SOURCE: Mufti, Aamir. “Reading the Rushdie Affair: ‘Islam,’ Cultural Politics, Form.” In The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere, edited by Richard Burt, pp. 307-39. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Mufti explores the cultural, political, and aesthetic forces at work in the reception of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses.

Gayatri Spivak has argued that, in the case of The Satanic Verses, “the praxis and politics of life” intercept the aesthetic object to such a degree that a “mere reading” of the novel has become impossible.¹ In this essay, I will examine the novel's “interception by” (and its intervention in) certain political contexts within the post-1979 Islamic world. The essay is not meant to provide an even partial “reading” of the text in traditional critical terms. Instead, it will focus on “the Rushdie affair” as a complex cultural (and...