Prof. Fudge fudging the facts re. the Satanic Verses

The Ayatollah's death sentence on Salman Rushdie, for his novel 'Satanic Verses', is now 30 years old. Fudge, a Professor of Arabic, has written an essay for Aeon commemorating the event.

First some context. The Indians had banned the book. This put the Iranians in a pickle because they had given  Rushdie a prize for his previous novel 'Shame'. That was before the fellow married an American Jew and started babbling about Satanic Verses.

Prof. Fudge has a different theory- viz. that Rushdie was a modern day Averroes who poked the beast of orthodoxy.

In exploring the life of Muhammad, Rushdie poked and prodded the Islamic tradition in its most sensitive regions.

To 'explore the life of Muhammad', one would need a profound knowledge of Arabic. Rushdie possessed no such thing. No doubt, he was poking and prodding something. But it was an action of a vulgar kind, not something nuanced or epistemic.

Early Islamic sources contain a number of elements that are at odds with the conventional, ‘orthodox’ or popular versions of Islamic origins.

This is true of every Religion. That is why, as one's theological study progresses one comes to rely increasingly on the wisdom of venerable elders thus incrementally fitting oneself to become one of their own order. In Islam, there is a haqiqi/majazi- exoteric/esoteric- distinction just as there is in every other Religion.

For example, there are a number of instances where Muhammad appears to be all too human in his apparent desires and actions,

That's a good thing. Prophets should be 'all things to all men'. Sinners need to latch on to some seeming weakness so as to identify with the Messenger and thus internalize the Message.

such as an occasional vindictiveness

Again, a good thing. He was a proper leader of men- not a push-over.

or his numerous marriages.

An excellent thing. Marriage is a blessing, provided you have the means to maintain your family. Emirs need to have a whole bunch of wives to cement alliances. Obviously, this implies great virility- a desirable quality, more particularly as you get on in years.

Muslim tradition tends to downplay these elements or rationalise them as part of his larger, divinely inspired plan.

There is no need to do so, save when warbling in virginibus puerisque.

Anti-Muslim polemicists, however, have long seized on such accounts as evidence of Muhammad’s malignity, and mention of human weakness or personal idiosyncrasies tends to be taken as a provocation.

Anti-Muslims don't believe the Quran is a revealed Scripture. That is the root of the problem.

Rushdie’s satire is provocative, certainly, but it is not part of that tradition.

Rushdie's writing was of a 'look at me! I'm so smart!' variety.  The satire was, however, of a self-confuting sort.

Khushwant Singh, a lawyer and prominent Indian man of letters, was asked to read the manuscript of 'Satanic Verses' to see if it was suitable for publication by Penguin India. He thought it was offensive in precisely the manner of 'Rangeela Rasool'- a scurrilous work published in the Twenties which caused a change in Indian law. There have always been shady print shop owners who bring out collections of smut. In India, such scoundrels could always be found to print up something offensive so as to trigger a communal riot. Sometimes, respectable people might get carried away and use offensive language in connection with venerable personalities honored by a rival sect. Indian Case Law has established clear precedents. An atheist is incapable of giving offense to anyone no matter what he writes but a Sectarian using vulgar language, perhaps in the heat of the moment and by way of retaliation, crosses the line. The Law prescribes an easy way of withdrawing the offensive material and clearing the air.

This is perfectly sensible. After all, respectable people don't want their sons or daughters reading about the supposed peccadillos of venerable personalities because their children's passions may be inflamed and they may be tempted to a like dissipation.

Islam is premised on the authenticity and integrity of the Quran, but there are some indications in early Arabic accounts that the collection of the Holy Scripture was not as complete and accurate as convention would have us believe.

Once again, this is true of all Religions. Convention is irrelevant. Obviously, human reception of the Divine is imperfect. But the Quran, like the Bible or Veda, is considered to be uncreated and eternal.

It is important not to exaggerate these elements, though: Muslim scholars have been aware of them for centuries, and Islam has flourished quite well nonetheless.

Quite well? Which other Religion almost immediately came into possession of an enormous Empire?

