A Crisis Of Faith

In his Mathnawi the great Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi tells a storyabout Moses and a shepherd. Moses happens upon the shepherd and hears himaddress God: "If you were here, God, I would serve you. I'd comb your hairand wash your clothes. I'd kill the lice on your body. I'd milk my goats andoffer you a bowl of fresh milk." Moses, highly offended, accuses theshepherd of blasphemy and threatens him into silence. But then Moses himself isreprimanded by God for coming between Him and the shepherd, for causing a breakinstead of a union.

Unfortunately God doesn't speak to mankind anymore, otherwise I imagine hewould give the same reprimand to those who demand Rushdie's head. For TheSatanic Verses may rightfully be seen as a "religious" book,written not out of contempt for the tradition but out of anguish over it. Morethan anything, it's a book about a crisis of faith, a human condition that isusually not allowed for by those who would live by the certainty of a distanthell and heaven. Rumi's shepherd believed in God and related to Him in thevocabulary of a shepherd; Rushdie does not believe in God yet feels compelled totry and make, in what may be called a Rushdie-an manner, a statement of faith.For Rushdie the opposite of faith is not disbelief. That is "Too final,certain, closed. Itself a kind of belief." For him, the opposite of faithis "Doubt. The human condition..."

Here, I must point out that the first and, in the opinion of some of the mostprofound minds in Islam, the greatest such crisis of faith was faced by Satanwhen he refused to obey God's command (as stated in the Qur'an) to bow beforeAdam, and thus insisted on retaining the absolute integrity of his devotion tothe One. Satan was punished by God, but has been celebrated by Sufis such as al-Hallaj(tenth century) and poets such as Iqbal (twentieth century). Iqbal called Satan"Lord of the People who Cherish Separation," and saw in his rebelliona creative tension.

Rushdie describes his book as an attempt to "give a secular, humanistvision of the birth of a great world religion." I have no reason not tobelieve him. In fact, I submit that in Rushdie's own terms, "Mahound theProphet" and "Submission the Idea" are not only triumphant butalso worthy of our respect. Repeatedly, various characters in the book areasked: What kind of idea are you? When you are weak will you compromise; whenyou are strong will you be generous? Abu Simbel, the Grandee of Jahilia and anenemy of Mahound, answers the first question: "I bend. I sway. I calculatethe odds, trim my sails, manipulate, survive." Rushdie's Mahound is alsohuman, he too has his moment of compromise, the moment of the Satanic Verses,but then he transcends it and embraces the inevitable.

What is the moment of the Satanic Verses? Al-Lat, Manat and al-Uzza werethree goddesses in pre-Islamic Arabia. Their names occur in the Qur'an, inchapter 53, verses 19-23, but a story of how those verses were first revealedand later partly abrogated because they allegedly contained words favourable tothe goddesses, was told by at least one of the earliest commentators withreference to verse 52 in chapter 22. The exegist suggests a desire on the partof the Prophet to make Islam easier for the Meccans, but since Qur'an is theWord of God, he assigns the effective role to Satan, who, he says, placed thecompromising words on the Prophet's tongue without his noticing it. However, alater revelation informed the Prophet of what had happened; it also abrogatedthe Satanic words. Most of the later commentators reject this version, thoughsome of them explain the event by arguing that Satan only caused the unbelieversto hear those words, that those words never actually crossed the Prophet's lips.Contemporary Muslim scholarship is unanimous in rejecting the entire story; manyWestern scholars accept it but do not question the Prophet's sincerity.

Does Rushdie charge his Mahound with insincerity, does he accuse him offraud? This is how Rushdie's Gibreel explains revelations: "...in thesemoments it begins to seem that the archangel is actually inside the Prophet, Iam the dragging in the gut, I am the angel being extruded from the sleeper'snavel, I emerge, Gibreel Farishta, while my other self, Mahound, lies ,entranced, I am bound to him, navel to navel, by a shining cord of light, notpossible to say which of us is dreaming the other. We flow in both directionsalong the umbilical cord."

These words contain the empathy of a secular mind, not charges of deception.To hear those charges, listen to William Muir Esqr. of Bengal Civil Service inhis The Life of Mahomet in 4 volumes, published in 1858. After recordingthe incident of the Prophet's first revelation, Muir comments: "Thus wasMahomet, by whatever deceptive process, led to the high blasphemy of forging thename of God, a crime repeatedly stigmatized in the Coran itself as the greatestthat mankind can commit" (vol. 2, p. 75).

