History Lessons for The Pope and George Bush  II  


WRITTEN BY A LIVING JEW IN ISRAEL, WHO IS AN  ATHEIST AND A VERY POPULAR 
COLUMNIST IS ISRAEL. IT CLEARS THE AIR OVER THE  RECENT DEFAMATORY REMARKS THE 
POPE MADE ABOUT ISLAM AND THE PROPHET. PLEASE SEND  TO AS MANY PEOPLE AND GET 
THEM EDUCATED. 

Muhammad's Sword

by Uri  Avnery

September 27, 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 50  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.  

¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤
To unsubscribe/subscribe or view archives of postings, go to the Gambia-L Web interface
at: http://listserv.icors.org/archives/gambia-l.html

To Search in the Gambia-L archives, go to: http://listserv.icors.org/SCRIPTS/WA-ICORS.EXE?S1=gambia-l
To contact the List Management, please send an e-mail to:
[log in to unmask]
¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤¤