their destination with references to hellishness, respectively in theater, the Bible, and cinema. He referred to Mahagonny, Babylon, and Alphaville. And Gibreel, clearly evoking his Indian background, referred to London as Vilayet’s capital. Thus allegorically, Gibreel and Saladin were jettisoned from the bosom of God in heaven to hell down below. With characteristic ambiguity, the narrator described this incident as their “angelicdevilish fall” (SV, 5).4
During their free fall, Gibreel and Saladin exposed their contrasting attitudes toward identity politics and integration. Gibreel chanted a song that emphasized his Indian eclecticism: “O, my shoes are Japanese . . . These trousers are English, if you please. On my head, red Russian hat; my heart is Indian for all that” (SV, 5).5 In rebuke, Saladin sang the British patriotic song “Rule, Brittania!” which was closely associated with the Royal Navy and imperial expansionism. And as another indication of his slavish commitment to cultural self-denial, throughout his headfirst descent, Saladin was wearing a grey suit with his jacket buttons done up and a bowler hat. Yet for all the implied stiffness of his ideological positioning, central to the plot’s further development was that, both his and Gibreel’s attitudes were not meant to be static.
Unbeknownst to them, their celestial free fall marked the beginning of their supernatural transmutation, with significant influence on their identity politics, normally a secular concern. With direct reference to Lamarck’s evolutionary theory, the narrator noted, Gibreel and Saladin began to acquire environmental characteristics. They passed through series of clouds, constantly metamorphosing into different forms, gods becoming bulls, women becoming spiders, and men becoming wolves. Notably, these cloud things were described as hybrid entities. And Saladin was semi-consciously gripped by a rising awareness of his own cloudiness, metamorphosis, and hybridity. From this point onward, Saladin painfully moved toward cultural eclecticism or hybridity, initially Gibreel’s trademark Indian trait, and Gibreel eventually adopted a sort of religio-cultural dogmatism with Islamic tones, whose strictness recalled Saladin’s initial opposition to cultural eclecticism as a strategy for successful integration to England. The narrator alternately referred to their concurrent but irreconcilable change as their transmutation, mutation, and reincarnation.6
Always exuberant, Gibreel was even less aware of the political momentousness of their fall than Saladin, who was introspective. And a miracle within miracle distracted Gibreel. Before touchdown, up in the air, he saw the specter of Rekha Merchant, seated on a flying carpet. She was a married Muslim woman who had committed suicide, due to heartbreak after their illicit love affair. Gibreel repeatedly sought Saladin’s confirmation of her spectral presence, to no avail, and Rekha interjected, further ascertaining the novel’s essential ambiguity. Rekha said, she was only for Gibreel’s seeing, and added, perhaps he was going crazy.
Still in jealous fury, Rekha cursed London-bound Gibreel with life in hell. By implication, her emphatic gesture cast doubt on Gibreel’s angelic repute. Confessedly, she cursed Gibreel with a hellish life and damned him because, in the first place, it was him who had sent her to hell. And she called him devil, who both came from and was going to hell. Indeed the subsequent development of the novel’s main plot undid the strictly dichotomous distinction between angels and devils. This said, provisionally, Rekha’s damning words had to be taken with a grain of salt. As Islam shunned suicide, she was a character doomed to hell. Accordingly, she uttered verses in an unidentifiable and unintelligible language, which was remarkably harsh and sibilant. This was almost certainly Arabic, and Gibreel vaguely discerned the word Al-lat in her revengeful verses. Al-lat was the leading goddess of Mecca before the advent of Islamic monotheism. Hence Rekha’s goddess was antipodal to Islam’s God, or Allah, and morally suspect.
