The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie)
Bibliotheek / „The Satanic Verses” van Salman Rushdie
Je was, de voorbije jaren, al een paar keer aan begonnen aan dit boek {x}, maar had telkens afgehaakt omdat je het werk onbegrijpelijk vond. Pas op 29-dec’16, na tram-gesprek met Roeselaarse moslim - en stadsgenoot - Rob (over of er nu één of meerdere - zoals de Bijbel, tiens - versies bestaan van de Koran), besefte je: “hoog tijd om Rushdie’s boek nu eens uit te lezen”… want precies de aan- of afwezigheid van bepaalde (Duivels?)verzen in de Koran, resulteerden effektief in verschillende edities van jouw favoriete boek, beste Rob :)
Vandaag kan je Rushdie’s ei appreciëren, o.w.v.
- de perfecte timing: ja, dit boek begint bij de jaar-overgang, in het koude Europa ;
- jouw bagage uit zuid-India (ref. Rushdie’s vele verwijzingen naar Pune / Mumbai / Tamil Nadu, met o.a. z’n Chola beeld-cultuur, en film-industrie, en Kanyakumari) ;
- jouw fascinatie over de - vandaag nog scherper gestelde - tegenstellingen van oost/west, aards/religieus en heden/verleden.
Het boek (35 jaar geleden gepubliceerd) is, precies door deze thema’s, profetisch & aktueel - maar evenzeer bevreemdend: een troebele cocktail !
--> Enkele citaten {0}:
p.44
Five and a half hours of time zones; turn your watch upside down in Bombay and you see the time in London.
p.100, met een fijne beschrijving van
- het dilemma waar Jahilia - oude naam voor Mekka - voor stond, met het nieuwe MONO-theïsme gepropageerd door die rare zakenman Mahound
- de oorsprong van de fameuze „Duivelsverzen” {1} in de Koran:
'The fortunes of the city of Jahilia were built on the supremacy of sand over water. In the old days it had been thought safer to transport goods across the desert than over the seas, where monsoons could strike at any time. In those days before meteorology such matters were impossible to predict. For this reason the caravanserais prospered. The produce of the world came up from Zafar to Sheba, and thence to Jahilia and the oasis of Yathrib and on to Midian where Moses lived; thence to Aqabah and Egypt. From Jahilia other trails began: to the east and north--east, towards Mesopotamia and the great Persian empire. To Petra and to Palmyra, where once Solomon loved the Queen of Sheba. Those were fatted days. But now the fleets plying the waters around the peninsula have grown hardier, their crews more skilful, their navigational instruments more accurate. The camel trains are losing business to the boats. Desert-ship and sea-ship, the old rivalry, sees a tilt in the balance of power. Jahilia's rulers fret, but there is little they can do. Sometimes Abu Simbel suspects that only the pilgrimage stands between the city and its ruin. The council searches the world for statues of alien gods, to attract new pilgrims to the city of sand; but in this, too, they have competitors. Down in Sheba a great temple has been built, a shrine to rival the House of the Black Stone. Many pilgrims have been tempted south, and the numbers at the Jahilia fairgrounds are falling.
At the recommendation of Abu Simbel, the rulers of Jahilia have added to their religious practices the tempting spices of profanity. The city has become famous for its licentiousness, as a gambling den, a whorehouse, a place of bawdy songs and wild, loud music. On one occasion some members of the tribe of Shark went too far in their greed for pilgrim money. The gatekeepers at the House began demanding bribes from weary voyagers; four of them, piqued at receiving no more than a pittance, pushed two travellers to their deaths down the great, steep flight of stairs. This practice backfired, discouraging return visits. . . Today, female pilgrims are often kidnapped for ransom, or sold into concubinage. Gangs of young Sharks patrol the city, keeping their own kind of law. It is said that Abu Simbel meets secretly with the gangleaders and organizes them all. This is the world into which Mahound has brought his message: one one one, Amid such multiplicity, it sounds like a dangerous word.'
Daarom wil de heerser van die stad, Abu Simbel (the Grandee), een deal sluiten met die Mahound (p.102):
'If our great God could find it in his heart to concede -- he used that word, _concede_ -- that three, only three of the three hundred and sixty idols in the house are worthy of worship . . ."