If the conventional narrative has a few holes, any skeptical alternatives have many more.

Indeed! Revelation is wholly imperative (insha), not alethic (khabar) in any respect. Thus skepticism has no internal inconsistency or other lacuna to latch on to.

Even so, these gaps and contradictions are present, and who is to say that one should not consider them and what they might mean?

Ijma- the 'overlapping consensus' of sensible people- gets to say that the activity is a nuisance. This is not to say that 'ijma' may be wrong. Still, it is fortunate that there is 'ijma' between all sects that the 'Satanic Verses' is apocrypha. There is similar ijma about all sorts of other things- e.g. slavery is wrong etc. Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism and so forth have also made great strides of a similar nature.

It is a different matter that, as a matter of protocol bound juristic discourse, a particular judgment is sanctioned on the basis of a particular Scriptural or other doxastic injunction. However, if you are not a lawyer or a Divine, why meddle with hermeneutics? If there is some utilitarian measure you wish to advance, spell out the costs and benefits and then apply for fatwas from Jurists. That's what Mohammad Ali Jinnah did when he alerted the Muslim community to the manner in which traditional Waqf law was disadvantaging them in comparison to the Hindus. Later on, Timur Kuran rediscovered this point for himself.

Prof. Fudge is not suggesting that Rushdie was seeking to reform Islam from within. He quotes the novelist as saying, that he intended

‘to write about religion and revelation from the point of view of a secular person’.

The problem here is that the Islamic Religion, unlike the Christian religion, holds revelation to be wholly imperative and eschatological. A secular person can have no view point on something which, of its nature, is outside the Aeon (al Dahr) and wholly unseen. No doubt, one could look for something like Al Arabi's notion of barzakh in Quantum phenomenology or even 'Quantum cognition' or 'Quantum finance'. Alternatively one could write a novel about a guy who falls in love with a Genie but remains an agnostic or something of that sort.

Rushdie wasn't taking that road. Prof. Fudge explains

'The themes of ...the novel...are ambiguous and impossible to summarise. One constant, however, is the question of belief, or more accurately, the shades of doubt between belief and disbelief.

A work of fiction only works if readers believe in the reality of the characters' psychology and thought processes. Now, silly people may be inclined to believe anything about people from a far away country because furriners be kray kray but inducing such people to believe stupid shite about towel-heads ain't what an artist is supposed to be doing.

Still, a poorly written novel of a scenes a faire type could have aesthetic value if it were topical or conveyed information of a type which changes one's values or preferences in a desirable manner.

More rarely, a work of fiction whose characters are mere puppets conveniently afflicted with psychosis so as to explain away their actions, may acquire importance because of the yet more unbelievable real life mishegoss it sparks off. But, when this happened to Satanic Verses, it was not Islam but belief in the value of the Great Modernist Novel which was shown up to be puerile.

Prof. Fudge takes a different view-

Rushdie’s is a modern, individualist perspective, and The Satanic Verses repeatedly shows us the point of view of a person asked to believe in something he doubts, like certain of Mahound’s associates and the husband of one of the most zealous devotees of Ayesha the seer. This is not a perspective with much precedent in Islamic literatures.

Islamic literature was written by people who knew a lot about Islam. Faith is a Gift. If it was granted to x and not y, then there is a mystery here which passeth all understanding.

No Muslim need believe some 'seer' can part the Red Sea. Jesus was the Seal of the Miracle Workers as Muhammad was the Seal of the Prophets. Islam's great utility is that provides one a legal defense against having to believe or disbelieve any nutjob who turns up. Either one is a Muslim or one isn't. Faith is a lemma immune to Evidential Decision Theory's dilemmas.

Rushdie, who studied a shite subject at Uni, was, of course, innocent of any complex Epistemological motivation.

As Prof. Fudge says-

For Rushdie, the essentials of religion are fairly simple. He is not concerned with scriptural hermeneutics or jurisprudential subtleties. Religion is not even a matter of ethics. It is a matter of whether you believe in God or not, and if you don’t, which he doesn’t, what to do about this fellow Muhammad?

If Faith has not been bestowed on you, you don't have to do anything at all which might otherwise be an 'outward and visible' sign of Election. This is common sense. There's no law saying you have to be a dick about stuff you believe- e.g. my certainty that all them posh British peeps are secretly from Ludhiana and that they dance the bhangra the moment I take my eyes off them. This credo of mine does not entail an obligation on my part to turn up at the domiciles of British Aristocrats demanding makkian di roti anytime I have of strong drink partaken.

The problem with investigating one's beliefs or non-beliefs is that a public nuisance may be created.

These are the areas that Rushdie chose to investigate.
The Satanic Verses contains, for example, a heavily fictionalised story of Ibn Abi Sarh, who worked as Muhammad’s scribe, copying down the revelation as the messenger recited it. Several sources tell us that Ibn Abi Sarh, when taking dictation, continued to write after Muhammad had ceased to speak, completing phrases with words he thought appropriate. When his additions went unnoticed, he was shaken. How could these be the words of God? They were his own! He left and fled to the prophet’s enemies. When the Muslims had conquered Mecca and Islam was triumphant, Muhammad demanded that Ibn Abi Sarh, among other apostates, be killed. He was eventually persuaded to grant clemency to his former scribe, but later expressed his regret that his companions hadn’t simply cut off his head.

Fudge is skating over the real offense here. Sarh was Arab. Rushdie names Salman Farsi as the offender. Why insult Persian people? Would he have done the same with respect to Hazrat Bilal Habshi? No! As a Caucasian he'd have been called out for racism to Black people.

Even more sensitive is the story of the satanic verses. In the earliest days of Muhammad’s prophetic mission, he was despairing of winning any more converts to his cause. Opposition was fierce. His message of one unique god was not welcome in a community that had long worshipped a variety of deities. Then, he received a revelation that seemed to resolve his problem: in addition to the one god, Allah, one could pray to three other minor gods, all female. Some of his enemies prostrated themselves alongside Muhammad: it seemed as though a compromise had been reached between his strict monotheism and the multiple deities of the Meccans.
There are different versions of what happened next. Either the angel Gabriel appeared and told Muhammad that Satan tampered with the words, or he realised himself that he had recited something not right, something that sacrificed his most fundamental principle. Subsequent divine revelation announced that, while Satan might interfere with a prophet’s recitation, God will intervene to remove the offending part. The ‘satanic’ words, those affirming the existence of the three female deities, were then excluded from the revelation, and strict monotheism was reconfirmed. The polytheists of Mecca resumed their hostility, but Muhammad had compromised nothing.

There was already a long tradition of Prophets' interceding on behalf of Humanity so that religious obligations be reduced and the path made easier for weaker vessels.

There are several anecdotes showing Prophets as having a motherly care for their flock or showing lovably human traits- e.g. a liking for sweets or a tenderness for cats.

No doubt, there is also a long tradition of pedagogues and preachers saying silly things. Still, all cultures have an equal share of that type of stupidity.

Today, virtually all Muslims consider the episode of the satanic verses to be a fabrication.

Today, virtually all Muslims think they have better things to do with their lives than argue the toss over something which has zero importance for their moral and spiritual life.

It is inconceivable, they say, that Satan’s words could have found their way into the revelation.

They say nothing of the sort unless you are being a dick and they want you to shut the fuck up and leave them alone.

It is inconceivable that the messenger of God, the prophet who serves as a guide for all believers, could have committed such an error.

It ought to be inconceivable because no good can come from conceiving any such utterly useless shite.

The story was surely a falsehood concocted by the enemies of Islam. In the 1960s, an Egyptian scholar went so far as to propose that all mention of the incident be excised from future editions of historical texts.

History, it appears, has forgotten his name. But there is no shortage of stupid Egyptian or Anglican or Equadorian clergymen. That's part of the fun.

But the problem is that many historical texts do contain the anecdote, in around 50 slightly varying versions.

