When was satanic verses released

Rini No. He did not deserve to have his life threatened for writing a book, ffs. See all 13 questions about The Satanic Verses…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of The Satanic Verses. Satanic Verses: A Composition He had just finished his thirty-fourth reading of the play.

The unsaid hate, the unseen events, the half-imagined wrongs; they tormented him. What could cause such evil to manifest, he just could not figure. He loved him too much to believe the simple explanation. And then the idea starts growing on him - to explore the growth of evil just as Shakespeare showed, explored the tragic culmination of it.

And because you show the growth, it can no longer be a tragedy, no, Satanic Verses: A Composition He had just finished his thirty-fourth reading of the play. And because you show the growth, it can no longer be a tragedy, no, no it has to be a comedy.

A tragicomedy. And he set to it. He painted Othello as an Indian actor, worshiped and adored and off on a mad canter to get his Ice Queen, his Desdemona. On his way he meets him - the poor man trying to forget his own roots and desperately reinventing himself, his Iago. Yes Iago too was once a man.

What twists of fate made him evil incarnate? Wait a minute, he blinks at his notes, if Iago is evil incarnate, does that not also mean that he is Satan incarnate? Chamcha then is Satan incarnate? Then Othello has to be God? A little bit more corruptible maybe? Let us make him the angel Gibreel, he decided. As an aside, as the angel, he can slip into that reality in his dreams and reenact the story history?

Why not call the novel so too, except that it would mean something else - the verses that the real Satan of the story, Iago, sings in Othello's ear.

He knows that this might be cause for misunderstanding, might ruffle a few feathers, but it is just a digression, the real story is beyond that - it is not the Event Horizon. But he can't help himself. He never could keep a story simple. Ah, now something beyond mere Othello is taking shape is it not?

If Iago is Satan, then surely it is in character to enjoy with consummate pleasure the sight of his own jealousy consuming himself - the green-eyed monster that feeds on itself. So Satan decides to narrate the story of one of his incarnations? Or rather, possessions? The questions that are to run his plot are flowing freely now. How an ordinary man when in contact with an angel inevitably had to transform into Lucifer himself.

How can one exist without the other. They meet and the spiral ensues and Iago mutates and agitates and like a cancerous growth his strange fate builds until he turns his wrath square on his angel, his Othello. And how can he then not try to destroy what he is not, what he can not be. There is the moment before evil, then the moment of, then the time after; and each subsequent stride becomes progressively easier.

But what about before and after the madness? It surely must be an ordinary life, with ordinary joys and pains. It is a cosmic drama, he concludes. In the process, every insinuated implication in the play is to be played out in this story - Cassio does sleep with Iago's wife, Iago is madly lustful of Desdemona, Othello is a deserving victim of directed revenge for very real ills and Iago needs no invented or unbelievable reasons for his actions.

He is justified. It was inevitable. Salman Rushdie sets down his pen. He has vindicated Iago, many a literature lover's favorite character. And for that, I am eternally thankful. View all 71 comments. I never got past page 60 in this book. I read and forgot and reread and forgot again up unto about the fifth reading when I thought to myself that I might rate Midnight's Children as one of the greatest books I've read, enjoyed the depiction of Benazir Bhutto as the Virgin Ironpants in Shame a great deal, but I also couldn't read Shalimar the Clown and thought that Grimus was excreble not even Rushie rated this first offering of his oeuvre.

So what was I doing trying so hard with the Satanic V I never got past page 60 in this book. So what was I doing trying so hard with the Satanic Verses? I felt that for a book to engender such a farrago of praise, death and destruction I must read it for myself and see what it was all about.

But I couldn't. It bored me rigid. However from the synopsis and reviews I have read of the book, I think it might translate into an excellent film, I just don't think there is a director alive courageous enough to make it, nor a cast who would act in it, and I don't blame any of them. But I do hate that the fundamentalists have got even that much of a victory. Well not death, nah, not that, just shut up already and go and moan to your friends and family like everyone else would.

View all comments. Occasionally, I will go into Half Price Books and buy a book that hasn't been recommended by any one I know, by an author I've never read before, solely because of its "critical acclaim.

It is a weakness. My decision was based on the controversy surrounding the book. It was thought to be so controversial, so blasphemous, that Ay Occasionally, I will go into Half Price Books and buy a book that hasn't been recommended by any one I know, by an author I've never read before, solely because of its "critical acclaim.

It was thought to be so controversial, so blasphemous, that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Salman Rushdie. It became every Muslim's sacred duty to hunt down this writer of fiction and kill him.

