Uri Avnery an Israel journalist

Gush Shalom (Israel)

[Uri Avnery, founding member of Gush
Shalom, was a member of the Irgun, wounded as an Israeli commando,
elected three times to the Knesset, publisher of Ha'olam Haze, and the
recipent of several awards.]

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.

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. On May 29,
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?