Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 109
109 C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N : BL A S PH E M Y, A P O S T A S Y A N D H E R E S Y T H E ‘ BU R N I NG’ ISSU E SU R ROU N DI NG T H E SATA N IC V E R SE S The burning of a few copies of The Satanic Verses in Bradford, Yorkshire by some Muslims created sensational head-line news in almost all the newspapers in Britain and was shown extensively on television. The action of a handful of angered Muslims was made out to be the standard reaction of all Muslims at large and the overall handling and tone of the subject led to an even greater rift between the West and Islam. At the outset I would like to point out that true Islam does not condone the actions of the handful of Muslims who took to book- burning to vent their anger and disgust as a form of protest at the contents of the infamous novel. The vociferous incident did not create any sort of physical violence but the Western media were intent on making a mountain out of a mole-hill. Notwithstanding this, what the media has conveniently forgotten to mention is the long line in history of incidents of book-burning by Christians dat- ing back to the Middle Ages. It had been a practice of the Church in immunising their followers against competing belief systems, like Islam and Judaism, by slandering the competition. Hans Kung, Professor of Dogmatic and Ecumenical Studies at the University of Tubingen, Germany, writes in Christianity and the World Religions : ‘In the high Middle Ages. . . Europeans had felt great admiration for the superior state of Arab culture, philosophy, science, and medicine, as well as for the economic and military power of Islam. . . . . The Renaissance, however, saw the rise of a tendency to disparage and reject everything Arabian, including the language. . . . in the face of the increasing military threat to