KristoCat said:
And wasn't Gabriel the second most powerful angel in the Old Testament? Interesting that he was "second place." (Michael was the most powerful I believe.) I'm sure Rushdie did that on purpose too, but what exactly he might have been saying with that, I'm not sure.
Sorry to be so late in responding to your post. To understand the significance of the opening page of "The Satanic Verses", where Gabreel Farishta and his companion are tumbling through the sky, falling from an airplane to earth, we must understand Islam's account of how the Qu'ran was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed. Islamic tradition has it that the Angel Gabriel (Gabreel), revealed the 128 Surahs (books) of the Qu'ran over a period of roughly 26 years. I am writing this from memory, so forgive any inaccuracies.
The title of Rushdie's novel, "The Satanic Verses", is taken from an actual account in the Hadith (or redacted oral tradition). The Hadith bears the same relationship to the Qu'ran as the Talmud (redacted oral tradition) does to the Torah (Penteteuch). There is a belief that Satan tricked Mohammed into including several verses in the Qu'ran which permitted the worship of the three "daughters of Allah". Some non-Islamic scholars conjecture that these "Satanic Verses" were initially included as a concession to appease certain pagan factions in Mecca in the early phases of conquest, before Mohammed's authority became absolute. The "satanic verses" were subsequently altered once the pagan factions were defeated.
What Rushdie is doing in his novel, in part, is parodying the entire process of revelation and calling into question the genuineness and authority of the Qu'ran. Rushdie has one scene where a scribe is writing down the revelations of the Prophet. The scribe is tempted to change a word here or there; minor alterations, and yet no one seems to notice, encouraging the scribe to greater boldness in taking liberties with the text. We must remember that the first Caliph, after the death of Mohammed, gathered all variant copies of the Qu'ran and had them burned. This event is recorded in Hadith and gives us some proof that there were indeed variant copies of the Qu'ran during the early years of Islam.
Of course, I realize that TBF forum rules prohibit the overt discussion of religion or politics except when it is directly related to the book under discussion. But you can easily see from the above that no one can really appreciate what Rushdie's novel is all about unless they have some background in Islamic history and beliefs.
One must understand that India for many centuries has been a mixture of Islam, Hinduism and Christianity coexisting simultaneously. This history of coexistence has made a profound change in those religions as they have mutually influenced each other. I have spoken at length with Roman Catholic priests from India, who, because of the centuries of influence of Hinduism and Islam in their culture, express interfaith viewpoints and syncretistic tolerance that one would never hear from Roman Catholic priests of other nationalities, e.g. Irish or Italian or Polish. And, I have spoken with devout Muslims from India who give accounts of adventures in the Prophet Mohammed's life which might come right out of the Mahabharat, and which would never be heard in the United Arab Emirates. Salman Rushdie, of course, is also a product of this syncretistic cultural bricolage.
Bear in mind that Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all "Abrahamic Religions", tracing back to the same origin in antiquity. They were quite possibly influenced and transformed by the Zoroastrians during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. The word Farishte (angel) is a Farsi word, but Farsi has its roots in Parsi, an ancient term for Persia, and a synonym for the Zoroastrians, or Parsees who fled from Muslim conquest in the first millennium and took shelter in India (where they remain to this day). Angels play a very unusual role in Zoroastrian theology and cosmology, acting in a capacity similar to Plato's "demiurge" (think of "demigod"), as agents of creation. If we look in the Old Testament at the Book of Ezra we see some very interesting "firsts". We see the first occurrence of the word "Jew" in the Old Testament. We see that the Persian King Cyrus, who was most likely a Zoroastrian, is called the "beloved of God". And, we see Jewish Synagogue worship depicted for the first time in a form which it retains to this day. All of this intertextuality is invoked by the parsi term "farishte" (angel).
We should consider that in Melville's "Moby Dick", it is Captain Ahab who converts to Zoroastrianism and becomes a Parsee. Rushdie is not the first to invoke these intertextual dynamics.
At the very heart of all this is the Zoroastrian eschatology or last times, which tells of a "lake of fire" which will be soothing as warm milk to those who are righteous, but a scalding torment to the wicked. The notion is that the righteous and wicked have each transformed their natures by their freewill choices and actions in life, to become materially different, as clay and gold materially differ. In the smithy's fire, gold becomes soft and radiant, while clay becomes hard and blackened.
The Greek Orthodox have an obscure interpretation called "the river of fire" which has its origins in the Zoroastrian lake of fire. This "river of fire" theology flows from the vision in the Book of Daniel of the "Ancient of Days" seated upon a throne, and from the base of the throne flows a fiery stream (or river of fire) which engulfs all things. The Greek understanding is that God is Love, and also God is a burning fire. God's love comforts the righteous and burns the wicked. We see this clearly in the parable of the prodigal son, who demands his inheritance and then squanders it it a foreign land until, reduced to poverty, he takes work from a cruel master, feeding carob husk fodder to pigs. By the way, to this day, carob husks are used as pig fodder in the near East. If you bite into a carob husk, it tastes sweet, but if you try to swallow it, you will choke, for it is fibrous and inedible for humans. The carob husks symbolize sins, which are initially sweet, but choke us. The pigs are the passions. The cruel master is the devil. When the prodigal son returns, the father welcomes him with love. The father has the same love for his other son, who never left, but always did his father's bidding. But now, that son is burnt and grieved by the love and forgiveness showered upon his prodigal brother, returned.
We see in such theologies as the "river of fire" and the "lake of fire" an image of purgatory, where impurities and transgressions are burned away by suffering. Such theologies raise the question of whether, ultimately all are saved and cleansed, which was Origen's notion, and which may be seen in a Buddhist/Hindu theology of rebirth (or the Nietzsche/Kundera "eternal return").
Well, I might go on at even greater length, but that would be beyond the scope of this thread. I hope I have shed some light on what Rushdie is potentially doing in his novel. And I also hope that my comments, though religious in nature, are deemed appropriate to the understanding of this novel, and offensive to no one.
