Muhammad’s Sword

By Uri Avnery

27 September, 2006

Gush Shalom

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.

But there were times when Emperors and Popes lived in peace with each other. We are witnessing such a period today. Between the present Pope, Benedict XVI, and the present Emperor, George Bush II, there exists a wonderful harmony. Last week’s speech by the Pope, which aroused a world-wide storm, went well with Bush’s crusade against “Islamofascism”, in the context of the “Clash of Civilizations”.

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?

http://mbarchives.blogspot.com/2006/12/muhammads-sword-by-uri-avnery.html

Post from Mark Levin’s Blog:

Is Islam the Most Violent Religion? – Bodycounts in Modern History

Often, I come across the assumption that Islam is a more violent religion.   It’s an assumption that colors our international relations, late night comedy and national discourse.  It has percolated into our worldview, and embedded itself there.  This is a very dangerous misconception we are laboring under.

The suggestion that Obama being pegged as a former, current or hidden Muslim is a kiss of death for his electability (it is) is rarely taken to the next step – as to why “Muslim” is a dirty word to us.  What does that say about us as Americans?  Are we really the best country in the world if we cannot imagine an actual Muslim American winning a nomination or the Presidency?  Aren’t we supposed to be tolerant and not racist?  Why don’t we raise our hackles the same way when we see digs at Arabs, Mormons and Muslims as we do when blacks, Hispanics or Jewish people are targeted?

Militant Islam is seen by us as a bigger threat to human life than Western military power.  Islam is seen as the violent religion.  The quantitative hard evidence is completely in the other direction.

The killing/infliction of pain by the West and Islamist militants is different in style and expense, except at the final moments – explosives ripping through human flesh of innocent men, women and children.  The first stages are radically different; one is a very expensive high-tech process which often involves pressing a button and never having to see who you are killing far away, the other is a low-tech, often suicidal effort with close proximity to the victim.  Both achieve the same result, of terror, and of targeted and collateral death.  Our collateral (innocent) bodycounts on them, far exceed the bodycount they exact on us.  But somehow, all the technology and wizardry that precedes that last moment of shrapnel through flesh, somehow gives us a thicker veneer of being civilized than some suicide attacker or beheader.  Why?  Aren’t we achieving the same grisly result?

Our analyses, pundits and media usually ignore this uncomfortable fact because it doesn’t make us look moral, or civilized.

Our media (like that of every nation) reports empathetically on the suffering of Western victims, while largely ignoring the video coverage (if it exists) of what happens on the other side or letting us hear their side.   Sometimes that video footage is never available – the poor don’t have camcorders.

We have no reason to feel morally superior just because women have fewer rights in some Muslim countries – we do a better job in actually killing them.

Yes, we have much more blood on our hands than “they” do.   I claimed this in an earlier post, but afterwards I researched the numbers to back it up.  I did most of this research when I commented on Israpundit a month ago, so the numbers are 1 month old.  Jonathan Tilove mentioned (correctly) in his article in Cleveland Plain Dealer:

http://www.cleveland.com/election/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/isele/1208608219122730.xml&coll=2:

“Mark Levin suggested that Americans have a blinkered view of the world, that in recent decades the Judeo-Christian West has more blood on its hands than Islam, and that the Israeli-Palestine conflict ought to be seen as “a clash of two equally valid worldviews, a clash of two rights, instead of as a clash between right vs. wrong.”

Here’s the data.

20th Century

Judaeo-Christians win the kill totals big in the 20th century, beating Islam hands-down. Think of Stalin (~20 million), WWI (20 million), WWII (72 million) which were mostly intra-Judaeo-Christian kills – this ‘group’ killed well over 50% of “its own” among the roughly 200 million deaths from war in the 20th century. Once again, the question arises – are the adherents of Islam really more violent than Judaeo-Christian adherents? The empirical evidence doesn’t support it. Quite the opposite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_deaths_and_atrocities_of_the_twentieth_century#Matthew_White.27s_estimates
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_deaths_and_atrocities_of_the_twentieth_century#Milton_Leitenberg.27s_estimate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties

In 1950, the global population was 2.5 billion, North America and Europe had a combined 720 million people, or close to 25% of the world population then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population

We have had a disproportionate share of the kills in that century, over 50%.  It would follow that Muslims have killed fewer people as a % of their population compared to the “Western group.”

Islam vs the West Since 2000:

We have killed more Muslim civilians from collateral damage of our bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel combined than all the Israelis and Americans (including combatants) who have been killed since 2000 by Muslims attacking Western targets. The math follows.

