Islam and Pope
Benedict's speech
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments directly
to JonatPower@aol.com
September 20th, 2006
LONDON - A young Danish cartoonist is one thing. But
a supposedly learned Pope is another. Pope Benedict has not only shot
himself in the foot he has, unwittingly no doubt, joined up as a full
member of President George W. Bush’s crusade against “Islamic
fascism”- at least that is how it is being perceived, not unreasonably,
in many parts of the Islamic world. Benedict is obviously still possessed
of a portion of the same naiveté he had as an fourteen old when
he joined the Hitler Youth and later the military. Just as his speech
at Auschwitz four months ago seemed to pass over the culpability of ordinary
Germans in what happened then so with his speech at his old university
on Friday did he too lightly deal with the hard facts of the 1400-year
relationship between Islam and Christianity. His apology is to say the
least disingenuous. He appears to be only “sorry for the reactions
in some countries” to his address. He is not yet ready to apologise
for the sloppy, uninformed, way he put together his speech.
The speech is not joined up thinking, at least not in the way Anglo-Saxon
scholars are trained to write. One point does not need logically to the
next. It is difficult, reading the whole text, to discern exactly the
principal theme of the speech. But judging from the early quote from the
14th century Byzantine emperor, Manuel 11 Paleologus, on the violent nature
of Islam and the Pope’s concluding remarks on Islam, it was indeed
meant to be aimed at the issue of Muslim/Christian relations. It is deceitful
of the Pope to now claim it was only “a few passages” that
have caused the fuss.
If he had been more sensitive to the Islamic world, this little travelled
Pope, who spent too much of his life in the cocoon of the pretty but isolated
university town of Regensburg, would have quoted as an example of the
dangers of violence being done in the name of God the activities of King
Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, who having first decreed a radical
policy of the mass conversion of Muslims, killed many of them and drove
the rest of the 700 year-old community out of Spain in 1492 and then turned
on the Jews. Some 80,000 Jews were forced out, a great many perishing
of hunger on the way to refuge.
Yes, we all know that Islam is more accepting of violence in its original
traditions that Christianity. It was by the sword that Mohammed conquered
Mecca and within 20 years of his death his followers had conquered large
parts of the Roman Empire and absorbed the Persian. In contrast, Christians
submitted themselves to the lion rather than fight and not until the Emperor
Constantine converted to Christianity some 300
years after Jesus’ death did Christianity take on the role of running
a state with its well-embedded military traditions.
But in those first 600 years of the spread and development of Islam one
of the most intriguing aspects is Islam’s tolerance for Judaism
and Christianity, right up to the time of the Byzantine emperor, Manuel
11. The Koran requires that Muslims should respect, “The People
of the Book”. Muslims in India were also compelled to be tolerant
to Hindus - the Taj Mahal with its fusion of Islamic and Hindu styles
is a testament to this benign attitude.
Even after Saladin’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1187 for the next
700 years the churches remained open. The Jews were given funds to rebuild
their synagogues. This was in marked contrast to the way the Crusaders
had ruled Jerusalem before when Muslim and Jews were mainly forbidden
from living within the city walls.
Likewise, from the fifteenth century on, when the majority of Arabs lived
under Ottoman rule, for its five hundred years of life Christians and
Jews were recognised and protected. Many of the Jews expelled from Iberia
were granted refuge in the Ottoman Empire. German, French and Czech Protestants
fleeing Catholic persecution were also given protection.
The Christian West, despite its long propensity to go to war against Muslims,
has a not only selective memory it has a deeply ingrained anti-Muslim
prejudice about the violent tendency of Muslims. Recall Shakespeare’s
witches brew of “nose of Turk and Tartar’s lips”, Dante’s
portrayal of Mohammed in hell, Voltaire’s “Fanaticism or Mohammed
the Prophet”, and Delacrox’s painting “Massacre of Chaos”,
with Christian women of Bulgaria pursued by Turkish lancers. (The mass
killings of the Muslims 50 years earlier in Peloponnesia were neither
depicted nor remembered.)
But why should a Pope who seems not to know clearly and without ambiguity
what went on in his own Christian country during his own youth to be aware
of the import today of all this?
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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