Some thirteen hundred and fifty years
after the fact, a single moment in the Prophet’s career was fictionalized in
1988, by Salman Rushdie, the contemporary Kashmiri-British novelist, in his
controversial novel Satanic Verses.
This fantasy novel, in the genre of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, was at the
epicenter of a major controversy,
drawing angry protests from Muslims
in several countries in Dar al–Islam.
Some of these protests turned violent. Death threats were issued to Rushdie,
including a fatwa
declared against him by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of Iran,
on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1989. As was mentioned in the last chapter,
the fatwa may itself have violated shari’a law.
The original controversy surrounded the
fact that the Prophet of Islam unconsciously mistook the words he had recited
to a group of pagans for the words of God. These words were music to the ears
of his audience. They had all heard the Prophet recite the names of three
imaginal feminine figures, Al–Lat, Al–Uzza, and Manat, who were, according to the footnotes in Muhammad Asad’s
translation of Q 53:19–20, the three Goddesses, considered in the pagan
pantheon as the daughters of Allah. French scholar of Islam Maxime Rodinson
makes the point in his critical biography, Muhammad,
that this was the unconscious at play:
Obviously (Tabari’s account as good as says so in fairly
clear words) Muhammad’s unconscious had suggested to him a formula which
provided a practical road to unanimity. It did not appear to conflict with his
henotheism, since these ‘great birds’ were, like angels and jinns, conceived of
as subordinate to Allah. Elsewhere they were called the ‘daughters of Allah’.
On the other hand this provided a clear indication that the new sect honoured
the city’s divinities, respected their shrines and recognized their cult as a
legitimate one. (2002, p. 107)
Both these events, the cultural unconscious
of the Prophet of Islam and the declaration of the fatwa by the Supreme Leader of Iran, are the perfect doorway into
the Garden of Paradise fed by the river of honey. From an integral perspective,
this Garden is in the lower–left quadrant, the domain of the Cultural
Psychology of Islam, as Wilber defines it in Integral Psychology: “The Lower Left represents the inside of the collective, or the values,
meanings, world–views, and ethics that are shared by any group of individuals”
(2000, p. 63). It is also the domain of the collective unconscious.
It is not astonishing at all to accept
that the Prophet expressed himself in a way that reflected the consciousness of
his pagan audience, if we fully appreciate the premise of the cultural complex
proposed by Singer and Kimbles in The
Cultural Complex:
As personal complexes
emerge out of the level of the personal unconscious in their interaction with
deeper levels of the psyche and early parental/familial relationships, cultural
complexes can be thought of arising out [of] the cultural unconscious as it
interacts with both the archetypal and personal realms of the psyche and the broader
outer world arena of schools, communities, media, and all the other forms of
cultural and group life. (2004, p. 4)
The premodern perspective was that Satan
had spoken these words through the Prophet; words that the Angel Gabriel later
advised him he would have to retract and rectify. The notion that these words
could have come from the cultural complex constellated by the Prophet’s
encounter with his pagan audience would have been a complex idea to understand
in his day. Satan was an easier figure to grasp for the evolving umma. What it does tell us is that the
cultural or collective unconscious is perhaps a more powerful force than the
Prophet himself could have realized. For a moment, his personal consciousness
was swallowed up by the collective unconscious.
What was even more astounding was the
emotional reaction of the Ayatollah Khomeini to the publication of the novel
and the violent protests which it brought in its wake. In The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from Foucault
to Baudrillard, Ian Almond’s essay titled “The Many Islams of Salman
Rushdie” well summarizes Rushdie’s consistent critique of Islam: “Islam, in
other words, is old: its built–in
obsolescence stifles the new and attempts to halt and even reverse history”
(2007, p. 98). Khomeini’s declaration of capital punishment for blasphemy and
apostasy, without a trial, only reinforced the very archaic reality about the
limits on literary license that a novelist could ever hope to take in the new
Islamic era that Khomeini was ushering in. Khomeini’s own cultural complex
prevented him from examining the validity of the spontaneous extension of his
own powers, while violating the very shari’a
laws he was duty bound to protect as the Supreme Leader. On the contrary, he
only helped to make the point that Rushdie was articulating through his
fiction: Islam is old and obsolete.
There was zero tolerance for literary license almost ten years into the Islamic
revolution in Iran. But what is less well known was reported by Afary and
Anderson in Foucault and the Iranian
Revolution:
Within weeks,
Abdullah al–Ahdal, a Muslim cleric in Belgium who had opposed Khomeini’s fatwa as inapplicable outside the
Islamic world, was shot to death. Then, in July 1991, Hitoshi Igarashi, who had
translated The Satanic Verses into
Japanese, was stabbed to death. (Afary, Anderson, & Foucault, 2005, p. 164)
It
turns out that the book’s Italian translator also survived a similar attack the
same month. The culture of violence, which was so much a part of early Islam
during the defensive wars fought by the Prophet and the martyrs who fell by his
side, is still with us to this day. These forms of cultural branding seem
incontrovertible, to the point that even if you could make the case that Islam
is essentially a peaceful religion, that position would be turned on its head
by the reality of the collective unconscious. The same can be said for the
martyr complex and martyrdom operations in Dar
al–Islam.
