The Prophet's Hair

16/12/2025

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  If Surrealism allowed the unconscious to dictate reason and gave art an aesthetic that needn’t be based on rational processes but irrational ones, it was also chiefly a painterly pursuit, with Dali, Magritte, Ernst and Miro. It may have begun after WWI as a literary movement with Andre Breton, but painting seemed its natural home. In contrast, magic realism was mainly a literary phenomenon, one associated with Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez chiefly, though it was a term created in the fictional context by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier in 1949. It described a certain type of Latin American fiction. Yet its presence became much more international than that, and examples include Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum,  Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Yet it was probably practised more in Latin America than elsewhere, by Jorge Amado, Isabel Allende and with special success by Marquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude became the ultimate example of the form. It is a book that has sold 50 million copies, according to Harper’s Bazaar, has been translated into 46 languages and has a literary reputation rare amongst bestsellers. 

         Britain’s main exponent has surely been Salman Rushdie, even if he might not have expected his magic realism to segue into the most horrible of realism when a fatwa was declared after the publication of Satanic Verses. Rushdie may have seen an absurdly exaggerated take on Muhammad, but the clerics in Iran weren’t for seeing the humour. The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared Rushdie a dead man walking. This Indian-born writer, educated at Rugby and who became part of the literary establishment after winning the Booker Prize in 1981 with Midnight’s Children, discovered that the reach of Islam was great indeed. For years, he remained in hiding, and the risks were clearly still evident in 2023 when he was badly attacked on a stage in New York. 

        Yet let us not get caught up in such details, though discussing them briefly removes the biographical elephant in the room, since it is central to Rushdie’s fame, if not to his success. Many who have never read Satanic Verses will know of the book. While there are famous tomes that remain far less read than their reputation suggests, few if any are so well-known based on the potential demise of the person writing them. Roland Barthes certainly didn’t have a fatwa in mind when speaking of ‘The Death of the Author’, but Rushdie wasn’t alone in fearing for his life. The Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed in 1994, and Farag Foda was killed in 1992.  

     Yet let us return to magic realism, and avoid the broadest of generalisations to focus on the specifics of Rushdie’s style, seeing in the story elements of the genre (if it is a genre). The story begins by locating us in the 20th century but as vaguely as it can manage: “Early in 19— when Srinigar was under the spell of a winter so fierce it could crack men’s bones as they were glass, a young man upon whose cold pink skin there lay, like a frost, the unmistakable sheen of wealth, was seen entering the most wretched and disreputable part of the city, where the houses of wood and corrugated iron seemed perpetually on the verge of losing their balance, and asking in low, grave tones where he might go to engage the service of a dependably professional thief.” Yet the place is named: the largest city in Kashmir. The story immediately offers hyperbole, with men’s bones capable of cracking in such a terrible winter, and a simile added for effect. It also includes in the hyperbolic the parenthetical, adding to the disreputable part of the city additional information about the type of housing, just as the narrator tells us of the sheen of wealth on the young man, with Rushdie again using a simile. The story also offers us this information in an extended, complex sentence structure.

       The narrator insists on an exaggerated approach, a style that could be provided by someone who wants to draw us into a story that may strain credulity but will retain our interest through the particular. Garcia Marquez describes this well when exaggeration meets the specific. If you are describing butterflies that allow a man to ascend, add that they are yellow butterflies, giving exaggeration a dimension of the believable, even if it can’t pass for the plausible. Another Marquez character who flies does so with the aid of sheets. Garcia Marquez says “The problem for every writer is credibility. Anybody can write anything as long as it’s believed.” (Paris Review) Central to magic realism, which can often resemble a fairy tale, is the detail that makes it modern and expansive. A giant won’t just be a giant, he may have shoes that are too small and make his feet hurt, a princess might be slender but still worries about her weight, and a hero could well realise that the string on his bow ought to be tighter. 

    Throughout, Rushdie provides details that expand the throughline of the story, which could be summarised thus: a wealthy moneylender, Hashim, finds the hair of the prophet in a vial and keeps it for himself. But it alters his personality, and his two children are determined to find ways to steal it and return the family to its relative former happiness. Hence, the son Atta finds himself in a dubious neighbourhood looking for a good thief, fails badly, and the daughter Huma tries again, the next day, with more wile than her brother. Again, parenthetical comment proves significant, and the story is told as a manipulated thing. The narrator mentions the daughter’s extraordinary beauty but adds that this beauty “was visible even through the enormous welts and bruises disfiguring her arms and forehead”. She ends up in a gulley that is as dark as ink. Later, there is a scar on the Sheikh she is trying to persuade to steal back the hair. It is the most sinister of scars: it was a “cicatrice in the shape of the Arabic letter ’S’.”

