FrontPage Symposium: The Pope and Islam

Trifkovic: Let's first set the record straight on the verse "la ikraha fiddeen" ("no compulsion in religion"), as it has great relevance for the proper understanding of the Pontiff's main point. Verse 2:256 is not at all "one reason why the great majority of Muslim scholars accept that forced conversion is against Islam." In reality, no mainstream Islamic scholar accepts today, or has ever accepted over the past 13 centuries, that 2:256 leaves non-Muslims free to make their religious choices unmolested and un-coerced, in accordance with their conscience and free will.

Some contemporary Islamic scholars explain that there is, indeed, no compulsion in making that choice - but once it is made, the options are bleak - death or submission - for those who make the "wrong" choice: "Faith and rejection, iman and kufr, cannot be forced upon one by others. So Islam does not say that others must be forced into Islam; that if they become Muslims, well and good, and if they do not, they are to be killed, that the choice is theirs." In the same spirit, there was no compulsion to accept Communism under the 1936 Soviet constitution, but the price of its insufficiently enthusiastic embrace was fatally steep for some tens of millions of Zeks.

The difference among Islamic scholars on 2:256 is that of degree, not kind. Some assert that it has been abrogated not only by 9:5 but also by 9:73 ("O Prophet, struggle with the unbelievers and hypocrites, and be thou harsh with them"). Other scholars - more "tolerant" ones, we might say - said 2:256 has not been abrogated, but it had a special application: it was revealed concerning the People of the Book (Jews & Christians), who should not be compelled to embrace Islam if they submit to the rule of Islam and pay the Jizya. It is only the idol worshippers who are compelled to embrace Islam and upon them 9:73 applies. As al-Nahas points out in An-Nasikh wal-Mansukh, "this is the opinion of Ibn 'Abbas which is the best opinion due to the authenticity of its chain of authority." In exempting the Jews and the Christians from 2:256, the ulema agree that pagans and atheists can and should be compelled to accept Islam by force.

The foremost Islamic scholar of all time, Ibn Khaldun, summed up the mainstream consensus - the consensus that is valid to this day - when he defined systemic violence as a religious duty based on the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert all men to Islam either by persuasion or by force. He readily concedes that "Islam is under obligation to gain power over all nations." For individual Muslims to say that they disagree with this position, or to reject the doctrine of abrogation, is simply irrelevant, because the consensus remains unshaken (and we've been through this many times before); but for them to claim that their heterodox disagreement implies the existence of a wide array of opinion in "mainstream" Islam is misleading.

Let me add that the orthodox Islamic rationale for compulsion - e.g. that given by Ibn al-'Arabi - is worthy of dialectical materialism's somersaults; we find that "no compulsion" actually means compulsion, and freedom is only the freedom to accept revealed truth:

"The Prophet said: I have been ordered to fight against the people until they testify that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah. This Hadith is taken from the words of Allah, 'Fight them on until there is no more tumult and religion becomes that of Allah'. (2:193) If someone asks how can people be compelled in the truth when the mere fact of compelling indicates a violation of the will of the one compelled? - the first answer is that Allah sent Mohammad calling people to Him, showing the way to the truth, enduring much harm ... until the evidence of Allah's truth became manifest ... and His apostle became strong, He ordered him to call people by the sword ... hence there is no more an excuse after being warned. The second answer is that people first are taken and compelled, but when Islam becomes prevalent ... their faith strengthens and finally becomes sincere."

Translated into the language of contemporary and equally mainstream Islamic discourse, with "reasonable" people there is no need for compulsion because "after all the clear proofs, the logical reasoning and the manifest miracles there is no need for force at all." But with those who persist in their obstinate refusal to be reasonable and convert (or submit), coercion is both legitimate and necessary. After all is said and done, the authorities at al-Azhar hold, jihad is "a divine obligation: the Muslim is always mindful that his religion is a Qur'an and a sword ... the Muslim is forever a warrior."

Comparing the early spread of Islam by the sword with the tendency of other past empires to expand by force is misleading because the Islamic empire was unique in its universalistic proclamations. Unlike Rome, Byzantium, Persia, Spain, etc., it knew no natural limits short of turning the entire world into Dar al-Islam; imperialism is immanent to Islam, as Ephraim Karsch argues so eloquently.

