Gospel & Universe 🇮🇳 The Fiction of Doubt

The Rise of the Simurg

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Introduction: Globalism & Agnosticism

In Gopel & Universe I mostly see agnostic doubt from a Western perspective, although I occasionally bring in Daoism, Hinduism, Sufism, and Buddhism, and in the previous section I went into detail about Daoism. In this section I’ll examine the global perspective of Salman Rushdie, a writer from a secular Muslim background who is intimately familiar with the ideas of Hindu India and the more secular West. In dealing largely with Rushdie’s first five novels, I examine the nature of his doubt from a global perspective, from where we see that names such as Pyrrho and Montaigne aren’t as familiar as names such as Attar and Somadeva.

The previous section, Believing in the Mystery, might be seen as one side of a spinning coin, and the present section, The Fiction of Doubt, might be seen as the other side. On the believing side is an open form of belief, one in which meaning is hidden in mystery, divinity has no face, and the spiritual path has no outline on the ground. On the other side of the spinning coin is an open doubt which is far less comforting: imprinted on the surface of the coin is an jagged, mine-studded terrain, one in which Rushdie leads us into the beauties and dangers of belief, doubt, and disbelief.

Rushdie writes about various beliefs in an ultimate Truth (or God) and in a human essence (or soul), yet he often turns these beliefs into mysticism, symbolism, paradox, ambiguity, doubt, and disbelief. He doesn’t let his reader relax into belief, and he doesn’t allow them to be comfortable with its use in political and social arenas. Indeed, if two things remain constant in Rushdie’s ever-changing universe it’s his deep respect for secularism and his deep antagonism to fundamentalism. On the political level his antagonism seems justified, given that his targets are authoritarians, yet on the theological level he seems to have weighted one side of the coin.

In spinning the coin of doubt, Whitman and the Daoists land on belief, and Rushdie lands on disbelief. Yet while the coin spins in the air — which symbolizes the status quo (or status flux!) of the agnostic — readers are invited to see religious and philosophical questions from an astounding variety of perspectives. Agnostics find this situation interesting, and come to their writings with 1. a suspension of disbelief, which brings them closer to Whitman, and 2. a suspension of belief, which brings them closer to Rushdie.

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Layout

On this page — ❧ The Rise of the Simurg — I start with a brief thematic and biographical introduction to Rushdie, emphasizing his interest in Attar’s 12th century poem The Conference of the Birds.

I then examine his first five novels as a group, using Attar’s paradigm to give shape to their varied styles and themes.

❧ S-I-M-U-R-G : All the Letters Mixed Up

❧ When Religions Collide ❧ When Religions Come Together

❧ Eruptions of the Sacred ❧ The Return of the Simurg

I then go into the individual novels in more detail, showing how Attar’s ideal of unity takes wildly different forms, integrating and clashing with a wide variety of themes, symbols, and paradigms:

Attar’s ideal of unity fuses with Hindu, Norse, and Dantean motifs in Grimus (❧ Iconoclasts: Flapping Eagle);

It becomes an ideal of subcontinental unity in Midnight’s Children (❧ The Two Adams and ❧ The Rock: Amina);

It’s degraded and obliterated in Shame (❧ The Poet & the Three Weird Sisters);

It endures a doomed resurgence in the political, cultural, psychological and religious chaos of The Satanic Verses (❧ The Flight of Angels: Gabriel & Allelujah);

And finally it attains a fantasy-laden redemption in its fusion with the Hindu paradigm of infinite stories in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (❧ Heraclitus: Athens & Allahabad∙Rushdie’s Sea of Stories; A Tale of Birds & Fishes — Note: this page on Haroun (1990) is presently located in the chapter River Journeys; later I’ll include it in this section, after I expand and integrate it with the 2010 sequel, Luka and the Fire of Life).

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Attar’s Simurg

I start my exploration of Rushdie’s doubt by looking at his favourite motif in the first five novels: the journey of 30 birds (si murgh in Persian) to the king of birds, the Simurg, on the Mountain of Qaf. Rushdie borrows this motif from Farid-ud-Din Attar’s Medieval poem, The Conference of the Birds, and he uses it to great effect in every one of his first five novels — from Grimus (1975) and his wildly successful Midnight’s Children (1981) to the increasingly dark Shame (1983) and Satanic Verse (1988), and finally his comic children’s story Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990).

