Farishta seeks and finds his lost love, the English mountaineer Allie Cone, but their relationship is overshadowed by his mental illness. Chamcha is arrested and passes through an ordeal of police abuse as a suspected illegal immigrant.īoth characters struggle to piece their lives back together. In a miraculous transformation, Farishta takes on the personality of the archangel Gabriel and Chamcha that of a devil. The plane explodes over the English Channel, but the two are magically saved. Chamcha is an emigrant who has broken with his Indian identity and works as a voiceover artist in England.Īt the beginning of the novel, both are trapped in a hijacked plane, flying from India to Britain. Farishta is a Bollywood superstar who specialises in playing Hindu deities (the character is partly based on Indian film stars Amitabh Bachchan and N. The two protagonists, Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, are both actors of Indian Muslim background. The frame narrative, like many other stories by Rushdie, involves Indian expatriates in contemporary England. The Satanic Verses consists of a frame narrative, using elements of magical realism, interlaced with a series of sub-plots that are narrated as dream visions experienced by one of the protagonists. Assassination attempts against Rushdie continued, including an attempt on his life in August 2022. In 1989, Supreme Leader of Iran Ruhollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against Rushdie, resulting in several failed assassination attempts on the author, who was granted police protection by the UK government, and attacks on connected individuals, including the Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi who was stabbed to death in 1991. Fearing unrest, the Rajiv Gandhi government banned the importation of the book into India. The book and its perceived blasphemy motivated Islamic extremist bombings, killings, and riots and sparked a debate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. Timothy Brennan called the work 'the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain'. The book received wide critical acclaim, was a 1988 Booker Prize finalist (losing to Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda), and won the 1988 Whitbread Award for novel of the year. The part of the story that deals with the 'satanic verses' was based on accounts from the historians al-Waqidi and al-Tabari.

The title refers to the Satanic Verses, a group of Quranic verses about three pagan Meccan goddesses: Allāt, Al-Uzza, and Manāt.

As with his previous books, Rushdie used magical realism and relied on contemporary events and people to create his characters. First published in September 1988, the book was inspired by the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. The Satanic Verses is the fourth novel of British-Indian writer Salman Rushdie.

The satanic verses by salman rushdie