Word: gibreel
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...have their careers and private lives monitored by adoring fans with an intensity that Lana Turner would have envied. Bachchan, the God Is My Witness star who looks like a more dashing Jon Lovitz and puts a fierce majesty into his basso declarations, is so famous he appears (as Gibreel Farishta) in Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses...
...Rushdie's most bitterly disputed passages deals with the famous Satanic verses from which the novel takes its title. Here Mahound is tempted by Gibreel (obviously a reference to the angel Gabriel) to cut a deal with the enemies of his embryonic faith and tolerate worship of three of their goddesses alongside the one God. Gibreel later tells Mahound that the idea came from Satan, and the prophet orders acceptance of the rival deities to be stricken from his holy text...
Saladin sprouts a pair of horns on his forehead and cloven hoofs; these mutations earn him, a British subject, rough handling by police and immigration officials. Gibreel develops a visible arc of light, a halo, around his head, and must cope with the awestruck reverence of perfect strangers. His new radiance aggravates an older problem, particularly puzzling in light of his newfound atheism: his vivid cinematic dreams, in which he is cast as the Archangel Gibreel, but without a script, and then asked by a series of petitioners to deliver Allah's word...
...these -- a businessman named Mahound -- who has settled Rushdie's mulligatawny as far as Islamic fundamentalists are concerned. For the Gibreel-Mahound exchanges are based, in an obviously distorted and hallucinatory manner, on an episode in the life of Muhammad: the Prophet's early willingness to include in the Qur'an an acknowledgment of three female deities and his later repudiation of these verses as satanically inspired. If Muhammad himself was willing to admit that he had been deceived, it is difficult to see why a tangential, fictional version of this long-ago event should cause such contemporary furor...
...faith to lecture Muslims on what they should or should not read would be impudent. But it must also be stated that there is no ridicule or harm in this novel, only an overwhelming sense of amazement and joy at the multifariousness of all Allah's children. As Gibreel and Saladin try to make their afflicted ways through contemporary London, a fascinating tapestry unfurls behind them. This backdrop contains vivid scenes -- among them, the subjugation of an immense subcontinent and ancient cultures by an upstart island, and the upheavals that result when this thralldom is abruptly ended. But the history...