Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 20
20 Muhammad a sinister phenomenon, despite (and because of) our geographical nearness to it. With the finger on the pulse of contemporary life, recently popular writers have treated the resurgence of Islam once again as an ominous turning point in the history of the West. Let’s admit the fact: Islam continues to strike us as essentially foreign, as more threatening, politically and economically, than either Hinduism or Buddhism, a phenomenon, in any case, that we have a hard time understanding. ’ (p. 19). Karen Armstrong, a contemporary English writer, talks of the at- tempt by Jewish and Christian scholars to reach a new understand- ing ‘after centuries of virulent Christian anti-Semitism’. Why are the scholars of these two great religions, Judaism and Christianity, suddenly willing to make amends for past hostilities? Perhaps they are putting aside their differences to work together to stem the tide of ‘The Great Enemy’ Islam from running havoc in the West. Islam is certainly regarded as the outsider as far as the goodwill of the whole world is concerned. Karen Armstrong is astute enough to admit this when she talks about Islam as being the one major religion which ‘seems to be outside this circle of goodwill and, in the West at least, to have retained its negative image. . . even though it is the third religion of Abraham and more in tune with our own Judaeo-Christian tradition. . . But the old hatred of Islam continues to flourish on both sides of the Atlantic and people have few scruples about attacking this religion, even if they know little about it. ’ Armstrong goes on to explain the reason for this hatred : ‘The hostility is understandable, because until the rise of the Soviet Union in our own century, no polity or ideology posed such a continuous challenge to the West as Islam. When the Muslim empire was established in the seventh century CE, Europe was a backward region. Islam had quickly overrun much of the Christian world of the Middle East as well as