Studying Islam

Post Reply

Username

Invalid Username or Password

Password

Format

Message Icon

Message

- Forum Code is ON
- HTML is OFF

Smilies

[quote]Barkha: Some would say how does somebody like yourself, who is an atheist, who doesn't believe in God, get to be a keen observer of religion and Islam in particular. But before we get into the academic question of that, tell us the story of when you discovered that you didn't believe in God ?

Rushdie: It has to do with a ham-sandwich.

Barkha: The lure of a ham-sandwich?

Rushdie: When I went to boarding school in England, my parents were not being very observant. And one of the few things that did happen in our house was that there were no pigs to eat.

Barkha: Your grandfather was a devout believer.

Rushdie: Yeah, my grandfather went on a Haj and so on. My father really wasn't and my mother, until after my father died, she started acquiring Islam in her rheumatism.

Barkha: Did you say that to her and did she react kindly?

Rushdie: More or less yes. You know my mother had a great sense of humor, both my parents did actually and I think that is what partly I hope I have got some of it. Anyway I went to England, I went to boarding school, at that point I had never eaten ham, pork, bacon, any of that. And I remember sitting in a Latin school looking at the Rugby Chapel - Rugby Chappel is actually a very beautiful Neo-Gothic building, but at that point to my 14-year-old eyes, it didn't look beautiful, it looked pretty ugly and I was thinking, what kind of God lives in a house like that.

By the end of the Latin lesson I had convinced myself that the answer was that - no kind of God lived in a house like that, because it was just an empty house and at that point I realized that I had ceased to believe in anything divine. To celebrate this I went to the school shop and bought a ham sandwich, which now I am sure was an extremely poor ham sandwich.

Barkha: And did you like that ham sandwich?

Rushdie: At that time I liked it, you know..that the thunder bolt felt and strike me dead then and I thought that that is proof about the nonexistence of God. And that was kind of comic exaggeration in the beginning of the Satanic Verses, when Gabriel goes through one of the most cataclysmic loss of faith but he also celebrates his loss of faith by going to the Taj in Bombay, stuffing his face full of bacon.

http://www.ndtv.com/homepage/BARKHA_RUSHDIE.htm
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
your opinions plz?

Edited by: raushan on Wednesday, January 24, 2007 9:35 AM[/quote]

Mode

Check here to be notified by email whenever someone replies to your topic

Show Preview