Is this a serious problem? Suppose Prof. Fudge is your son's tutor. He calls you up and says 'We have a problem. Could you come to my office?'. You break into a cold sweat. Is it drugs, or has your kid gotten mixed up with some crazy terrorist cult, or has he been caught cheating in an exam or...for fuck's sake, tell me what the problem is, Prof!

Imagine your relief when Fudge says 'the problem is that many historical texts do contain a particular anecdote.'  You realize you were worrying for no good reason. As you stand up to go, your anal sphincter loosens and you quickly shove the back of your hand down the seat of your trousers to catch a dribble of feces. You then shake Prof. Fudge's hands with vim and vigor and wipe the rest of the chocolate fudge that you made on the sleeves of his tweed jacket.

Problems of Fudge's sort are best resolved in no other way.

Moreover, as the book Before Orthodoxy: The Satanic Verses in Early Islam (2017) by Shahab Ahmed convincingly shows, the first generations of Muslims did not question the incident.

It is not possible to 'convincingly show' any such thing. All Shahab Ahmed could do was to show that no epistemic scandal arose at that time in this connection.
Ahmed passed away recently at a young age. I'd certainly have liked to have a drink with him. He wouldn't have liked having a drink with me. This is because I am living disproof of his notion that wine can push forward mystical discourse, as opposed to incontinence and talking garbled nonsense. Islam prohibits wine for a good reason. An idiot like me can feel on a par with the Ulema after a couple of drinks. A great nuisance is created thereby. It is better that the great and good deny themselves the daughter of the grape so that the Mosque does not become polluted by Circe's swine.

Still, mention of Shahab Ahmed makes one thing clear. A guy who went to a British Public School can 'investigate' Islam to some good purpose but only if, like Ahmed, he knows 15 languages and can converse on a plane of equality with great jurists and historians.

This is not to say that great jurists and historians aren't as stupid as shite. Any one of them might be guilty of such misology as is demonstrated by the following-

'For orthodoxy to obtain as a social fact—that is: for a single truth-claim to establish and maintain itself in society as the sole and exclusive truth—it is necessary, as a practical matter, for the proponents of that truth-claim to be in a position to impose sanction (which need not necessarily be legal sanction) upon dissenters. Orthodoxy, in other words, is not merely an intellectual phenomenon: it is also social phenomenon—it is, as Talal Asad has famously said, “not a mere body of opinion, but a distinct relationship—a relationship of power.”

Ahmed is committing a 'modal scope fallacy'- i.e. placing a degree of unwarranted necessity on the conclusion. Babies and kittens and puppy dogs all think they are soooo cute and that they can crawl all over you and you will squirm with delight. This is a social fact regarding which I want to be a dissenter, indeed, I often pretend to be a stone-hearted curmudgeon till left alone with one of these creatures. They can't sanction me in any way, yet there I am, a couple of minutes later, cooing over them and seeking ineffectually to engage their affections.

Most 'social facts' are established non-coercively in line with the folk theorem of repeated games. By contrast, coercive orthodoxy breeds its own resistance because coercion is costly. It uses up scarce resources. It becomes vulnerable to phase transition.

Talal Asad had a peculiar history. What he says makes sense given his antecedents. But people would think I had gone crazy if I wrote 'Tamil Brahman Orthodoxy is not merely an intellectual phenomenon: it is also social phenomenon—it is, as Cho Ramaswamy would have looked an utter fool for saying, “not a mere body of opinion, but a distinct relationship—a relationship of power.'

Islam found an Occassionalist solution to its Aristotelian problem before Western Christianity. This entailed a modal collapse such that the doctrine of imkan-al khizb- God's inability to lie- became the default position.

Following Ahmed, Fudge takes a different view-

Only gradually, with the development of certain doctrines regarding the sinlessness of prophets, did the story become impossible to accept. Even Ibn Taymiyyah, the 14th-century firebrand and intellectual forefather of Salafism, accepted the veracity of the satanic verses story.

Thus, the story is wholly inconsequential. I recall hearing a story when I was a kid that the Moon landing was bound to cause a profound convulsion within Islam coz it conflicted with orthodox beliefs. Nothing of the sort happened because Scripture is wholly insha, imperative, and has no alethic, khabar, content whatsoever.

