Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani misrepresents the Pope’s words and speaks of jihad as “effort to save mankind from idolatry” — whether mankind likes it or not, of course. From Iran’s Mehr News Agency, with thanks to the Constantinopolitan Irredentist:
TEHRAN, Sept. 25 (MNA) — Most Western jurists know that reason and wisdom are the main sources of Islamic jurisprudence, Imam Sadiq Institute Director Ayatollah Jafar Sobhani said on Monday in an open letter addressed to Pope Benedict XVI.
“Normally, monarchs and tyrants refer to clergymen to legitimize their rule over the people. But now the opposite has happened, in that a religious leader has referred to the words of a medieval emperor to legitimize his own ideas, and thus accused a great community of ignorance and irrationalism,” the senior member of the Qom Seminary”s Council of Mujtahids stated.
Sobhani added, “You have in fact defied the text of the Bible, in which Jesus (AS) says: “˜Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.”
“You shouldn’t have based your words on a medieval emperor’s sayings.”
He explained, “Islam uses the appealing term of jihad, not massacre. Jihad means effort to save mankind from idolatry”¦ Before, some tyrants did not allow preachers to promulgate their divine religion and used to kill the believers. Islamic jihad was meant to pave the way for the divine religion to be genuinely presented to the people….”