So I thought these were the days long before the reaction to Danish comics wow, this book pissed off people enough that they want to kill him? I must read this book. It's gotta be good. That's what controversy does. It brings a lot of attention to something that doesn't always merit the attention. So, when I bought Rushdie's book, I fell for the hype. Partly because it was a subject that I did have an interest in. I'm an amateur theologian, and I can't find better amusement than blasphemy.

Besides that, I love Magic Realism and this book had plenty of that. What this book did not have plenty of was editing. This book was in serious need of an editor. There were parts that were more thrilling and exciting, but overall, the writing of the book was bland and uninspired for its very interesting subject matter.

Quick Plot Summary: Two Indian ex-patriots, now living in England living very famous lives are on an airplane when it is exploded by terrorists.

They survive the explosion and the fall and upon landing begin changing. The garish obnoxious one, gains a halo, becoming the arch-angel Gabreel and the prim and proper other one gains horns and goat legs. The devil's story is his reintroduction into society and the angel's story is through his dreams, he inspires the prophet Mohammad. Everything culminates into a showdown between these two entities.

But along the way, nothing happens. We have pages and pages of unnecessary background information. And then, we have more pages and pages of unnecessary background information. We keep getting filled with pages and pages of unnecessary background information.

Suddenly, we're faced with a book that is much larger, and more importantly, much drier than it should be. It really does have the basis for a great story. Wonderful things happen in this book that everyone should read, but it's not worth getting through all the unnecessary to get there.

I've never taken so long to read a book. Usually, I read a book when I want to and usually that's all the time. This book, I only read in great spurts when I was sitting and waiting. I read a bunch when I was sitting and waiting at a debate tournament. I read a bunch while I was sitting and waiting monitoring my students testing. I read a bunch while I was sitting and waiting in the bathtub for my health to return.

Never was there a point when I wanted to pick up this book because it was interesting and I couldn't wait to get back to the story. As big a fan of magic realism as I am, I was disappointed. If you're looking for a Muslim centric magic realism story that uses a lot of the same story telling techniques that Rushdie uses, I recommend a far superior story done by a far superior writer: Farnoosh Moshiri's At the Wall of the Almighty.

View all 22 comments. From the archives: September 27 The Satanic Verses , the controversial first draft of the Quran recently discovered after spending years in a safe deposit box, finally appeared yesterday to a mixed reception.

I'm so excited!! Can you believe it?! Influential blogger AyatollahK has been particularly outspoken. View all 40 comments. Apr 24, Taylor rated it it was amazing Recommends it for: those who are not easily daunted. Shelves: favorites , in-a-land-far-away , desert-island-picks , not-by-a-white-guy , fiction , ramble-on , own , to-reread , recommended , the-power-of-love. Here's the thing about this book that you will immediately grasp from what everyone says: it's a beast. I do not mean this in a bad sense.

I mean this in the sense that it's overwhelming. It's long, complex storylines that involve overlapping characters and storylines that don't overlap in time or space at all , dense and occasionally slow.

It is not for the reader with ADD. No matter how quickly you think you might read, reading this book will slow you down. No matter how determined you are to Here's the thing about this book that you will immediately grasp from what everyone says: it's a beast. No matter how determined you are to catch every single detail and nuance of this book and what it means, you will not. I can generally blaze through a book in a matter of days. It took me an entire year to read this book, and was almost certainly my longest read.

I often had to go back and refer to other parts of the book to keep names and events straight. Rushdie is a master writer, and I can't tell you how much I took away from this book. I would have liked to taken a class on it while reading it so that I could have understood more of it, but even without one, I enjoyed every second of it.

View 2 comments. Mar 03, Sean Barrs rated it did not like it Recommends it for: those who have a strong grasp on Islamic theology and the Quran. Shelves: 1-star-reads , magical-realism , i-tried. The Satanic Verses is vastly imaginative and creative; it is a force to be reckoned with in the literary world providing you can actually get through it.

Perhaps if I was more widely read I would have appreciated it more. T The Satanic Verses is vastly imaginative and creative; it is a force to be reckoned with in the literary world providing you can actually get through it.

Otherwise most of the allusions will be wasted on you like they were me. It drew upon such a huge wealth of myths, religion and stories that it became so hard to follow. Multiple names are used to refer to the same characters and they frequently shifted in and out of the narrative making it hard to focus on the story and discern what the actual story was at any given point. This meant that a confusing novel became even more confusing.

