Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 27
Rushdie: Haunted By His Unholy Ghosts 27 including the ruling Labour government headed by Attlee and all the Conservatives, congratulating him on his success in India. Can the incitement of a civil war that claimed the lives of nearly a million people be regarded as an act of heroism ? But as destiny would have it, is it not incredibly ironic that after almost thirty years of the massacre of a million people, the Earl of Mountbatten himself would be blown up into a million pieces as a target of an IRA bomb, which can only be described as a result of a civil war between two sects of a religion that is predominant in the West, Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians? M USL I M L I BE R A L T HOUGH T At about the same time that the Fundamentalist movement back to Islam started, and the access to Western education and the nega- tive appreciation of Islam by the Western orientalists was getting under way, it gave rise to liberal thought in the minds of some of the Muslim scholars. This was fully exploited by the orientalists who have attempted to suggest that the morals and ethics of Muslims somewhat deteriorated due to the strict and orthodox rules of Islam, and in order to be accepted as part of the Western society they had to forego some of the stricter habits and they had to relax their con- servative attitude to religion. From the middle of the last century to the present, there has certainly been a reconstruction of Muslim thought. There have been conservative reformers whose main concern has been to purify Islam of all un-Islamic practices which had crept into it, by returning to the Qur’an and primitive traditions, whereas the liberal reformers realised that the purification of the House of Islam must go hand-in- hand with its modernisation. There have been some leading liberal scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries, notably Jamaluddin Afghani (1839-97), Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) and Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-98), who influenced the thinking of many an Indian Muslim.