Acts of Negation: Modality and Spatiality in The Satanic Verses

This paper reads Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses through a postcolonial critical perspective. It argues that the author rewrites the history of Islam by utilizing postcolonial strategies of historiographic modality and spatiality in order to challenge Islam as a colonizing force and deconstruct what he considers its essentialist creeds. Ironically, Rushdie negates postcolonial discourse by essentializing Islam and evaluating it from an imperial perspective and a Eurocentric point of view. Such practice undermines his claims to modality and to spatial history writing and compromises his decolonizing project against Islam.