         The story becomes a visually and poetically dense tale, but we shouldn’t forget the irony, absurdity and facetiousness practised. As Huma persuades the thief to take up her request, she details to him how the father found the vial and how it has transformed his personality. The father wasn’t an especially nice man before; nevertheless, he did have principles: he would charge the borrowers an interest rate of 71 per cent, all the better to dissuade them from their spendthrift ways. “They will be cured of this fever of borrowing, borrowing all the time — so you see that if my plans succeed, I shall put myself out of business.” Here is irony. And what about absurdity? When Huma tries to arrange a deal with the thief, it has a bureaucratic aspect that makes the seriousness of the endeavour appear couched in the grind of monetary and legislative minutiae. The Sheik “demanded comprehensive details of the crime to be committed, including a precise inventory of items to be acquired, also a clear statement of all financial inducement being offered with no gratuities excluded, plus, for filing purposes only, a summary of the motives for the application.” Is this man a notorious thief, a budding lawyer, a pedantic accountant? This is someone who lives in “the most wretched and disreputable part of the city” and Rushdie here turns him into someone who wants to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.

       And what about facetiousness? Near the end of the story, after the hair has briefly been in the Sheik’s house, the hair recovered, and the Sheikh killed, a miracle occurs as his children become once again able-bodied. Earlier in the tale, the narrator has told us that with the “absolutist love of a parent, he [the Sheik] had made sure they were all [his children] provided with a lifelong source of high income by crippling them at birth, so that, as they dragged themselves around the city, they earned excellent money in the begging business.” Not anymore. There is irony in the absolutist love, but even more there is a facetious tone that is taking atrocious realities lightly. As Slate magazine notes: “since disabled child beggars get more money than healthy ones, criminal groups often increase their profits by cutting out a child’s eyes, scarring his face with acid, or amputating a limb. In 2006, an Indian news channel went undercover and filmed doctors agreeing to amputate limbs for the begging mafia at $200 a pop.”

       But Rushdie turns this into a lightly amusing scenario: a useless blessing, as the sons find on the morning of their father’s death, they will be fully functional and financially impoverished. Instead of being happy about this newfound ability to walk, “they were all four of them, very properly furious, because this miracle had reduced their earnings by 75 per cent, at the most conservative estimate.” It is as if Jesus had said take up thy bed and walk, and the lame man replied he’d prefer not to — there is money to be made by remaining impaired.

       Perhaps one way of seeing magic realism is as a type of fiction that not only wishes to blend the magical with the plausible, but also to feel once again that stories can be told when much that passes for the modern in literature seems to have retreated from the importance of the telling. Rushdie reckoned, “I thought it odd that storytelling and literature seemed to have come to a parting of the ways. It seemed unnecessary for the separation to have taken place. A story doesn't have to be simple, it doesn't have to be one-dimensional but, especially if it's multidimensional, you need to find the clearest, most engaging way of telling it.” (Paris Review) If the fairy tale and the fable are one-dimensional, magic realism is, if you like, a three-dimensional literary form, determined to add to the bare bones of a skeletal tale, the fleshy folds of fictional conceit, the attention to detail that surprises, and a shifting tone that can move from the abominably serious to the wittily light. 

         In form, we could say ‘The Prophet’s Hair’ is a variation of numerous tales that address the problem of greed, from the Brothers Grimm story ‘The Ungrateful Son’ to the Greek myth of ‘Midas’. The father is now dead, the Sheikh as well, Atta and Huma too, and the Sheikh’s four sons financially ruined, even if a pragmatist might say they merely have to smash in their own legs this time. Only the boys' mother has reason to be happy. Her lost eyesight returns, and so she spends her remaining days looking upon the beauty of the Kashmir valley. It is about as cheerfully miraculous a conclusion as Rushdie would wish to provide, saying, “I’ve never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular.” (Paris Review) It gives the story a happy ending, which perhaps the modern writer has to earn in a different way than a classical one, with Rushdie paying the price in irony and facetiousness before the tale can come good for one of its characters, if not for the others. It is the sort of tranquillity he might have wished for no less miraculously after the edict placed upon his own head.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Prophet's Hair