Attar’s motif is crucial to Rushdie’s exploration of doubt because it allows him to partake of the Islamic poetical tradition and yet maintain a distance from strict definitions of Islam, both scriptural and societal. Attar’s long poem also has a special meaning for Rushdie in regard to freedom of expression, and in this sense it might be compared to the “Miller’s Prologue” in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Just as the host in Chaucer’s poem insists on the drunken miller’s right to speak, so each bird-pilgrim in Attar’s poem is given a voice. Each person, or bird, is free to speak up, and also free to go on the mystical journey or not.

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Attar & Khayyam

While Rushdie uses Attar (1145-1221) extensively, in terms of free-thinking he’s more in synch with the skeptical poet, mathematician, and astronomer Omar Khayyam (1048-1131), who also lived in the north-eastern Persian city of Nishapur in the 12th century. Khayyam was a free-thinking sensualist and also a skeptic who questioned Islam itself, which makes him quite close to Rushdie and quite distinct from Attar.

While Attar is more philosophically conservative than Khayyam, he nevertheless uses a great deal of poetic imagery shared by Sufi poets like Attar. Together the two poets represent a rich range of religious and intellectual sensibility. Rushdie uses Attar explicitly and implicitly, integrating his Conference schema into the structure of his stories in multiple ways, the doubting and sensual spirit of Khayyam is more a general influence. The only exception to this is Shame, where a weakling version fo the fearless Nishapur free-thinker informs the protagonist: Rushdie’s Omar Khayyam Shakil is a comic, frightened, opportunistic, and finally tragic version of the famous poet.

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Rushdie’s Liberal Upbringing

Rushdie takes Attar’s Simurg to places the Persian poet would disapprove, especially were Attar to peer into the dark and disturbing depths of Shame and The Satanic Verses. Yet Rushdie doesn’t live in the Middle Ages. He was deeply influenced by the skeptical, permissive, and exploratory culture of England in the 1960s and 1970s. Having lived his early life in a cosmopolitan and secular family in Bombay, and having gone to Rugby as a young teen and then to Cambridge as a young man, it’s not surprising that his liberal artistic philosophy is in line with Chaucer, John Stuart Mill, and all the other playful, explorative, and iconoclastic writers that followed those two key English figures.

With Rushdie we’re dealing with a writer who was born into a liberal Muslim family and did his Masters in Islamic History. He has a detailed understanding of The Arabian Nights, Khayyam, Rumi, Mahfouz, and the accounts (or Hadith) of Muhammad’s life. He knows all about communalism (the tension between Hindus and Muslims in the subcontinent), about Partition (the creation of West and East Pakistan), and about the conflict in Ayodhya (where the 16th century Babri Mosque was destroyed so that a temple to Rama could be built on the mythic place of his birth).

Rushdie was also born in Mumbai (then Bombay), where Hinduism is dominant. He knows about Hindu gods and Hindu classics, including less well-known works such as Somadeva's Kathāsaritsāgara (The Ocean of the Streams of Stories). He knows about the questioning of the Vedas and the dogmatism of the caste system. He knows about the rich narrative and philosophical writings of Hinduism, from the Upanishads to the great epics (Mahabharata and Ramayana), to the endless permutations of mythic stories in the Puranas and in works like Somadeva's Ocean of the Streams of Stories.

Finally, his family was fluent in English, and he was educated at Rugby and Cambridge, where writers such as Snorri, Dante, Shakespeare, Eliot, and Bulgakov are part of the cultural and literary landscape. Rushdie’s writing brings together these diverse traditions, often highlighting the gaps and fissures, the fragmentation, diversity, and heterogeneity of a global perspective. Yet he also suggests, implies, and at times insists on the secular possibilities of what one might call mystical unity or spiritual muddledom.

Rushdie refuses to acknowledge prudish or puritanical limits to exploration in literature, art, or philosophy. He feels free to do what he wants with tradition, however conservative this tradition may have been in the past, or however conservative it may still be. In writing about cultural and religious traditions, he writes in the wake of the first wave of Indian writers in English — that is, in the wake of Tagore’s anti-colonial politics, Narayan’s comic use of religion, Anand’s leftist politics, Rao’s highbrow philosophy, and Joshi’s realistic and anguished characters. He also writes in the wake of the European writers of the Enlightenment with its ruthless application of reason, of the Romantic Age with its Promethean Satan, and of the last two centuries with their evolution, Naturalism, decadence, and existentialism. 

