re who has read rushdie s the satanic verses in article r cl innknk bozo dsinc com perry dsinc com jim perry writes anyway since i seem to be the only one following this particular line of discussion i wonder how many of the rest of the readership have read this book what are your thoughts on it i read it when it first came out and the controversy broke put my name on the waiting list at the library that way if the book was really offensive none of my money would find its way to the author or publisher and read it cover to cover to use a phrase that seems popular here right now and i liked it the writing style was a little hard to get used to but it was well worth the effort coming from a similar background rushdie grew up in bombay in a muslim family and moved to england i grew up in new delhi it made a strong impression on me and he used many of the strange constructions of indian english the yaar at the end of a sentence butbutbut the occasional hindi phrase etc at the time i still sorta kinda thought of myself as a muslim and i couldn t see what the flap was all about it seemed clear to me that this was allegory it was clear that he described some local prostitutes who took on the names and personae of muhammed s wives and had not as my grandfather thundered implied that muhammed s wives were prostitutes in short every angry muslim that had read even part of the book seemed to have missed the point completely and i won t mention the fact that the most militant of them had never even seen the book oops i just did perhaps in a deep sense the book is insulting to islam because it exposes the silliness of revealed religion why does an omnipotent deity need an agent she can come directly to me can t she how do we know that muhammed didn t just go out into the desert and smoke something and how do we know that the scribes he dictated the quran to didn t screw up or put in their own little verses and why can muhammed marry more than four women when no other muslim is allowed to although i think the biggest insult to islam is that the majority of its followers would want to suppress a book sight unseen on the say so of some holy guy not to mention murder the author over the years when i have made this point various primarily muslim posters have responded saying that yes indeed they have read the book and had called it such things as filth and lies i would rank rushdie s book with hitler s mein kempf or worse and so on i had much the same response when i tried to talk about the book a really silly argument after all how many of these same people have read mein kampf it just made me wonder what are they afraid of why don t they just read the book and decide for themselves maybe the reaction of the muslim community to the book and the absence of protest from the liberal muslims to khomeini s fatwa outrage was the final push i needed into atheism s shamim mohamed uunet noao cmcl arizona shamim shamim cs arizona edu take this cross and garlic here s a mezuzah if he s jewish a page of the koran if he s a muslim and if he s a zen buddhist you re on your own member of the league for programming freedom write to lpf uunet uu net
