Reading this book was quite strange, but interesting. It was also fun to read as it had elements of humor in it that most of the other literature that we have read does not. It was also the only novel that we have read this semester. It was kind of hard for me to understand why it was controversial at first, but then after reading around it and participating in the class discussion I think I know why. Rushdie was making fun of the Quran, so when it got out of hand he was punished. This book lead to riots and unrest, so Ayatollah Khomeini addressed it as he saw fit. He saw this book as an act of apostacy, which was punishable by death.
One thing that I noticed while reading this book was the similarities it had to a book that I have read that was recently turned into a television series which I have watched. Good Omensby Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett is about an angel and a demon working together before and on Judgement day to prevent it and save the Earth. The main two characters in Satanic Versesare also act as a demon and an angel, and they have to figure out how to navigate Earth and do as they have been told. Gaiman and Pratchett wrote Good Omensaround the time when Salman Rushdie had to go into hiding for writing Satanic Verses. They were worried that their book might be met with similar problems, but when it was released, all it got was love. The problem came years later when Neil Gaiman produced a television mini-series on Good Omens. Thousands of Christians signed a petition to Netflix to discontinue the show. This is kind of ironic because it is not even a Netflix show. It is an Amazon Prime show, and there was never going to be more than one season of the show.
Gaiman and Pratchett never had to hide like Rushdie did, but they witnessed the full impact of Rushdie’s book. They saw the reports of the riots and the attempts on his life. They and Rushdie both knew that their respective books might cause controversy in their respective religious worlds (Rushdie-Islam, Gaiman and Pratchett-Christianity), but they wrote and published them anyway. The meeting and actions of a demon and an angel caused a lot of protests, especially when they do not quite follow what they are supposed to do.
My questions for this text were:
- How do the two main characters in the first part view themselves? Their relationship? How are they viewed by the people in their lives?
- How do their outfits reflect their personality? What about their actions and expressions?
- How are the differences in good and bad explored in this text? Are they really so different? Could “human” be considered its own category somewhere in between? If so, how would you define “human.”