In addition to borrowing freely from Islamic and Hindu literary traditions, Rushdie swims in the liberating and alienating currents of the last five European centuries, at times bobbing like Rabelais’ Gargantua in the Seine, at times tasting the elixir of knowledge from Pope’s Pierian Spring, at times driving like Conrad’s Marlow up the dark river of the Congo. Like Forster, he acknowledges that all of this makes it impossible to say that everything under the stars fits together into some Unified Whole. The universe is more a muddle than a unified Mystery. Or, if it is a Mystery, we see only fragments of its wholeness. And yet, because all possibilities must be entertained by an open, liberal artist, it’s possible that wholeness somehow exists.

In the meantime, the closest we can come to it is dreaming about it, representing it, or suggesting it in works of science, philosophy, and art — as in Cranach’s 16th century painting Cupid Complaining to Venus (below). In it the Roman goddess of love looks very much like Eve shaking a branch of knowledge to get at the fruit, all the time looking us in the eye, her lithe body tempting us into her smooth naked world with only ostrich-feather pompoms for a hat and only a necklace and choker for clothes. With these bare minimums, she offers us the world that lies around her, with its dark forest and its animals, its house on the shoreline of tranquil waters, its steep path that leads into the mountain peaks of castled stone and endless blue sky.

Cupid, below her on the left, is probably complaining on account of the bees from his honey-comb. But Venus doesn’t seem to be listening much, as she caresses with her foot the black root that slithers up from the dark floor of the forest.

Cranach’s painting contains a world of possibilities, from the Renaissance world of forbidden fruit and slithering evil, back to the Classical world and the golden apple which began the Trojan War. And yet Venus’ beauty and her frank independence seem to defy all the auguries of doom, instead taking us into a new version of the old Classical myths, a rebirth of the human form. Or to a new appreciation of Eve, with her curiosity intact.

I can’t help seeing Cupid Complaining to Venus in light of a work that Cranach couldn’t have known about: Sartre’s 1938 novel, Nausea. In it Sartre sees the black root of a chestnut tree as if it were some alien form of life. The black root alienates him from the natural world and completes the deep sense of alienation he already feels. To Venus, on the other hand, the root she caresses with her foot seems harmless enough, like her beauty and the love she inspires… and yet we can’t know where it will all lead, this eating of the apple, this frank display of nudity Nor could Cranach know where it would all lead in his day, when science was starting to have an impact, when his friend Luther questioned the authority of the Church. Time slipping ahead of him, his painting went off into the world, passing through Hitler’s hands and ending up in the National Gallery in London.

This may seem like a long detour, merely to make the point that a work of art can contain diverse philosophical, theological, and historical dimensions and ambiguities, making us question our sense of meaning as we see it change in the hands of history and geography, religion and myth, astronomy and cosmology, everyday experience and mysticism. Yet this is precisely the world Rushdie’s fiction explores, only within a largely Indian context, with it’s Muslim-Hindu dualities, it’s clashes and borrowings, it forbidden knowledge and its flights of mythic fancy, its dogma and its liberalism. All of this is on offer in Rushdie’s first five novels, which constitute a wide canvas that stretches from Dante’s Purgatory to Shiva’s Kailasa in Grimus (1975), from the Rann of Kutch to the Bay of Bengal in Midnight’s Children (1981), from the depths of Hell in Nishapur and London to the flight of angels across dangerous skies in Shame (1983) and The Satanic Verses (1988), and from the Arabian Sea on Earth to the Sea of Stories on the moon in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). Throughout all these journeys, Rushdie looks us straight in the eye, as if to ask, So, what do you think?

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The Huge Scenic Background  

If this world is not to our taste, well, at all events there is Heaven, Hell, Annihilation — one or other of those large things, that huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air. All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all. But in the twilight of the double vision a spiritual muddledom is set up for which no high-sounding words can be found; we can neither act nor refrain from action, we can neither ignore nor respect Infinity.  (Forster, A Passage to India)

It's not quite true that all that's known as art assumes the existence of things such as Heaven, Hell, and Annihilation — unless we assume that by assumption he means possibility. Nevertheless, it’s fair to say that confirming, questioning, and denying this huge scenic background has preoccupied artists from the days of Gilgamesh to those of Paradise Lost and Midnight’s Children.

Rushdie's first five novels are full of this huge scenic background — but also of the confusion or muddledom which comes from being caught between cosmic and earthly scenarios. For instance, the title of his first novel, 'Grimus,' is itself a mixed-up or anagrammized version of Attar’s mythical 'Simurg,' a mythical God who is rumoured to reside on the cosmic Mountain of Qaf, and who is the object of the Sufi mystical quest dramatized in The Conference of the Birds, an 11th Century poem by the Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar. The god on top of the mountain in Grimus however is a false, megalomaniacal god, and therefore he must destroyed. This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. The quest to destroy the twisted icon this god has become is conflated with Dante’s journey to Paradise (where metaphors fall apart because they can’t express the ineffable), Shiva’s love-making on Kailasa (which threatens the cosmos), and the journey of Loki (to burn down the abode of the gods).

