The Issue of Blasphemy

Islam is such that no one’s pen can tarnish it. Human history, knowledge, and even the vast expanse of the universe would reject any such endeavour. Who could defame the image and distort the history of an individual whose arrival has forever altered the course of human history? A WORK OF FICTION Salman Rushdie’s ‘The Satanic Verses’ was reviewed in the New York Weekly, TIME (February 13, 1989). Commentator Paul Gray expresses the view that the protests from the Muslim public against the book were unnecessary and undesirable. However, I cannot fully agree with the commentator’s perspective. Gray states that the book merely reflects on history, implying that since it is based on historical events, there should be no uproar about it. However, this assumption that the book is grounded in historical events is unfounded. The reality is that this book is a work of fiction, both in its style and its historical references. The reviewer goes on to say, “The Gibreel-Mahound exchanges are based, in a distorted and hallucinatory manner, on an episode in the life of Muhammad—the Prophet’s early willingness to include in the Quran an acknowledgement of three female deities and his later repudiation of these verses as satanically inspired. If Muhammad was willing to admit that he had been deceived, it is difficult to see why a tangential, fictional version of this long-ago event should