I did not end up getting very far into Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie but through my research around the book I think it is actually very cool. The whole book is a critique of Islam and is kind of a way for Rushdie to vent about his troubles with the religion.
Salman Rushdie actually got into a great deal of trouble with this book and I think it is very important for the context of the book. As a result of his writing, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Rushdie. I did not know what this was so I researched further and it turns out this was a serious threat to Rushdie. Khomeini was very unhappy with Rushdie’s words speaking ill of Islam and as a result essentially put a kill order out on Rushdie. This was crazy to me because I had no clue this happened when I first started reading this book but it was super interesting. Rushdie went into hiding for a very long time and he produced multiple other texts during this period but there was a serious threat to his life for a very long period of time.
I can definitely understand why Muslims would want this text to be forbidden. The text kind of just dunks upon the religion and its understandable why some would be upset by this. The book certainly has literary merit and was very enjoyable for the parts that I did read. This book is definitely worth going back to whenever I find the time to read a book. This is one of the texts that I knew the least about going into, but I was pleasantly surprised at all of the context surrounding the book, and honestly it made the book even more enjoyable. The name of the book did scare me going into it though.
