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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 Quran 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 Quran. 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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