*Muhammad's Sword
by Uri Avnery
GUSH SHALOM*
http://zope. gush-shalom. org/home/ en/channels/
avnery/115909481 3
*23-09-2006
*
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?
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