Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 64
64 Mohamed Arshad Ahmedi M U H A M M A D ’S C H A R AC T E R M A L IGN E D The Western orientalists, especially Watt, have fully availed themselves of all the material which depicts the life of Muhammad(sa) in the minutest detail. Muhammad’s life was an open book for everyone to read freely. Never in the history of mankind have the actions and sayings of a single person been looked at with such scru- tiny as have been those of the Holy Prophet(sa) of Islam. The real aim of the western scholars has never been to study the character of Muhammad(sa) to fully appreciate it, but it has been to find faults in any form whatsoever. When they did not succeed in this design, they then twisted the information with deceit and guile. They be- came so desperate and so focussed to this end that certain Western orientalists devoted their whole work to it. So much so, in fact, that they ended up imagining themselves to be in Muhammad’s shoes and thinking like him and putting their own base and spurious ideas and thoughts and passing them off as those of Muhammad(sa). The real problem is that of jealousy; they could never conceive of anyone being so perfect, and so to make sure that the rest of the non-Muslim world did not fall under the spell of this ‘magician’, this ‘perfect human being’, they began to attribute moral lapses and errors of judgement on his part and made him out to be like any ordinary human being. These alleged ‘moral lapses’ were then gradually led to contribute to him inventing revelations of his own and attributing them to God - thus the idea of the ‘satanic verses’ was invented. SATA N IC I N F LU E NC E S The Holy Qur’an, like the character of the Holy Prophet sa, has had the greatest amount of scrutiny impressed upon it. It has been examined probingly, verse by verse, word by word, by commenta- tors and scholars both Muslim and non-Muslim. But the aim of the Christian and Jewish scholars has been to find inconsistencies, con- tradictions and historical factual errors at any cost, even if it meant by lying and deceiving.