In the passage below, from the...

In the passage below, from the chapter entitled “Mahound” in Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” (Viking Press), an Indian actor magically transformed after an airline crash into the archangel Gibreel, is thinking about his own “past,” when he spoke the words of sacred scripture to the ecstatic prophet. Gibreel, the actor/archangel, is spoken of sometimes in the first, sometimes in the third person. Muslims have been offended both by the perceived obscenity (some of it here omitted) of passages such as this one and by the way such passages seem to mock the divine origin of the Qur’an.

“In a cave five hundred feet below the summit of Mount Cone, Mahound wrestles the archangel, hurling him from side to side, and let me tell you . . . there was never a person with such a rage in him, he has to know he has to KNOW and I have nothing to tell him, he’s twice as physically fit as I am and four times as knowledgeable, minimum, we may both have taught ourselves by listening a lot but as is plain to see he’s even a better listener than me; so we roll kick scratch, he’s getting cut up quite a bit but of course my skin stays smooth as a baby, you can’t snag an angel on a bloody thorn-bush, you can’t bruise him on a rock . . . Mahound finishes it. He throws the fight.

“After they had wrestled for hours or even weeks Mahound was pinned down beneath the angel, it’s what he wanted it was his will filling me up and giving me the strength to hold him down, because archangels can’t lose such fights, it wouldn’t be right, it’s only devils who get beaten in such circs, so the moment I got on top he started weeping for joy and then he did his old trick, forcing my mouth open and making the voice, the Voice, pour out of me once again, made it pour all over him, like sick.”