’re merely puppets in a far removed, otherworldly drama being shaped in favour of the fallen angel. Chamcha does however appear conscious that he pulls Gibreel’s strings: in devising his plan to destroy Gibreel, he becomes a “tyro puppeteer” studying Gibreel’s “strings, to find out what was connected to what” (SV 432). After Chamcha delivers the “little, satanic verses” which drive Gibreel mad with jealousy, the narrator exclaims: “How comfortably evil lodged in those supple, infinitely flexible vocal cords, those puppetmaster’s strings!” (SV 445). At this point, the distinction between the sentiments of the narrator and those of his devil-puppet/puppeteer is difficult to gauge. What is relatively clear, however, is that the narrator has managed to execute his diabolic plan by using his devil-puppet to pull the strings of his angel-puppet. The coup de grace (or coup de feu rather) occurs when Gibreel enters his final gap of consciousness, during which Allie is shot and/or pushed, and plummets from Everest Vilas.
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Gunfire on God’s Mountain
The satanic narrator uses the three goddesses (of the satanic verses incident) and associated female figures to promote the shirk of polytheistic compromise and to place himself in a position of power. This isn’t, however, the strategy he uses in his treatment of Allie, who is arguably his most challenging opponent, as well as one of the few characters over whom he doesn’t seem able to exert a victorious demonizing influence. For Allie represents a very deep, yet in no way fanatic or unreasonable, devotion to the God-Mountain, Everest. Allie’s temperament is antithetical to the violent and puritanical zeal of characters such as Tavleen and the Imam, and she avoids the dogmatism and intractability of Eugene Dumsday, Mahound or Hind. Indeed, she remains closest to Sufyan in her open-minded sympathy.
In order to see the extent to which the narrator goes in attacking Alleluia, one must note the links between the events which occur at the start, middle, and end of the novel: the explosion of the plane Bostan at the height of Mount Everest, the gunshot Allie hears at the peak of Mount Everest, and the shots which appear to be fired on the roof of Everest Vilas. Also, one must recall that Chamcha’s antagonism to Allie is couched in terms of a jealousy which derives from Satan’s jealousy of the good angel Gabriel, and that Chamcha’s revenge combines the actions of the snake in the Garden of Eden with those of Iago in Othello. While the satanic narrator is successful in keeping Allie from her angel Gibreel and from her God-Mountain (which is 29 thousand feet high, just one thousand feet short of Attar’s 30), he nevertheless fails to eradicate the traces of Sufi yearning and unity which Allie leaves behind.
Rushdie subtly associates the explosion of Bostan at the height of Everest with the explosive sound, the “sharp report, like a gun,” which occurs when Allie nears the peak of Mount Everest. Her visions begin with “rainbows looping and dancing in the sky, the radiance pouring down like a waterfall from the sun,” and she becomes convinced that she is in the presence of angels. She says that she would gladly die there, except that she hears “a noise, a loud, sharp report, like a gun.” This sharp noise changes positive to negative, upwards to downwards: “That snapped me out of it. I had to yell at Pem [the Sherpa] until he, too, shook himself and we started down. The weather was changing rapidly: a blizzard was on the way. The air was heavy now, heaviness instead of that light.” (SV 199).
Despite the immense pain of her fallen arches, Allie yearns to make a second ascent of Everest, an effort mirrored in her yearning to climb the mountain of Gibreel’s love: “Denied mountains by my weak-boned feet, I’d have looked for the mountain in him: establishing base camp, sussing out routes, negotiating ice-falls, crevasses, overhangs. I’d have assaulted the peak and seen the angels dance” (SV 314). After forgiving Gibreel for smashing her miniature mountains, Allie returns to India in the hopes of climbing Everest again. Yet before she can do this she visits Gibreel in Bombay, only to be shot or pushed to her death after being brought by him to the roof of his apartment tower, Everest Vilas. Given that Gibreel earlier pointed his finger at Sisodia and shot him, Gibreel’s admission that he pointed his finger at Allie before her death suggests that he shot her as well (SV 545). Gibreel may thus have entered his most disastrous gap in consciousness. The text, however, is ambiguous: Allie may have been pushed by Rekha, the angry, jealous spirit who says (unconvincingly) that she isn’t jealous of Alleluia and that she would be happy to be Gibreel’s mistress. If Allie is pushed by Rekha, one still has to ask, Why did Gibreel bring her to the roof of his apartment? Another possibility is that Satan pushes her - a possibility not far removed from the previous two, for if Gibreel is possessed or if the witch-like Rekha pushes her, both cases suggest strong satanic intervention.