"He asks for Allah's approval of Lat, Uzza and Manat. In return, he gives his guarantee that we will be tolerated, even officially recognized; as a mark of which, I am to be elected to the council of Jahilia. That's the offer.' - Niet toevallig zijn dit precies de drie tempels die eigendom (en dus grote bron van inkomsten) zijn van Abu Simbel :)
Mahound gaat eerst akkoord, en declameert het ook zo bij het publiek, maar (opmerkelijk) zonder enige vorm van extase (die hij, bij vorige declamaties, WEL ten toon had gespreid): 'No trace of moisture can be detected on the lashes of his unopened eyes.' (p.111)
Vervelende consequentie: vanaf nu worden zijn volgelingen niet langer gevreesd, maar uitgelachen (als ordinaire opportunisten) door de stedelingen. En ook Hind, de vrouw van Abu Simbel (the Grandee), zegt hem vlakaf: 'I don't want you to become weak. You shouldn't have done what you did.' Mahound decodeert dit (terecht) als: 'the Grandee will betray his pledge’ (p.116)
Daarom trekt hij terug naar zijn meditatieberg (Mount Cone), waar hij zich tijdens een nieuwe meditatie/visioen laat overmeesteren (via een worstelgevecht) - en opnieuw instrueren - door de engel Gibreel. Uitgeput concludeert Mahound over zijn recente “visioenen”:
"The last time, it was Shaitan." This is what he has _heard_ in his _listening_, that he has been 'tricked, that the Devil came to him in the guise of the archangel, so that the verses he memorized, the ones he recited in the poetry tent, were not the real thing but its diabolic opposite, not godly, but satanic. He returns to the city as quickly as he can, to expunge the foul verses that reek of brimstone and sulphur, to strike them from the record for ever and ever, so that they will survive in just one or two unreliable collections of old traditions and orthodox interpreters will try and unwrite their story
...but Gibreel, hovering-watching from his highest camera angle, knows one small detail, just one tiny thing that's a bit of a problem here, namely that _it was me both times, baba, me first and second also me_. From my mouth, both the statement and the repudiation, verses and converses, universes and reverses, the whole thing, and we all know how my mouth got worked.
"First it was the Devil," Mahound mutters as he rushes to Jahilia. "But this time, the angel, no question. He wrestled me to the ground.' (p.119)
…en loopt snel terug naar het markt-terrein van de stad met z’n vele temples:
'He stands in front of the statues of the Three and announces the abrogation of the verses which Shaitan whispered in his ear. These verses are banished from the true recitation, _al-qur"an_. New verses are thundered in their place.'
p.195
Wie dit boek leest, begrijpt waarom ayatollah Khomeini een fatwa uitriep {2} tegen dit boek:
- niet o.w.v. voorgaande chapter "II Mahoun”, met daarin de spot met de profeet en ontstaansgeschiedenis van z’n boek
- maar o.w.v. dit chapter "IV Ayesha”, die de „imam”, in ballingschap (niet in een voorstadje van Parijs, maar in London) te kakken zet. De kerel met grijze baard had dus gewoon een groot ego… zoals alle despoten.
p.203
Interessante beschrijving van hoe religie de menselijke tijd overstijgt:
'They love me," the Imam's voice says, "because I am water. I am fertility and she (Ayesha, Empress of Iran) is decay. They love me for my habit of smashing clocks. Human beings who turn away from God lose love, and certainty, and also the sense of His boundless time, that encompasses past, present and future; the timeless time, that has no need to move. We long for the eternal, and I am eternity. She is nothing: a tick, or tock. She looks in her mirror every day and is terrorized by the idea of age, of time passing. Thus she is the prisoner of her own nature; she, too, is in the chains of Time. After the revolution there will be no clocks; we'll smash the lot. The word _clock_ will be expunged from our dictionaries. After the revolution there will be no birthdays. We shall all be born again, all of us the same unchanging age in the eye of Almighty God.'
p.279
MOVIE: „Imitation of life” with Lana Turner & Mahalia Jackson
p.281
“The Pakis have finally driven me out of business." She heard the word _p-a-c-h-y_, and had a bizarre vision of elephants lumbering down the Moscow Road, flattening Sunday news vendors. "What's a pachy?" she foolishly asked and the reply was stinging: "A brown Jew.'
p.284
'An iceberg is water striving to be land; a mountain, especially a Himalaya, especially Everest, is land's attempt to metamorphose into sky; it is grounded flight, the earth mutated -- nearly -- into air, and become, in the true sense, exalted. '
p.291
p.330
This Shaitan was no fallen angel. -- Forget those son-ofthe-morning fictions; this was no good boy gone bad, but pure evil. Truth was, he wasn't an angel at all! -- "He was of the djinn, so he transgressed." -- Quran 18 :50, there it was as plain as the day. -- How much more straightforward this version was! How much more practical, down--to--earth, comprehensible! --Iblis/ Shaitan standing for the darkness, Gibreel for the light. -- Out, out with these sentimentalities: _joining, locking together, love_. Seek and destroy: that was all.
