Devils and demons

In The Satanic Verses, devils and demons are both imagined supernatural beings and identities attached to people whose bodies or conduct disturb accepted categories. Saladin Chamcha’s goat-like transformation makes that instability visible: others read his appearance as proof of evil, while he struggles to decide whether the creature is still himself. As the image spreads through London, it becomes at once a reason for suspicion, a popular emblem of defiance, and a sign of how easily social judgments turn fantasy into public reality.

The demon as a contested identity

The novel does not settle the meaning of Saladin’s transformation by declaring him either literally demonic or merely mistaken about his condition. His body is treated as evidence by the people around him, but their explanations differ. Some interpret him through religious language, others through ideas of illness or possession, and still others through racial and political stereotypes. The creature therefore occupies an unsettled space: it can be feared as a supernatural threat, regarded as a medical problem, or understood as a person made vulnerable by institutional power.

That uncertainty begins in the aftermath of Saladin’s arrival in England. After an anonymous report of a suspicious figure on the beach, fifty-seven uniformed constables and thirteen dogs take part in a search, while additional officers guard the exits of Rosa Diamond’s home. Immigration officials are present as well. When Saladin appears in the hallway, the officers identify him as the person they have been seeking. His explanation that he survived the destruction of the Bostan is dismissed; without a passport or other identifying document, he cannot make his British identity count. His insistence that he is a familiar television actor is treated as another absurdity rather than as a means of establishing who he is.

The police encounter makes the creature’s status inseparable from the treatment of migrants. Saladin is not first encountered as a person asking to be recognized, but as a suspicious body whose appearance and undocumented arrival invite official scrutiny. He later tries to establish his identity through affiliations and practical details, including his membership in Actors’ Equity and the Automobile Association, and asks the officers to check a computer. The challenge to his Englishness—whether a person with his name and appearance can be English—shows that the demon label is reinforced by racialized assumptions, not produced by appearance alone.

Saladin among the Sufyans

After police custody and hospitalization, Saladin is taken in by Muhammad Sufyan’s household. His illness and unfamiliar body do not immediately make him welcome. Hind interprets his arrival through the language of the Devil and associates his breath with a source of spiritual pollution. The contrast between her alarm and the daughters’ curiosity gives the scene its divided response: Mishal and Anahita regard him as strange and compelling, while Hind fears for the safety and honor of the household. Her offer of chicken soup sits beside her conviction that something evil has entered the home.

The possibility of possession is also raised as an explanation for the transformation. Mishal wonders whether it might be temporary and whether an exorcism could help. Muhammad Sufyan considers the possibility, while Jumpy Joshi redirects the household toward the circumstances of Saladin’s treatment. He identifies the wrongful arrest, intimidation, violence, detention, and medical intervention as part of the account that must be considered. This explanation does not establish that the change is medically caused; rather, it places supernatural speculation alongside concrete experiences of institutional harm and psychological distress.

The family’s welcome is itself complicated. Muhammad Sufyan offers Saladin a place to recover among people he calls his own kind, but Saladin rejects the assumption that shared background makes them his people. He has spent much of his life trying to distance himself from that identity. Thus, the creature is not simply brought home by a community that recognizes him: he must contend with the difference between being offered shelter and being assigned belonging. The demon figure gathers together the conflicts between the identity Saladin has fashioned, the migrant category imposed on him, and the community he has sought to leave behind.

Self-perception and public image

For a time, Saladin accepts the creature as an image of his own moral state. He thinks of himself as evil and as an embodiment of what others condemn. Yet he later resists that conclusion, telling himself that appearances do not provide a reliable guide to identity. His effort to separate himself from the labels of Devil, goat, and Shaitan does not remove the transformed body; it marks a change in how he interprets it. The creature’s appearance remains, but it no longer supplies a sufficient explanation of who he is.

Meanwhile, the image escapes his control. People begin dreaming of a horned, devil-like Saladin, and the figure enters waking life through posters, badges, sweatshirts, and rubber horns worn by young people. Among some Black and Asian residents, the image becomes a source of identification and a way to inhabit a form of power that white society has rejected. Mishal recognizes that this change in meaning is collective: the rejected image can be occupied and reclaimed. Saladin, however, is bewildered by the popularity. He did not set out to become a hero or to create a political symbol.

The same circulation of the demon image produces a harsher response. Police community-relations officers cite a supposed devil cult among young Black and Asian people, and racialized suspicion intensifies through raids and detention. When the Granny Ripper murders become part of public discussion, authorities and rumor connect the killings to occultism among the city’s Black residents. Saladin, previously treated as an illegal migrant or criminal, comes to signify opposing things at once: outlaw, threat, and racial hero. The novel emphasizes that these meanings travel through dreams and stories until the imagined figure is treated as real, with material consequences for people whom the image is used to police.

Gibreel and the unstable supernatural

Gibreel Farishta’s experience supplies a contrasting version of the same uncertainty. He faces the fact of his mental illness and receives care at the Maudsley Hospital, yet his recurring dreams continue. His doctors and Alleluia Cone at first take his apparent ability to distinguish dreams from waking life as a hopeful sign. In retrospect, that separation is bound up with his division of the angelic self from his ordinary identity: by treating the visionary figure as another person, he tries to suppress it while also preserving its power.

The distinction matters because the narrative does not make a diagnosis settle the supernatural question. Gibreel’s paranoid schizophrenia, medication, and medical supervision are concrete parts of his experience, but they do not turn every vision into a simple falsehood within the story. His crisis is presented through both clinical care and an account of visions that continue to affect his actions. Saladin’s transformation and Gibreel’s angelic identity therefore mirror one another without being identical: each exposes the strain of dividing a self into ordinary and otherworldly parts, while leaving uncertain which side has authority.

That instability also has consequences for relationships and conduct. Alleluia cares for Gibreel through his illness, while Saladin, ignorant of the extent of his treatment and vulnerability, sees him as a fortunate rival and later recognizes an opening through which he can harm him. On a later journey with Alleluia, Saladin learns that Gibreel has recently taken a car and spoken of damnation and summoning Azraeel; the doctors have warned that possessive jealousy may trigger his illness. The episode joins religious language to a psychiatric crisis and a practical risk, without making those elements interchangeable.

Across these strands, devils and demons name no single stable category. They describe an apparent transformation, a feared spiritual presence, a diagnosis proposed by those nearby, and a political image capable of both empowering and endangering a community. The creature’s significance lies in the struggle over interpretation: who gets to call someone monstrous, what evidence is accepted, and whether a stigmatized image can be turned against the order that imposed it.