The apologists assert that Muslims are called by the Kuran to strive for peace, but the "peace" is possible only under an all-pervasive Islamic rule. Such "peace" does not only have the negative meaning of the absence of war. It is a positive state of security, attainable once all infidels are killed, converted or subjugated. This is exactly the same definition of "peace" as that used by the Soviet empire in the period of its external expansion (1944-1979): attainable only after the defeat of "imperialism as the final stage of capitalism" and the triumph of the vanguard of the proletariat in the whole world.

And by the way, the Mutazila school or al-Farabi were as "Islamic" as Voltaire was "Christian." Yes indeed, they held that God was rational and "justice was the essence of God," etc. but that was over a millennium ago, and persecution, exile, and death were their reward. The resulting "middle ground" - supremely prevalent to this day - may use the rational form, but in substance it is implacable in the view that only Allah creates our acts and enables us to act, and we are but transmission belts with a preordained balance of debit or credit that determines our destiny in the hereafter. Even the salaat is a payment of debt, not communication, and it is offered in the hope of placating a capricious and unpredictable Master. The Master, Allah, is so transcendent as to be devoid of personality.

As then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger wrote back in 1979, "the unrelated, unrelatable, absolutely one, could not be a person. There is no such thing as a person in the categorical singular." In the end, Allah the unknowable and un-personable, is served out of fear, obedience, and hope of bountiful heavenly reward. Islam explicitly rejects the notion that "he who has my commandments and keeps them, he is it who loves me." (John, 14:21) The Kuran states the opposite: "Say, If ye love Allah, follow me; Allah will love you and forgive you your sins." (3:31) This "love" is a means of winning love and forgiveness. It is the "love" of the self.

If "Islam is not represented solely by its irrationalists," it is undeniably dominated by them - to the extent of making rationalist dissenters irrelevant at best, and heretical apostates at worst. The willingness of a few rationalists to risk such designation may be laudable in human terms but it will do absolutely nothing to modify Islam as a doctrine. As Sir William Muir noted a century ago, a reformed faith that should question the divine authority on which the institutions of Islam rest, or attempt by rationalistic selection or abatement to effect a change, would be Islam no longer. Pope Benedict is aware of this important fact, and for that insight he will not and cannot apologize. A timely reminder of that reality, rather than another futile round of "interfaith dialogue," is the lasting benefit of the Regensburg controversy.

Akyol:
Mrs. Bat Ye'or defines my argument that "dhimmitude was fine by medieval standards" as "cynical." Well, then, let's ask this to the "survivors" of that "dhimmitude." Turkey's Jewish community can be a good point of reference. In 1989, they established The Quincentennial Foundation, which was an initiative to thank the Ottoman Empire and its Turkish inheritors for saving Jews from the religious tyranny of Catholic Spain and some other medieval Christian states. Established and run by prominent members of Turkey's Jewish community, the foundation's documents declare:

Ottoman rule was much kinder than Byzantine rule had been. In fact, from the early 15th century on, the Ottomans actively encouraged Jewish immigration. A letter sent by Rabbi Yitzhak Sarfati (from Edirne) to Jewish communities in Europe in the first part of the century "invited his coreligionists to lease the torments they were enduring in Christendom and to seek safety and prosperity in Turkey".

When Mehmet II "the Conqueror" took Constantinople in 1453, he encountered an oppressed Romaniot (Byzantine) Jewish community which welcomed him with enthusiasm. Sultan Mehmet II issued a proclamation to all Jews "... to ascend the site of the Imperial Throne, to dwell in the best of the land, each beneath his Dine and his fig tree, with silver and with gold, with wealth and with cattle..."

... In 1492, the Sultan ordered the governors of the provinces of the Ottoman Empire "not to refuse the Jews entry or cause them difficulties, but to receive them cordially. "According to Bernard Lewis, "the Jews were not just permitted to settle in the Ottoman lands, but were encouraged, assisted and sometimes even compelled."

... Over the centuries an increasing number of European Jews, escaping persecution in their native countries, settled in the Ottoman Empire... In the free air of the Ottoman Empire, Jewish literature flourished.

... On October 27,1840 Sultan Abdulmecid issued his famous ferman concerning the "Blood Libel Accusation" saying: "... and for the love we bear to our subjects, we cannot permit the Jewish nation, whose innocence for the crime alleged against them is evident, to be worried and tormented as a consequence of accusations which have not the least foundation in truth..."

Naim Avigdor Güleryüz, the vice president of The Quincentennial Foundation and the curator of the Jewish Museum in Istanbul, speaks about the "the remarkable spirit of tolerance and acceptance which has characterized the whole Jewish experience in Turkey... [and] in the Ottoman Empire.”

Yet this whole experience is supposed to be a part of "slavery of dhimmitude" according to Mrs. Ye'or. What are we supposed to make of this contradiction?

I suspect it points to an ideological bias towards Islam, which is even more dominant in the writings of Mr. Trifkovic.

Mr. Trifkovic makes a great deal about forced conversion. We have just discussed this issue here on Frontpage, so I won't repeat everything I have said there. My take on that is clear: According to the Qur’an, religious freedom is well-established. Ban an apostasy is a later development, which grew out from political considerations. "Islamic imperialism" was also basically a political phenomenon; conquests took place not to force people to convert to Islam, but to expand the territory of Islamic states. The rule of these states was not egalitarian to non-Muslims, so it was not acceptable in modern standards, but it was far from the bloody tyranny portrayed by Mrs. Ye'or and Mr. Trifkovic.

That's why some of the heterodox Christian communities in the Middle East welcomed the early conquests of Islam, which they saw as more tolerant than their Byzantine rulers. According to Thomas Brown, historian at the University of Edinburgh, "Coptic- and Aramaic-speaking Monophysites in Egypt and Syria saw their Arab fellow Semites as deliverers from Greek tax-gatherers and orthodox persecutors" and the early Islamic Empire under Umayyads (661-750) was for them "a regime which resembled a benign protectorate rather than an empire." (Thomas Brown, "The Transformation of The Roman Mediterranean", in The Oxford History of Medieval Europe, George Holmes, ed. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988, pp. 11, 12) I would also strongly suggest a concise piece about Islam's political history by a Christian author, Mr. Jerald Whitehouse, the director of the Global Center for Adventist-Muslim Relations.

Mr. Trifkovic also speaks about slavery. Yes, unfortunately, slavery was a fact in the pre-modern Islamic world, like it was so in the West until the 19th century. I am sure Mr. Trifkovic has heard about something called the American Civil War and why it erupted. You could tell me that Islamic world lags behind modernization and medieval attitudes still prevail in some Muslim communities. And I would completely agree. But if you tell me that Islam has brought nothing to the world but "slavish dhimmitude," coercion, and bloodshed, I would tell you that you are wrong and biased. People have the right to hate Islam for personal reasons, but they don't have the moral right to distort history to simply bash it.

Mr. Trifkovic's likening of Mutazila or al-Farabi to Voltaire is also deeply erroneous; Voltaire was not a Christian, he was a deist; followers of the Mutazila school or al-Farabi were all self-declared Muslims and today there are many Muslim intellectuals who cherish their heritage.

The most startling distortion I have seen here is about Muslim theology. Mr. Trifkovic says, "salaat is a payment of debt, not communication." I don't know how he came to this conclusion, but millions of Muslims practice their salaat (daily prayers) to thank and praise God, based on the Koranic command, "I am Allah, there is no god but Me, so worship Me and establish salat to remember Me." (20:14) Salaat is basically a ritual to raise and maintain God-consciousness and that's why it "precludes indecency and wrongdoing" (29:45)

And, again despite Mr. Trifkovic's assertion, Allah is not far from love. Quite the contrary: one of the 99 names of God in Islam is Al-Wadud, which means "Most Loving." Dozens of verses in the Koran explain the good morals that Allah loves. Several verses, like 3:134, confirm, "Allah loves the good-doers."

A final reminder: the term "Allah" simply means "the God" in Arabic and we Muslims believe that He is the God of Abraham. So we are certain that He is also the God of Jews and Christians. Thus the effort to portray Him as "capricious and unpredictable" sounds quite predictable when it comes from aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins, but it is sad to see a few Christians like Mr. Trifkovic voicing this insult to God, too. I can only hope for their deliverance; for they know not what they do.

Bat Ye’or: I am pleased to see that Mr. Haidon is much more open than others to different arguments and that he accepts that the traditional Islamic view of non-Muslims needs urgent and necessary consideration from Muslim scholars.

