Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses is a much contested piece of work. Its politics dichotomized responses into either condemnatory or supportive categories. In some forms of defense of its content, critics employed the principle of artistic necessity to explain the book’s transgression against Islamic ideology. This paper intends to neither defend nor condemn but rather to read the work through a postcolonial critical perspective and expose its limitations and inherent contradictions.