Just Commentary E-Newsletter, October, 2006
International Movement for a Just World
just-international.org
Muhammad's Sword
By Uri Avnery
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 worldwide 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, 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 29 May 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 favourites 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
reconquered 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 terror” - 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?
Uri Avnery is a leading Israeli intellectual associated with
the human rights group, “Gush Shalom”.
