something of a traditionalist or Eastern background. Fear could remove his nearly impeccable varnish and show remnants of a superstitious heritage. To his own embarrassment, during takeoff on his flight back to London, he had crossed two pairs of fingers and rotated his thumbs, evidently practicing an Indian superstition, which he had picked up from his father in childhood. Given that his flight was hijacked and eventually exploded by Sikh terrorists, this superstitious trick was insufficient protection. Nevertheless, the whole incident of the hijacked aircraft did actually reveal a supernatural prophetic aspect to him. Before the flight, he had dreamed of a Canadian-accented bomber, carrying her explosives under the guise of a baby held close to her breasts. And once in the cabin, he noticed the almost perfect resemblance between his nightmare vision and fellow passenger. Although he severely admonished himself for Indian superstitiousness, soon afterward the nightmare came true. The woman of his dream, Tavleen, turned out to be the leader of a Sikh terrorist quartet.14
While the rest of chapter I.4 did not provide enough material for a comparison between Saladin and Mahound, it did hint at the future possibility by presenting Saladin as someone with supernatural prophetic qualities in pursuit of rebirth. Yet this chapter did offer a compact basis for comparison between Tavleen and Mahound. To begin with, the determined Tavleen and her weak-willed male counterparts sought for an independent homeland for Sikhs, religious freedom, and justice. Hence like prophet Mahound in the subsequent chapter of The Satanic Verses, Tavleen launched her religious project with three subordinates. Also noticeable, Tavleen and fellow hijackers landed their London-bound aircraft on a six-lane highway at the Al-Zamzam oasis and held it there for 111 days. The narrator’s reference to the oasis of Al-Zamzam here pointedly served to establish another link to the Mahound story line. In that story about the foundations of Submission, a religion closely modeled on Islam, the pioneering members of the faith community congregated at Zamzam—indeed in the Islamic tradition, the Zamzam Well in Mecca was an essential destination for pilgrims. Finally, in another obvious reference to Mahound and other and spiritual visionaries in the novel, Tavleen was also preoccupied with rebirth. In this context, she murmured, unique ideas and causes had to respond to some essential enquiries upon their advent. Of historical import, they had to make known whether they were unyielding, determined, and forceful, or demonstrably easygoing, reconciliatory, and giving in.
For her part, Tavleen was unyielding. Rather than accept a weakened resolve, failure, or surrender, she exploded the hijacked aircraft over the skies of England and killed everyone, except Saladin and Gibreel who were saved miraculously. Thereby, the strong-willed amazon’s religious aspirations came to naught. Her last words on record referred to the distinctiveness of martyrs, akin to the sun and stars. In contrast to self-destructive Tavleen, who was blinded by fanaticism, Mahound knew how to combine his religious zeal with political acumen. He was therefore able to achieve his ends. Uncoincidentally, Saladin wanted to tell Tavleen that unwillingness to compromise might become a pathological obsession, sort of a dictatorship, and make for fragility when, in contrast, flexibility was a civil trait that promoted longevity.15
Although The Satanic Verses has widely been held to be critical of Islamic misogyny, Tavleen’s tragic excesses showed that Rushdie’s alleged feminism was not impeccable. To add, Rushdie’s description of suicide bomber Tavleen, sexy like a bomb, was bound to raise the ire of his feminist critics, who accused him of sexism, due to his penchant for physically attractive heroines.16
