Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 61
Rushdie: Haunted By His Unholy Ghosts 61 cause any ripples or make any waves of any significance. It was too tame and hardly controversial. Something more dramatic and more sensational had to be plot- ted; something that would make everyone sit up and take notice. This would be the culmination of all the plotting and machinations devised by the two major enemies of Islam, namely the Jews and the Christians. Before we get to the end result of this plan, let me first bring the reader up to date on some of the other factors that contributed to the fruition of this plan. CON T E M P OR A RY AT TAC K S The West had still not managed to penetrate the conservative thinking within Islam; so seeds of doubt, in some way or another, had to be sown within those ranks, and the Christian nations were also aware of a small, but mainly silent body of liberal opinion in Islam which they had tried desperately to exploit. The Sharia is made out to be medieval in its moral guidance and that little, if anything, had been done to adapt it to the new social structures of life at the end of the 20th century. The hopes and aspirations of the Western Orientalists are fully exposed in the concluding paragraph of Watt’s Islamic Fundamentalism and Modernity, ( p. 143) : ‘When ordinary Muslims become aware that the idyllic condi- tions they were promised if they went back to early Islam are un- likely to be realised in practice, there may be a greater revulsion of feeling against those who advocate that policy. ’ But how wrongly and gravely they made their judgements and how it backfired on them ! Watt was right in assuming that there ‘may be a greater revulsion of feeling’, but only it turned out to be against the very people who had tried to instil this kind of thought - and that was the West.