The Rushdie incident as law-and-literature parable.

• Author: Chakravorty, Pinaki
• Position: Salman Rushdie

Given relatively unsophisticated notions of "law" and literature," Salman Rushdie's incendiary novel, The Satanic Verses,(1) is "literature," and the measures taken or attempted against it in Iran, India, and elsewhere,(2) however questionable, are "law" or interpretations of law. That there is interaction and clash between "law" and "literature" in the Rushdie incident is therefore obvious as a matter of common sense. That the Rushdie incident might have parabolic significance in the context of existing law-and-literature scholarship(3) is also, therefore, commonsensically valid. A parable is a story at once particular and universal(4) - a fact-intensive, narrative example (and possibly even subversive counterexample(5)) that moves beyond its particular facts to general maxims. By retelling the Rushdie incident within a law-and-literature context,(6) I will thus be telling a story about law and literature, in the tradition of legal storytelling begun by the law-and-literature movement itself.(7) My story, in turn, will demonstrate how capacities for reading and telling stories can be similar, and yet very different, within law and literature.

This Note presents the media incident surrounding Rushdie's publication of The Satanic Verses as a parable for the coexisting proximity and distance between literature and law. Part I factually situates the parable by summarizing the legal action within the incident and the novel that instigated it. Part II suggests that the Rushdie incident speaks authoritatively about law and literature because it can itself be understood as a complex literary narrative constrained by its own uncomfortably trial-like, bipolar medium.

Having established a parabolic strategy of reading, this Note goes on to read the Rushdie incident for its lessons about the law-literature boundary. First (as discussed in Part III), the incident demonstrates that legal pronouncement, when based on the reading of a literary narrative, may do violence and injustice to literary meaning. The editing and reordering of evidence necessary to achieve any legal pronouncement means, when the "evidence" is literary, that reading in the literary sense must be compromised or authoritatively simplified into trial-like side taking. Second (as discussed in Part IV), the Rushdie incident implicates an author who had previously aspired to make his fiction a quasi-legal instrument of political and social change, but who, upon success, insists that politically opinionated fiction should not be the same as politically motivated action for purposes of legal condemnation. The visible material effects of The Satanic Verses make Rushdie's assertion of literature's quasi-legal power believable; yet equally believable are his later caveats about fiction's limitations as lawmaker. Finally, the incident pinpoints a further discrepancy between law and literature (discussed in Part V) by underscoring the different conceptions of authorial intention assumed by a "multivoiced" literary novel and by the "univocal" legal society that condemns it. It nonetheless remains difficult to draw a lesson of law-literature discrepancy from the Rushdie incident, since "pluralist" championing of novelistic multivoicedness within a multicultural state appears to reconcile law and literature, albeit with some limitations. Furthermore, "fundamentalist" censure of Rushdie's novel can be understood in its own terms as a differing literary sensibility.

The Rushdie incident thus argues both for and against the law-literature relationship, its categorical stationings of law and literature being indistinct, nuanced, erratically convergent and divergent. At once example and troublesome counterexample, the incident comes to stand for a certain paradox, factually retold, at the heart of law-and-literature scholarship. Whether it relates to such scholarship in a paradigmatic or parasitic fashion is therefore predictably undecidable.

1. "Die He or Justice Must":(8) A Brief Parsing of

   the Rushdie Incident

   1. Legal Responses to The Satanic Verses

      When Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verses, he was not a stranger to the "business end" of his frequently offended readership. His dangerous roman a clef career, beginning with Midnight's Children, had already earned him a lawsuit in the High Court of London from then Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi, for one of that book's many thinly veiled and insulting references to Gandhi and her family.(9) Rushdie's next book (Shame), flippantly fictionalizing more than one generation of Pakistani politicians, had angered those among them who were still alive.(10) When The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988, Rushdie "expected that the mullahs wouldn't like it."(11)

