Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 23
Rushdie: Haunted By His Unholy Ghosts 23 3. Islam is a religion of self-indulgence. In the perception of the daily life of Muslims sexuality was thought to play a great part. It was supposed that a Muslim could have many wives, not just four, but seven, or ten, or even more and that in Paradise he was promised delectable female companions. One writer even thought that there was a verse in the Qur’an which permitted fornication, and other verses were imag- ined to permit or encourage abnormal sexual practices. 4. Muhammad is the Anti-Christ. Muhammad was regarded as a false prophet and as he was not really a prophet, he had established a religion in opposition to the religion of Christianity, so he must have been doing something evil, and he must, therefore, be a tool or agent of the Devil. In other words, he was the Anti-Christ. The character of Muhammad(sa) was further maligned and tra- duced by alleging moral failures on his part; the main points be- ing that Muhammad(sa) was insincere, sensual and treacherous. Thomas Carlyle vigorously used the attacks over a hundred years ago. These very important aspects of the distorted image of Islam, which was formed by Christian scholars in the 12th and 13th centu- ries, still tend to control European thinking to this day. For exam- ple, Maxime Rodinson, the famous French orientalist, in his book, Mohammed writes on the subject : ‘For the Christians in particular, he became the arch-enemy, an object of execration, an epileptic fraud. The accounts given of him by his disciples were taken and twisted to make a hideous portrait of a cruel and lascivious individual, steeped in every kind of viciousness and crime. ’ (pp. 301/302). Any rational thinking person will find this hard to believe. COLON I ALISM A N D C H R IST I A N I T Y Over a period of three to four centuries, the Europeans, mainly the Portuguese, the British, the French and the Dutch, began to