In view of the current international interactions between different faiths and the rise of Islamic radicalism, this is a long overdue duty, essential for the peace of the planet. It is true that, following in the steps of Edward Said, the West has produced a host of apologetic works and this did not encourage self-criticism. In an indirect way, we are somehow responsible for a lack of stimulating debate and for having neglected many brilliant Muslim dissidents. Maybe it is the West’s servility that causes rejection and contempt by Muslims for the opinions of non-Muslims about their own dhimmi history and destiny as subjected peoples. This attitude of denial and even hate suppresses all possible interactions and progress to build common views. At least Mr. Haidon’s honest assessment of the situation opens the way for improvement.

Trifkovic’s view makes clear the type of options open to non-Muslims. The choice between conversion, submission, or war is essential to jihadist ideology and this has been in force for over a millennium and on three continents. Millions of people have suffered from jihad. Muslim as well as non-Muslim chronicles provide us with countless details and vivid descriptions on the manner in which Koran 2:256 was applied.

Muslim scholars explain clearly in their numerous treatises on jihad the conditions that have determined these options. In some cases there was not even a choice, like for instance in the case of the massacres of the idol worshippers, or because the conditions of war were not clearly defined. We cannot assume that scholarly opinions decided the course of every event. We have to distinguish between abstract, legal discussions in mosques and the human realities linked to jihad ideology and warfare on the ground. For instance, al Baladhuri (d. 892) writes – among so many other Muslim and non-Muslim chroniclers – that all the countryside of Mesopotamia and the Levant were taken without treaty. The Arabs raided throughout Palestine and Syria, and treaties were given only to the large towns. The peasantry was killed or enslaved. This is the general pattern of all the military expeditions from Andalusia to India. And one found the same thing during the conquest and Islamization of Anatolia and the Balkans. One must also distinguish between the organized military campaigns and the continuous raids practiced against infidel territories.

We see that there is an official theological and legal context, well analyzed by Trifkovic, but there is also a much wider historical and complex field that has greatly shaped the unfolding of events and the Islamization of the conquered lands. Was there no religious compulsion when Christian children of both sexes were, for centuries under the Ottoman, taken into slavery and converted to Islam? Or when Jewish orphans were abducted and put into Islamic orphanages in Yemen? In both cases, parents were forced to abandon their children under pain of death. Deportations of Jewish and Christian villagers were recurrent under the Ottomans, while Muslims colonizers were privileged. Even now we can observe the discrepancies between an idealized theory and the reality, when forced conversions of Christians erupted in the Moluccan Islands in 2000, or violence against non-Muslims in Afghanistan, Iran or Iraq gave little choice to the populations concerned.

Continuous pressure and discrimination, like today in Egypt, for instance, lead to conversions. In view of these facts and the deafening silence of the Muslim elite, the relative tolerance of 2: 256 seems an abstract formalism, rarely respected by Muslim leaders. Because when we speak of “no compulsion in religion”, it means religious equality -- and this never happened. It is true that this situation prevailed in Christian lands also, but intellectuals denounces it rather than accepted it.

As for Mr. Akyol, he persists in seeing dhimmitude as a privileged situation limited to the relationships between the Ottoman and the Jewish communities. And to prove his point he quotes moving extracts of gratitude from a dwindling Turkish community. But Mr. Akyol, I can find many more declarations of dhimmi gratitude and even adoration for Muslim leaders. I have published a letter to the sultan from Armenians in Biredjik (Turkey) in March 1896, stating that their admiration and love for Islam inspired them to immediately convert. Another one was sent to praise the virtues of the governor of Dyarbakir -- and three weeks later he had the whole Armenian population there killed.

The history of dhimmitude is full of Christian praise for Islam and venomous accusations against Christian enemies of the dar al-harb. It is enough to see today the hatred of the Palestinian churches for what they call the “false American Christians”. Their hatred exceeds even that of the Taliban.

This is not to deny Ottoman’s welcome to the Jewish refugees from Spain in 1492, which is a fact, but this event does not encapsulate the whole history of jihad and dhimmitude that started long before the Ottoman Empire, in the seventh century and today persists on a world level. It has encompassed myriads of people, not only Jews and Christians, but also Zoroastrians, Buddhists, Hindus, and Africans. Most of these people have been wiped out of their homelands, like the Buddhists and Hindus in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Zoroastrians in Iran, the Greeks and Armenians in Turkey.

In Africa, the Christian and pagan kingdoms were devastated by repeated incursions for the slave trade that was conducted on religious grounds, unlike the Atlantic trade which was racially motivated and started much later, in the fifteenth century. Dhimmi gratitude has always been requested to prove Islamic grandeur and superiority over Christianity. Sometimes it is justified, but at others, not.

The simplistic reasoning of Mr. Akyol overlooks the period of strict enforcement of dhimmi’s servitudes, including under the Ottomans, and Muslim violent opposition to their emancipation as sought by the European powers. It is England and America who tried to stop the slave-trade practiced in the Ottoman Empire by piracy or military expeditions, with its genital mutilation of eunuchs. Sultan Abdulmecid’s edict relates to a blood libel accusation leveled in his empire, in Damascus (Syria) brought against the Jewish community by his own vassal, the Egyptian governor together with the French consul. The ferman was issued under strong pressure from England, Prussia and Austria after some Jews, including children, were jailed and some died under torture.

In short, those facts which illustrate only Islamic protection, and to which many others can be added, cannot be used to praise and justify the theological and legal institutions of jihad and dhimmitude, which transfer to the Muslim authority the individual basic human rights of non-Muslims to life, security, freedom and religion. They cannot overshadow the complex texture of thirteen centuries of dhimmitude from Afghanistan to Spain, from Hungary south to Nubia.

Mr. Akyol’s persistent refusal to face the realities of dhimmitude and to insist continually on Christian anti-Ssemitism – as if one would excuse the other – points to an incapacity for self-criticism. It indicates a hatred toward those who dare examine an Islamic political system which they are not allowed to criticize according to the shari’a. It corresponds to the law that punishes by jail any mention of the Armenian genocide and the Turkish pressure on the European states to accept Ankara’s view. But if we want a true dialogue in order to foster peace and mutual respect, we must first get rid of arrogant and insulting behavior toward those whose testimony is different from what we want to hear -- albeit true.

Haidon: Neither I nor Mustafa need to apologize for every transgression (and they are almost innumerable) committed in the name of Islam. At the same time, however, we must acknowledge (without qualification) that throughout Islamic history Muslims have used Islam to oppress non-Muslims and commit other acts of barbarism. To be sure, there have been pockets in Islam's history where Muslim-non-Muslim relations could be construed as have been peaceful and non-oppressive, but the overwhelming historical and legal sources indicate that such pockets certainly did not constitute the norm.

Brother Akayol and Mr. Trifkovic have entered into a substantive debate on the topic of compulsion in Islam, so I will not partake into a full debate on this now, but I find Mr. Trifkovic's citation and reliance on the statement of Ayatullah Morteza Mutahhari, to show how their is compulsion in Islam, as if this view is a mainstream view to be irresponsible, as a shoddy practice for someone of Mr. Trifkovic's stature. The opinion cited is a minority opinion. You would be hard pressed to find opinion by many ulema in the West who would sustain that view. Nonetheless, history and contemporary events cannot be ignored and this issue must be confronted intra-Islam.

With much respect to Mr. Trifkovic, I found some of his argumentation flawed and erroneous. His characterisation of the Muta'zilites as being as "Islamic" as Voltaire was Christian, illustrates not only ignorance about the rationalist movement, but a clear tendency to dismiss without any substantive discussion reform movements or efforts. I wonder if Mr. Trifkovic could argue the same for modern scholars like Fazlur Rahman, Abdullahi Na'im, Khaleel Mohammed and other true reformers, as not being "Islamic".

Similarly, Mr Trifkovic's remarks about salaat are baseless and completely wrong as are his remarks about the lack of "personality" of Allah (refer to Brother Akayol's citation of the 99 attributes of Allah). Salaat is our primary communication with Allah, and is not merely a ritualistic "payment". Salat in Islam is indistinguishable in purpose from Christianity or Judaism. Du'a or supplication is also an essential companion to salaat.

While Brother Akayol does not need me to defend him, I can honestly and without qualification say that he is one of the most introspective and self-critical contemporary Muslims I know. I too share his frustration. At the same time, I feel that Brother Akayol might be placing too much emphasis in defending Muslim history. Again, while I recognise that there have been periods within Islamic history where there has been peace and relative equality between Muslims and non-Muslims, in Muslim states, I believe they are far and few between. By criticising Muslim history, we are not condemning Islam itself, we are condemning the hermeneutical approaches developed by men to interpret Islam. We must acknowledge that the laws of the dhimma have no place in modern civilization, and are a direct affront to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Bill of Rights.

While I disagree with Bat Ye'or's characterisation of Brother Akayol's rejoinder, I respect her analysis and do not contest her historical overview. Having seen the devastating impact of actual and de facto dhimmitude on Christians and other non-Muslims in Egypt, Sudan and Palestine, I understand that it is a systemic issue and one which must be confronted. I will never forget the plight of a Christian family who were forced from a Gazan town because they would not capitulate to Hamas terrorists to pay them jizya. On many occasions, the "moderate" Qaradawi and Tantawi have defended, in their entirety, the laws of the dhimma.

In my view, meaningful inter-faith dialogue, in which Muslims participate, cannot occur without intra-faith dialogue within Islam taking place. Within that intra-faith dialogue Muslims must debate openly, and develop contextualist and rationale methods of interpreting the body of Islamic jurisprudence. The failure to do so will hold grave consequences.

Trifkovic: Oh, dear: we seem to have strayed not only from the topic but also from common courtesy. So be it, let's get on with it and start with the most important point of all: do we all "believe in the same God"?

Of course we do not.

The formal argument first. It is clear and fairly simple. The Christian God of the Creed is trinitarian: the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things seen and unseen; the Son, our Lord and Savior, eternally begotten of the Father; and the Holy Spirit, the giver of life. This is the orthodox faith, "which except a man shall have believed faithfully and firmly he cannot be in a state of salvation." The doctrine of the Deity of Christ is essential. Unless the Son is truly God and "one with the Father," Christians would be idolaters. If He were but a prophet, Christians would be foolishly entrusting themselves to a created creature in the vain hope of salvation.

Islam, on the other hand, violently and explicitly rejects and condemns the Christian doctrine of God (Kuran 4:171), the Trinity (5:37), and the deity of Christ (5:72, 5:17), and Allah unambiguously condemns Christians as disbelievers worthy of destruction (9:29-30). Muhammad's insistence that there is a heavenly proto-Scripture and that previous "books" are merely distorted and tainted copies sent to previous nations or communities means that these scriptures are the "barbarous Kuran" as opposed to the true, Arabic one. (Let's leave aside for a minute the puzzling question of how any degree of "distortion" of the Kuran could produce either an Old or a New Testament.) The Muslim Tradition also regards the non-canonical Gospel of Barnabas, and not the New Testament, as the one that Jesus taught. To cut the long story short, orthodox Islam teaches that it alone worships one true God that Judaism and Christianity tell lies about - lies for which Christians and Jews will be punished in hell.

"One God" cannot be trinitarian and infinitely transcendent. Christians and Muslims cannot be both right. Their convergent paths do not lead to the same hilltop.

The substantial argument: The widespread belief in the non-Muslim world that Islam accords respect to the Old Testament and the Gospels as steps in progression to Mohammad's revelation is mistaken. Modern Muslim apologists try to stress the supposed underlying similarities and compatibility of the three faiths, but this is not the view of orthodox Islam.

Unlike the Christian faith in God revealing Himself through Christ, the Koran is not a revelation of Allah - a heretical concept in Islam - but the direct revelation of his commandments and the communication of his law. Christian God "comes down" and seeks man because of His fatherly love. The Fall cast a shadow, the Incarnation makes reconciliation possible. Allah, by contrast, is unknowable and so purely transcendent that no "relationship" is possible. He reveals only his will, not himself. Allah is "everywhere," and therefore nowhere relevant to us. He is uninterested in making our acquaintance, let alone in being near to us because of love. We are still utterly unable to grasp his purposes and all we can do is what we have to do, to obey his command. Allah's absolute transcendence means that he cannot be fathomed, only worshipped. It is by virtue of being infinite, not loving, that he is inseparable from his creation. His absolute sovereignty means that his "closeness" to man is not a two-way relationship; man's experience of Allah is impossible. Any such attempt would imply heretical encroachment on his absolute transcendence. Ultimately, Allah's absolute transcendence means that he is everything and nothing. He cannot be grasped by the human mind and is greater than we can comprehend. Every thought about him is insufficient and false.

No, this is emphatically not the "same God" a Christian or a Jew believes in. Judging by Islam's fruits through the ages we'd be fully justified to suspect very different origins of Muhammad's "inspiration."

Regarding slavery I have "heard about something called the American Civil War and why it erupted," but in addition to not believing in the same God we seem not to have the same understanding of American history. Unlike some members of this panel, I have also heard about something called "states' rights" that greatly complicates the seemingly simple morality play of 1861-65.

In reality Christendom is the only civilization in history to have created from within itself a successful movement to condemn and abolish slavery. It is a matter of historical record that other civilizations, and most notably Islamic civilization, have not achieved this. The world of Islam has never striven to do so without external prompting. To this day the only places in the world where one can buy a slave for ready cash are Moslem countries, e.g. Mauritania and Sudan.

While both the Old and New Testaments recognized slavery, the Gospels do not treat the institution as divinely ordained. The slaves are human, and all men are equal in the eyes of God regardless of their status in this life: "there is neither Jew nor Greek," says St. Paul, "there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." Slavery was to early Christians a fact of life, and a thing of men.

The Kuran, by contrast, not only assumes the existence of slavery as a permanent fact of life, but regulates its practice in considerable detail and therefore endows it with divine sanction. Muhammad and his companions owned slaves, or acquired them in war. Muhammad's scripture recognizes the basic inequality between master and slave, and the rights of the former over the latter (Kuran, 16:71; 30:28). The Kuran assures the Muslim the right to own slaves (to "possess their necks") either by purchasing them or as bounty of war (58:3). The prophet of Islam had dozens of them, both male and female, and he regularly sold, purchased, hired, rented, and exchanged slaves once he became independently wealthy in Medina after the confiscation of Jewish property. In line with the racist views of Muhammad about his own people, the Arabs, as "the nobles of all races," in Islam's heyday only Arabs were exempt from enslavement.

Divine sanction of slavery in Islam means that disobedience to one's master carries everlasting punishment, while obeying the master is the slave's only path to paradise (Mishkat al-Masabih, Book I, Hadith No. ii, 74). Under sharia the slave has no legal powers or rights whatsoever - but a Muslim slave-owner is explicitly entitled to the sexual enjoyment of his slave women. The Koran mandated that a freeman should be killed only for another freeman, a slave for a slave, and a female for a female (2:178). The Tradition says that "a Muslim should not be killed for a non-Muslim, nor a freeman for a slave" (The Commentary of al-Baydawi, p. 36).

The slave trade inside the Islamic empire and along its edges was vast. It began to flourish at the time of the Muslim expansion into Africa, and it still survives. The Spanish and Portuguese originally purchased African slaves for their American colonies from Arab dealers. There are notable differences between the slave trade in the Islamic world and the trans-Atlantic variety. The former has been going on for 13 centuries and it is an integral feature of the Islamic civilization, while the influx of slaves into the New World lasted less than three hundred years and effectively ended by the middle of the 19th century. It is estimated that ten to twelve million Africans were taken to the Americas during that period. The number of captives taken to the heartlands of Islam-while impossible to establish with precision-is many times greater. Nevertheless, there are tens of millions of descendants of slaves in the Americas, and practically none in the Muslim world outside Africa. They were not allowed to have families, and most men were brutally castrated even before reaching the market.

The abolitionist sentiment in Europe and America was inseparable from Christian faith and world outlook. William Wilberforce and the Clapham Sect, inspired by the Wesleyan Revival, lobbied for abolition and finally succeeded in having the legislation adopted at Westminster that abolished slavery in the British Empire and turned Britain into a determined foe of slave traders everywhere. The evangelical revival movement provided momentum to the abolitionist movement in the United States.

Islam provides no analogous abolitionist imperative. Black people had been enslaved on such a scale that in Arabic the term black became synonymous with slave. The mixed-race, predominantly Negroid but self-avowedly "Arabic" denizens of the transitional sub-Saharan zone were indoctrinated into treating their completely black southern neighbors with racist disdain. (To this day it can be dangerous to one's life to ask a dark-looking but Arabic-speaking Sudanese or Mauritanian Muslim if he was "black.") The collaborators eventually surpassed their Arabic mentors in raiding tropical regions to capture slaves, mutilating the males by radical castration, raping females, and depopulating entire regions in the process.