I also recall some nutter in India getting worked up about the 'Da Vinci Code'. The notion was that Christianity would collapse if people believed Christ had got married and that his blood-line survives amongst us probably in the shape of Netanyahu & Trump's secret love-child.

In his book, Ahmed proposed that the story served particular functions in different contexts for the very first generations of believers: it might have originated to explain certain obscure Quranic verses; it might have been an uplifting narrative of triumph over adversity, of succumbing to temptation at a moment of despair, and then returning to the straight path. In other words, it is possible for believers to find meaning in a non-orthodox interpretation of the anecdote. Likewise, it is possible for a nonbeliever such as Rushdie to find something valuable in the life of the prophet, even when God is out of the picture.

Psychosis is not valuable. Nor is a story about how Power corrupts and Absolute Power corrupts Absolutely Fabulous luvvies who live in Holland Park or Notting Hill.

It is perfectly possible to take a game-theoretic 'Law & Econ' approach to Scripture. Robert Aumann has illumined the Talmud in this manner. However the Rabbis had already developed very sophisticated juristic principles like 'halacha vein morin kein'- the law, knowledge of which forbids the very action it otherwise enjoins.

'Legal fictions' feature in the early evolution of every system of Jurisprudence. The early Muslims were great jurists. But defeasibility is the essence of the Law. That's what permits the flourishing of Trade and the fine Arts and exact Sciences. Unfortunately, it also creates material for scurrilous schoolboys, of whatever age, to exercise their stupidity over. Stuff like this-

The Muhammadan revelation becomes a matter of human history and behavior, a story of belief and credulity, of power and knowledge, one that has echoes throughout human experience.

So, Christ didn't die for our sins but merely so that Monty Python could make 'Life of Brian'

None of this is to say that The Satanic Verses does not offend. It clearly does. For those who make it that far into the novel, the scenes in which the prostitutes adopt the names and personae of Mahound’s wives are guaranteed to send the faithful into fits. Neither the novel nor its author makes any suggestion that this is meant as a comment on the prophet’s wives, real or fictional, and to claim otherwise, as many have, is simply incorrect. At the same time, one can hardly claim surprise that people are offended.

The prostitutes, in Rushdie's novel, takes on what they view as the attributes of historical personages. Thus the novel does comment on them as it does on the Prophet himself. There is a Robert Graves 'King Jesus' type twist to this which parallels the Shah's twin sister's appearance in the Khomeini episode and the characterization of 'Hind'. I suppose if you are a guy with a Muslim name writing about Muslims, misogyny comes as standard. Bitches be kray kray. They will poison you or destroy your life. Talaq them now. Talaq them good. Then Talaq them once more, just to be on the safe side.

One might argue that whatever his criticisms, Rushdie should have been more respectful. But this is a dangerous path, one that misjudges what is at stake. Is it not the case that many great works of Western literature, from François Rabelais to Voltaire, James Joyce to Philip Roth, offended a good number of religious groups and authorities?

I think it was very wrong for Rabelais and Voltaire to write in Chinese in such a manner that Chinese people would feel hatred, loathing and contempt for Western Europeans and the Religion they professed. What's that? Rabelais and Voltaire didn't write in Chinese? Oh. In that case, Rushdie is nothing like them. Nor is he like Joyce or Roth because the vast majority of subcontinental Muslims are either ignorant of English Literature or as agnostic as I am of claims that it has produced anything finer than Agatha Christie, P.G Woodhouse, and J.K Rowling.

This is not to say that I don't get that Joyce was a great writer for smart Irish peeps. I was taught 'Portrait of the Artist' by an elderly Irish Christian Brother. His comments gave me an inkling of what an Aquinian Universal Socialism might look like.

Similarly, Roth was writing of his own highly successful community during the midst of a great revolution in sexual mores. In neither case was there any lasting offence.

Rushdie's book is in a wholly different category. It is 'Rangeela Rasool' tarted up with a bit of pseudo-intellectual, Homi Bhabha type 'hybridity' or plagiarism.

