Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 86
86 Mohamed Arshad Ahmedi His taunts at Islamic beliefs and Qur’anic verses are also ex- pressed and he quotes from Surah Al-Rahman yet again. ( Perhaps this is the only part he knows !) While writing about the Indo-Pakistan war on the Kashmir fron- tier, he writes that : ‘There were, inevitably, deaths; but the organisers of the war had catered for these as well. Those who fell in battle were flown di- rectly, first class, to the perfumed gardens of Paradise, to be waited on for all eternity by four gorgeous Houris, untouched by man or djinn. “Which of your Lord’s blessings”, the Qur’an inquires, “ would you deny?”’ (p. 77). This is an exact replica of the subject that Rushdie has mocked in his previous book Midnight’s Children, and which bears an un- canny similarity to the defamatory language used by earlier critics of Islam, like Peter the Venerable and Thomas Aquinas discussed earlier. Rushdie, in all his books, and especially, in Shame, has related mundane and everyday instances of normal life in Pakistan and has deliberately picked out the warts in that society and highlighted them in trying to portray a sense of hypocrisy, corruption, bigotry and all things nasty in the Muslim state of Pakistan. He has includ- ed politicians, singers, film stars, sportsmen, religious leaders, the Media and even ordinary villagers. Rushdie has acted almost like a spy for the West, to expose the ills of Pakistan’s Muslim society in ensanguined detail, without any sense of shame. In his discourse about Pakistani politics it is quite clear that he favoured Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, as Bhutto himself was a puppet of the West. Bhutto and his children also, had been educated in Britain and were lovers of all things Western. What is also clear is Rushdie’s contempt for Zia-ul-Haq and his ‘Islamization’ of Pakistan. It has become quite apparent that Rushdie stands for everything unIslamic, so it was natural for him to scathingly scorn Zia’s Islamic