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Muhammad's
Sword
By
Uri Avnery
Since the days when
Roman Emperors threw Christians to the lions, the
relations between the emperors and the heads of the
church have undergone many changes.
Constantine the Great, who became Emperor in the year
306 - exactly 1700 years ago - encouraged the practice
of Christianity in the empire, which included Palestine.
Centuries later, the church split into an Eastern
(Orthodox) and a Western (Catholic) part. In the West,
the Bishop of Rome, who acquired the title of Pope,
demanded that the Emperor accept his superiority.
The struggle
between the Emperors and the Popes played a central role
in European history and divided the peoples. It knew ups
and downs. Some Emperors dismissed or expelled a Pope,
some Popes dismissed or excommunicated an Emperor. One
of the Emperors, Henry IV, "walked to Canossa", standing
for three days barefoot in the snow in front of the
Pope's castle, until the Pope deigned to annul his
excommunication.
But there were
times when Emperors and Popes lived in peace with each
other. We are witnessing such a period today. Between
the present Pope, Benedict XVI, and the present Emperor,
George Bush II, there exists a wonderful harmony. Last
week's speech by the Pope, which aroused a world-wide
storm, went well with Bush's crusade against "Islamofascism",
in the context of the "Clash of Civilizations".
IN HIS lecture at a
German university, the 265th Pope described what he sees
as a huge difference between Christianity and Islam:
while Christianity is based on reason, Islam denies it.
While Christians see the logic of God's actions, Muslims
deny that there is any such logic in the actions of
Allah.
As a Jewish
atheist, I do not intend to enter the fray of this
debate. It is much beyond my humble abilities to
understand the logic of the Pope. But I cannot overlook
one passage, which concerns me too, as an Israeli living
near the fault-line of this "war of civilizations".
In order to prove
the lack of reason in Islam, the Pope asserts that the
prophet Muhammad ordered his followers to spread their
religion by the sword. According to the Pope, that is
unreasonable, because faith is born of the soul, not of
the body. How can the sword influence the soul?
To support his
case, the Pope quoted - of all people - a Byzantine
Emperor, who belonged, of course, to the competing
Eastern Church. At the end of the 14th century, the
Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus told of a debate he had -
or so he said (its occurrence is in doubt) - with an
unnamed Persian Muslim scholar. In the heat of the
argument, the Emperor (according to himself) flung the
following words at his adversary:
"Show me just what
Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find
things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to
spread by the sword the faith he preached".
These words give
rise to three questions: (a) Why did the Emperor say
them? (b) Are they true? (c) Why did the present Pope
quote them?
WHEN MANUEL II
wrote his treatise, he was the head of a dying empire.
He assumed power in 1391, when only a few provinces of
the once illustrious empire remained. These, too, were
already under Turkish threat.
At that point in
time, the Ottoman Turks had reached the banks of the
Danube. They had conquered Bulgaria and the north of
Greece, and had twice defeated relieving armies sent by
Europe to save the Eastern Empire. On May 29, 1453, only
a few years after Manuel's death, his capital,
Constantinople (the present Istanbul) fell to the Turks,
putting an end to the Empire that had lasted for more
than a thousand years.
During his reign,
Manuel made the rounds of the capitals of Europe in an
attempt to drum up support. He promised to reunite the
church. There is no doubt that he wrote his religious
treatise in order to incite the Christian countries
against the Turks and convince them to start a new
crusade. The aim was practical, theology was serving
politics.
In this sense, the
quote serves exactly the requirements of the present
Emperor, George Bush II. He, too, wants to unite the
Christian world against the mainly Muslim "Axis of
Evil". Moreover, the Turks are again knocking on the
doors of Europe, this time peacefully. It is well known
that the Pope supports the forces that object to the
entry of Turkey into the European Union.
IS THERE any truth
in Manuel's argument?
The pope himself
threw in a word of caution. As a serious and renowned
theologian, he could not afford to falsify written
texts. Therefore, he admitted that the Qur'an
specifically forbade the spreading of the faith by
force. He quoted the second Sura, verse 256 (strangely
fallible, for a pope, he meant verse 257) which says:
"There must be no coercion in matters of faith".
How can one ignore
such an unequivocal statement? The Pope simply argues
that this commandment was laid down by the prophet when
he was at the beginning of his career, still weak and
powerless, but that later on he ordered the use of the
sword in the service of the faith. Such an order does
not exist in the Qur'an. True, Muhammad called for the
use of the sword in his war against opposing tribes -
Christian, Jewish and others - in Arabia, when he was
building his state. But that was a political act, not a
religious one; basically a fight for territory, not for
the spreading of the faith.
Jesus said: "You
will recognize them by their fruits." The treatment of
other religions by Islam must be judged by a simple
test: How did the Muslim rulers behave for more than a
thousand years, when they had the power to "spread the
faith by the sword"?
Well, they just did
not.
For many centuries,
the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims?
Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary,
Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the
Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs,
Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived
at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to
their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become
Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.
True, the Albanians
did convert to Islam, and so did the Bosniaks. But
nobody argues that they did this under duress. They
adopted Islam in order to become favorites of the
government and enjoy the fruits.
In 1099, the
Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim
and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of
the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the
occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were
still the majority in the country. Throughout this long
period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only
after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country,
did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the
Arabic language and the Muslim faith - and they were the
forefathers of most of today's Palestinians.
THERE IS no
evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on
the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews
of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did
not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets
like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great
Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets,
scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and
Muslim scholars worked together and translated the
ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That
was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been
possible, had the Prophet decreed the "spreading of the
faith by the sword"?
What happened
afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics
re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a
reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were
presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to
be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of
thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith,
escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms
in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews
settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the
west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of
the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south.
Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the
tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the
auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions
that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to
the Holocaust.
WHY? Because Islam
expressly prohibited any persecution of the "peoples of
the book". In Islamic society, a special place was
reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy
completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a
special poll-tax, but were exempted from military
service - a trade-off that was quite welcome to many
Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon
any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle
persuasion - because it entailed the loss of taxes.
Every honest Jew
who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a
deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected
the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian
world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by the
sword" to get them to abandon their faith.
THE STORY about
"spreading the faith by the sword" is an evil legend,
one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great
wars against the Muslims - the reconquista of Spain by
the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the
Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. I suspect that the
German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables.
That means that the leader of the Catholic world, who is
a Christian theologian in his own right, did not make
the effort to study the history of other religions.
Why did he utter
these words in public? And why now?
There is no escape
from viewing them against the background of the new
Crusade of Bush and his evangelist supporters, with his
slogans of "Islamofascism" and the "Global War on
Terrorism" - when "terrorism" has become a synonym for
Muslims. For Bush's handlers, this is a cynical attempt
to justify the domination of the world's oil resources.
Not for the first time in history, a religious robe is
spread to cover the nakedness of economic interests; not
for the first time, a robbers' expedition becomes a
Crusade.
The speech of the Pope blends into
this effort. Who can foretell the dire consequences?
Source:
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1159094813/
/ Related file:
Avnery
posted 27 September 2006 |
