Analysis: Rushdie's The Prophet's Hair

Salman Rushdie's The Prophet's Hair is permeated with metaphors, on both a small scale as literary flourishes ("...a flower-vendor was rowing his boat through water to which the cold of the night had given the cloudy consistency of wild honey") and a larger scale which may betray a deeper and much more significant meaning. Rushdie tells the story of a family living in the Kashmir valley in India who are destroyed by the supernatural effects of a religious trinket that has been brought into their household. The trinket is a strand of the prophet Muhammad's hair encased in a glass vial. There are many religious overtones throughout the story, accompanied by slightly more subtle undertones regarding the corrupting nature of money. I believe that with this story, Rushdie intends to articulate the negative effects of humanity's two most significant motivations, money and religion, and perhaps comment on the nature of humanity's need for these motivations.

All of the primary characters in this story, along with most of the secondary characters, can be categorized into one of two groups: those whose god is money, and those whose god is an actual deity, in this case the prophet Muhammad. The thieves who beat and rob Atta at the beginning of the story are inarguably motivated by money ("...he was set upon by two men whose faces he never saw, robbed of the substantial bank-roll which he had insanely brought on this solitary excursion, and beaten within and inch of his life."), as is the flower-vendor who finds him ("The flower-vendor moored his craft and by stooping over the mouth of the injured man was able to learn the poor fellow's address...whereupon, hoping for a large tip, the hawker rowed Atta home"), and Sheikh Sin, the Thief of Thieves, whom Huma subsequently hired to steal the hair from her father ("...so in the extraordinary commission he had accepted from the moneylender's daughter he saw his opportunity of amassing enough wealth at a stroke to leave the valley forever"). Hashim himself is contently under the spell of money when he is first introduced into the story, though he does not stay that way, and it is the switch of his allegiance from money to religion that provides the conflict in the story and begins the rising action. Initially, though, he is a wealthy, respected moneylender charging "an interest rate of over seventy per cent," which seems like an unreasonably high amount. His family, as an extension of him, can also be said to be under the spell of money. Hashim and his wife made sure to instill the values of money in their children ("In their children...the moneylender and his wife had successfully sought to inculcate the virtues of thrift, plain dealing, and a healthy independence of spirit.")

The characters who can be considered devout Muslims at the outset of the story are few in name. Sin the thief's wife and four sons can be considered this way, though that does not become evident until later in the story. The son's particularly pose a problem to my theory of the story, as they are said to be both devout ("...they had all grown up to be hopelessly devout men, who even spoke of making the pilgrimage to Mecca some day") and professional beggars ("...he [Sin] had made sure they were all 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"). I can only liken this to what it must be like for a child to have two parents of different religions in modern society, such as one parent who is Jewish and one who is Christian. Most likely, the children are naturally conflicted and may choose to incorporate both religions, which is what the thief's sons have apparently done. More importantly, the community in which Hashim's family lives is evidently devout to a great extent, judging by its reaction to the original theft of the prophet's hair ("...that revered hair whose theft from its shrine at Hazratbal mosque the previous morning had created an unprecedented hue and cry in the valley"). Of course, the most significant religious character turns out to be Hashim, who, upon finding the prophet's hair and apparently accepting Islam as his faith, begins backpedaling so hard in an attempt to right the wrongs he has committed in his life thus far that he seems to go insane. Hashim's massive shift in belief ultimately causes his own death as well as that of both his children, and results in his wife being committed to an asylum. In this way, Rushdie exemplifies the corrupting nature of fundamentalist religion.

In the end, Rushdie uses the hair itself to dictate the religion/money theory through the effects it had on each character. Hashim and his family, who had previously worshipped money, ultimately perished; Sin the thief, who sought nothing more than jewels, was shot and killed; and Sin's wife and four sons, who remained devout Muslim's throughout the story, were miraculously cured of their lifelong ailments (in the case of the sons this is especially significant, since the curing of their ailment rendered each of them much less able to make money). By giving every character a specific motivator, Rushdie suggests how it is a facet of human nature for a person to need motivation, and shows how such motivations can corrupt and destroy.

The only character of any significance left unaccounted for is the Deputy Commissioner of Police, and his allegiance is open to interpretation. One could say his allegiance is to the law, or rather to justice, which in another significant motivator. He seems to be the personification of government in the story.