Salman Rushdie and the Scriptural Revolution

Louis Massignon, the late French historian and student of Islam, once remarked that the Muslim world had undergone the industrial revolution but remained untouched by the scriptural revolution. During the past two weeks, however, the Muslim scriptural revolution may have begun at last in earnest.

The conditions for it were ripe. Salman Rushdie named one of them when he described his novel “The Satanic Verses” as “about migration, its stresses and transformations, from the point of view of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to Britain.” Migration and the immigrants’ continuing communication with their homeland has made it possible for a book like his, published in Britain and the United States, to become an event in India, Pakistan and eventually even Iran.

Relations between Britain and the Indian subcontinent go back 300 years, of course, but during most of that period, only a small elite traveled from the colony to the seat of empire. If the elite became Westernized, in the manner of Nirad Chaudhuri (see Page 3), it mattered little. Their countrymen, outside the elite, might have been shocked had they known what the elite was thinking, but few did know.

Today, many know. Knowledge of English is far more widespread than it was, and--perhaps most important--Indian and Pakistani Muslims (not to speak of Muslims from other countries) are resident in Western countries in larger numbers than ever before.

When the Iranian imam decrees the death of a British citizen and bomb threats close down a New York publishing house, it is difficult not to believe that they are doing something to us. What on earth, what of remotely comparable gravity, can we have done to them to provoke this response?

Were Massignon alive, he might reply: You have exported your scriptural revolution. “We” may be said to have done this, rather than Rushdie alone, for the confrontation clearly has come to involve more than just his brilliant, daring novel, central though that work remains. Rushdie was born into a Muslim family in a Muslim part of the world. By his own explicit testimony as well as by the evidence of his book, he is no longer a Muslim. Has this change--his apostasy, his dropping out (a capital offense in the eyes of some conservative Muslims)--been a purely interior voyage? Or is it rather to be charged to his Western education? Many Muslims, without for a moment excusing Rushdie, clearly suspect the latter.

Rushdie writes: “the battle of ‘The Satanic Verses’ is a clash of faiths, in a way. Or, more precisely, it’s a clash of languages. As my fictional character ‘Salman’ says of my fictional prophet ‘Mahound,’ ‘It’s his Word against mine.’ ”

The clash is all that and more, for Rushdie’s very way of putting the question--”his Word against mine”--reflects no ordinary faith but rather the paradoxical faith of rationalized Western secularism. His is the clash between the will to believe and the will to dispense with belief.

The scriptural revolution in the Western, Christian-and-Jewish world was not, at the beginning, so radical a clash as this. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution may have dismissed the Bible, but the dismissal didn’t stick. The 18th Century needed the Bible. Its own extra-biblical understanding of ancient history was scarcely less sketchy and vague than that of the Old Testament.

No, the Western scriptural revolution began later, at the dawn of the 19th Century when the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone (1799) pushed open the door to the genuinely ancient Near East. Suddenly, the world Europe lived in--the historical world, not the paleontological or geological one--was older than Europe had ever guessed, even if the realization of just how much older would require a series of epoch-making excavations in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

During the 19th Century, as a free-standing, extra-biblical historical context took shape, historians began to set the founding figures of Western religion--Moses and Jesus--within it. The Bible--for centuries the unquestioned, Genesis-to-Apocalypse ground upon which the figures of all of human history had been drawn--now became just one figure among many on a still larger ground. The resistance of the Church to this change was massive.

Had the Rosetta Stone been deciphered in 1599 instead of 1799--that is, before Europe had exhausted its capacity for inter-Christian religious violence in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the Western scriptural revolution might have been resisted with counter-revolutionary death sentences like those that the Ayatollah has decreed against Salman Rushdie. As it was, 19th-Century scholars like David Friedrich Strauss and Ernest Renan, each the author of a life of Christ in which the New Testament was taken simply as one historical document among others, were reviled and, in some spiritual sense, destroyed. Strauss, whose book was published in Germany in 1835, never taught again: No university dared hire him. Renan, a French priest whose “History of the Origins of Christianity” appeared in 1863, was excommunicated and disgraced.

But these books, however radical they seemed in their day, were the fruit of scholarship rather than of the artistic imagination. Liberal theological thought quickly assimilated them and ultimately was strengthened by them. More important, neither author foresaw the disappearance of religion in favor of art.

One who did foresee (or perhaps better, propose) such a disappearance was the British poet and critic Matthew Arnold. In an oft-quoted essay, Arnold wrote: “For poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry.” Later, an American critic would put it more tersely: “Poetry can save us!”

Fiction, in Arnold’s day, was thought of rather as television is in our own. The higher functions of literature were discharged by poets, not novelists. But the echo of Arnold can surely be heard when Rushdie says of his vocation to fiction: “Unable to accept the unarguable absolutes of religion, I have tried to fill up the hole with literature. The art of the novel is a thing I cherish as dearly as the book-burners . . . value their brand of militant Islam.”

After World War I, Arnold’s literary idealism came under fire. If you have ever heard the phrase “sweetness and light” mockingly spoken, then you have heard Arnold mocked, for he coined it. It was, if you will, a summary of his humanistic faith. Post-Auschwitz, that faith is in more trouble than ever.

And yet Arnold’s project--to replace religion with literary culture--has had a remarkable staying power. Harold Bloom, the distinguished Yale professor of literature, has just published a set of lectures under the title “Ruin the Sacred Truths” (Harvard University Press). The title alludes to the 17th-Century poet Andrew Marvell writing on John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Marvell feared of the great Milton:

That he would ruin (for I saw him strong)

The sacred Truths to Fable and Old Song. But the ruin Marvell feared, Bloom promotes. Religion is a precursor-phenomenon to art, he says, scripture a preliminary form of imaginative literature. The key recognition is that “God and the imagination are one” (Wallace Stevens).

The merits of this position may be debated. For now, the point is simply that it is to just such a radical position--and to no more intermediate one--that Salman Rushdie has leapt. The prophet in his book, he says, “is surrounded by fictional followers, one of whom happens to bear my own first name. Moreover, this entire (Mahound) sequence happens in a dream, the fictional dream of a fictional character, an Indian movie star, and one who is losing his mind, at that. How much further from history could one get?”

Not much further at all, but there’s the rub. Muslim scholars and Western scholars in dialogue with them have for years, by slow steps, been attempting the Strauss-Renan form of the scriptural revolution, studying Islam as something that, arising in a particular historical context, has developed differently in different parts of the world. Rushdie vaults over all that; and because he is of Muslim origin, a part of the Muslim world is dragged along with him. Salman Rushdie becomes, by that act, an incalculably more disruptive Islamic Revolutionary than the Ayatollah Khomeini; and it is for this reason that he now has a $6-million price on his head.