THE POPE, JIHAD, AND “DIALOGUE”

The most important address commemorating September 11, 2001 was delivered on September 12, 2006, a day after the fifth anniversary of this cataclysmic act of jihad terrorism. It was not delivered by President Bush,¹ and was not even pronounced in the United States.

Despite his critique of modern reason, Benedict argued that he did not intend to promote a retrogression

back to the time before the Enlightenment and reject[ing] the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: We are all grateful for the marvelous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity.³

Christianity, the Pope maintained, was indelibly linked to reason, and he contrasted this view with those who believe in spreading their faith by the sword. Benedict developed this argument by recounting the late fourteenth-century “Dialogue Held with a Certain Persian, the Worthy Mouterizes in Anakara of Galatia,” between the Byzantine ruler Manuel II Palaeologus and a well-educated Muslim interlocutor.⁴ The crux of this part of his presentation was the following:

Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God,” he [the Byzantine ruler] says, “is not pleased by blood—and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats..

However, it is Benedict’s discussion of the Byzantine ruler's allusions to “the theme of the jihad (holy war)”⁶ —Koran 2:256, “There is no compulsion in religion,”⁷ notwithstanding—that has unleashed a firestorm of condemnation and violence from Muslims across the world.⁸ And this ancient hatred apparently influences even the most respected, ecumenical Muslim elites. Witness the much-lionized Georgetown professor of Islamic Studies Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the quintessential, “enlightened” Muslim moderate. During an interview this week (September 19, 2006) on National Public Radio’s The Diane Rehm Show, Professor Nasr revealed that he cannot accept reasoned criticism of either Muhammad’s sacralized violence, from which the institution of jihad arises, or Muslims acting violently at mere mention of this undeniable linkage by infidels.⁹ As columnist/blogger Mona Charen reported, Nasr

took issue with [the] description of the violence perpetrated against Christians worldwide following the Pope’s remarks as “unprovoked.” He [Nasr] interjected “But it was provoked.” Diane Rehm equably restated his position (I [Charen] paraphrase) “So you think words are violence.” He [Nasr] confirmed.¹⁰

The same day, moderate Pakistani Muslim autocrat Pervez Musharraf, also in response to the Pope's lecture, argued for international blasphemy laws to be imposed (i.e., international Sharia) upon those who “defame Islam.”¹¹ His comments give voice to a process that is being institutionalized by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) on behalf of all fifty-six of its member nations: the Islamization, or creeping “Sharia-zation” of human-rights standards,¹² including the creation of international Sharia Courts.¹³

These developments pose a grave threat to mankind's most basic freedoms, in particular freedom of conscience.

Here are the words of Pope Benedict XVI deemed so incendiary by both Muslim leaders and the masses:

Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels,” he [Manuel II Palaeologus] turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: “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.”¹⁴

The historical context for these words—which were likely written by Manuel II Palaeologus between 1391 and 1394——turns out be much more banal, albeit unknown to fulminating Muslims,¹⁶ and Islamic apologists of all ilks, especially the disingenuous

Muslim,¹⁷ and hand-wringing non-Muslim promoters of empty “civilizational dialogue.”¹⁸

Warren Treadgold has provided this relevant summary historical background highlighting the cumulative effects of the relentless Turkish Muslim depredations against the Byzantine Empire in its Anatolian heartland by the late fourteenth century:

As the Turks raided and conquered, they enslaved many Christians, selling some in other Muslim regions and hindering the rest from practicing their faith. Besides levying the usual head tax [the deliberately humiliating “jizya,” as per Koran 9:29, imposed upon non-Muslim “dhimmis” vanquished by jihad], the Turks adopted the practice of taking Christian boys [i.e., the devshirme levy] from their families and raising them as Muslims [i.e., forcibly converting them to Islam], usually for military service in special corps known as Janissaries [i.e., often fighting against the Christian populations of their parents]. Conversions, Turkish migration, and Greek outmigration increasingly endangered the Greek minority in central Asia Minor. When the Turks overran Western Anatolia, they occupied the countryside first, driving the Greeks into the cities, or away to Europe, or the islands.

When Manuel II composed the Dialogue (which Pope Benedict excerpted), the Byzantine ruler was little more than a glorified dhimmi vassal of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid, forced to accompany the latter on a campaign through Anatolia to subdue and occupy the last independent Byzantine city in Western Anatolia, Philadelpheia.²⁰ Earlier, Bayezid had compelled the Byzantines under Manuel II to submit to additional humiliations and impositions—heavier tribute, which was already onerous—as well as the establishment of a special quarter in Constantinople devoted to Turkish merchants, and the admission of an Ottoman kadi to arbitrate the affairs of these Muslims.²¹

During the campaign he was conscripted to join, Manuel II witnessed with understandable melancholy the great metamorphosis—ethnic and toponymic—of formerly Byzantine Asia Minor. The devastation and depopulation of these once-flourishing regions was so extensive that often Manuel could no longer tell where he was. The still-recognizable Greek cities whose very names had been changed into something foreign became a source of particular grief.

