Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 48
48 Mohamed Arshad Ahmedi proud and humble, chaste and sensual, intelligent and, in certain things, oddly stupid. ’ (p. 313). The sorcery of the orientalists is clearly exposed and it is this very necromancy that has attributed weaknesses on the part of Muhammad(sa) which allegedly have been responsible for satanic influences to enter his mind as they do the minds of ordinary human beings. This is what Maxime Rodinson has adjudged and drawn an inference in his concluding paragraph which also ends in extremely condescending terms : ‘Ought we to be surprised at these complexities and contradic- tions, this mixture of strength and weakness? He was after all, a man like other men, subject to the same weaknesses and sharing the same powers, Muhammad ibn Abdallah of the tribe of Quraysh, our brother. ’ (p. 313). Brother indeed ! With a brother like Rodinson, who needs en- emies? DR. NOR M A N DA N I E L Dr. Daniel was a scholar of Queen’s College, Oxford before the Second World War and later became a protège of the great Western Orientalist, William Montgomery Watt, after the War. Watt became the supervisor of his doctoral thesis. With a supervisor like Watt it was no wonder then that his sub- sequent works should be a parody of Watt’s literary contribution to the Muslim-Christian polemic. Dr. Daniel’s most famous work was in keeping with the theme of the Western Orientalists in trying to ascertain why a deformed image of Islam had been established in the European mind and it is this that Dr. Daniel tries to delineate in its process of becoming one of the dogmas of Christian society. But it soon becomes evident that the line of action is the same; the arguments are the same; the very limited source of material is the same, and the dubious motives that surface are also the same. This work by Dr. Daniel is called Islam