Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 26
26 Mohamed Arshad Ahmedi arm’s length, always keeping them coming back for more, but never letting them take their fill. The Western-type education provided was something that most of the local people wanted, and this included a lot of Muslims, but there was always pressure for the acceptance of Christianity. Even in the field of medicine, whereby hospitals and medical clinics were set up, there are reports of places where it was made a condition of treatment that the patients should attend services or listen to sermons. A large number from the Hindus in India and from the primitive peoples in Africa succumbed to the material necessities and were converted to Christianity; there were, however, much fewer con- verts from Islam; perhaps due to the fact that at about the same time there were a lot of books published by Western scholars who had continued to present Islam in a distorted fashion and as there was a fundamentalist move back to Islam any way, it seemed to have an adverse effect on the aims of the Christian missionaries. So Islam has always proved to be the stumbling block for the Christian nations of the West. It has always been regarded as a threat to their plans of total world domination and they spared no expense to fully achieve their aims. The hatred for Islam was evident in India as well. During the reign of the British it became abundantly clear that the rul- ers had greater affinity with the Hindus than the Muslims whom they despised. The obvious example is that of Earl Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India. In a recent programme on British televi- sion on Channel 4, entitled Secret Lives, and shown on 9 March 1995, a number of historians and biographers openly talked of Mountbatten’s favouritism for the Hindu leader Nehru and his hatred for Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of the Muslim state of Pakistan. The historians also blamed Mountbatten for inciting the civil war between Hindus and Muslims which claimed almost a million lives, most of them Muslims. On his return to England after India’s independence, he received a hero’s welcome from everyone,