The plain in which we are now [encamped] had some name when it prospered and was inhabited and ruled by Rhomaioi [Byzantine Greeks]. Now that I seek to learn that name, I am ignorantly inquiring after wolf's wings, as the saying goes, for there is no one to teach it to me. There are many cities to be seen here, but they have no inhabitants, by which inhabitants towns are ornamented and without which [inhabitants] one could not call them cities. The majority of the cities remain a miserable sight to those whose ancestors formerly inhabited them. Not even their names survive as a result of their previous ruin. Upon inquiring as to the names of the cities, whenever those to whom I addressed the inquiry would reply, “we call them by those names” (for time obliterated their names) I am instantly distressed, but I lament in silence still being in control of my senses.²²

Letter 16 in the corpus of Manuel's letters—written in 1391 to Demetrius Cydones, at the same time as the Dialogue—makes specific reference to the murderous

Turkish threat to the Byzantine Empire, noting how the Greek Christian inhabitants of Anatolia

have fled to the clefts in the rocks, to the forests, and to the mountain heights in an effort to escape a death from which there is no escape, a very cruel and inhuman death without any semblance of justice..

It was during this unhappy sojourn that Manuel II's putative encounter with a Muslim theologian occurred, ostensibly in Ankara.²⁴

Manuel II's Dialogue was one of the later outpourings of a vigorous Muslim-Christian polemic regarding Islam's success, at (especially Byzantine) Christianity's expense, which persisted during the eleventh through fifteenth centuries, and even beyond. The Muslim advocates' (particularly the Turks) most prominent argument was the indisputable evidence of Islam's military triumphs over the Christians of Asia Minor (especially Anatolia, in modern Turkey). These jihad conquests were repeatedly advanced in the polemics of the Turks. The Christian rebuttal, in contrast, hinged upon the ethical precepts of Muhammad and the Koran.²⁵ Christian interlocutors charged the Muslims with abiding a religion which both condoned the life of a “lascivious murderer” and claimed to give such a life divine sanction.²⁶

Manuel, and generations of Christian interlocutors, argued that the “Christ-hating” barbarians could never overcome the “fortress of belief,” despite seizing lands and cities, extorting tribute, and even conscripting rulers to perform humiliating services. Manuel II’s discussions with his Muslim counterpart simply conformed to this pattern of polemical exchanges, repeated often, over at least four centuries.²⁷

Returning to Pope Benedict’s now-controversial lecture, even if one accepts an apologetic interpretation of Koran 2:256 as prohibiting forced conversion to Islam (see below), this verse was abrogated by the verses of jihad, for example 9:5, and many others in sura 9, as well as sura 8. Indeed Koran 9:5 alone is held to have abrogated as many as one hundred pacific (or seemingly pacific) verses.²⁸ And the profound importance of properly understanding the doctrine of abrogation is underscored for Muslims by this anecdote attributed to the fourth Rightly Guided Caliph, Ali [ibn Abi Talib]:

Ali said to Abdul Rahman “can you differentiate between abrogating and abrogated verses” Abdul Rahman said, “no.” Thereupon Ali said “Thou art damned and causeth others to be damned.”²⁹

Koranic sources, in particular the timeless war proclamation (the Koran being the “uncreated word of Allah” for Muslims) on generic pagans (not simply Arabian pagans), Koran 9:5, offers pagans the stark “choice” of conversion or death: “Then, when the sacred months are drawn away, slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them, and confine them, and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush.

The idolatrous Hindus (and the same applies to enormous populations of pagans/animists wherever Muslim jihadist armies encountered them in history, including, sadly, contemporary Sudan), for example, were slaughtered and enslaved in vast numbers during the waves of jihad conquests that ravaged the Indian subcontinent for well over a half millennium (beginning at the outset of the eighth century CE).— And the guiding principles of Islamic law regarding their fate —derived from Koran 9:5—were unequivocally coercive. Jihad slavery also contributed substantively to the growth of the Muslim population in India. K. S. Lal elucidates both of these points:

The Hindus who naturally resisted Muslim occupation were considered to be rebels. Besides they were idolaters (mushrik) and could not be accorded the status of Kafirs, of the People of the Book—Christians and Jews.. Muslim scriptures and treatises advocated jihad against idolaters for whom the law advocated only Islam or death.. The fact was that the Muslim regime was giving [them] a choice between Islam and death only. Those who were killed in battle were dead and gone; but their dependents were made slaves. They ceased to be Hindus; they were made Musalmans in course of time if not immediately after captivity.slave taking in India was the most flourishing and successful [Muslim] missionary activity.. Every Sultan, as [a] champion of Islam, considered it a political necessity to plant or raise [the] Muslim population all over India for the Islamization of the country and countering native resistance.³²

The late Rudi Paret was a seminal twentieth-century scholar of the Koran and its exegesis.³³ Paret's considered analysis of Koran 2:256 puts this verse in the overall context of Koranic injunctions regarding pagans, specifically, and further concludes that 2:256 is a statement of resignation, not a prohibition on forced conversion.

