Rushdie and the Shi'ites at Hawkes Bay

More on the Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie:

The tragic confusion of good and evil is intensified in the novel’s 8th chapter ‘The Parting of the Arabian Sea’. Gibreel this time dreams of an ill-fated pilgrimage of the villagers of Titlipur lead by the mystical and mysterious girl Ayesha. The events of this part of the narrative are based on a real incident which occurred in 1983: thirty-eight Shi’ites marched into Hawkes Bay in Karachi, Pakistan at the instigation of their spiritual guide who had taught them that the sea would part as in the days of the Exodus, enabling them to journey to the holy city of Kerbala, in Iraq.[1]

In The Satanic Verses, Ayesha, strangely surrounded by butterflies which are interpreted as some kind of divine sign, determines to reach Mecca by marching through the Arabian Sea. Mirza Saeed tries to persuade his very ill wife Mishal to abandon the pilgrimage; but like most of the devotees, she will not be swayed despite her declining physical condition. Even the deaths of several elderly pilgrims have little effect: they are now called ‘martyrs’ by Ayesha. Increasingly, Ayesha’s fanaticism makes her more and more tyrannical and brutal, condoning the stoning to death of an abandoned baby as ‘the Devil’s Child’ out of religious fervour. Mirza Saeed can only look on helplessly as his wife and her companions stride into the sea and are drowned: or, at least, that is what Mirza himself witnesses. Others present, more devout than he, claim that the sea did in fact miraculously open as prophesied by Ayesha.

Rushdie, with his self-consciously postmodern narrative technique, appears to relish the ambiguity: the miracle both did and did not happen, and it ‘happened’ in a dream sequence in any case. But it is not the triumphalist, miraculous and religious version of events that we the reader are inclined to believe. The tragedy is as much the willingness of the faithful to ignore the death of the naïve and the innocent. It takes religious fanaticism – the ‘eyes of faith’ – to make a sign of divine benevolence out of such willful self-destruction; and Rushdie despairs of ever convincing those who look with such eyes on the world. Those who would be, and would have, martyrs are (as far as he is concerned) beyond the pale.

[1] The tragic story is told in Akbar S. Ahmed, "Death in Islam: The Hawkes Bay Case," Man 21, no. 1 (1986)