The Fallibility of Prophets Theme Analysis

After he departed the ubiquitous images of his face began to rot. On the gigantic, luridly coloured hoardings from which he had watched over the populace, his lazy eyelids started flaking and crumbling, drooping further and further until his irises looked like two moons sliced by clouds, or by the soft knives of his long lashes. Finally the eyelids fell off, giving a wild, bulging look to his painted eyes. Outside the picture palaces of Bombay, mammoth cardboard effigies of Gibreel were seen to decay and list. Dangling limply on their sustaining scaffolds, they lost arms, withered, snapped at the neck. His portraits on the covers of movie magazines acquired the pallor of death, a nullity about the eye, a hollowness. At last his images simply faded off the printed page, so that the shiny covers of Celebrity and Society and Illustrated Weekly went blank at the bookstalls and their publishers fired the printers and blamed the quality of the ink.

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 returns to the city as quickly as he can, to expunge the foul verses that reek of brimstone and sulphur, to strike them from the record for ever and ever, so that they will survive in just one or two unreliable collections of old traditions and orthodox interpreters will try and unwrite their story, but Gibreel, hovering-watching from his highest camera angle, knows one small detail, just one tiny thing that’s a bit of a problem here, namely that it was me both times, baba, me first and second also me. From my mouth, both the statement and the repudiation, verses and converses, universes and reverses, the whole thing, and we all know how my mouth got worked.

“First it was the Devil,” Mahound mutters as he rushes to Jahilia. “But this time, the angel, no question. He wrestled me to the ground.”

“Gibreel,” said Saladin Chamcha, “help.”

But Gibreel’s eye had been caught by Rosa Diamond. He looked at her, and could not look away. Then he nodded, and went back upstairs. No attempt was made to stop him.

When Chamcha reached the Black Maria, he saw the traitor, Gibreel Farishta, looking down at him from the little balcony outside Rosa’s bedroom, and there wasn’t any light shining around the bastard’s head.

The other scrambled to his feet and stood pulling at his fingers, his head bowed. “What I want to know, sir,” he mumbled, “is, which is it to be? Annihilation or salvation? Why have you returned?”

Gibreel thought rapidly. “It is for judging,” he finally answered. “Facts in the case must be sifted, due weight given pro and contra. Here it is the human race that is the undertrial, and it is a defendant with a rotten record: a history-sheeter, a bad egg. Careful evaluations must be made. For the present, verdict is reserved; will be promulgated in due course. In the meantime, my presence must remain a secret, for vital security reasons.” He put his hat back on his head, feeling pleased with himself.

For Blake’s Isaiah, God had simply been an immanence, an incorporeal indignation; but Gibreel’s vision of the Supreme Being was not abstract in the least. He saw, sitting on the bed, a man of about the same age as himself, of medium height, fairly heavily built, with salt-and-pepper beard cropped close to the line of the jaw. What struck him most was that the apparition was balding, seemed to suffer from dandruff and wore glasses. This was not the Almighty he had expected.

Mahound had no time for scruples, Salman told Baal, no qualms about ends and means. The faithful lived by lawlessness, but in those years Mahound— or should one say the Archangel Gibreel? — should one say Al-Lah? —became obsessed by law. Amid the palm-trees of the oasis Gibreel appeared to the Prophet and found himself spouting rules, rules, rules, until the faithful could scarcely bear the prospect of any more revelation, Salman said, rules about every damn thing, if a man farts let him turn his face to the wind, a rule about which hand to use for the purpose of cleaning one’s behind. It was as if no aspect of human existence was to be left unregulated, free.

‘In the old days you mocked the Recitation,’ Mahound said in the hush. ‘Then, too, these people enjoyed your mockery. Now you return to dishonour my house, and it seems that once again you succeed in bringing the worst out of the people.’

Baal said, ‘I’ve finished. Do what you want.’

So he was sentenced to be beheaded, within the hour, and as soldiers manhandled him out of the tent towards the killing ground, he shouted over his shoulder: ‘Whores and writers, Mahound. We are the people you can’t forgive.’

Mahound replied, ‘Writers and whores. I see no difference here.’

Chamcha recommended caution. Recalling Mishal Sufyan’s loathing for Simba, he said: “The fellow has—has he not?—a record of violence towards women . . .” Jumpy turned his palms outward. “In his personal life,” he owned, “the guy’s frankly a piece of shit. But that doesn’t mean he disembowels senior citizens; you don’t have to be an angel to be innocent. Unless, of course, you’re black.” Chamcha let this pass. “The point is, this isn’t personal, it’s political,” Jumpy emphasized, adding, as he got up to leave, “Um, there’s a public meeting about it tomorrow. Pamela and I have to go; please, I mean if you’d like, if you’d be interested, that is, come along if you want.”

The moment Saladin Chamcha got close enough to Allie Cone to be transfixed, and somewhat chilled, by her eyes, he felt his reborn animosity towards Gibreel extending itself to her, with her degree-zero go-to-hell look, her air of being privy to some great, secret mystery of the universe; also, her quality of what he would afterwards think of as wilderness, a hard, sparse thing, antisocial, self-contained, an essence. Why did it annoy him so much? Why, before she’d even opened her mouth, had he characterized her as part of the enemy?

“‘Minnamin, Gut mag alkan, Pern dirstan,’” Chamcha replied. “It means, ‘My darling, God makes hungry, the Devil thirsty.’ Nabokov.”

“Him again,” Gibreel complained. “What bloody language?”

“He made it up. It’s what Kinbote’s Zemblan nurse tells him as a child. In Pale Fire.”

“Perndirstan,” Farishta repeated. "Sounds like a country: Hell, maybe. I give up, anyway. How are you supposed to read a man who writes in a made-up lingo of his own?”

“They are going to die,” Saeed replied.

It was too late. The villagers, whose heads could be seen bobbing about in the distance, had reached the edge of the underwater shelf. Almost all together, making no visible attempt to save themselves, they dropped beneath the water’s surface. In moments, every one of the Ayesha Pilgrims had sunk out of sight.

None of them reappeared. Not a single gasping head or thrashing arm.