SOURCE: Sawhney, Simona. “Satanic Choices: Poetry and Prophecy in Rushdie's Novel.” Twentieth-Century Literature 45, no. 3 (fall 1999): 253-77.

In the following essay, Sawhney applies Georg Lukacs's and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel to The Satanic Verses and discusses Rushdie's book as a hybrid of the novel genre.

That such an episode could actually have been mentioned and treated by ancient Muslim authors whose authority is not doubted merely proves that at the heart of the foundation of Islam, what we have here called the textual question, that of divine-human “construction” … had already been settled satisfactorily for that time. In fact, great debates took place on the subject; … the Mu'tazilites went so far as to deny the uncreated origin of the Koran. … What can be said is that this text was at one and the same time human, all-too-human, as well as divine—at times excessively divine.

—Fethi Benslama 84-...