I find the history of the novel, the events that led Rushdie to go into hiding as he feared for his own life, far more interesting than the actual work itself perhaps because I can actually comprehend the facts as they are not veiled in a web of incomprehensible allegory.

One day I will come back to this book, not anytime soon; it will be a day when I am more familiar with the texts it discusses and engages with. At least then, I may be able to read it and form a solid opinion of it. View all 12 comments. Jul 16, Michael Finocchiaro rated it really liked it Shelves: fiction , indianth-c , favorites , magical-realism , indian-subcontinent , post-modern.

Unfortunately, most people know this book from the scandal and fatwa it generated around the personage of its prolific and outspoken author Salman Rushdie rather than the book itself.

The thing that enraged some Muslims and the Ayatollah of Iran most of all was Rushdie's hypothesis that Mohammed, being completely illiterate and having the Qu'ran being narrated to him by Archangel Gabriel could have dozed off at one point and that Satan could have impersonated Gabriel without Mohammed noticing Unfortunately, most people know this book from the scandal and fatwa it generated around the personage of its prolific and outspoken author Salman Rushdie rather than the book itself.

The thing that enraged some Muslims and the Ayatollah of Iran most of all was Rushdie's hypothesis that Mohammed, being completely illiterate and having the Qu'ran being narrated to him by Archangel Gabriel could have dozed off at one point and that Satan could have impersonated Gabriel without Mohammed noticing causing some verses of the Holy Book to be written by him. That's it.

Just a theory. No more than when Kazantzakis imagines Jesus fantasising about accepting Mary Magdalene's sexual advances. It ended by saying, "we have a message for Peter Sissons … he will pay the price for being rude and insulting to the representative of Imam Khomeini.

The call was from a group called the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution , one of the first groups to claim responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing. David told me that I was going to have hour personal protection for me and my family until further notice — the arrangements had already been made. My new best friends, the men who were to be my family's constant companions for the next few months, were already waiting to look after me.

Clearly ex-soldiers, probably ex-SAS, these two guys lived in our attic for almost two months, and I was chauffeured to work every day.

I got to know what it was like to be someone under threat. God knows how people live with it for years. If you go out for a meal they are at the next table, and if you want to go to the toilet, they go in first to make sure it's safe. Eventually I said, I just can't go on like this. They gave me a thorough briefing on how to look after myself, I had a hotline to the local police station, and was trained to look under my car and to vary my route to work every morning.

During that time I had to interview Margaret Thatcher. After the interview she took me to one side and said she was aware of the threat to me and that they would do all they could to protect me.

She was very maternal. I thought: gosh, I really do have to take this seriously. Looking back to the autumn of , I think it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that it was in the heat of the Satanic Verses affair that we first saw the forging of a consciously British Muslim identity in the UK. I was a second-year university student at the time and it was a heady feeling marching and demonstrating alongside others who were from various ancestral backgrounds, including from the Indian subcontinent, north Africa, south-east Asia and elsewhere, but all united by their faith in Islam.

Of course, our demands — which included the pulping of all copies of Rushdie's novel — were, in retrospect, totally over the top and very embarrassing. We may not have liked his book, but there could be no excuse for trying to deny others the right to buy it and read it for themselves. I would hope that if the same events were to be replayed today, UK Muslims would instead respond by publishing their own books offering their own narrative.

But you know what? After all these years, I still think Salman Rushdie is a bit pompous. Our families had been friends in Bombay before my father came to England and Rushdie's family moved to Pakistan. I was introduced to Salman by Italo Calvino in , so we'd been friends for a while by the time of the fatwa. From Ulysses , to Last Exit to Brooklyn , to Baudelaire to Madame Bovary , books have been attacked and condemned by various authorities, but it hadn't happened for a while in Britain.

We'd all become rather complacent. The fatwa is one of the most significant events in postwar literary history; it reminded us that words can be dynamite and that in other parts of the world, particularly in the Muslim world, writers who spoke freely could be in great danger. One of the most important things about The Satanic Verses is that Rushdie was speaking of uncertainty and asking the questions that anyone who believes also has to ask themselves. This came at a huge price, and all of us should be grateful to him for his bravery in being willing to pay it.

The novel was bold and imaginative, yes. But blasphemous? How could a lateth-century novel be that? It didn't win the prize, but Salman — allegedly a bad loser — was gracious about the novel that did, Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda. The fatwa was issued on 14 February , the eve of Bruce Chatwin's memorial service.

