The Pope,
the Christians and the Muslims
Let the Dialogue Begin (Part 1 of 7)
By Professor Nazeer
Ahmed
CA
Now
that the dust has settled over the Pope’s
remarks, and the noise from the Muslim street
has quieted down, it is time to move beyond the
immediate clamor and initiate a Catholic-Muslim
dialogue on the place of reason in religion.
Lest I be accused of being an apologist, let me
at the outset express my own surprise and dismay
at the quotations used by Pope Benedict XVI in
a lecture he delivered at his alma mater, a theological
seminary in Germany. His quotes from the Byzantine
emperor Manual Paleologus II about Islam and the
Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) were out
of context, historically inaccurate and extremely
offensive in their thrust.
However, I am also disappointed at the response
of Muslim scholarship and of the Muslim street
to this episode. Making of effigies is forbidden
in Islam. Burning of effigies is even more so.
As a student of history, I am appalled at the
knee-jerk reaction that has become a hallmark
of the Muslim street. As a devout Muslim I cannot
condone the making or burning of effigies of any
person. As a human being I must categorically
condemn those who have reportedly threatened harm
to the religious leader of one billion people.
There is much that the Catholic Church shares
with Orthodox Islam: veneration of the earlier
Prophets, honor for Virgin Mary (may God be pleased
with her) , mother of Jesus (peace be upon him),
a moral code embracing integrity, compassion and
love, abhorrence of infanticide including abortion,
emphasis on family values and profession of monotheism.
Islam goes one step further and permits family
ties with Christians.
For the sake of completeness, I reproduce below
the relevant paragraph from the Pope’s speech
as it appears on the web:
“In the seventh conversation (?- controversy)
edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches
on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must
have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There
is no compulsion in religion". According
to the experts, this is one of the suras of the
early period, when Mohammed was still powerless
and under threat. But naturally the emperor also
knew the instructions, developed later and recorded
in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending
to details, such as the difference in treatment
accorded to those who have the "Book"
and the "infidels", he addresses his
interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness
which leaves us astounded, on the central question
about the relationship between religion and violence
in general, saying: "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".
The emperor, after having expressed himself so
forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons
why spreading the faith through violence is something
unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the
nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God",
he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not
acting reasonably (?) is contrary to God's nature.
Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever
would lead someone to faith needs the ability
to speak well and to reason properly, without
violence and threats... To convince a reasonable
soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons
of any kind, or any other means of threatening
a person with death...".
Before a dialogue begins, let us briefly examine
the historical context of the comments supposedly
made by the emperor Manuel II. It was the year
1399. The Ottoman sultan Bayazid II (known as
Yildirim in Turkish), fresh from a victory over
the Bulgars (1393) and a Crusader army at Nicopolis
(1396), laid siege to the capital city of Istanbul
(then known as Constantinople) and demanded its
surrender. The Byzantine possessions in Anatolia
and southeastern Europe had already fallen to
the Ottomans. The hard pressed emperor appealed
to Pope Boniface XIV in Rome for military help.
Christendom was rife with its own internal squabbles,
as it is even to this day. Pope Boniface IX (1389-1404)
saw a golden opportunity to absorb the Eastern
Orthodox Church, which the Latins considered a
heretical sect, within the Catholic fold. The
Vatican refused to help unless the Orthodox Church
gave up its independence and merged with the Roman
church.
Faced with a choice of surrendering his soul or
his throne, Manuel II chose to do neither. He
dug in his heals and the siege went on until 1402.
Negotiators went back and forth across the Bosporus.
It was during this period that a despondent emperor
Manuel II, sitting forlorn in his palace, recorded
the recollections of his conversations with a
“Persian scholar”. The Byzantine garrison
in Istanbul was well supplied with food and water
but the prolonged siege took its toll. Manual
II was discussing terms of surrender with Bayazid
II when help came from an unexpected quarter.
Timur (d 1405) and his Tartar horsemen came galloping
down from Samarqand, destroying and pillaging
as they went. Timur overran Russia (1387), lay
waste the Iranian highlands (1398), sacked Delhi
(1399), defeated the Mamlukes of Egypt (1401)
and advanced into Anatolia. Bayazid lifted the
siege of Istanbul and moved his janissaries to
face the horsemen of Central Asia. The mighty
armies of the Turks and the Tartars met at the
fateful Battle of Ankara (1402). Timur was victorious;
Bayazid II was taken prisoner and died in captivity
three months later. The Byzantines extended their
lease on Istanbul for another fifty years until
it was captured by Sultan Mohammed II (1453).
This was the historical context of the comments
supposedly made by a despondent emperor Manual
II while he was under siege by the Ottomans. What
was the intent of Pope Benedict XVI in using a
quotation from this episode in his lecture? His
spokesmen tell us he was decrying the use of violence
in religion. If so, the Pope had plenty of ammunition
from his own tradition to support this thesis.
For a starter, the Germans were forcibly converted
to Christianity by Charlemagne at the beginning
of the ninth century. Between the years 800-804,
during his invasion of German lands, Charlemagne
the king-emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, put
to sword some five thousand Germans to force them
to accept Christianity. Then, there is the long
list of excesses committed by the Church: the
Crusades (996-1683), the sack of Istanbul and
the Eastern Orthodox churches (1204), encouragement
for the African slave trade (1444--) the Spanish
inquisition against the Jews and the Muslims (1492),
acquiescence in the decimation of the Aztecs and
the Incas (1516-1540), the thirty year war against
the Protestants (1618-1648), and its silence during
the Nazi holocaust (1932-45). Why bash another
religious tradition to make a reasonable observation?
The use of an obscure quote from an emperor who
had his back to the wall against Turkish military
pressure was totally unnecessary and detracts
from the central them of the Pope’s lecture,
which was the place of reason in religion. A scholar
with an acute sense of history might have surmised
that the Turks would have overrun the Eastern
Roman (Byzantine) empire with or without Islam,
much as the Visigoths (Western Germanic tribes)
overran the Roman empire in the fourth and fifth
centuries.
It is a law of history, as enunciated by Ibn Khaldun
that settled civilizations invariably become placid
and in the course of time are overrun by more
dynamic nomadic people. I have expanded on this
observation in my book, “Islam in Global
History”. The Turks, a restless, virile
people from the upper reaches of Central Asia,
started their great migrations in the tenth century.
Pressures on grazing land were one of the principal
reasons for these migrations. In the eleventh
century they overran the Ghaznavid empire based
in Afghanistan and moved relentlessly westward,
brushing aside the Buyids of Iraq and Persia,
until they encountered the Byzantines in Asia
Minor.
In 1072, at the momentous battle of Manzikert,
they defeated the Byzantines. This battle, a turning
point in world history, opened up Anatolia and
southeastern Europe to Turkish settlements. The
expansions continued under the Ottomans (1299
onwards) until they reached their zenith with
the second siege of Vienna in 1683. According
to the laws enunciated by Ibn Khaldun, there was
inevitability to the Turkish expansions. They
would have occurred with or without Islam. What
Islam did was to mold the nomadic Turks into founders
of two great world empires, that of the Seljuks
and of the Ottomans. The hapless emperor Manuel
II, who is referred to as“ a Byzantine shaped
by Greek philosophy” by the Pope, was obviously
unaware of the empirical laws of history and blamed
Islam for what was a logical, rational consequence
of Turkish expansions into Western Asia and Europe.
(To be continued).
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