As stated before, chapter I.4 also included Rushdie’s attack against Western irrationalism and religious bigotry, with particular reference to American Christianity. Although Rushdie’s primary Western target in The Satanic Verses was racism and xenophobia in England, or a variety of social conservatism, in chapter I.4 he launched a mini frontal-attack on American Christianity through his depiction of Saladin’s seat neighbor Eugene Dumsday, a ridiculous American evangelist, who was leaving India, where he had campaigned against Charles Darwin and evolutionism. Dumsday wore a neon-green shirt with luminous golden dragons, and he had huge red hands and the voice of an innocent ox. According to Dumsday, the belief that humans evolved from a chimpanzee had depressed American youth and made them turn to drugs and premarital sex. Saladin mused, in India, a nation of passionate believers, Dumsday’s case against science as God’s adversary was bound to be quite appealing, but the American had failed to connect with his audience. And in the aftermath, he had been solicited by drug dealers, an incident that struck Saladin as the revenge of Darwin. However, Rushdie concocted an even worse revenge for this ridiculous American religious fundamentalist. Somewhat accidentally, Tavleen cut his tongue off.17
Chapter I.4 ended with the trials and tribulations of prophetic lives, most notably including Tavleen and Gibreel. In the 110th day of the hijack, just before takeoff from Al-Zamzam, Tavleen sacrificed a cut-sird, meaning a Sikh who had abandoned the turban and cut his hair, or a religious renegade. The hijackers had already released all but fifty passengers, including women, children, Sikhs, Saladin’s fellow actors, and eventually Dumsday who complained too much. Then, traveling incognito and in need of company, Gibreel took Dumsday’s former seat next to Saladin. Saladin noticed Gibreel’s remarkably bad breath and painstaking efforts to stay awake, among other things by studying Dumsday’s pamphlet on contemporary academic attempts to reconcile science and religion. Dumsday had written that dry scientific characterizations were no match for the old-fashioned notion of a Supreme Creator. Finally, Gibreel fell asleep, woke up after four days, and urinated for eleven minutes. Saladin learned, Gibreel shunned sleep to escape dreams that had begun the very night he had eaten pork and always continued from where they had last stopped. In these dreams, which exacted a heavy toll on his nerves, Gibreel consistently embodied God’s archangel Gibreel. Avowedly, he was not acting. He was truly and unmistakably embodying Gibreel, the very archangel. Saladin took these confessions for egomania, although Gibreel was genuinely disturbed. Meanwhile, in the desert heat and feeling abandoned, some of the other passengers were seeing and hearing specters outside. In time, as was befitting a prophetic leader, Gibreel animatedly lectured his co-hostages on reincarnation, death, and rebirth, and likened their captivity to a process of regeneration: the day of their release would be the day of their rebirth. Thereby, he became a source of both their annoyance and optimism. Privately, however, his highest thought and ultimate obsession remained a woman, albeit named Alleluia.
NOTES
1. As Bardolph (1994, 216) noted, these dreams do not purport to be truth and, therefore, should not be considered blasphemous. And Hussain (2002, 10) informed of the exalted status of dreams in the Islamic tradition, notwithstanding the subversive nature of The Satanic Verses’ dreams.
2. Nietzsche was unacknowledged in the passage. Among the many comparable Nietzschean formulations in Thus Spoke Zarathustra was, “And whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative” (Nietzsche 1978 [1883–1891], 116).
3. For Brennan (1989, 154), Gibreel and Saladin’s fall from the skies combined rebirth in the biblical tradition and the Hindu notion of reincarnation. Kimmich (2008, 166) evoked Miltonic fall.
4. The Satanic Verses, hereafter referred to as SV.
5. For the song and its origins in Indian film Shree 420, see Stadtler (2014, 89–93). Stadtler informed, Shree 420 was a film about journeying and identity in postcolonial India. For another study on Shree 420 and allusions to it in The Satanic Verses, see Aravamudan (1989, 6–10).
6. Kuortti (2007, 132–33) argued, Saladin first realized his becoming hybrid during his celestial fall, and his demonic turn afterward suggested a link between blasphemy and identity construction.
7. For Saladin and demonic possession during the fall, see Clark (2000, 145). Demon-possessed Saladin’s order to angel Gibreel to fly and sing and the latter’s subservience marked a shift in the cosmic order: “Satan usurps God’s position in the cosmic chain of command.”
