Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses addresses much more than the infamous controversy within Islam. It is about nationalism, migration, religion, postmodernism, politics, rebirth, hybridization, transformation, compromise, and Islam. However, the great controversy of the Satanic verses, as portrayed in Rushdie's novel, serves as the template from which all the other issues can be examined. Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, likewise, can be seen as an expected response that seems to fit the themes addressed in the novel. The typical Western opinion that the Ayatollah's reaction is representative of "backwards" Islam is also an ironic manifestation of the novel's themes.
Rushdie is best described as a chef who concocted an elaborate recipe for controversy. Like a bitter apostate Christian who attends church to ask blasphemous questions, he even intended to cause this controversy in order to bring more public attention to the themes he addresses in his novel.
It never happened and then it did, maybe then or maybe not.
Rushdie's recipe starts with three main ingredients: three ongoing plotlines that could exist independently. The first is Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta's ordeal, initiated at the beginning of the novel with their fall and miraculous survival from the terrorist attack on the jumbo jet Bostan Flight AI-420 (the significance of the flight number is up for interpretation). Rushdie then adds the tale of Ayesha and the town of Titlipur, and finally, the chapters set in Jahilia with the prophet Mahound and the religion of Submission.
After the rebirth of Gibreel and Saladin after the airplane attack, the novel follows these two Indian expatriate ac ...