Pope's Tirade Aginst Islam

The pope and his establishment have expressed their regrets since and said that they were sorry about the Muslim reaction.

Some said that he had no hostile intent but had meant to start a dialogue between the Muslims and the Church. However, the fact is that it wasn't the dialogue he wanted to start but a confrontation, since his predecessor Pope John-Paul had already started the dialogue.

In branding Islam as a religion devoid of "reason" and tainted with evil, he anticipated protests, slogans, burning of churches, killing of nuns and so on, so that he could be vindicated in his views. In our stupidity, we are already doing just that and have fallen into his trap. Such behavior only goes to prove his point that Muslims and their leadership are divorced from reason and are so deeply entrenched in the culture of protests and noisy demonstrations that they are incapable of mounting a serious challenge to any antagonist who uses his brains.

We have done enough of this. Now it is time to understand that we have a problem on hand. There is an adversarial relationship between the Vatican and the World of Islam. This is one challenge on top of many others that we are facing in the Twenty-first century. On the bright side, Pope Ratzinger has done us a favor by allowing us an insight into his mind. His speech, which he delivered to the faculty in the University of Regensburg, of which once he was a member, was a well thought-out strategic speech, a mission statement so to speak. John Allen Jr., the Vatican correspondent for the National Catholic Reporter wrote in Op Ed column of the New York Times on Sept.19 that on March 23rd the Pope summoned his 179 cardinals for a close-door business meeting. Islam and the Muslim World was the main item of discussion. A decision was taken to take a tough stance against Islam. Pope Ratzinger had already removed Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, considered an expert on Muslim affairs and sent him off to Egypt as an envoy. So it is obvious that some vitally important strategic decisions have already been made in the Vatican.

On an interesting note, let me bring into picture an Italian female journalist, Oriana Fallaci, who died recently and had been reviling Islam and Muslims in her statements and in her books. Referring to the Muslim immigrants in Europe she wrote; "The sons of Allah breed like rats." "Europe is no longer Europe" she told the Wall Street Journal - "It is Eurabia, a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense." The Pope had already expressed his views about the Turks that they did not belong in Europe and should stick to their own kind in Asia. Such concurrence of views immediately won Fallaci an audience with the Pope. It is ironic that while Ratzinger hails from the land of Hitler and Fallaci from the home of Mussolini, we are the ones who are called Fascists by President Bush.

So my friends the Pope's speech in The University of Regensburg, is a watershed event in the history of interfaith relations and may have profound consequences for the world. But let us not get unreasonably agitated about it. What needs to be done is to think coolly and come up with counterstrategy. In the modern world there is a Caesar and a Pope --- The Caesar is the Master of the world, or at least thinks that he is. Today, both, the Caesar and the Pope have chosen to be our enemies. Can the situation get any more serious? And here we are, fighting over every possible triviality such as the moon, the length of our beards and our trousers the Shia Sunni problem and so on --- Talking about the moon, most of us in America have never once attempted to see the crescent and have probably not seen one in our lifetime and yet we would fight over whether it was seen or not. --- Go on my brothers, spill your blood in vain and disappear from the face of the world. Addressing the people of India the poet Iqbal had said: na samjhoge to mit jaoge ai Hindostan walo. Tumhari dastan tak bhi na hogi dastanon men. It applies perfectly well to the Muslim nation today. (Translation: If you do not realize the seriousness of the situation, you will surely perish. Even your story will not be one among the stories that are told!)

Now let us go back to the crux of the Regensburg lecture. The lecture deals with such topics as faith and reason, the nature of God and the symbiosis of Christianity with the essence of Hebraic and Hellenistic thoughts. In order to present a contrast between Christianity and Islam, he opens the discussion with a supposedly historical dialogue between the Byzantine emperor and an educated Persian at the time of the first siege of Constantinople by the Ottomans, wherein the Emperor says: "Show me what Mohammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as the command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." The issue here is the sword, which at that time hung over the capitol of his empire and as a result he was sharp-tongued towards his enemy. Nevertheless Ratzinger uses this scene to picture Islam as a doctrine, which preaches coercion and bloodshed and is averse to reason, which he believes is the hallmark of Christianity. It doesn't take much to prove Ratzinger wrong.

He admits the existence of the verse: Let there be no compulsion in religion. Truth stands out clear from error. (2:256) But he believes that this is the early revelation, when Muhammad (S) was still powerless and under threat. But the later verses, he says exhort the believers to resort to warfare and bloodshed to spread the word of God. Clearly, this is an evil manipulation on the part of Ratzinger to eliminate the most important and fundamental instructions in the Qur'an as being exceptions and irrelevant to the overall message. Verses like:

Invite all to the way of your Lord with wisdom and beautiful preaching and argue with them in ways that are most gracious, for your Lord knows who has strayed from His path and who has acted according to the guidance. (16:125)

And who is better in speech than the one who calls people to Allah, does righteous deeds and declares "I am one of those who are Muslims" (41:33)

And if you reject the message, so did nations before you. And the duty of the messenger is only to articulate with clarity. (29:18)

These are the verses, which are the soul and the essence of the Qur'an and define the methodology of presenting the message. Whoever has acted in accordance with these instructions has followed Islam and whoever has not acted accordingly is a transgressor.

