Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 164
164 Mohamed Arshad Ahmedi prejudices or past preconceptions. The renowned Islamic scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith observed as far back as 1956 that a healthy and functioning Islam was crucial because it had helped Muslim people to cultivate decent values and ideals which are also shared in the West because they spring from a common tradition. He also points out the ‘fundamental weakness’ of both Western civilisation and Christianity in the modern world which ‘is their inability to rec- ognise that they share the planet not with inferiors but with equals. Unless Western civilisation intellectually and socially, politically and economically, and the Christian church theologically, can learn to treat other men with fundamental respect, these two in their turn will have failed to come to terms with the actualities of the twentieth century. ’ (Islam and Modern History, p. 305). Karen Armstrong also supports this view in her book Muhammad, A Western Attempt To Understand Islam : ‘We in the West have never been able to cope with Islam: our ideas of it have been crude and dismissive and today we seem to believe our own avowed commitment to tolerance and compassion by our contempt for the pain and inchoate distress in the Muslim world. ’ She is also forthcoming in the way forward for both communities: ‘The reality is that Islam and the West share a common tradition. From the time of the Prophet Muhammad, Muslims have recognised this, but the West cannot accept it. . . . . The beloved figure of the Prophet Muhammad became central to one of the latest clashes between Islam and the West during the Salman Rushdie affair. If Muslims need to understand our Western traditions and institutions more thoroughly today, we in the West need to divest ourselves of some of our prejudice. Perhaps one place to start is with the figure of Muhammad: a complex, passionate man who sometimes did things that is difficult for us to accept, but who had genius of a profound order and founded a religion and a cultural tradition that was not based on the sword - despite the Western myth