Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 41
Rushdie: Haunted By His Unholy Ghosts 41 and Islam the final religion, the historical process must be moving towards the ultimate triumph of Islam throughout the world. This meant that Christianity would probably fade away completely. (Muslim-Christian Encounters. ’ (page 49. ) Perhaps this was the fear and the reason that gave birth to the Western Orientalists. As Watt freely admits in the same book: ‘Many of the European colonialist writings about Islam had the aim of getting to understand it better, in order to control it better. . . . . . The Christians, for their part, formed a number of separate groups under the colonialist power. . . . It would have been imprudent of them to make serious criticisms of Islam openly, or to form a distorted image of it, such as was created in Western Europe. ’ (pp. 72-73). It is interesting to note Watt’s comments as he is regarded as one of the giants among the Western Orientalists; and here, he cat- egorically states that the aim of the orientalists had been to ‘control’ Islam, implying that Islam was getting out of hand and was spread- ing world-wide. He further admits that Western critics of Islam had created a ‘distorted’ image of it in Europe.