      The profusion of legal activity against the book in the few months after its publication was nevertheless surprising. General protest without the color of law ubiquitously legitimated legal interposition, if not the exact legal action taken.(12) On October 5, 1988, the Indian Finance Ministry announced a ban on the novel, adding that the ban did not detract from the novel's literary and artistic merit.(13) Other countries, including Bangladesh, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Sudan followed the Indian government by instituting their own bans.(14) In December, the Islamic Defence Council in London held a protest rally, and on January 14, 1989, Muslims in Bradford, Yorkshire, burned a copy of The Satanic Verses in public.(15) On February 12, 1989, approximately 2000 protesters stormed the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, attacking police with stones and bricks; five protesters were killed when police opened fire on them.(16)

      On February 14, 1989, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran pronounced a fatwa (religious sentence)(17) on Teheran radio, sentencing to death Rushdie and all involved in the publication of his book "who were aware of its content," and promising heaven and martyrdom to all who would die in implementing the sentence.(18) The text of the fatwa, though clearly expressing a sentence against blasphemy or apostasy,(19) is noticeably unspecific about exactly how the book breaches law and therefore gets some of its legal force contextually, from the months of more specific public protest preceding it.

      As a legal pronouncement against literature, the fatwa must have begun in some kind of "reading" or "interpretation" of literature, but hermeneutic faculties are subordinated in the final pronouncement to judgment. Despite its religious veneer and its arguably questionable interpretation of Islamic law,(20) it is as much a legal proclamation as a religious one. Indeed, the categories of law and religion conflate in Islamic law, as this excerpt from Khomeini's elaborate post-fatwa message of February 23, 1989, shows:

      Salutations to those who rushed forward to discover the inner meaning of jurisprudence, and became sentinels to their nation and community . . . .

      . . . .

      For hundreds of years . . . [t]he oppressed people have always drunk their fill from the pure fountain of the gnosis of illustrious jurisconsults. . . .

      . . . .

      . . . The Satanic Verses is . . . a calculated move aimed at rooting out religion and religiousness, aimed above all at Islam and its clergy. . . . [I]f the World Devourers could, they would have burnt out the roots and title of the clergy.(21)

      To use Robert Cover's terms, the fatwa, like other measures taken against the novel, summons "imperial" force to create "normative meaning" (specifically, that the book is offensive and cannot be countenanced); in this, it is vitally legal.(22)

      Legal activism against The Satanic Verses did not stop with the fatwa. British Muslims later sued Rushdie and his publisher in English court under common law charges of blasphemy and sedition.(23) In the case against Rushdie, the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court affirmed a denial of seditious libel and blasphemous libel charges, on the basis that the common law offense of blasphemous libel applied only to attacks on the Christian religion.(24)

      Perhaps other legal measures could have been marshaled that were not. In a plea to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Dr. Syed Pasha of the Union of Muslim Organisations in Britain asked (unsuccessfully) for prosecution of Rushdie and his publisher under the British Public Order Act.(25) In a public letter, Indian Member of Parliament (MP) Syed Shahabuddin threatened Rushdie with several Indian Penal Code provisions that could have been used against him, had Rushdie only been living in India.(26)

      However overbearing and authoritarian, all legal response against The Satanic Verses actually relates to the literary text as both master and slave. Judgment is subservient to the extent that it must ground itself in the novel, though judgmental "reading," even in good faith, characteristically crosses into forcible misreading.

   2. The Novel and How It Offends

      The Satanic Verses is a precarious collection of overdetermined stories so uncontainable that they overflow into one another; in uncanny ways they even overflow into and circumscribe the terms of the ensuing incident. The central narrative begins with two men - Gibreel Farishta, dream-tormented schizophrenic(27) and sometime anxious religionist turned disbeliever,(28) a larger-than-life cinema idol from the excruciatingly melodramatic "theological" genre of Hindi films;(29) and Saladin Chamcha,(30) a British-educated Indian living in England, called the "Man of a Thousand Voices and a Voice" by virtue of his television and radio advertising background,(31) and therefore, importantly, also an actor. "[Ac]tors are not people,"(32) muses Chamcha at the beginning of the novel, foreboding Farishta's metamorphosis into an angel and Chamcha's own transformation into fiend, complete with bestial horns and hooves. Bedeviled by his own appearance, Chamcha is taken by the English police for an illegal immigrant, beaten and manhandled, ending up in a...