This was the argument of Sadik Jalal al-Azm, a Syrian philosophy professor who was arrested in 1970 on blasphemy charges stemming from his book Critique of Religious Thought (1969), in which he condemned religiosity in the Arab world, and blamed it for many social and political ills.

The man was an old fashioned Marxist and thus had his own protectors. Rushdie, unlike Tariq Ali, was pretending to be an 'emic' Muslim rather than a deracinated, but still posh, Trotsykite.

He wrote various pieces in defence of The Satanic Verses and its author, including ‘The Importance of Being Earnest About Salman Rushdie’ (1989), an extended comparison with Rabelais and Joyce, noting the difference between the canonical status granted to Western authors who challenged religious authority or orthodoxy and the, at best tepid, support for Rushdie.

Joyce inspired Lacan, Derrida, Deleuze and so forth. How is he comparable to Rushdie? Even Homo Baba has stopped gushing about him.

The least interesting thing about Joyce is his 'challenge to religious authority'. On the contrary, many a Jesuit has written a PhD thesis on the manner in which Joyce was 'steeled in the school of old Aquinas'.

Fudge comments-

Some might protest at the assumption of Muslim backwardness in need of secularisation, but al-Azm argues that there is a long list of Muslim writers who have faced various trials for their expression of independent or secular thought. Rushdie, he says, is part of this lineage.'

Al-Azm wrote in Arabic for Arabic readers. Rushdie wrote in English for fellow Oxbridge graduates. Had he been a Leftist writing for an Indian audience, he'd have been obliged to be either a Marxian miserabilist or a Naipaul type Eeyore. Instead his books were gossipy and salacious. Thus India, the country he identified with (though his family emigrated to Pakistan) returned his affection and merely banned one of his novels because it crossed a line. He was welcomed back to tout his subsequent works.

It is certainly true that anti-Muslim sentiment (and politics) has reached levels where any criticism of Islam is suspect for its motives, but one wonders about the fate of this intellectual tradition of secular dissent.

The fate of this tradition was to be as boring as shit and then to emigrate somewhere a handful of journalists would pretend to give a damn.

In the current climate, the fate of a highbrow novel might not be the most pressing issue, but it does seem that those who value literature should at least be aware of what is at stake.

Those who value literature should write. They should then look around and see who writes better than them. Support that guy. In this way, Literature advances. Joining Oprah's book of the month club will make you stupid- but not as stupid as reading Booker picks or whatever text it is the Nobel committee- whom I firmly believe to be a bunch of pervs- wants to shove up our collective arse to get its jollies.

Fudge writes-

 Should we, in any case, assume that everyone of Muslim background takes offence? No. In 1989, a Pakistani reader wrote to The Observer newspaper in London:

Salman Rushdie speaks for me in The Satanic Verses, and mine is a voice that has not yet found expression in newspaper columns … Someone who does not live in an Islamic society cannot imagine the sanctions, both self-imposed and external, that militate against expressing religious disbelief … Then, along comes Rushdie and speaks for us. Tells the world that we exist – that we are not simply a fabrication of some Jewish conspiracy.

This Pakistani guy knew very well that Pakistani newspapers- like Indian newspapers- are shit. But so too is the Observer.
Rushdie wasn't writing for sub-continentals without a visa to Yurop or Amrika. He was gloating over his own immunity to the concerns of the people he pretended to be writing about. That's why he couldn't be the second Kipling.

Al-Azm, too, noted that the controversial sections of The Satanic Verses spoke to him personally, that he too had wondered what kind of a man was Muhammad:

Was he a world-historic figure or an instrument of Divine Will and Plan? Was he a pious God-fearing figure of traditional legends or a shrewd and calculating long-distance trader and merchant? Was he a servant of the Spirit and its higher ideals (having read some Hegel) or a philanderer and womaniser? After some exposure to Freud I did ask myself questions about the psychoanalytic significance of his earlier marriage to a woman fit to be his mother and his later infatuation with girls fit to be his daughters.

