Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses

The four of them are washing once more when Mahound arrives; they cluster around him, whowhatwhy. Hamza stands back. ‘Nephew, this is no damn good,’ he snaps in his soldier's bark. ‘When you come down from Coney there's a brightness on you. Today it's something dark.’

Mahound sits on the edge of the well and grins. ‘I've been offered a deal.’ By Abu Simbel? Khalid shouts. Unthinkable. Refuse. Faithful Bilal admonishes him: Do not lecture the Messenger. Of course, he has refused. Salman the Persian asks: What sort of deal. Mahound smiles again. ‘At least one of you wants to know.’

‘It's a small matter,’ he begins again. ‘A grain of sand. Abu Simbel asks Allah to grant him one little favour.’ Hamza sees the exhaustion in him. As if he had been wrestling with a demon. The water-carrier is shouting: ‘Nothing! Not a jot!’ Hamza shuts him up.

‘If our great God could find it in his heart to concede – he used that word, concede – that three, only three of the three hundred and sixty idols in the house are worthy of worship...’

‘There is no god but God!’ Bilal shouts. And his fellows join in: ‘Ya Allah!’ Mahound looks angry. ‘Will the faithful hear the Messenger?’ They fall silent, scuffing their feet in the dust.

‘He asks for Allah's approval of Lat, Uzza and Manat. In return, he gives his guarantee that we will be tolerated, even officially recognized; as a mark of which, I am to be elected to the council of Jahilia. That's the offer.’

Salman the Persian says: ‘It's a trap. If you go up Coney and come down with such a Message, he'll ask, how could you make Gibreel provide just the right revelation? He'll be able to call you a charlatan, a fake.’ Mahound shakes his head. ‘You know, Salman, that I have learned how to listen . This listening is not of the ordinary kind; it's also a kind of asking. Often, when Gibreel comes, it's as if he knows what's in my heart. It feels to me, most times, as if he comes from within my heart: from within my deepest places, from my soul.’

‘Or it's a different trap,’ Salman persists. ‘How long have we been reciting the creed you brought us? There is no god but God. What are we if we abandon it now? This weakens us, renders us absurd. We cease to be dangerous. Nobody will ever take us seriously again.’

Mahound laughs, genuinely amused. ‘Maybe you haven't been here long enough,’ he says kindly. ‘Haven't you noticed? The people do not take us seriously. Never more than fifty in the audience when I speak, and half of those are tourists. Don't you read the lampoons that Baal pins up all over town?’ He recites:

‘They mock us everywhere, and you call us dangerous,’ he cried.

Now Hamza looks worried. ‘You never worried about their opinions before. Why now? Why after speaking to Simbel?’

Mahound shakes his head. ‘Sometimes I think I must make it easier for the people to believe.’

An uneasy silence covers the disciples; they exchange looks, shift their weight. Mahound cries out again. ‘You all know what has been happening. Our failure to win converts. The people will not give up their gods. They will not, not.’ He stands up, strides away from them, washes by himself on the far side of the Zamzam well, kneels to pray.

‘The people are sunk in darkness,’ says Bilal, unhappily. ‘But they will see. They will hear. God is one.’ Misery infects the four of them; even Hamza is brought low. Mahound has been shaken, and his followers quake.

He stands, bows, sighs, comes round to rejoin them. ‘Listen to me, all of you,’ he says, putting one arm around Bilal's shoulders, the other around his uncle's. ‘Listen: it is an interesting offer.’

Unembraced Khalid interrupts bitterly: ‘It is a tempting deal.’ The others look horrified. Hamza speaks very gently to the water-carrier. ‘Wasn't it you, Khalid, who wanted to fight me just now because you wrongly assumed that, when I called the Messenger a man, I was really calling him a weakling? Now what? Is it my turn to challenge you to a fight?’

Mahound begs for peace. ‘If we quarrel, there's no hope.’ He tries to raise the discussion to the theological level. ‘It is not suggested that Allah accept the three as his equals. Not even Lat. Only that they be given some sort of intermediary, lesser status.’

‘Like devils,’ Bilal bursts out.

‘No,’ Salman the Persian gets the point. ‘Like archangels. The Grandee's a clever man.’

‘Angels and devils,’ Mahound says. ‘Shaitan and Gibreel. We all, already, accept their existence, halfway between God and man. Abu Simbel asks that we admit just three more to this great company. Just three, and, he indicates, all Jahilia's souls will be ours.’

‘And the House will be cleansed of statues?’ Salman asks. Mahound replies that this was not specified. Salman shakes his head. ‘This is being done to destroy you.’ And Bilal adds: ‘God cannot be four.’ And Khalid, close to tears: ‘Messenger, what are you saying? Lat, Manat, Uzza – they're all females ! For pity's sake! Are we to have goddesses now? Those old cranes, herons, hags?’

Misery strain fatigue, etched deeply into the Prophet's face. Which Hamza, like a soldier on a battlefield comforting a wounded friend, cups between his hands. ‘We can't sort this out for you, nephew,’ he says. ‘Climb the mountain. Go ask Gibreel.’

Gibreel: the dreamer, whose point of view is sometimes that of the camera and at other moments, spectator. When he's a camera the pee oh vee is always on the move, he hates static shots, so he's floating up on a high crane looking down at the foreshortened figures of the actors, or he's swooping down to stand invisibly between them, turning slowly on his heel to achieve a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree pan, or maybe he'll try a dolly shot, tracking along beside Baal and Abu Simbel as they walk, or hand-held with the help of a steadicam he'll probe the secrets of the Grandee's bedchamber. But mostly he sits up on Mount Cone like a paying customer in the dress circle, and Jahilia is his silver screen. He watches and weighs up the action like any movie fan, enjoys the fights infidelities moral crises, but there aren't enough girls for a real hit, man, and where are the goddamn songs? They should have built up that fairground scene, maybe a cameo role for Pimple Billimoria in a show-tent, wiggling her famous bazooms.

And then, without warning, Hamza says to Mahound: ‘Go ask Gibreel,’ and he, the dreamer, feels his heart leaping in alarm, who, me? I'm supposed to know the answers here? I'm sitting here watching this picture and now this actor points his finger out at me, who ever heard the like, who asks the bloody audience of a ‘theological’ to solve the bloody plot? – But as the dream shifts, it's always changing form, he, Gibreel, is no longer a mere spectator but the central player, the star. With his old weakness for taking too many roles: yes, yes, he's not just playing the archangel but also him, the businessman, the Messenger, Mahound, coming up the mountain when he conies. Nifty cutting is required to pull off this double role, the two of them can never be seen in the same shot, each must speak to empty air, to the imagined incarnation of the other, and trust to technology to create the missing vision, with scissors and Scotch tape or, more exotically, with the help of a travelling mat. Not to be confused ha ha with any magic carpet.

He has understood: that he is afraid of the other, the businessman, isn't it crazy? The archangel quaking before the mortal man. It's true, but: the kind of fear you feel when you're on a film set for the very first time and there, about to make his entrance, is one of the living legends of the cinema; you think, I'll disgrace myself, I'll dry, I'll corpse, you want like mad to be worthy . You will be sucked along in the slipstream of his genius, he can make you look good, like a high flier, but you will know if you aren't pulling your weight and even worse so will he ... Gibreel's fear, the fear of the self his dream creates, makes him struggle against Mahound's arrival, to try and put it off, but he's coming now, no quesch, and the archangel holds his breath.