Rushdie Haunted by his unholy Ghosts — Page 59
59 C H A P T E R E IGH T: N E W BR E E D OF ‘ S C HOL A R S ’ To replace Watt would be a really difficult task for the Christian scholars in the West; they must have explored all sorts of avenues and possibilities; they had even begun to find scholars from within the Indo-Pakistani Muslim community; perhaps this was to be their future plan: to find infiltraters from within these communities and, slowly but surely, to expose them to the West. DR. M IC H A E L NA Z I R-A L I The first of these was Dr. Michael Nazir-Ali, a former Provost of Lahore Cathedral in Pakistan, and who presently has become the first Asian Diocese Bishop in England. He was bestowed this honour in January 1995. Dr. Nazir-Ali was born in Pakistan and came from a Muslim background but converted to Christianity with his father at an early age. He has been living in England for most of his adult life so he was an ideal tool for the West to exploit and he was fully ‘encour- aged’ to write on Islam from a Christian viewpoint. Dr. Ali has borrowed most of his material from previous orien- talists and some liberal-minded Muslim scholars; therefore what he presented was nothing really new or startling. His first book which he wrote in 1980 is entitled Islam - A Christian Perspective, in which he clearly expresses the Christians’ jealousy of Muhammad’s reverence and adoration by his followers compared to that of any other Prophet, including Jesus. The jealousy continues to seep out throughout the book and he is brave enough to suggest that the God of the Christians is better than the one mentioned in the Qur’an : ‘the Qur’an always speaks of God’s love for the righteous or for the believers and never of his love for sinners. The New Testament, on the other hand, speaks often of God’s love for sinners. ’ ( p. 62).