I bring up William Muir for two reasons. One has to do with Satan. Whilediscussing the possible explanations of the Prophet's belief in his owninspiration, Muir writes, "It is incumbent upon us to consider thisquestion from a Christian point of view, and to ask whether the supernaturalinfluence, which appears to have acted upon the soul of the Arabian Prophet, maynot have proceeded from the Evil One and his emissaries. It is not for us todogmatize on so recondite and mysterious a subject; but the views whichChristian verity compels us to entertain regarding the Angel of darkness and hisfollowers, would not be satisfied without some allusion to the fearful powerexrcised by them, as one at least of the possible causes of the fall of Mahomet-- the once sincere enquirer -- into the meshes of deception."

The Christian polemicist would have Satan as the active cause of all therevelations; the Muslim exegist assigns only the abrogated words to Satan'spowers, the rest to Allah through Gibreel; but Rushdie's secular purpose isdifferent. Again listen to his Gibreel, who "hovering-watching from hishighest camera angle, knows one small detail, just one tiny thing that's a bitof a problem here, namely that it was me both times, baba, me first and secondalso me. From my mouth, both the statement and the repudiation, verses andconverses, universes and reverses, the whole thing, and we all know how my mouthgot worked."

The second reason I bring up William Muir is that when Sayyid Ahmad Khan, whosingle-handedly changed the destiny of Muslim South Asia in the nineteenthcentury, read Muir's book. he did not burn it. Instead, in 1869, he sailed offto England, spent many months in the British Museum libraries, wrote awell-documented rejoinder in Urdu, had it translated into English and thenpublished it from London with his own money. And if anyone thinks Sayyid AhmadKhan feared his English masters they don't know what they are talking about.

I don't deny that there are words, actions and images in the book that woulddeeply hurt the sentiments of any good Muslim or even of many good Christiansand Jews. Even a dubious Muslim like myself felt offended several times. If Iimagine that God would scold those who want Rushdie dead, I have no doubt thatGod would slap Rushdie's wrist hard and more than a few times for not being moresensitive to the sentiments of exactly those whom he wished to champion. But Icannot question Rushdie's motives. Anyway, there is a greater issue.

In the early history of Islam, a group of Muslims began to denounce the firstthree Caliphs as usurpers, and accused Ayesha of conspiracy and worse; some ofthem even suggested that there had been deletions in the Qur'an. Other Muslimspersecuted them. The two groups still hold to their separate views, but aftermuch killing and conflict have learned to live with each other. Similarly, whilethe vast majority of Muslims insisted on the transcendence of God, a small groupfound greater joy in God's immanence; they sought to unite with Him; one of themeven boldly shouted "I am the Truth." Many of them were severelypunished; the one who made the bold claim was crucified. But over the centuriesthe two groups learned to accept each other. Now, in these troubled times ofours, a man for whom the God of his tradition is dead but its historical prophetvery much alive, has tried to imagine a life of the soul incorporating thelatter but independent of the first. What should be done to him? What will bedone to him? How will History judge us in its course?

The Prophet of Islam was very clear in his mind as to which of his acts andwords were "prophetic," and which "human." Once, he gavesomeone advice concerning horticulture which turned out to be wrong; he acceptedhis mistake, and told the man that he was not infallible in mundane matters.Ordinary Muslims, however, see him as almost divine, not just free of any sinbut devoid of any human weakness at all. The common Muslim in South Asia doesnot get his idea of the Prophet from learned texts; he gets it from the mauloodsermons and popular texts that celebrate the Prophet's birth. He learns aboutthe orphan boy who grew up to receive prophethood, who suffered greatly at thehands of his enemies but never took revenge, who bore ridicule and publichumiliation without raising a hand to defend himself. The ordinary Muslim vowsin his heart to defend that gentle soul with all the force at his command.That's why it is so easy to arouse him in the Prophet's name.

I learned about the Prophet from my grandmother, who also had me read to hersome of her favourite books. She told me that when the Prophet returned to Meccain triumph he forgave all his former enemies. Now, as an adult, I read theearliest available biography of the Prophet, written of course by a Muslim. Itconfirms what my grandmother had told me, but it also adds that a few peoplewere in fact ordered by the Prophet to be killed, including two or three poets,one of whom was a woman. Does this take anything away from his larger act ofmagnanimity? It does not. In fact it underscores his generosity by bringing itwithin human dimensions. Now forgiveness becomes something possible for ordinarymortals like us.

C.M. Naim is Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago