Timothy R. Furnish, a perspicacious Assistant Professor of History at Georgia Perimeter College and author of Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, their Jihads and Osama bin Laden (Praeger, 2005), and with whom I recently participated in a FrontPage Symposium, has some excellent observations on Pope Rage (thanks to Tex):
One might think that Muslims would be offended because the head of the world’s largest Christian denomination considers them, well, unreasonable. But the rent-a-mobs in Gaza and Kashmir are proving the truth of his assertion in that regard. As for the numerous statements by Muslim spokesmen that the pope is “ignorant” of Islam and Islamic history—well, the reality is that they simply can’t handle the truth.First, Muhammad was not just a man claiming that God spoke through him; he was also a political and military leader. Driven out of Mecca and taking the reins of power in Medina, Muhammad and the Muslims spread their faith not just via da`is (missionaries), but by the sword; in fact, Jews in Medina who refused to accept Muhammad’s prophethood (and who, to be accurate, were accused of plotting against King Muhammad) were killed or enslaved. The conquest of Mecca in 630 CE was accomplished at swordpoint, not by persuasion. The creation of a huge Islamic Empire by the first four caliphs, the Umayyads and the Abbasids (between 632 and the end of the first millennium CE) was carried out via conquest—not by handing out brochures. Granted, Jews and Christians within the Muslim-ruled territories from the Pyrenees to the Indus were not all forced to convert—but the relegation to second-class status known as dhimmah led, eventually, to the majority of people in North Africa and the Middle East converting to Islam.
The initial phase of Islamic conquests resulted in about half the territory of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire switching hands. For several centuries the borders stabilized and the Byzantines ruled a state pushed back into Anatolia and the Balkan Peninsula. But in the 14th century CE a new wave of Muslim jihadists, the Ottoman Turks, were again moving on Byzantine lands. This was the situation facing Manuel II, and no doubt his view of Islam as “evil and inhuman” was in no small measure influenced by watching what was left of his empire disintegrating. (Indeed, less than three decades after his death Constantinople would fall to the Ottoman ruler Mehmet II.) One might ask how many Muslims setting fire to Christian churches, or to effigies of the pope, are even aware of this? I suspect that even if they were, it would make no difference.
For, in the view of some Muslims, it is not unreasonable to spread their religion by violence, for two reasons: 1) it is the final revelation of God to humanity and 2) the Qur’an enjoins it. To paraphrase Dr. Henry Jones (Indiana’s father): “goose-stepping morons like yourselves should be reading your holy book instead of burning churches.” If they did, they would discover that:
* Surah Muhammad [47]:3 says “When you meet the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike off their heads….
* Surah Anfal [8]:12 says “I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, strike off the tips of their fingers.”
* Surah al-Nisa’[4]:74 says “Let those who would exchange the life of this world for the hereafter, fight for the cause of God….”
* Surah al-Nisa’[4]:56 says “The true believer fights for the cause of God, but the infidel fights for the devil.”
* Surah al-Nisa’[4]:101 says “The unbelievers are your inveterate enemies.”
* Surah al-Ma’idah [5]:51 says “Believers, take neither Jews nor Christians for your friends.”Only in a truly Bizarro world can those passages NOT be an incitement for some to violence, to “evil and inhuman” acts. Are there other passages in the Qur’an mitigating these? Yes.4 But many of these more benevolent passages are also considered by many Muslims to have been abrogated by the more martial ones.
Read it all.
Well, in a Bizarro world we definitely could use a Superman right about now.
Discusssion, with interview of Ibrahim Cooper, on WMAL 630 in Washington, DC is from 9-10 am EST.
I've only just heard that the Kashmiris had protested against the Pope by holding a one day strike throughout the whole of Kashmir! Kashmir came to a grinding halt yesterday.
Take that! Pope Benedict!!!!LOOOL!!
(I have been laughing all morning about this report!!!!)
Unbelievable!
http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3801422a12,00.html
When someone like the Pope can no longer stand up and tell the truth we, as a global community, are no longer free. Our freedom is being robbed and looted by those who neither understand or desire freedom and liberty themselves. They wish to shackle us with the irons that have held them in the Middle Ages.
We must rise up and let it be known that freedom and liberity will not bow its knees to any man's god or gods.
We need to fight them in the media, fight them in the marketplace, and fight them in the streets if it comes to it. If we roll over and ignore the Islamists intentions, our grandchildren will live in hell.
It is not good against evil. It is liberity and freedom against the authoritarian control and oppression of an Islamic fundamentalist theocracy.
Steel yourselves.
ahhh we are doomed.
they have the left on their side, its not just us against them but us aginst everyone else.
W_D_J_D Oh for God's sake pull yourself together and grow some. We haven't even begun to fight here. This weekend I read the Rage and the Pride again and I watched Patton and I tell you I'm stoked up!
