Where the Pope Went Terribly Wrong
September 19, 2006
On the day after the fifth anniversary of 9/11, the Pope, leader of the 1.1 billion Catholic Christians around the world, tossed fuel on the fire of Christian-Muslim antagonism with a very poorly considered speech. In his remarks at a German university, he deliberately chose to quote a Byzantine emperor’s view of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) without stating his opposition to that view, implicitly thereby supporting it.
The Emperor claimed that Muslims were commanded by Muhammad to spread Islam by force, and that anything new in Islam is evil. Needless to say, not exactly the most disarming opening line if the goal is to start a dialogue with Muslims.
When asked to explain what he was up to, the Pope initially offered three ideas. First, he was trying to point out that violence should never be perpetrated in the name of religion. Second, that there was a distinction between the important role of reason in Christian faith as opposed to the lack of reason in Islam, and finally he claimed to only be trying to provoke discussion with the Islamic world on these issues.
The Pope however simply got it all wrong. Both in terms of history and in terms of theology. The Pope’s version of history posits a liberal, tolerant Christianity spread by persuasion, compared with an Islam spread by forced conversion. His Emperor that he quotes is trying to prevent the further forcible spread of Islam.
But the truth is quite different. While Christianity in its first two centuries was spread by persuasion, it remained a minority faith in the larger Roman Empire. What made Christianity the dominant faith in Europe and North Africa was the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, who then made it the state religion, and forcibly spread the faith to all corners of the Roman Empire. Further warfare, such as Charlemagne’s campaigns in Germany in the 8th century, helped spread Christianity into regions that were never under Roman control.
The Catholic Church launched the Crusades in the 11th century, subsequently spread the religion to the New World backed by Spanish arms. In the great age of European imperialism, Christian armies seized forcibly most of the Earth’s surface, and missionaries justified and followed the armies.
In contrast, Islam was not spread by force. While political borders were expanded by military actions, and in this the Muslims behaved no differently than anyone else in the pre-modern world, the religion was not.
Muslim rulers in fact discouraged conversions, as they could not tax Muslims as heavily. Historically, most regions conquered by Muslim armies remained non-Muslims for centuries. These include Egypt, Spain, India, and the Balkans. Conversely, the largest Muslim communities in Southeast Asia and in Sub-Saharan Africa were the results of traders, not soldiers, as those areas were never conquered by Muslim armies.
The Byzantine Emperor the Pope quoted was ruling in the late 14th century. Within 50 years his empire crumbled under the Ottoman assault, and the Turks then carried forward into the Balkans up to Vienna. On the other side of the Mediterranean, Catholic armies overran the Muslim Spain by 1492. Contrary to the Pope’s historical vision, the consequences of these two victories were quite different. The Ottomans created the most religiously tolerant empire in Europe for the next 400 years, and the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Balkans remained Christians, while in Spain all the Jews and Muslims were expelled or forced to convert. The Spanish Inquisition was created to ensure that new converts did not backslide in secret. To add to the irony, the Ottomans welcomed the expelled Jews of Spain, who were the origin of the Sephardic communities of Jews in the Muslim lands.
On a theological level, the Pope is also deeply wrong. There is no more rational a religion than Islam. Doctrinally, Islam believes that men can find their way to God and the truth through their own reason, and revelation is not necessary. Abraham came to God without revelation. The Quran describes itself as a “mercy”, not a necessity. Our God-given reason is sufficient to distinguish good from evil and to avoid idol-worship. Quranic guidance is a mercy from God to illuminate the path more clearly. Christianity on the other hand rejects reason as a path to the Trinity. One cannot imagine that without exposure to Christian scripture, anyone could reason their way to the intricacies of Christian, much less Catholic, theology. But many people around the world have reasoned their way to ethics and belief in one God without exposure to the Quran. Christians themselves accept that the Trinity is not a rational concept, and must be taken on faith alone. Even in the Middle Ages, what forced Catholic scholars to try to integrate Greek rationalism and Christian thought was their exposure to Arabic texts and commentaries of Aristotle and Plato.
Catholicism also has a very poor history of association with modern rational thought. Galileo was threatened with torture for declaring the Earth orbits the Sun. In the 19th century, the Catholic church rejected Darwin’s findings. And its current view that a fertilized human egg in a Petri dish is a life is profoundly irrational.
The Pope’s remarks reflect a profound hostility to Islam. His choice of quoting a medieval polemic against Islam was deliberate. It was also ill-informed and served only to heighten tensions between Muslims and Christians, rather than reduce them. As the Pope, he should choose his words more carefully, and be better aware of the real history and doctrines of Islam before he comments on them.