"As a man thinketh, so is he." The real problem of the Muslim world is not that of natural recourses or political systems. Ernest Renan, who started his study of Islam by praising its ability to manifest "what was divine in human nature," ended it-a quarter o a century and three long tours of the Muslim world later-by concluding that "Muslims are the first victims of Islam" and that, therefore, "to liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him." The West is yet to learn, fully, the lesson that my Balkan ancestors were forced to learn six centuries ago: that Islam is a collective psychosis seeking to become global, and any attempt to compromise with madness is to become part of the madness oneself. The quarrel is not of our choosing, and those who submit to that faith must solve the problem they set themselves.

Akyol: Thomas, thank you so much. I very much appreciate your work, too. You argue that Islam should be saved from medieval traditions and its principles should be reinterpreted in the modern context — and that's exactly what is needed.

I of course accept that in the history of the Islamic civilization there are so many episodes that we would not accept today. And we would indeed flatly denounce. Yet this does not mean unfair criticism of that civilization should be accepted.

The trouble with Mrs. Ye'or's approach is, as I have noted before, she judges the history of the Islamic civilization by modern standards. The historical method is, however, to compare a historical phenomenon with its contemporaries. That's why I mention medieval Christianity along with medieval Islam. It is not a "my religion's history is better then yours" argument. Yet Mrs. Ye'or continues to judge medieval Islam according to "the individual basic human rights of non-Muslims to life, security, freedom and religion," which are all modern concepts. The Declaration of Human Rights is a product of the Enlightenment, not the Spanish Inquisition. (On the other hand, the advance of these modern concepts in contemporary Islamic world is very slow and that's indeed a major problem.)

As for Mr. Trifkovic, actually I would refrain from getting into an argument with people who simply — and disrespectfully — insults my religion with terms like "collective psychosis." Neither I nor a billion Muslims who find peace, dignity and happiness in Islam do not need to be "liberated" from it.

Just to simply point to two of his most obvious distortions: If Trinity makes the God of Christians another God than that of Islam, then the same would apply for Judaism, too. Jews, of course, don’t believe in Trinity. But most Jews and Christians agree that they believe in the same God. His whole description of the Islamic concept of God is also distorted; I know no such God.

As for the Koran's stance on Christians, he overlooks many positive verses, like "... nearest among [men] in love to the believers wilt thou find those who say, 'We are Christians': because amongst these are men devoted to learning and men who have renounced the world, and they are not arrogant." (5:82)

The Sunni orthodoxy, which was influenced by the political needs of the early Muslim empire, invented the doctrine of abrogation within the Koran in order to override such tolerant verses in favor of the more belligerent ones. And this is a big problem. But the abrogation doctrine is rejected by many modern Muslims — including myself, and Thomas I guess — and this means that the tolerant verses of the Koran would be the general rule and the belligerent ones would be seen as contextual— related to war situations. This would mean the rejection of jihadism — an ideology of permanent war. And this is actually what the majority of the world's Muslims would agree with today. One would need to be in "'psychosis" to believe that they are all jihadists and that's the only possible interpretation of the Koran.

Bat Ye’or: Mr Haidon’s position represents a real opening in what appeared until now to be a cemented Muslim wall of historical denial. No one asks for apologies. People today are not responsible for acts committed centuries ago, although the Church has apologized to the Muslims for the Crusades. But if we want to open a meaningful dialogue, we have to start from a minimum consensus, and this is that all human beings are equal. It is from that common base that we can recognize the injustice of ideologies, institutions and policies. The aim of this acknowledgement is not to prove the superiority of one creed over others, it is to create a dynamic of social and political improvements.

I do not understand how Mr. Akyol can allege that I am judging medieval Islam according to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, when I am simply giving historical facts. If one follows his argument, history would never have been written. However, many examples I gave are not medieval, there are contemporary. We are living now – with terrorism – a period of global jihad. Abductions are perpetrated nowadays in Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, in Sudan and Darfur, and even in Egypt where young Coptic girls are kidnapped. Innocent civilians are beheaded in Iraq today, while orphan Jewish children were abducted from their family in Yemen until the departure of the Jews in 1948-50. The Taliban imposed discriminatory colors for the few Hindus in Afghanistan, and oppressed women. And dhimmitude exists till now.

Of course, no one can suppress all these injustices committed against Muslims and non-Muslims if it is not the Muslims themselves. And to do that, they have to see them and discuss them openly and decide to act. It is their responsibility toward Muslims, Islam, and the world.

FP: Mustafa Akyol, Thomas Haidon, Serge Trifkovic and Bat Ye’or, thank you for joining Frontpage Symposium.