Alleluia’s association with angels and mystical unity makes her the perfect target of the satanic narrator, who depicts her in the same negative way he depicts God, that is, as cold and self-serving. Allie’s description at the Shepperton film studio party suggests God’s frosty indifference (a theme on which the satanic narrator often harps), and highlights Satan’s jealousy of both Gabriel and the human spirit that can ascend to God’s icy realm: “The moment Saladin Chamcha got close enough to Allie Cone to be transfixed, and somewhat chilled, by her eyes, he felt his reborn animosity towards Gibreel extending itself to her, with her degree-zero go-to-hell look, her air of being privy to some great, secret mystery of the universe; also her quality of what he would afterwards think of as wilderness, a hard, sparse thing, anti-social, self-contained, an essence. Why did it annoy him so much? Why, before she’d even opened her mouth, had he characterized her as part of the enemy?” (SV 428). Allie’s spiritual “essence,” her celestial visions and her yearning to climb the Mountain of God, make her a figure of envy, for in Islam Iblis once enjoyed the plenitude of being which comes from proximity to God. As was noted earlier, the narrator transmits his jealousy of Gabriel to Chamcha, his hoofed double. The narrator notes how Chamcha “struggles alone through that partying throng,” while Farishta is “beset with admirers, at the very centre of the crowd.” It’s in this setting that the “glacial presence by Farishta’s side of Alleluia Cone” makes him feel “the entirety of his loss,” and, “at its bottom, his own anonymity, the other’s equal celebrity, and the great injustice of the division” (SV 425). To avenge the “great injustice” of this division, the narrator gets his hoofed double to drive his Archangel into a homicidal jealousy, thus torturing them both with the very emotion that he himself longs to escape.
The source of this jealousy surfaces after the narrator tells us that he won’t shrug off the question of why evil exists: “It’s not unknown for literary-theatrical exegetes, defeated by the character [of Iago], to ascribe his actions to ‘motiveless malignity’. Evil is evil and will do evil, and that’s that; the serpent’s poison is his very definition. - Well, such shruggings-off will not pass muster here” (SV 424-425). The narrator doesn’t then give us a clear explanation of why evil exists, although he does illustrate his implicit meaning (that envy lies at the root of his evil) by depicting Chamcha’s jealousy of Gibreel during the Shepperton party. Implicitly, he’s arguing that Satan’s evil is a reaction to divine injustice, and that Satan’s motives have little in common with the supposed motivelessness that gives evil a bad name. Chamcha “has destroyed what he is not and cannot be; has taken revenge, returning treason with treason; and he has done so by exploiting his enemy’s weakness, bruising his unprotected heel. - There is satisfaction in this” (SV 466). The narrator here charges his fellow angels with treason, and claims that they too deserve to have their heels bruised. The logic is demonic, for while in the ancient myth the serpent is allowed by God to exact punishment on the first couple, here the narrator is saying that he is justified in inflicting punishment on an angel who wouldn’t rise with him against God, on an angel who still enjoys the bliss of God’s icy realm.
In addition to having Allie murdered, the satanic narrator contrives events so that Sufyan’s life is snuffed out and so that Sufyan’s views are marginalized. We don’t hear Sufyan’s views about Othello, but instead we hear the views of his wife, who is far more concerned about money than ideas: “And what was it that made them a living in this Vilayet of her exile, this Yuké of her sex-obsessed husband’s vindictiveness? What? His book learning? His Gitanjali, Eclogues, or that play Othello that he explained was really like Attallah or Attaullah except the writer couldn’t spell, what sort of writer was that, anyway?” (SV 248). Sufyan’s views on important questions, such as the motives of Iago, are thus left unexplored. Readers only know that Sufyan’s wife has distorted something Sufyan appears to have said into the contours of her own misunderstanding. One can only wonder what her husband might say about Shakespeare’s tragedy, given his love of Tagore’s Gitanjali, Virgil’s Eclogues and a thousand other philosophic things. For Sufyan “swallow[s] the multiple cultures of the subcontinent,” and he has a “pluralistic openness of mind” which allows him to “quote effortlessly from Rig-Veda as well as Quran-Sharif, from the military accounts of Julius Caesar as well as the Revelations of St John the Divine” (SV 246, 245). Add to this his status as “least doctrinaire of hajis” (SV 243), his name, and his sympathy for the wool-covered Chamcha, all of which associate him with the Sufis. Schimmel notes that the derivation of Sufism “from suf, ‘wool,’ is now generally accepted - the coarse woolen garment of the first generation of Muslim ascetics was their distinguishing mark.”[cclxxii] Rushdie goes to some pains to bring in this association when he has the goat-like Chamcha wrapped in a “sheepskin jacket” (SV 244). Sufyan also immediately accepts Chamcha in his fallen, transformed state (SV 243-244), which perhaps suggests that Sufyan holds an unconventional Sufi view of Satan.
