Water over wine

Water over wine is a recurring expression in The Satanic Verses, turning a contrast between substances into a struggle over religious authority, political power, and time. In the Imam’s vision it names the victory of an unchanging sacred order over the turbulent world of history; in the Mahound episodes, the surrounding uncertainty about revelation complicates any simple division between purity and corruption.

The image and its political meaning

The Imam makes water a measure of spiritual and social purity. He drinks filtered water repeatedly and argues that its simplicity and life-preserving nature should be honored; in his account, anyone who pollutes it also pollutes the soul. Wine, by contrast, is associated with the Empress Ayesha: he condemns her drinking as evidence of moral corruption and imagines her as drinking blood. Water and wine thus become opposed signs through which the Imam interprets the conflict between his religious project and the Empress’s rule.

That opposition grows into a program for political change. In a broadcast carried from a ham radio in Kensington to the Imam’s imagined Desh, Bilal gives voice to the Imam’s call for revolution against both the Empress and history itself. The Imam rejects progress, science, and rights as deviations from the completed revelation, and sets God’s still waters against the Empress’s flowing wines. What begins as the language of an exile’s anger becomes, in the narrator’s account, a dream of controlling history and remaking the world beyond it.

From prophecy to the end of time

The Imam’s water imagery culminates in a dream of victory. After the fall of Al-Lat, a dark stain remains where her body had been; the clocks in Desh then ring without stopping, passing beyond ordinary measures of time. Their chimes announce the exile’s return, the victory of water over wine, and the beginning of the Imam’s Untime. The expression therefore does more than promise one faction’s defeat of another: it imagines the abolition of historical time in favor of a sacred order outside its changes.

The dream’s scale is also unstable. The Imam is imagined as swallowing the people who pass through the palace gates, even as the clocks signal a promised new era. The image of purification and deliverance is joined to domination. Water over wine may sound like a clean moral reversal, but the surrounding vision makes its political cost difficult to ignore: the Imam’s triumph is inseparable from his ambition to command the people and replace history with his own order.

Revelation, doubt, and interpretation

The contrast resonates with Mahound’s crisis over Abu Simbel’s proposal. The offer would recognize the goddesses Lat, Uzza, and Manat and grant Mahound a seat on Jahilia’s council. Salman the Persian warns that accepting it could make Mahound appear to have tailored revelation for political advantage and weaken the creed that there is no god but God. Mahound answers that listening to Gibreel is also a kind of asking, and that the angel often seems to come from within his deepest self. The question is not simply whether one side is pure and the other corrupt: the source of the words themselves remains uncertain.

That uncertainty sharpens when Mahound recalls miracles that failed to persuade the people of Jahilia. He asks Gibreel why they still worship the goddesses after witnessing the opening and washing of his heart, and after his return from Jerusalem with an accurate account of the city. He also recalls the command of forty daily prayers being reduced to five after he met Moses, and wonders what he should recite next. Gibreel remains silent. The narrative places the Imam’s certainty about an eternal order beside Mahound’s unanswered questions, making the later promise of water over wine feel less like a settled theological answer than one forceful claim among competing accounts of divine speech.

A motif, not a final verdict

Other scenes in the novel keep the problem of certainty open. Alicja Cohen recounts a lie-detector test in which a man convinced he is Napoleon denies being Napoleon, only for the machine to register his answer as a lie. Her story turns modern measurement into an uncertain judge of inner conviction. Later, Mirza Saeed Akhtar challenges Ayesha because she offers interpretations of an angel’s communications rather than quoting the angel’s precise words; Ayesha replies that he speaks in clear and memorable forms. These episodes do not repeat the water-and-wine image, but they echo its central tension: claims to truth depend on who interprets a message, and on what counts as proof.

The expression consequently carries both the Imam’s desire to escape historical change and the novel’s resistance to simple guarantees of truth. Water is made to stand for life, clarity, and divine stillness; wine for intoxication, blood, and the movement of history. Yet the scenes surrounding the motif reveal that purity can also serve power, while revelation remains entangled with interpretation. Water over wine is a promise of final resolution inside a narrative that repeatedly makes the authority behind such promises uncertain.