. . . O most slippery, most devilish of cities! -- In which such stark, imperative oppositions were drowned beneath an endless drizzle of greys. -- How right he'd been, for instance, to banish those Satanico-Biblical doubts of his, -- those concerning God's unwillingness to permit dissent among his lieutenants, -- for as Iblis/Shaitan was no angel, so there had been no angelic dissidents for the Divinity to repress; -- and those concerning forbidden fruit, and God's supposed denial of moral choice to his creations; -- for nowhere in the entire Recitation was that Tree called (as the Bible had it) the root of the knowledge of good and evil. _It was simply a different Tree!_ Shaitan,’ 'tempting the Edenic couple, called it only "the Tree of Immortality" --and as he was a liar, so the truth (discovered by inversion) was that the banned fruit (apples were not specified) hung upon the Death-Tree, no less, the slayer of men's souls. -- What remained now of that moralityfearing God? Where was He to be found? -- Only down below, in English hearts. -- Which he, Gibreel, had come to transform.'
p.341
'At the oasis of Yathrib the followers of the new faith of Submission found themselves landless, and therefore poor. For many years they financed themselves by acts of brigandage, attacking the rich camel-trains on their way to and from Jahilia. Mahound had no time for scruples, Salman told Baal, no qualms about ends and means. The faithful lived by lawlessness, but in those years Mahound -- or should one say the Archangel Gibreel? -- should one say Al-Lah? -- became obsessed by law. Amid the palm-trees of the oasis Gibreel appeared to the Prophet and found himself spouting rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelation, Salman said, rules about every damn thing, if a man farts let him turn his face to the wind, a rule about which hand to use for the purpose of cleaning one's behind. It was as if no aspect of human existence was to be left unregulated, free. The revelation -- the _recitation_ -- told the faithful how much to eat, how deeply they should sleep, and which sexual positions had received divine sanction, so that they learned that sodomy and the missionary position were approved of by the archangel, whereas the forbidden postures included all those in which the female was on top. Gibreel further listed the permitted and forbidden subjects of conversation, and earmarked the parts of the body which could not be scratched no matter how unbearably they might itch. He vetoed the consumption of prawns, those bizarre other-worldly creatures which no member of the faithful had ever seen, and required animals to be killed slowly, by bleeding, so that by experiencing their deaths to the full they might arrive at an understanding of the meaning of their lives, for it is only at the moment of death that living creatures understand that life has been real, and not a sort of dream. And Gibreel the archangel specified the manner in which a man should be buried, and how his property should be divided, so that Salman the Persian got to wondering what manner of God this was that sounded so much like a businessman. This was when he had the idea that destroyed his faith, because he recalled that of course Mahound himself had been a businessman, and a damned successful one at that, 'a person to whom organization and rules came naturally, so how excessively convenient it was that he should have come up with such a very businesslike archangel, who handed down the management decisions of this highly corporate, if non-corporeal, God.'
p.367
'Baal said, "I've finished. Do what you want."
So he was sentenced to be beheaded, within the hour, and as soldiers manhandled him out of the tent towards the killing ground, he shouted over his shoulder: "Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can't forgive."
Mahound replied, "Writers and whores. I see no difference here.'
p.373
'It all boiled down to love, reflected Saladin Chamcha in his den: love'
…and the Obscene; this last from a letter written by Henry James, Sr, to his sons. . . "Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject's roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.”
p.379
'_To be born again, first you have to die_.'
p.389
Dr. Uhuru Simba:
'I stand here, because I have chosen to occupy the old and honourable role of the uppity nigger. I am here because I have not been willing to seem reasonable. I am here for my ingratitude.' He was a colossus among the dwarfs. 'Make no mistake,' he said in that court, 'we are here to change things I concede at once that we shall ourselves be changed; African, Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Cypriot, Chinese, we are other than what we would have been if we had not crossed the oceans, if our mothers and fathers had not crossed the skies in search of work and dignity and a better life for their children. We have been made again: but I say that we shall also be the ones to remake this society, to shape it from the bottom to the top. We shall be the hewers of the dead wood and the gardeners of the new. It is our turn now.' I wish you to think on what my son, Sylvester Roberts, Dr. Uhuru Simba, said in the place of justice. Think on it while we decide what we must do.'
p.390
'one of Camus's most popular slogans:
_The passage from speech to moral action has a name: to become human_.
p.392
Evolution theory had come a long way since Darwin. It was now being argued that major changes in species happened not in the stumbling, hit-andmiss manner first envisaged, but in great, radical leaps. The history of life was not the bumbling progress -- the very English middleclass progress -- Victorian thought had wanted it to be, but violent, a thing of dramatic, cumulative transformations: in the old formulation, more revolution than evolution.
p.405
Alicja, on the verge of catching the plane west, berated her daughter at Terminal Three. "I don't understand where you get these notions from," she cried amid backpackers, briefcases and weeping Asian mums. "You could say your father's life didn't go according to plan, either. So he should be blamed for the camps? Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects. This Gibreel of yours: maybe he's how history happens to you."
p.413
''Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan,'" Chamcha replied. "It means, 'My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty.' Nabokov... In _Pale Fire_."
p.430
'Babel: a contraction of the Assyrian "babilu". "The gate of God." Babylondon.’
—
{3} https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS0r7H9C9vE
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