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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. In 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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