So, Mr. Ratzinger is absolutely wrong in suggesting that the Qur'an advocates using force in spreading the religion.

Now let us go to the question of Jihad. Why is there a mention of warfare (jihad) in the Qur'an. How can you reconcile war and bloodshed with the nature of God, a question which Ratzinger has posed. Although he seems to have read the Qur'an and a few selective verses, he seems to be unaware of the voluminous literature, Qur'anic and otherwise, which exists on the subject. Unlike the New Testaments, Qur'an is not a book, which exclusively deals with spirituality, the soul, meditation, sins and salvation. Qura'n deals with all these and more. It is a manual of individual and collective living. Collective living entails community relations as well as intercommunity and international relations. Muslims were a political community right from the very beginning. There were Muslim as well as non-Muslim tribes living within its borders, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians. There were alliances and treaties. The system, which governed them was guided by divine revelation, a compendium of guidelines, that is Qur'an. Now it seems that if the revelation concerning spiritualism were separated into one volume labeling it the holy scripture and the rest of the revelation into volume II and given it some earthly title, the Ratzingers of today would have no objection but such manipulation would not be in the nature of God.

When we say that the Qur'an was revealed during the formative years of a community and its integration process, then let us say also that no community, whether historical or modern has so far managed never to engage in wars and survived. Both of Rome's pagan and Christian versions were founded and sustained by war, often holding Bible in one hand and sword in the other. The New World and its Christian domains were established this way too. The Holy See has often initiated, conducted and concluded vastly destructive and genocidal wars. The Crusades are one example. The Christian soldiers were free to resort to whatever tactics their imagination could come up with. The massacres in the Crusades are just one example.

Only Islam has a code of ethics for warfare, rules of engagement, unparalleled in their fairness. Time doesn't permit me to go into details but they are well-documented. Let us also understand that all the verses pertaining to Jihad are conditional and contextual. Some are the instructions given to the prophet in the thick of the battle. Keep in mind that force is recommended in the Qur'an to fight against oppression, persecution and injustice, when human rights are violated and the rights of nations are arrogantly trampled upon under the hooves of horses or under the iron chains of the tanks, when people are dispossessed of their lands and properties. Not to fight against such injustices is considered a grave sin in Islam. The Qur'an Says:

"And why should you not fight for the cause of Allah and of those, who being weak are oppressed, men women and children, who cry out ‘our Lord rescue us from this land of oppressors and raise from you, for us one who would protect us and raise from you, for us one who will help." (4:75)

Let me quote a passage from Murtaza Mutahhari's book; "Any religion, if it is a complete religion must have thought about what it will do on that day when it is faced with aggression, or let us suppose, it is not itself faced with aggression but another people are. It is for such a day that religion must have a law of war, or law of jihad. The Christians say that peace is good and we agree; peace is good but what about submission, humiliation and misery? Are submission, humiliation and misery also good? --- Islam never gives permission to be humiliated, while at the same time it strongly advocates peace."

The world is in a great turmoil today. There is euphoria of war everywhere. There are several conflicts raging, often involving Muslims on one side and non-Muslims on the other side, and some times groups of Muslims, who feel oppressed fighting against their Muslim oppressors. There is a range of weaponry on each side. Each side goes to war with the weapons it has and not with the weapons it wished it had. So, you find tanks and helicopters on one side and suicide bombers on the other. There is no justification for either of these tactics and the methods used certainly do not satisfy the requirements of jihad. But why not look at this as political conflicts in their historical context, instead of branding them as a war between civilizations, or war between Muslims and Christians and Muslims and Jews. The war in Northern Ireland has never been described as a war between the Vatican and the Church of England. The war in Sri Lanka has never been described as a war between Hindus and Buddhists. The Tamil Tigers were the ones who invented suicide bombings but no one has assigned the tactics to Hinduism.

The greatest crime that is being committed today is to hide the underlying causes of the conflicts so that the conflicts can be perpetuated. This is a crime more horrendous than that of the Holocaust. The present Pope is also a perpetrator of this crime and in his case it is a sin, which he is carrying on his shoulders and on the conscience of the Catholic Church.

Finally, in trying to prove that Islam is averse to reason and the nature of God in Islam is conceptually different from that in Christianity, Ratzinger resorts to another tool. He says that Ibn Hazm stated that God was not bound by even his own word and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practice idolatry. Ratzinger's contention is that it is not in God's nature to act or command against reason. First of all he is invoking an age-old debate within Islam itself. Ibn Hazm was an Eleventh century Islamic scholar who lived in Muslim Spain. He was an adherent of the Zahiri school of thought in Islam. Zahiris interpreted Qur'an in rigidly literal sense and were opposed to any interpolation of the meanings of the Qur'an and thus when the Qur'an talks about God descending from the throne, to the Zahiris it meant God using his legs to do so. This is what is called in Greek anthropomorphism. The Zahiri school is now extinct but the methodology is believed to have been adopted by the present day's Salafis. My point is that instead of using the mainstream view, Ratzinger uses a small minority's view to advance his erratic criticism of Islam.

Source: DailyMuslims.com