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Attar's Valley

Rushdie’s first five novels might be seen in terms of Attar’s Conference of the Birds (1177), especially Attar’s concept of a journey across the valleys of mysticism. In Attar, this journey has multiple stages and is quite complex, as I explain in the next page, Grimus: All the Letters Mixed Up). Here I’ll simplify the schema, and go from the top of one side of the valley (his first novel, Grimus), down into the depths of the valley (Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses), and then back up the other side (Haroun and the Sea of Stories).

At the top of one side of the valley we find Grimus, published in 1975. Here we find the Simurg in all its iconoclastic glory. That is, we find it not only broken on the altar of man’s idolatry, but also exploded into a general annihilation. This follows the mystical notion that in order to find God you must destroy the self and all its limited perspectives, so that you can enter into an annihilation that’s also a fusion or unity with God. In Midnight’s Children (1981) we drop from this peak of mystical annihilation, and fall precipitously into the Fallen World: we fall from the Eden of Kashmir into a divided world and into the degradation of Attar’s 11th century ideal of Conference, which is used by Rushdie as a contrast to communalism (Muslim-Hindu conflict) and the degradation of democracy (Indira Gandhi’s suspension of parliament during the Emergency). By the end of the novel there only remain vague hints of Attar’s unity to save us from the bleakness of history. In Shame (1983), we fall yet further into the valley, so deep that the lofty ideals of Attar are all but crushed beneath the weight of lust, violence, and militarism. And yet, thinking back on the two novels, we remember the ideals of unity: old Aziz sahib and his thirty species of birds, the Free Islam Conference that Aadam Aziz hopes can unify Muslims and Hindus, the brave stand of Amina against the many-headed monster of communalism, the Midnight’s Children Conference Saleem hopes can move India into liberal democracy, and the vain attempt of Mahmood to play a double bill in his movie theatre, a Muslim-Hindu ideal which ends up being the double bill of his destruction.

While it would seem there's no where to go but up, we fall yet further, into the deep abyss of The Satanic Verses (1988), a novel which reworks the account of Muhammad’s rejection of polytheism from the perspective of a homicidal schizophrenic (there are many other stories in the novel, even comic stories, yet this is one of the main narratives, and also the one that gives rise to the title). In the Verses, the forces of the deep are unleashed, snuffing out the eclecticism of Sufyan and the love and mystical mountain peaks of Alleluia. Yet even in their obliteration, and in the general fall of religion into insanity, Rushdie insists on the secular, humane mystical visions of Sufyan and Alleluia, names which suggest both Sufism and praise God.

The fifth novel is a glorious, comic return to the unifying ideals of Attar: in Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1991) Rushdie returns us to the peaks, the dark forces vanquished, the journey at once finished and just beginning. I examine Rushdie’s fusion of Attar’s Islamic paradigm and Somadeva’s Hindu paradigm in 🇮🇳 Rushdie’s Sea of Stories (in ♒️ A River Journey).

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While in his early fiction Rushdie pokes enormous holes in what Forster calls the huge scenic background of stars, fires, blue or black air, this background remains there nevertheless. It insinuates itself into the concerns of his characters, and is crucial to the structures and meanings of his narratives. This fits with what Rushdie calls, in an interview with Eleanor Wachtel, a type of fiction “which doesn’t prejudge whether your characters are right or wrong,” “a form in which the idea of the miraculous can coexist with observable, everyday reality.” 

This form of writing is very compatible with agnosticism, which also doesn’t prejudge the correctness of belief or disbelief. In his essays Rushdie highlights skepticism about all forms of religious doctrine, yet he also highlights the idea of spiritual flight, of keeping an open mind, and of the right of people to explore belief and disbelief in any way they want. His exercise of this right eventually gets him in trouble with the mullahs of Iran in 1988, forces him to go into hiding for a decade or so, and makes him the victim of a vicious knife attack in Chautauqua, New York, on August 12, 2022. The price he’s paid for his stand — which at once includes and critiques religion — is well known, and makes him something of a paradox: a living martyr for religious and artistic freedom.

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Next: 🇮🇳 All the Letters Mixed Up

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