This Al-Azm character must be as stupid as shit. The hero of a particular age is given attributes that age considers worthy of admiration. Having lots of wives was considered a good thing back then. Ayesha's claim is that by some miracle she attained puberty at a very young age. It is utterly foolish to quote Freud- whose Medical practice was based on fraud (the A.M.A decided almost half a century ago that 'neurosis' is not a medical condition) in connection with the 'seal of the Prophets'. There is no evidence of any 'infatuation with young girls'. It is highly repugnant to make this suggestion. It licenses crimes against young people. The sensible thing is to say, 'God can cause even a newborn to assume the form of a fit and healthy adult'. But, God isn't doing that anymore so lay off kiddies you disgusting pedo swine otherwise we will cut your goolies off and kick your head in for good measure.'

Fudge ends his essay thus-

Rushdie’s satire has nothing to do with the crude criticism of Islam that has become widespread and that Rushdie himself (somewhat understandably) has engaged in, which posits a fundamental incompatibility with modernity or the need for an Islamic ‘reformation’.

I think Fudge is fudging the facts when he makes this claim. Rushdie, writing at a time when Zia ruled the roost in Pakistan, is making the case that Power is essentially Fascist and that no type of Islamic politics can have any trajectory that does not end in either impotence or what Hitchens would call 'Islamo-fascism'. Rushdie was moving away from an earlier 'Sufi' ambivalence of a jadidi type to full blown American vulgarity.

It is instead the kind of critique that only a novel can provide. It points to the cracks and weaknesses in the certainties of the tradition; it tells us that commands and prohibitions can reveal more than their issuers intend, that Muhammad’s power and status might have changed his behaviour, that the Quran as we know it might not in fact be the direct word of God, that if the scripture says that the prophet’s wives should remain behind a curtain, some imaginations will run wild about what is going on in there – that to talk of belief implies the existence of doubt and nonbelief.

The trouble is this sort of critique is wholly paranoid. It can find the same 'cracks and weaknesses' in any protocol bound, juristic process which culminates in 'buck stopped' certainties or intensional propositions. One could find patriarchy in mathematical physics and pederasty in the two times table. Following a Foucault or Chomsky one could denounce the neighbor's cat for illegally surveilling you in a manner that serves the interests of American hegemony and Globalised Finance. I'm not saying stuff like that doesn't happen in real life. As I have frequently explained on my blog, I wasn't actually doing anything sexual to my Dyson vacuum cleaner. However, the neighbor's cat witnessed what happened and I accept that it might have got the wrong idea about why I stuck a certain appendage of mine down the hose. I just wanted to clear a blockage is all. What happened subsequently may indeed have voided the warranty. In any case, the lady at John Lewis to whom I return my Dyson vacuum cleaners, because they lose suction so quickly, was getting somewhat shirty. She'd put on disposable gloves to handle the item. Anyway, that's the reason I have a non functioning Dyson in my flat. I'm not saying the neighbor's cat is a spy for the big Corporations. However, it does seem to be more than a coincidence that Jim Dyson has moved his head office to Singapore where all cats are enrolled in a Government mandated surveillance program. At least this is what I have been told by my cousins who live there. I had wanted to visit them but they dissuaded me by telling me of Singapore's draconian punishments for interfering with domestic appliances.

Come to think of it, perhaps there is some merit in Rushdie's book. Clearly only magical-realism can illuminate contemporary problems like the one posed by neighborhood cats spying for big Corporations.

As Fudge says-

It is these aspects of The Satanic Verses that have been eclipsed by the Rushdie affair and its aftermath, but it is these that will persist well after the current social and political landscape has changed.

 In other words, the fact that 'belief' and 'certainty' bring about their own antithesis is a fact that will persist. Currently you may believe, nay you may be certain!, that the cat is not spying on you. However, if Fudge isn't fudging his pants as opposed to speaking sooth, then it is these aspects of your episteme which will be undermined long after Sir James Dyson has gone bankrupt because of all the Singaporeans who interfere with his appliances when their cats are not looking. Them Singaporeans are very sneaky that way.