Casualties on the “Muslim side”:

Direct collateral damage in Afghanistan from US bombs ~5,000 by end of 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/1740538.stm
This is a 2002 number – the likely number exceeds 10,000:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_%282001-present%29

Iraq invasion: 1,033,000 dead, with about 93,000 from aerial bombardment. “48% died from a gunshot wound, 20% from the impact of a car bomb, 9% from aerial bombardment, 6% as a result of an accident and 6% from another blast/ordnance.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORB_survey_of_Iraq_War_casualties (9% of the 1,033,000 is about 93,000 dying from just aerial bombardment)

Palestinians killed by Israelis minus Pals who were subjects of a targeted killing: 4,719 – 230 = 4,489. (the furthest this number can go down to is 2168, if we eliminate those taking part in “hostilities” which I guess can include rock-throwing. I think the number should be kept at 4,719 since on the Israeli side we are including soldiers.)
http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp

Casualties on the “Judaeo-Christian side”:

Israeli soldiers and civilians killed by Pals: 1,044 (soldiers are included because it was hard to discern the number for the Pals)
http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp

Sept 11 kills by AQ: 2,998 dead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11%2C_2001_attacks

2003 attacks on Istanbul synagogues: 57 dead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Istanbul_bombings

2004 Madrid bombings: 191 dead
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11_March_2004_Madrid_train_bombings

2005 London bombings: 52 dead http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings

Let’s say we also include the Western soldiers killed according to Wikipedia:

Coalition deaths in Afghanistan: 723
Coalition deaths in Iraq: 4,350

I’m sure I’ve left out a few – feel free to add them in and adjust. I’m sure you can quibble with some of the classifications, but –

TOTALS

Number of Muslims killed by direct Western action (mostly aerial bombardment) since 2000: Over 100,000 dead.

Number of Christians and Jews killed by action of Muslims since 2000: Between 9,000 and 10,000. (includes all Western combatants as well)

That’s 10 X. Who has caused more terror?  Is Islam really more violent a religion than ours?

Killing of innocent civilians is terrifying, and should count as “terrorism” whether or not initiated by a state.  It is sudden, and kills noncombatants.   I believe this same analysis, taken back 25 or 50 years will show the same thing.

How much can we blame religion?

Does this mean Christianity or Judaism is more violent, and has less regard for human life?   I’m not sure.

I don’t think our religions are violent by nature, but I think our devaluation of human life (that is not like our own) is evident from the data.   The same way many people in the West (openly or in their minds) tie any violence by Muslim extremists to problems with Islamic culture, religion, ideology and the Koran (instead of political grievances) – this data might lead an independent observer to argue that the Bible and the Torah, and the Judaeo-Christian culture they spawn is responsible for all the innocent deaths caused by Western violence.

Given their similar roots, I don’t see any of the three Abrahamic religions as being any more peaceful or murderous than each other. I’m no scholar of comparative religion, but I think that’s a reasonable position unless someone shows me research indicating otherwise.

Each religious text – whether it’s the Bible, Torah and Koran – are complex enough to have passages that appear to be peaceful or vengeful. The Bible has “turn the other cheek” as well as an “eye for an eye.” None of these tomes is internally consistent. And they were composed in an era and culture that doesn’t look like ours.  People who have political or other axes to grind will always be able to find passages in each of these texts to make their point. I could say that “eye for an eye” is the justification why I gouged out the eye of a doctor who messed up my Lasik surgery. Or some other act of revenge that is illegal under law. Does that mean my religion is a violent one, because I’ve found a passage in there to justify it?

Iraq and Intra-major faith deaths

Many will say that these post-2000 numbers ignore intra-faith violence.  Yes, because it’s hard to assign responsibility.  Also, we’d have to include many African conflicts, Yugoslavia etc where the religious lines are less clear.

Let’s look at Iraq.  The bloodletting in Iraq was triggered by our invasion of Iraq, cheerleaded by the US neocons, and more quietly by Israel which saw Saddam as an existential threat.  Iran has now taken that place for Israel, and the cheerleading by our neocons and right-wing evangelicals continues for in effect, a premeditated attack on Iran.  I think these people should be more appropriately labeled neoracists.

If we did go intra-Islam, we’d have to include the Sunni-Shia violent deaths in Iraq, which are probably 70-80% of the 1 million Iraq deaths.   I partly blame those religious leaders in Iraq who could have done something to prevent the civil war – but we started the whole thing.  Analyzing this becomes messy – if we hadn’t initiated our invasion, the civil war wouldn’t have ensued – so who should get how much blame?

Saddam, by most accounts I’ve heard, could be blamed for about a million deaths. But almost all of that ended in 1991; there was no humanitarian casus belli of a genocidal level beyond the normal authoritarian tortures and killings after 1991:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam%27s_Iraq#Documented_human_rights_violations_1979-2003

And for much of that time he wasn’t an enemy of major powers like us:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Saddam%27s_Iraq#Collusion_of_foreign_powers_in_Saddam-era_human_rights_abuses

Individuals locked in the middle of a civil war, when survival is at stake, and people are seeing blood in roving mobs, are obviously not without blame. But those who have greater power and influence, have greater responsibility. In Yugoslavia the leaders set in motion the ethnic hatred and conflict, where neighbors who had lived peacefully next to each other were killing each other. I hold them more responsible, rather than the former neighbors. Rwanda was similar.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/marklevin/gGBT7R