  If Surrealism allowed the unconscious to dictate reason and gave art an aesthetic that needn’t be based on rational processes but irrational ones, it was also chiefly a painterly pursuit, with Dali, Magritte, Ernst and Miro. It may have begun after WWI as a literary movement with Andre Breton, but painting seemed its natural home. In contrast, magic realism was mainly a literary phenomenon, one associated with Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez chiefly, though it was a term created in the fictional context by the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier in 1949. It described a certain type of Latin American fiction. Yet its presence became much more international than that, and examples include Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum,  Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Yet it was probably practised more in Latin America than elsewhere, by Jorge Amado, Isabel Allende and with special success by Marquez, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude became the ultimate example of the form. It is a book that has sold 50 million copies, according to Harper’s Bazaar, has been translated into 46 languages and has a literary reputation rare amongst bestsellers. 

         Britain’s main exponent has surely been Salman Rushdie, even if he might not have expected his magic realism to segue into the most horrible of realism when a fatwa was declared after the publication of Satanic Verses. Rushdie may have seen an absurdly exaggerated take on Muhammad, but the clerics in Iran weren’t for seeing the humour. The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared Rushdie a dead man walking. This Indian-born writer, educated at Rugby and who became part of the literary establishment after winning the Booker Prize in 1981 with Midnight’s Children, discovered that the reach of Islam was great indeed. For years, he remained in hiding, and the risks were clearly still evident in 2023 when he was badly attacked on a stage in New York. 

        Yet let us not get caught up in such details, though discussing them briefly removes the biographical elephant in the room, since it is central to Rushdie’s fame, if not to his success. Many who have never read Satanic Verses will know of the book. While there are famous tomes that remain far less read than their reputation suggests, few if any are so well-known based on the potential demise of the person writing them. Roland Barthes certainly didn’t have a fatwa in mind when speaking of ‘The Death of the Author’, but Rushdie wasn’t alone in fearing for his life. The Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed in 1994, and Farag Foda was killed in 1992.  

     Yet let us return to magic realism, and avoid the broadest of generalisations to focus on the specifics of Rushdie’s style, seeing in the story elements of the genre (if it is a genre). The story begins by locating us in the 20th century but as vaguely as it can manage: “Early in 19— when Srinigar was under the spell of a winter so fierce it could crack men’s bones as they were glass, a young man upon whose cold pink skin there lay, like a frost, the unmistakable sheen of wealth, was seen entering the most wretched and disreputable part of the city, where the houses of wood and corrugated iron seemed perpetually on the verge of losing their balance, and asking in low, grave tones where he might go to engage the service of a dependably professional thief.” Yet the place is named: the largest city in Kashmir. The story immediately offers hyperbole, with men’s bones capable of cracking in such a terrible winter, and a simile added for effect. It also includes in the hyperbolic the parenthetical, adding to the disreputable part of the city additional information about the type of housing, just as the narrator tells us of the sheen of wealth on the young man, with Rushdie again using a simile. The story also offers us this information in an extended, complex sentence structure.

       The narrator insists on an exaggerated approach, a style that could be provided by someone who wants to draw us into a story that may strain credulity but will retain our interest through the particular. Garcia Marquez describes this well when exaggeration meets the specific. If you are describing butterflies that allow a man to ascend, add that they are yellow butterflies, giving exaggeration a dimension of the believable, even if it can’t pass for the plausible. Another Marquez character who flies does so with the aid of sheets. Garcia Marquez says “The problem for every writer is credibility. Anybody can write anything as long as it’s believed.” (Paris Review) Central to magic realism, which can often resemble a fairy tale, is the detail that makes it modern and expansive. A giant won’t just be a giant, he may have shoes that are too small and make his feet hurt, a princess might be slender but still worries about her weight, and a hero could well realise that the string on his bow ought to be tighter. 

    Throughout, Rushdie provides details that expand the throughline of the story, which could be summarised thus: a wealthy moneylender, Hashim, finds the hair of the prophet in a vial and keeps it for himself. But it alters his personality, and his two children are determined to find ways to steal it and return the family to its relative former happiness. Hence, the son Atta finds himself in a dubious neighbourhood looking for a good thief, fails badly, and the daughter Huma tries again, the next day, with more wile than her brother. Again, parenthetical comment proves significant, and the story is told as a manipulated thing. The narrator mentions the daughter’s extraordinary beauty but adds that this beauty “was visible even through the enormous welts and bruises disfiguring her arms and forehead”. She ends up in a gulley that is as dark as ink. Later, there is a scar on the Sheikh she is trying to persuade to steal back the hair. It is the most sinister of scars: it was a “cicatrice in the shape of the Arabic letter ’S’.”

