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chapter 1 Salman Rushdie’s Wounded Secularism Battle lines are being drawn up . . . Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark. Better you choose which side you are on. —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses Quoted out of context, as the words of celebrities often are, the epigraph above might easily be taken to betray Salman Rushdie’s personal convictions on any question of the “secular versus religious,” as the available choices are rendered in this passage of The Satanic Verses. Even readers lucky enough to have read the novel during the brief pre-fatwa window—opening with its hardcover publication in the United Kingdom on September 26, 1988, and closing less than five months later with the Ayatollah Khomeini’s announcement on February 14, 1989—would be forgiven for assuming that Rushdie had shaped The Satanic Verses as the sharp tip of his secularist spear. After all, one of the novel’s most conspicuous embodiments of formal religion is a vengeful imam, who appears in Gibreel’s dreams with “beard . . . blowing in the wind . . . red eyes . . . [and] fingernails that have grown into long, curved claws” (218). As befits a villain in a novel that owes much to Menippean satire, a tradition that blends carnivalesque parody with a picaresque prose form and epic narrative range, the imam’s vision of purity and genocide serves as an antiphonic mirror for the novel’s celebration of the hybrid and the new. The first American edition was released a week after the fatwa, and the paperback was delayed by security concerns until 1992; thus, for most readers of the novel, myself included, the dust cloud of the so-called “Rushdie affair” has made it even more difficult to discern the details and implications of what turns out not to be a “battle” of “secular versus religious” in The Satanic Verses at all.1 20 ❘ Wounded Secularism In his public pronouncements, Rushdie has often been forced into a pugilistic corner on the subject of religion, from which he echoes the sentiments and confrontational posture of the militant secularism he satirizes in The Satanic Verses. “‘In God We Trust,’” for instance, an essay published in 1985 and again in revised form after the fatwa, opens with the following assertion, similar in style and form to that of the epigraph: “We stand at a moment in history,” Rushdie declares, “in which, as we look around the planet, it appears that God—or, rather, formal religion—has begun once again to insist on occupying a central role in public life. There could scarcely be a more appropriate time to explore the subject of the relationships between politics and religions” (Imaginary Homelands 376). In this essay, Rushdie articulates a deeply antagonistic model of the relationship between religion and secularism, one that seems to contain the platform of his thinking throughout the subsequent decades. With its panoptic view of the planet and complicit “we” of insider address, Rushdie’s observer of history lays claim to a familiar set of secularist ramparts, rising to defend a public sphere from which God has allegedly once been purged against the incursions of a resurgent “formal religion.” Rushdie’s primary argument against religion takes as its object textual originalists of various schools—those who believe their sacred texts represent the inerrant word of God—seeing in these modes of reading nothing more than just-so stories and prescientific attempts to explain natural phenomena . In this oft-cited essay, Rushdie communicates the terms and history of his personal convictions in bold tones, espousing an atheism that has become an integral aspect of his public persona, literary voice, and critical reception. If, as he claims, when the subjects of his novels “made it essential for [him] to confront the issue of religious faith,” his aim was to “describe” rather than pass “judgment,” Rushdie’s goals in his essays, in contrast, often seem closer to those of “new atheists” like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Daniel Dennett : to bloody noses rather than extend a generous hand. The combative secularist advocating muscular, evangelical atheism in The Satanic Verses turns out to be, not one of the novel’s protagonists , but “a tall, thin Bengali woman” named Swatilekha—a minor, unsympathetic figure rendered with an attention to detail that belies her peripheral role in the narrative. Cast as a postcolonial academic whose opinions on the subject are the result of “too much college education,” Swatilekha rejects art for what she calls the “crystal clarity” of atheist sloganeering...

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