His holiness Pope Benedict XVI recently made a speech at University of Regensburg in Germany titled “Faith, Reason and the University Memories and Reflections“. In his speech the Pope discusses concepts of God’s transcendence and relationship between religion and violence in general, amongst other things. He could have illustrated all his thoughts by using examples of religiously motivated or religiously justified violence perpetrated by Christians but he chose to use accusations made by erudite Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus during his conversations with a Persian scholar in 1391AD. The Emperor’s hateful accusations are presented along with Pope’s own clarifications and inferences in such a way that it would not be too far fetched to assume that he was implying something. Here are some examples:
Example 1:
“The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”. According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war.”
Implication 1: Quranic teachings became aggressive as prophet Mohammed (PBUH) became militarily more powerful.
Implication 2: Quran is word of man not word of God, otherwise it would not progressively change with increasing military power.
Example 2:
“he (the Emperor) addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “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”.”
Implication: Islam is an evil and inhumane religion that supports spread by the sword. This implication is strengthened by the fact that Pope went through the trouble of quoting the Emperor but did not make any clear attempt to refute the Emperor’s claim.
Example 3:
“The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent……At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God.”
Implication: The Islamic concept of God is unreasonable and thus Muslims act in unreasonable ways. In comparison, the Greek and Biblical concepts of God are supremely reasonable.
I find it hard to believe that this is all a coincidence or that it was said with the best of intensions. Why would anyone dig up an ancient story from 1391AD in which a Byzantine Emperor makes inflammatory accusations about prophet Mohammed (PBUH) during conversations with a Persian scholar? The timing is also suspicious since the West is having a confrontation with Iran that is being portrayed by some in the West as a part of wider clash of ‘ideologies’ or ‘civilisations’.
Thoughout the speech no reference is made to historic acts of violence and persecution committed by Christians. One such historic act of violence was witch-hunts that were most often justified with reference to the Bible’s prescriptions like:
“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” (Exodus 22:18)
and
“A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones” (Leviticus 20:27)
Likewise, no mention is made of barbaric acts commited by crusaders. It is a historical fact that the crusades were a series of military campaigns often waged in the name of Christianity and many times sanctioned by the incumbent Pope himself.
The Pope’s comments seem even more peculiar if you consider what unbiased Western writers have been saying about Islam’s prophet:
“In the fifth and sixth centuries, the civilised world stood on the verge of chaos. The old emotional cultures that had made civilisation possible, since they had given to man a sense of unity and of reverence for their rulers, had broken down, and nothing had been found adequate to take their place. ….. It seemed then that the great civilisation which had taken four thousand years to construct was on the verge of disintegration, and that mankind was likely to return to that condition of barbarism where every tribe and sect was against the next, and law and order were unknown ……. The new sanctions created by Christianity were creating divisions and destruction instead of unity and order …. Civilisation like a gigantic tree whose foliage had over reached the world ….. stood tottering ….. rotted to the core …. Was there any emotional culture that could be brought in to gather mankind once more to unity and to save civilisation? … It was among the Arabs that the man was born who was to unite the whole known world of the east and south”. J. H. Denison, Emotions as the Basis of Civilisation, pp. 265-9.
To an outsider it would seem that Pope has now jumped onto the Islam bashing bandwagon and has lent his support to the destructive idea of clash of ‘ideologies’ or ‘civilisations’. I am afraid that Pope has done un-repairable damage to the cause of interfaith harmony. Whether the apology offered by Vatican will be enough to convince the Muslim world otherwise remains to be seen.
Khalid M. Syed
Canberra, Australia
(Also see: In Defense of Pope Benedict by www.antiwar.com)
