The Satanic Verses controversy traditions themselves see Abraham as not without fault and deserving of criticism; that Rushdie referred to Mohammed as "Mahound", a conjurer, a magician and a false prophet, yet these remarks are made by a drunken apostate, a character with whom neither reader nor author has any sympathy; that the book insults the wives of the Prophet by having whores use their names, yet the wives are explicitly said to be chaste and the adoption of their names by whores is to symbolise the corruption of the city then being described (perhaps symbolising Mecca in its pre-Islamic state); that the book
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