Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 28
28 Mohamed Arshad Ahmedi The British East India Company was a powerful body in India and was greatly influential in imposing its colonial imperialism and had great influence on the local indigenous population which included Hindus, Muslims and Christians. As time went by, people slowly became torn between their loyalty to the British and their native patriotism. Many, including Indian Muslims, decided to declare their loyalty to the British and moreover, decided that their salvation lay only in the acquisition of Western learning. With these two aims in mind, they became con- vinced that British rule was better than the rule of the supposedly decadent Mughals, and also that if they wanted to prosper under it they had better start acquiring European science and learning. There were those who foolishly and naively thought that the British Christians, rather than being out to destroy Islam, were its well-wishers and wanted the Muslims to develop socially, politi- cally and economically. But they had not accounted for one major hazard which would retard this progress, or, in fact, stop it in its tracks from the very beginning. The greatest obstacle to the material, social and intellectual progress of the Muslims was their conservative attitude to religion. The liberal reformers, in order to overcome this problem saw the need to re-examine the foundations of the Islamic faith and advo- cated laxity in certain aspects to accommodate their secular ambi- tions. And as is human nature, when laxity or any form of slackness appears, and you start to divert from the original teachings and you start becoming apologetic for what you believe in, and you begin to compromise, then the path that leads people astray knows no bounds, and slowly but surely it takes a progressively downward plunge. A younger contemporary of Sir Syed Khan, the famous Indian modernist Ameer Ali Syed, published a book in 1873 called The Spirit Of Islam which became the manifesto of Islamic liberalism. A