In the Shadow of the Sword (book) tale by the ears, conjuring the half-vanished past with such gusto that characters and places fairly bound from the page." Jones goes on to finish his review by asking, "Is this Satanic Verses territory?" Holland quotes Salman Rushdie at the very beginning of the book, acknowledging, wryly, another British author who ventured onto the sticky wicket of Islam’s origin myths." Ziauddin Sardar, writing for the "New Statesman", was highly critical of the book. He says "the real aim of the book is to examine the validity of 'Muslim sources' and to assess the extent of Muslim scholarship down the centuries.
The Satanic Verses Verses" "Rushdie's largest aesthetic achievement". Timothy Brennan called the work "the most ambitious novel yet published to deal with the immigrant experience in Britain" that captures the immigrants' dream-like disorientation and their process of "union-by-hybridization". The book is seen as "fundamentally a study in alienation." Muhammd Mashuq ibn Ally wrote that ""The Satanic Verses" is about identity, alienation, rootlessness, brutality, compromise, and conformity. These concepts confront all migrants, disillusioned with both cultures: the one they are in and the one they join. Yet knowing they cannot live a life of anonymity, they mediate between them both. "The Satanic Verses" is