Muhammad's Sword
By Uri Avnery
avnery@actcom. co.il
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. The 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? WORLD VIEW
NEWS SERVICE
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