The Satanic Verses faith and revelation, not to mention the political manipulation of religion. Rushdie's own assumptions about the importance of literature parallel in the literal value accorded the written word in Islamic tradition to some degree. But Rushdie seems to have assumed that diverse communities and cultures share some degree of common moral ground on the basis of which dialogue can be pieced together, and it is perhaps for this reason that he underestimated the implacable nature of the hostility evoked by "The Satanic Verses", even though a major theme of that novel is the dangerous nature of closed, absolutist belief systems."
The Satanic Verses and "Midnight's Children" may appear to be more "comic epic", "clearly those works are highly satirical" in a similar vein of postmodern satire pioneered by Joseph Heller in "Catch-22". "The Satanic Verses" continued to exhibit Rushdie's penchant for organising his work in terms of parallel stories. Within the book "there are major parallel stories, alternating dream and reality sequences, tied together by the recurring names of the characters in each; this provides intertexts within each novel which comment on the other stories." "The Satanic Verses" also exhibits Rushdie's common practice of using allusions to invoke connotative links. Within the book