Just as Rushdie allows his Hind to frame, to edit, and to omit Sufyan’s opinion on a matter which has direct applicability to the theme of the novel, so Rushdie allows his satanic narrator the freedom to frame his own case, to plead his own cause, to define his own terms, and to marginalize or eliminate whatever or whoever doesn’t help him attain his goals. Clearly, the satanic narrator doesn’t encourage readers to contemplate Allie’s fate in light of Sufyan’s implicit Sufism.
Interestingly, the mysticism suggested by Allie and Sufyan isn’t something critics have spend much time examining. Hélène Kafi refers to Qaf and to several other Sufi ideas in a creative essay, yet she doesn’t show where Sufi motifs enter the text.[cclxxiii] Abedi and Fischer suggest that Everest and Qaf can be associated with “the ice-woman,” that is, the English Allie and Pamela.[cclxxiv] Syed suggests a correspondence between Calf, Qaf, Kailasa and Alleluia’s “mystical Himalayas.”[cclxxv] David Myers calls Rushdie a “free-thinking mystic,” and contends that the ending of the novel suggests that the only way out of the maze created by loss of faith is “through unorthodox, mystic faith or intellectually open discussion in a framework of altruistic socialism.”[cclxxvi] It’s difficult, however, to see why in an article in which he calls Rushdie a mystic, he ignores Sufi mysticism – especially when it might go some way in explaining the liberation he detects. Sara Suleri offers a provocative reading which, although not specifically focused on mysticism, suggests that Rushdie has a religious sympathy not alien to iconoclastic mysticism: “Even before the fundamentalists descend to burn the published text, the book itself inflames, unfolding as an act of archaic devotion to the cultural system that it must both desecrate and renew”; Rushdie’s use of the ghazal links him “to a highly wrought tradition in which a recurrent trope is the rejection of Islam for some new object of epistemological and erotic devotion.”[cclxxvii] Suleri argues that just as poets such as Ghalib (who Rushdie quotes in the novel) take on the “burden of devotional blasphemy” (in which “irreligion compels” and “faith retards”), so Rushdie’s religious renunciation “is figured as a taut and ironized submission to the alterities represented by an Islamic culture in a colonial world.”[cclxxviii] While these comments offer avenues of possibility, they don’t take into account the overwhelming diabolism of the text. Critics tend to see Rushdie's mystical or iconoclastic moments as rays of light in a prism of many colours. I on the other hand see the mysticism of Allie and Sufyan as two thin shafts of wavering light in an ingeniously constructed prison of darkness.
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One might ask, What is the point of marginalizing Allie and Sufyan and allowing evil to dominate? And what is the value of a drama in which a devil-figure drives an angel-figure to homicide and suicide, and in which the devil-figure walks away scot-free? I would argue that this scenario is meaningless in the same way that the evil Satan and Iago stand for is without any positive or redeeming features (and I’m here of course not talking about any Romantic or Promethean Satan). Nevertheless, while the text is meaningless on the level of the satanic narrator’s vision - as is Othello on the level of Iago’s vision - it affirms the value of love and tolerance on a symbolic and mystical level. The suffering caused by the satanic narrator gains meaning when readers recognize his divisive scheming, when they sympathize with the victims of his manipulations, and when they see that the initial explosion of the plane Bostan is echoed in the gunfire that twice stops Alleluia from climbing to God and thus actualizing the deepest meaning of her name. In this sense the novel can become everything the satanic narrator doesn’t mean it to be.
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