Salman attended the service but disappeared straight afterwards. At the time, I was literary editor of the Observer, and Salman had been due to deliver a review of the new Philip Roth novel the following Tuesday.

To my amazement, it showed up on time, in the post. Book reviews don't normally make headline news, but with Salman in hiding this one did. An ITN camera crew turned up and shot footage of the typescript. Salman had scribbled a friendly note at the top and the cameraman, outwitting me, sneaked a shot of it. What appeared didn't compromise Salman but he was upset and angry, understandably enough.

In time we got over that and he began reviewing again — the only kind of writing he felt up to. He also came round to my flat a few times, for supper — a break from incarceration for him and a way for friends of his to catch up and pledge support. Our kids grew up with the idea that when you give a dinner party armed plainclothes policemen sit watching television in the next room. I did an interview with him, to accompany it, which meant meeting him at a safe house.

The paper decided that the interview made me a marked man a not unreasonable position: editors and translators of his would later be stabbed and shot and sent a security guard to stay. Nothing remotely threatening happened, but for a week the guard accompanied us everywhere, even on an outing to the gardens at Wisley. I also got out of jury service: the court didn't want me once they knew who I was. When Andreas Whittam-Smith, editor of the Independent, and I travelled to Bradford to meet Muslim clerics, to see if they'd disassociate themselves from the fatwa, we didn't get anywhere.

And though things are easier for Salman now, the threat to his life hasn't gone away. Other writers also suffer at the hands of repressive regimes and religious zealots. No cause seems more important to me than to go on defending them — and their right to imagine. The 60 or so novels submitted for the Whitbread prize were initially divvied up between three judges Fay Weldon, bookseller John Hitchin and myself.

Each of us was asked to read the titles on our list and submit our preferred three, and we would select the winner from the shortlist of nine. The Satanic Verses was on my list of I did not include it in my selection, but the other judges called it in and I was outvoted when they insisted on awarding it the prize. It was close to the last moment when the book could be judged solely on its literary merit.

The Moor's Last Sigh was his first adult novel after The Satanic Verses , so it was crucial for both Salman and the book that he should be able to do publicity. I have never had to go to New Scotland Yard to discuss publication before or since. When we suggested the possibility of a reading at the National Theatre, the initial reaction was a mixture of alarm and incredulity.

But this stage passed, and we were soon privileged to have Scotland Yard become increasingly inventive about how we might manage a book launch.

These ideas, if I am not mistaken, included a sort of a Magical Mystery Tour, which would pick up our audience from the South Bank and ferry them to an undisclosed destination.

The final answer seemed much simpler: a launch at Waterstone's in Hampstead, albeit under very tight security. But how was our audience to find out about the event at all? Security demanded we refrain from any announcement until the day of the reading. Then we would have to rely on a small blackboard outside the shop. I have a vivid memory, hours before the reading was due to start, of looking out of an upstairs window while the sniffer dogs disappeared inside the shop, and then seeing a large number of police on horseback coming up the deserted high street.

The blackboard, however, was a huge success. We got a crowd, every member of which submitted to the detectors with good will. It was a truly great event. Salman was always a wonderful ally in making publication happen despite the difficulties and obstacles. He was also able to take immense pleasure in the process of publication, which we had all hitherto taken for granted. We went together to see the first copies of The Moor's Last Sigh come off the printing press.

As Salman picked up the first copy and held it in his hand, it occurred to me that this moment was, literally, publication. I had never valued it so highly in my life. The controversy marked the first demonstration of Islam's globalisation, allowing Muslims from around the world to imitate one another's protests as seen on TV, without any organisational links.

Whatever the local politics involved at each site of Muslim protest, it was the global arena emerging with the end of the cold war that gave the Rushdie affair its meaning. The author and his book were incidental to this mobilisation, which is why so few of its Muslim critics had read the novel. But even after other such controversies, over cartoons or papal comments, all concerned with insults against Muhammad, debate about them is dominated by old-fashioned ideas about free expression.

Become an author Sign up as a reader Sign in. Myriam Renaud , University of Chicago. Author Myriam Renaud Ph.

Angry demonstrators protest against the book in The year-old writer lived in hiding for many years after Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his execution. Sir Salman said writers were still being attacked for their works in the same way, in Muslim countries including Turkey, Egypt, Algeria and Iran.

He pointed out that, as recently as last week, Channel 4 had cancelled a screening of its documentary, Islam: The Untold Story, following security threats. However, the author said he noted that, on the 20th anniversary of the fatwa, many who had arranged protests against him told newspapers they thought their actions had been a mistake.