Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 21
Rushdie: Haunted By His Unholy Ghosts 21 the great Church of North Africa. . . This brilliant success was threatening; had God deserted the Christians and bestowed his favour on the infi del? Even when Europe recovered from the Dark Ages and established its own great civilisation, the old fear of the ever-expanding Muslim empire remained. Europe could make no impression on this powerful and dynamic culture. . . . . This fear made it impossible for Western Christians to be rational or objective about the Muslim faith. . . . Western scholars denounced Islam as a blasphemous faith and its Prophet Muhammad as the Great Pretender, who had founded a violent religion of the sword in order to conquer the world. Mahomet became a bogy to the people of Europe, used by mothers to frighten disobedient children. . . . This inaccurate image of Islam became one of the received ideas of Europe and it continues to affect our perceptions of the Muslim world. ’ (Armstrong, Muhammad, A Western Attempt To Understand Islam, pp. 10/11). Most of what has been written about Islam, the Holy Prophet(sa) and other noble personages by the Western writers has been depre- ciative and disparaging, and that has been one of the reasons why the general public and the masses have been so mis-informed about Islam. Montgomery Watt is honest enough to admit that the good and salient points of Islam have not been projected enough to alter its distorted image: ‘Many Christians came to appreciate the knightly generosity of a Saladin, but only a small amount of scholarly work was done. It was the scholars of France and Western Europe who created the new and more detailed image of Islam. ’ (M-C Encounters, pp. 80/81). And this ‘new and more detailed image of Islam’ was, in fact, presented in a most twisted and distorted fashion to negate all the virtues of Islam. I shall look at just some of the writers starting from the early period in medieval Europe.