Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 39
Rushdie: Haunted By His Unholy Ghosts 39 Indian/Pakistani background; he should be a Muslim only in name; he should be a member of the Westernised ‘elite’; and if he were an author of some repute, so much the better. The seeds had been sown years, perhaps centuries ago, and now the poisonous fruit was almost ready. This was to be their ‘Ace up the sleeve’, who in the end turned out to be the ‘Joker in the Pack’ - only the facts proved later that it was to be no joke; it was to be no laughing matter for all concerned. In fact it turned out to be quite the opposite. Even non-Muslims all around the world were going to add a new word to their vocabularies no matter what language they spoke - and this word was Fatwa. The scene was set for Salman Rushdie who fulfi lled all the re- quirements adequately. There are bad apples in every cart, but the West had scraped the very bottom to dig out the most rotten one in the shape of Rushdie, and furthermore it has exposed this rotten apple to the rest of the world to suggest that in Islam, these sorts of ‘apples’ are progressively becoming the norm. I shall return to this later. ISL A M’S SE LF - SU F F IC I E NC Y Another criticism levelled against Islam has been its image of being self-sufficient. The Western orientalists have always tried to portray Muslims as being blind in their belief in Islam and its teach- ings and in Islam being self-sufficient for their moral and secular needs. And because of this, they argue that ordinary Muslims are prevented from gaining any knowledge of doctrines of other faiths. This attitude of trying to prevent people from hearing about other doctrines seems then to show a distrust of the ability of the ordinary human mind to distinguish between truth and falsehood. Montgomery Watt, in his book Muslim-Christian Encounters, accus- ingly dates this thought back to the time of the Holy Prophet(sa): ‘There are a number of Hadith and stories of early Muslims which serve to enforce the principle that it is undesirable to