Da 'The Satanic Verses' alle vignette su Maometto: quando la libertà di espressione artistica incontra il sacro

Tutto il sogno di Gibreel non è nient’altro che il racconto della nascita dell’islam. Rushdie ebbe modo di studiare l’argomento a Cambridge e quello che ritiene essere l’aspetto più interessante è proprio il legame tra la religione testimoniata da Maometto e la storia:
“one of the things that really interested me about Islam is that it’s the only great world religion whose origin is found inside recorded history. If we’re trying to look at what a religion is, how it comes to be and how it comes to mean what it means, the only one we can study is Islam. The rest is myths and legends. You can’t see the texts of Christianity and Judaism as history books. But Islam has a lot of historical material. For me, that made it absolutely fascinating – the way in which a great idea would grow out of the circumstances of its time and then become universal”.

I riferimenti al contesto e ai protagonisti di quell’evento sono piuttosto evidenti, a partire dal nome del profeta, Mahound, termine dispregiativo usato dai cristiani nel medioevo:
“Mahound – with his variants Mahum, Mahun, Mahoune, Macon, Machound and so forth – is a medieval European version of Muhammad, whom Christians presumed the infidel Muslims worshipped as God. For poets from Langland to Burns, Mahound is synonymous with the devil – an expletive by which people swear, or a false god. The image of the prophet-as-devil came to Europe with the returned Crusaders; its origins lie in the polemics that followed the Muslim conquest of the Near East, when disgruntled Christian clerics put it about that the Prophet of Islam was an impostor”.

Per alcuni critici già la scelta di utilizzare l’appellativo Mahound in chiaro riferimento a Maometto risulterebbe offensiva:
“how audacious and impertinent of Rushdie to keep insisting that this work can be deemed fictional when he clearly admits that it was Muhammad(sa) that he was writing about; and the fact that ‘Mahound’ is used to refer to Muhammad(sa) is a clear indication of the deliberate attempt to provoke Muslims”.

Se però, come detto, nei romanzi di Rushdie i nomi non sono assegnati casualmente, allora anche in questo caso la prospettiva si allarga e il personaggio Mahound va a collegarsi alla tematica della migrazione:
“the polemical ‘misnaming’ of Muhammad as Mahound links up with Rushdie’s strategies of reclamation in the novel. The Satanic Verses addresses problems of cultural representation and examines the role of language in the alienation of the migrant”.

È proprio l’autore a chiarire questa decisione:
“why Mahound? […] Because I thought it was a way of reclaiming, or unpoisoning a name. Take a name given in scorn and transform it”.

Ancora a difesa dello scrittore
“it could be argued, moreover, that Rushdie’s use of the term Mahound is a dramatically effective tactic to draw Western attention to the ways in which Western linguistic usages unthinkingly insult and degrade Muslims: after all, how many Westerners still refer to Islam as Muhammadanism, a linguistic usage that is in its implications no better than ‘Mahound’”.

Agha Shahid Ali sostiene, invece, che la tattica di usare un nome infamante per riscattarlo e dargli nuova dignità, nel caso di Mahound-Maometto non funzioni:
“Rushdie somewhere says that he wanted to occupy the term Mahound the way Blacks had occupied black and turned it around so that now it does have positive connotations; they have rescued the term from those who possessed it. But is Mahound in The Satanic Verses turned around in any such fashion? Some have argued that Mahound is quite an attractive figure and that Rushdie in his depiction of Mahound reveals a very deep and subtle loyalty to Islam. But what, in effect, does it mean to occupy a negative term unless one makes it obviously positive? I think using Mahound was one of Rushdie’s truly unfortunate choices. Why dig up a term from medieval Europe and then give it back to the Europeans, with some modifications of course, but essentially as something they are happy with? They can say: See, we were right, right from the days of the Crusades”.

Una scelta audace, dunque, quella di modellare un personaggio di nome Mahound sulla vicenda storica del profeta dell’islam, Maometto. Su questo punto si concentrano molte delle critiche al romanzo e a Rushdie, colpevole secondo alcuni di aver denigrato la figura di Maometto e dei suoi primi compagni.