After the community which the Prophet had established had extended its power over the whole of Arabia, the pagan Arabs were forcefully compelled to accept Islam stated more accurately, they had to choose either to accept Islam or death in battle against the superior power of the Muslims (cf. surahs 8:12; 47:4). This regulation was later sanctioned in Islamic law. All this stands in open contradiction to the alleged meaning of the Quranic statement, noted above: la ikraha fi d-dini. The idolaters (mushrikun) were clearly compelled to accept Islam— unless they preferred to let themselves be killed [Note: Koran 9:5]..

In view of these circumstances it makes sense to consider another meaning. Perhaps originally the statement la ikraha fi d-dini did not mean that in matters of religion one ought not to use compulsion against another but that one could not use compulsion against another (through the simple proclamation of religious truth).³⁴

Such coercion applies not only to “pagans.” Renowned Princeton scholar of Islam Patricia Crone makes the cogent argument that those of any faith may be forcibly converted during acts of jihad resulting in captivity³⁵ (including, for example, the jihad kidnapping of the two Fox reporters Centanni and Wiig³⁶). In her recent analysis of the origins and development of Islamic political thought, Dr. Crone makes an important nexus between the mass captivity and enslavement of non-Muslims during jihad campaigns, and the prominent role of coercion in these major modalities of Islamization. Following a successful jihad, she notes:

Male captives might be killed or enslaved, whatever their religious affiliation. People of the Book were not protected by Islamic law until they had accepted dhimma (Koran 9:29). Captives might also be given the choice between Islam and death, or they might pronounce the confession of faith of their own accord to avoid

execution: jurists ruled that their change of status was to

be accepted even though they had only converted out of

fear.³⁷

An unapologetic view of Islamic history reveals that forced conversions to Islam are not exceptional—they have been the norm, across three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe—for over thirteen centuries.³⁸

Moreover, during jihad—even the jihad campaigns of the twentieth century (i.e., the jihad genocide of the Armenians during World War I, the Moplah jihad in Southern India [1921], the jihad against the Assyrians of Iraq [early 1930s], the jihads against the Chinese of Indonesia and the Christian Ibo of southern Nigeria in the 1960s, and the jihad against the Christians and Animists of the southern Sudan from 1983 to 2001),— the dubious concept (see Paret, above) of “no compulsion” (Koran 2:256, which was cited with tragic irony during the Fox reporters “confessional”!⁴⁰) has always been meaningless.

A consistent practice was to enslave populations taken from outside the boundaries of the Dar al Islam, where Islamic rule (and law) prevailed. Inevitably fresh non-Muslim slaves, including children (for example, the infamous devshirme system in Ottoman Turkey, which spanned three centuries and enslaved five hundred thousand to one million Balkan Christian adolescent males, forcibly converting them to Islam), were Islamized within a generation, their ethnic and linguistic origins erased.⁴¹

Two enduring and important mechanisms for this conversion were concubinage and the slave militias— practices still evident in the contemporary jihad waged by the Arab Muslim Khartoum government⁴² against the southern Sudanese Christians and Animists. And Julia Duin reported in early 2002 that murderous jihad terror campaigns—including, prominently, forced conversions to Islam—continued to be waged against the Christians of Indonesia’s Moluccan Islands.⁴³

Recently, at the close of a compelling, thoroughly documented address (delivered April 2, 2006, at the Legatus Summit, Naples, Florida) titled, “Islam and Western Democracies,” Cardinal George Pell, the Archbishop of Sydney, posed four salient questions for his erstwhile Muslim interlocutors wishing to engage in meaningful interfaith dialogue:

(1) Do they believe that the peaceful suras of the Koran are abrogated by the verses of the sword?

(2) Is the program of military expansion (100 years after Muhammad’s death Muslim armies reached Spain and India) to be resumed when possible?

(3) Do they believe that democratic majorities of Muslims in Europe would impose Sharia (Islamic religious) law?

