The title of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses is taken from abrogated chapters or “surahs” of the Quran. These same surahs also form one of novel’s story lines. The nature of Muhammad’s “false transmission,” a blasphemy in itself, forms a reflection upon discernment, interpretation and translation. For the faithful follower of the Islamic text, only the pure Quran exists; all else is blasphemy. Rushdie encountered the surahs most of the Western world views as apocryphal as a young man in the 1960s at Cambridge. In one of his many writing notebooks, Rushdie wrote, “How does newness enter the world?” The answer, as Rushdie also recorded in his notebook, lies in “the act of migration,” which “puts into crisis everything about the migrating individual or group, everything about identity and selfhood and culture and belief.” But how can a crisis be said to be successful? Does authorship require a responsibility, or does the responsibility lie in the “sophisticated” reader? If the answer is found in the communication that lies within and blasphemy is a transgression from within, Rushdie becomes Muhammad, negotiating cross culturally from within and without