When we finally level the sights those poor bastards are going to lose, lose, lose! Intellectually, militarily, socially, financially.
Let's get busy. We have much to do.
The Pope is 'never' wrong, but he can be mistaken. In this case, I dont think so.
No matter who said that Mohammad brought evil, mohammad brought evil. Talk about straining out the gnat while letting the camel through. The evil bringer, Mohammad, deserves to be catching the flack, not someone who calls your attention to it. Muslims are extreemly hypocrical. As a group, they burn churches, murder Christians and Jews, displace millions like in Darfur, steal everything in sight, and then lie about it. They insult Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and every other religious 'ism'.
Bibles are shredded and religious items (crosses ect) are ground up on the spot at Saudi airport customs.
Let someone insult (tell the truth) the 'Prophet', and all hell breaks loose. Let anyone desecrate a Quran and there is hell to pay. Kind of one sided dont you think? Islam is very stable in its instability, but like any house of cards, it eventually becomes top heavy and crashes from its own weight. All we have to do is to keep kicking those bottom cards (telling the truth about Allah, Mo and Islam) and soon the whole mess will come tumbling down...the Pope gave it a good kick and thats why they are pzzed off...Instead of apologising, he should kick em again...
His Holiness's actual point - that using violence to propagate religion subverts the reasoning necessary for achieving true faith - seems to have sailed cleanly over the heads of most - though not all - Moslems. Although this was clearly a general point equally applicable to most faiths, it is encouraging that many Moslems realise Islam is so singularly defined by violence that this home truth was tantamount to a thinly vieled admonishment of Mohammad's doctrines. Like the Big Book of Death Threats says, compulsory religion ain't no 'religion' at all (and if anyone disagrees, god help me I'll strike off their opposite pinky fingers and toes...)
Churchill's comment about Christianity's survival having hinged upon its support from a renaissance "against which it has vainly struggled" seems pertinent here; the upshot being that today, people of all faiths and none can give thanks for a universe almost infinitely more grandiose than that of our forbears - we have progressed from worshiping a god that created a 'cosmos' not a mere 30,000 miles in diameter, but some 25 billion light years across; of not one world but an unfathomable number of worlds.
And if one takes the fundamentalist Christian view that this particular lump belongs to Satan, then this devil's domain is but a grain of dust, a molecule of matter in a heavenly creation of unimaginable proportions. Unfortunatley, more unimaginable to some than others...
True story; perusing the window display of a telescope store in town, a Moslem gentleman passing by quipped "what do these people expect to see, the face of allah?" to which I just lamely smiled and shrugged. Later of course I wish I'd responded with the obvious question - just where is allah's creation? Pre-Islamic Arabs and even early Moslems realised the "face of allah" lay behind the outermost sphere of the fixed stars. But to this submitter, at the dawn of the 21st century, reason and enlightenment were the prevail of jahilya, and thus the greater majesty of creation was bidah - his ilah, "allah", had created nothing more than the big square flat thing under his feet. And it struck me that while Christians and others - even atheists - raise our praise to the heavens, the servants of allah prostrate themselves towards the flat earth, and a small sandstone box in Mecca, the pagan temple from which the deities of so many other worlds, stars and planets, were banished by a marauding horde of iconoclasts fourteen centuries ago.
For a long time I rejected all religion as an artificial cap on our knowledge, a travesty against one of god's greatest gifts; the ability (and thus obligation) to rationalise. An enforced ignorance of nature's full glory. More recently I've become a determinist, and contrary to what some may think, I believe this view goes some way towards reconciling the shifting metaphors of religion and science. In a universe bereft of randomness or chance, devoid of free will or 'intelligent design', perhaps faith is a true virtue - an acceptance of our humble significance and the wonders of existence. And perhaps most of all, a reason to be - as much as faith may be tempered by reason, it is in itself a reason.
The Pope's incisive point was that religion and reason are mutually dependent, and even a flaky old Catholic atheist like me can appreciate that. Violent coercion - jihad - is inimical to any semblance of free will and reason, and the gauntlet has been thrown down for those Moslems or apologists who wish to take it up. We're all ears and waiting...
Domestos,
That was very well written and reasoned.
Good Job.
KnightHawk
KnightHawk - shucks, cheers ears. The weight of responsibility upon this Holy Father - and probably the next dozen or so - is perhaps the greatest any have held for centuries, and he seems genuinely keen to make peace with Moslems (real peace and not subservience). We can only hope and pray that Moslems can make peace with Islam (without the rest of us going tits up)...
Found this on Sky News
The head of Australias Catholic church says the Popes controversial comments on Islam have been proved right. Read it all here http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-1234375,00.html