(4) Can we discuss Islamic history—even the hermeneutical problems around the origins of the Koran—without threats of violence?⁴⁴

Dr. Habib Malik, in an eloquent address delivered February 3, 2003, at the at the 27th Annual Council for Christian Colleges and Universities Presidents Conference decried the platitudinous “least common denominators” paradigm which dominates what he aptly termed the contemporary “dialogue industry”:⁴⁵

We’re all three Abrahamic religions, we’re the three Middle Eastern monotheisms, the Isa of the Koran is really the same as the Jesus of the New Testament.. This is politicized dialogue. This is dialogue for the sake of dialogue. Philosophically speaking, this is what Kierkegaard called idle talk, snakke in Danish; what Heidegger called Gerede; what Sartre called bavardage. In other words, if this is dialogue, it’s pathetic.it needs to be transcended, and specifically to concentrate, to focus on the common ethical foundation for most religions can also be very misleading. Because when you get into the nitty-gritty, you find that even in what you supposed were common ethical foundations, there are vast differences, incompatibilities. Suicide bombers is one recent example. Condoned by major authoritative Muslim voices; completely unacceptable by Christianity.⁴⁶

Cardinal Pell’s unanswered questions⁴⁷ highlight the predictable failure of the feckless “We’re all three Abrahamic religions,” “dialogue for the sake of dialogue” approach to both Muslim-Christian and Muslim-Jewish dialogue.

Eschewing the comforting banalities of his predecessor, Benedict XVI has acknowledged that real dialogue, as opposed to bavardage,— begins not by kissing the Koran,⁴⁹ but by reading it. Most important, he is impatient⁵⁰ with an interfaith dialogue between Muslims and Christians limited to platitudes about “Abrahamic faiths,” which scrupulously avoids serious discussions of the living, sacralized Islamic institution of jihad war.

Until Muslims evidence a willingness to engage in such forthright discussions, Benedict appears to share Dr. Malik's sobering conclusions from his February 2003 speech: “One certainly needs to be open at all times to learn from the Other, including to learn at times that the Other right now has nothing to teach me on a particular issue.”⁵¹

Postscript

William Oddie, a prominent British Catholic writer and broadcaster, aptly characterized⁵² the brazen hypocrisy of the decision by the clerical hierarchy of Sunni Islam's Vatican to terminate “dialogue” with the Vatican during January 2011 in response to the Pope's call for an end to discrimination against Egypt's Coptic Christian minority;⁵³ while myriad Al Azhar and other international Muslim scholars routinely hector non­Muslim societies about any perceived injustices to Muslims; and simultaneous to the Al Azhar call to suspend dialogue with the Vatican, an Al Azhar cleric was reaffirming the “justice” of the classical Muslim imperative to wage aggressive, unprovoked “offensive” jihad⁵⁴ against non-Muslims not yet under Islamic suzerainty.

The decision of Sheik Ahmad el-Tayeb, president of the al-Azhar University in Cairo, and members of the Islamic Research Academy to suspend dialogue with the Vatican was made unanimously in response to the Pope's reference “to the discrimination endured by Coptic Christians in Egypt” after a bombing at a Coptic Orthodox church left 23 people dead. Sheik el-Tayeb had earlier criticised the Pope's remarks as “unacceptable interference in Egypt's affairs.” So: it's OK for Muslim “scholars” to comment on anything that happens to Muslims anywhere in the world, on the ground that wherever there are Muslims is part of the “umma,” the Muslim world, so that isn't interfering in anyone else's internal affairs, but for the Pope to complain about the oppression of fellow Christians is precisely such an interference. And the point is, of course, that whether or not they are for some reason engaging in “dialogue,” these same “scholars” think they have a right and a duty not merely to urge the oppression of other religions but in the end to eliminate them entirely on their territory. Just as Sheik Ahmad el-Tayeb was breaking off dialogue with Rome, one of his colleagues in the al-Azhar University, Dr Imad Mustafa, was issuing a fatwa. He began by stating the well-known doctrine of “defensive jihad,” that is Muslims must go to war against infidels who attack them. Of course, the word “attack” is often spread rather thinly to justify aggression. But now Mustafa has publicly and explicitly come up with a new concept [Note: Mr. Oddie is incorrect; this is classical, offensive jihad warfare; see Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad, pp. 26-28, 94-99, 125-353], one that up until now was supposedly restricted to groups like al-Qaida: “Then there is another type of fighting against the non-Muslims known as offensive jihad...which is to pursue the infidels into their own land without any aggression [on their part].. “Two schools [of Islamic jurisprudence] have ruled that offensive jihad is permissible in order to secure Islam's border, to extend God's religion to people in cases where the governments do not allow it, such as the Pharaoh did with the children of Israel, and to remove every religion but Islam from the Arabian peninsula.” “And to remove every religion but Islam”: what a detestable euphemism for murder. And that, in the end, it seems, is the ambition of the “scholars” of this important Islamic “university.” I put these words into inverted commas to indicate what is rapidly becoming very obvious, even to those determined to put as optimistic a gloss on interfaith relations as possible: that the words really don’t seem to mean to the Muslim world anything remotely like what we mean by them.⁵⁵

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