Arguably, the novel’s description of the exact workings of the supernatural miracle that saved Gibreel and Saladin was an all the more forceful blow to the traditionally conceived notion of an angel. In contrast to angels that were intermediaries between gods and men, the angel Gibreel of The Satanic Verses was a highly malleable figure, who apparently conveyed messages between man and man, that is, between the same man—utilized as a sort of inspirational midwife. This last aspect of Gibreel’s angelic nature became more obvious in the novel’s following chapters and story lines with other prophetic revelations, including those devoted to Mahound and prophetess Ayesha. Nevertheless, the opening chapter did subtly broach the topic. It demonstrated angel Gibreel’s subservience to mankind in the making of a supernatural miracle and, in this connection, his malleability in the hands of man. Angel Gibreel did not act as a go-between God and men, or between God and Saladin. Of the two, in what concerned their safe landing, Saladin’s role has apparent primacy. Up in the air, despite his distaste for the boisterous and extravagant Gibreel, Saladin instinctively refrained from shunning the latter’s embrace. Somehow against himself, he did not get to command the other to stay away from him, to go away. Something that began to move and make loud noises in his intestines kept him from rejecting Gibreel. Instead he received Gibreel’s embrace with open arms. According to Saladin, in retrospect, what took over his will and saved his life despite himself was an inner volition. This inner volition had risen up against his slavish desire for assimilation through cultural self-denial, which symbolically amounted to death or disappearance. Hence a genuine, unspoilt, an all-powerful desire for survival overtook him, and it immediately condemned his pitiful character and its trademark quality, being his incomplete artificial presence. Saladin simply surrendered to such an innermost and expansive force. However, what overruled his will had an outside origin too. An external entity, resembling a hand, embraced him, so tightly yet so gently, but in all cases causing extreme discomfort, and it was capable of controlling his words and movements too. Then whatever its exact origin, this volition of and through Saladin, commanded angel Gibreel to fly and sing. Consequently, angel Gibreel began to flap his arms with increasing rapidity and sang in a language and with a tune that was reminiscent of Rekha’s curse in verse. And already embraced, they thereby save their lives. Apparently, Saladin commanded Gibreel, and Gibreel did what was asked from him.
Afterward in safety, Gibreel took this incident to be a celestial miracle, but the more Westernized of the two, Saladin, attributed it to disturbed perceptions and sheer luck. More truly, he attempted to reject the experience through reasoning. Yet paradoxically, in their dealings with other people, it was Saladin who honestly attempted to explain what happened and was taken for an absolute fool. Gibreel, man of the people, showed more common sense.
When all is said and done, the opening of The Satanic Verses heralded a momentous reinterpretation of the division of labor between man and angel. Most noticeably in this new relationship, God was out of the picture. But instead, the narrator made a vague reference to Satan to explain the chapter’s lifesaving miracle. He said, he knew what had really happened, he had seen it all. He avowedly made no claims to omnipresence and omnipotence but suggestively asked who really worked the miracles and whether Gibreel’s song was angelic or satanic? Then he put his identity into question and asked who had the best melodies. Inevitably, this and additional narratorial interjections have led to recurrent speculation about a satanic narrator. And not far removed from such speculation was the possibility of Saladin’s demonic possession, especially given his later transformations, both physical and moral. All the more so because during Saladin’s fall from the skies to England, he had felt a relentless grip on his heart, which made him think death was out of the question. Indeed it was after his supernatural or demonic possession, possibly effected through a light ray, he had ordered Gibreel to fly and sing.7 Hence his miraculous safe landing at England marked rebirth in dual sense, as the demonic newcomer.
Chapter I.2
In The Interpretation of Dreams, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1950 [1899]) argued, dreams were a subconscious attempt to reassemble thoughts, images, and sensations incurred in the conscious or awake state of being. In parallel, the narrator’s detailed description of Gibreel’s previous life in chapter I.2 offered sufficient evidence for supposing that his angelic revelations were projections based on his past learning and experiences. Although none of these shed any light on Gibreel’s miraculous safe landing in England, they did possibly explain his spectral or holy visions. Thus, for example,