         The story becomes a visually and poetically dense tale, but we shouldn’t forget the irony, absurdity and facetiousness practised. As Huma persuades the thief to take up her request, she details to him how the father found the vial and how it has transformed his personality. The father wasn’t an especially nice man before; nevertheless, he did have principles: he would charge the borrowers an interest rate of 71 per cent, all the better to dissuade them from their spendthrift ways. “They will be cured of this fever of borrowing, borrowing all the time — so you see that if my plans succeed, I shall put myself out of business.” Here is irony. And what about absurdity? When Huma tries to arrange a deal with the thief, it has a bureaucratic aspect that makes the seriousness of the endeavour appear couched in the grind of monetary and legislative minutiae. The Sheik “demanded comprehensive details of the crime to be committed, including a precise inventory of items to be acquired, also a clear statement of all financial inducement being offered with no gratuities excluded, plus, for filing purposes only, a summary of the motives for the application.” Is this man a notorious thief, a budding lawyer, a pedantic accountant? This is someone who lives in “the most wretched and disreputable part of the city” and Rushdie here turns him into someone who wants to dot the i’s and cross the t’s.

       And what about facetiousness? Near the end of the story, after the hair has briefly been in the Sheik’s house, the hair recovered, and the Sheikh killed, a miracle occurs as his children become once again able-bodied. Earlier in the tale, the narrator has told us that with the “absolutist love of a parent, he [the Sheik] had made sure they were all [his children] provided with a lifelong source of high income by crippling them at birth, so that, as they dragged themselves around the city, they earned excellent money in the begging business.” Not anymore. There is irony in the absolutist love, but even more there is a facetious tone that is taking atrocious realities lightly. As Slate magazine notes: “since disabled child beggars get more money than healthy ones, criminal groups often increase their profits by cutting out a child’s eyes, scarring his face with acid, or amputating a limb. In 2006, an Indian news channel went undercover and filmed doctors agreeing to amputate limbs for the begging mafia at $200 a pop.”

       But Rushdie turns this into a lightly amusing scenario: a useless blessing, as the sons find on the morning of their father’s death, they will be fully functional and financially impoverished. Instead of being happy about this newfound ability to walk, “they were all four of them, very properly furious, because this miracle had reduced their earnings by 75 per cent, at the most conservative estimate.” It is as if Jesus had said take up thy bed and walk, and the lame man replied he’d prefer not to — there is money to be made by remaining impaired.

       Perhaps one way of seeing magic realism is as a type of fiction that not only wishes to blend the magical with the plausible, but also to feel once again that stories can be told when much that passes for the modern in literature seems to have retreated from the importance of the telling. Rushdie reckoned, “I thought it odd that storytelling and literature seemed to have come to a parting of the ways. It seemed unnecessary for the separation to have taken place. A story doesn't have to be simple, it doesn't have to be one-dimensional but, especially if it's multidimensional, you need to find the clearest, most engaging way of telling it.” (Paris Review) If the fairy tale and the fable are one-dimensional, magic realism is, if you like, a three-dimensional literary form, determined to add to the bare bones of a skeletal tale, the fleshy folds of fictional conceit, the attention to detail that surprises, and a shifting tone that can move from the abominably serious to the wittily light. 

         In form, we could say ‘The Prophet’s Hair’ is a variation of numerous tales that address the problem of greed, from the Brothers Grimm story ‘The Ungrateful Son’ to the Greek myth of ‘Midas’. The father is now dead, the Sheikh as well, Atta and Huma too, and the Sheikh’s four sons financially ruined, even if a pragmatist might say they merely have to smash in their own legs this time. Only the boys' mother has reason to be happy. Her lost eyesight returns, and so she spends her remaining days looking upon the beauty of the Kashmir valley. It is about as cheerfully miraculous a conclusion as Rushdie would wish to provide, saying, “I’ve never seen anywhere in the world as beautiful as Kashmir. It has something to do with the fact that the valley is very small and the mountains are very big, so you have this miniature countryside surrounded by the Himalayas, and it's just spectacular.” (Paris Review) It gives the story a happy ending, which perhaps the modern writer has to earn in a different way than a classical one, with Rushdie paying the price in irony and facetiousness before the tale can come good for one of its characters, if not for the others. It is the sort of tranquillity he might have wished for no less miraculously after the edict placed upon his own head.


© Tony McKibbin