Muhammad's Sword

Since the days when Roman Emperors threw Christians to thelions, the relations between the emperors and the heads of the church haveundergone many changes.

Constantine the Great, who became Emperor in the year 306—exactly 1700 yearsago—encouraged the practice of Christianity in the empire, which includedPalestine. Centuries later, the church split into an Eastern (Orthodox) and aWestern (Catholic) part. In the West, the Bishop of Rome, who acquired the titleof Pope, demanded that the Emperor accept his superiority.

The struggle between the Emperors and the Popes played a central role inEuropean history and divided the peoples. It knew ups and downs. Some Emperorsdismissed or expelled a Pope, some Popes dismissed or excommunicated an Emperor.One of the Emperors, Henry IV, "walked to Canossa", standing for threedays barefoot in the snow in front of the Pope's castle, until the Pope deignedto annul his excommunication.

But there were times when Emperors and Popes lived in peace witheach other. We are witnessing such a period today. Between the present Pope,Benedict XVI, and the present Emperor, George Bush II, there exists a wonderfulharmony. The recent speechby the Pope, which aroused a world-wide storm, went well with Bush's crusadeagainst "Islamofascism", in the context of the "Clash ofCivilizations".

In his lecture at a German university, the 265th Popedescribed what he sees as a huge difference between Christianity and Islam:while Christianity is based on reason, Islam denies it. While Christians see thelogic of God's actions, Muslims deny that there is any such logic in the actionsof Allah.

As a Jewish atheist, I do not intend to enter the fray of this debate. It ismuch beyond my humble abilities to understand the logic of the Pope. But Icannot overlook one passage, which concerns me too, as an Israeli living nearthe fault-line of this "war of civilizations".

In order to prove the lack of reason in Islam, the Pope asserts that theprophet 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 14thcentury, the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus told of a debate he had—or so hesaid (its occurrence is in doubt)—with an unnamed Persian Muslim scholar. Inthe heat of the argument, the Emperor (according to himself) flung the followingwords at his adversary:

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you willfind things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the swordthe 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 adying empire. He assumed power in 1391, when only a few provinces of the onceillustrious 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 defeatedrelieving 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 presentIstanbul) fell to the Turks, putting an end to the Empire that had lasted formore than a thousand years.

During his reign, Manuel made the rounds of the capitals of Europe in anattempt to drum up support. He promised to reunite the church. There is no doubtthat he wrote his religious treatise in order to incite the Christian countriesagainst the Turks and convince them to start a new crusade. The aim waspractical, theology was serving politics.

In this sense, the quote serves exactly the requirements of the presentEmperor, George Bush II. He, too, wants to unite the Christian world against themainly Muslim "Axis of Evil". Moreover, the Turks are again knockingon the doors of Europe, this time peacefully. It is well known that the Popesupports 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 renownedtheologian, he could not afford to falsify written texts. Therefore, he admittedthat the Qur'an specifically forbade the spreading of the faith by force. Hequoted the second Sura, verse 256 (strangely fallible, for a pope, he meantverse 257) which says: "There must be no coercion in matters offaith".

How can one ignore such an unequivocal statement? The Pope simply argues thatthis commandment was laid down by the prophet when he was at the beginning ofhis career, still weak and powerless, but that later on he ordered the use ofthe sword in the service of the faith. Such an order does not exist in theQur'an. True, Muhammad called for the use of the sword in his war againstopposing tribes—Christian, Jewish and others—in Arabia, when he was buildinghis state. But that was a political act, not a religious one; basically a fightfor territory, not for the spreading of the faith.

Jesus said: "You will recognize them by their fruits." Thetreatment of other religions by Islam must be judged by a simple test: How didthe Muslim rulers behave for more than a thousand years, when they had the powerto "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 thehighest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs,Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or anotherunder Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them tobecome Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.

True, the Albanians did convert to Islam, and so did the Bosniaks. But nobodyargues that they did this under duress. They adopted Islam in order to becomefavorites of the government and enjoy the fruits.

In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim andJewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At thattime, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians werestill the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort wasmade to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from thecountry, did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the Arabic languageand the Muslim faith—and they were the forefathers of most of today'sPalestinians.

There is no evidence whatsoever of any attempt toimpose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spainenjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else untilalmost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the greatMaimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In MuslimToledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated theancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the GoldenAge. 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 Catholicsre-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religiousterror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to becomeChristians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousandof Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them werereceived with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco inthe west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) inthe north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothinglike 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 persecutionof the "peoples of the book". In Islamic society, a special place wasreserved 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 militaryservice—a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said thatMuslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentlepersuasion—because it entailed the loss of taxes.

Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deepsense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations,while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by thesword" to get them to abandon their faith.

The story about "spreading the faith by thesword" is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe duringthe great wars against the Muslims—the reconquista of Spain by the Christians,the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. Isuspect that the German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables. That meansthat the leader of the Catholic world, who is a Christian theologian in his ownright, 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 newCrusade of Bush and his evangelist supporters, with his slogans of "Islamofascism"and the "Global War on Terrorism"—when "terrorism" hasbecome a synonym for Muslims. For Bush's handlers, this is a cynical attempt tojustify the domination of the world's oil resources. Not for the first time inhistory, a religious robe is spread to cover the nakedness of economicinterests; not for the first time, a robbers' expedition becomes a Crusade.

The speech of the Pope blends into this effort. Who can foretell the direconsequences?