Truck and Barter

The idea of holy war or jihad (which is about defending the community or at most about establishing rule by Muslims, not about imposing the faith on individuals by force) is also not a Quranic doctrine. The doctrine was elaborated much later, on the Umayyad-Byzantine frontier, long after the Prophet's death. In fact, in early Islam it was hard to join, and Christians who asked to become Muslim were routinely turned away. The tyrannical governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, was notorious for this rejection of applicants, because he got higher taxes on non-Muslims. Arab Muslims had conquered Iraq, which was then largely pagan, Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish. But they weren't seeking converts and certainly weren't imposing their religion.

The pope was trying to make the point that coercion of conscience is incompatible with genuine, reasoned faith. He used Islam as a symbol of the coercive demand for unreasoned faith.

But he has been misled by the medieval polemic on which he depended.

In fact, the Quran also urges reasoned faith and also forbids coercion in religion. The only violence urged in the Quran is in self-defense of the Muslim community against the attempts of the pagan Meccans to wipe it out.

The pope says that in Islam, God is so transcendant that he is beyond reason and therefore cannot be expected to act reasonably. He contrasts this conception of God with that of the Gospel of John, where God is the Logos, the Reason inherent in the universe.

But there have been many schools of Islamic theology and philosophy. The Mu'tazilite school maintained exactly what the Pope is saying, that God must act in accordance with reason and the good as humans know them. The Mu'tazilite approach is still popular in Zaidism and in Twelver Shiism of the Iraqi and Iranian sort. The Ash'ari school, in contrast, insisted that God was beyond human reason and therefore could not be judged rationally. (I think the Pope would find that Tertullian and perhaps also John Calvin would be more sympathetic to this view within Christianity than he is).

As for the Quran, it constantly appeals to reason in knowing God, and in refuting idolatry and paganism, and asks, "do you not reason?" "do you not understand?" (a fala ta`qilun?)

Of course, Christianity itself has a long history of imposing coerced faith on people, including on pagans in the late Roman Empire, who were forcibly converted. And then there were the episodes of the Crusades.

Another irony is that reasoned, scholastic Christianity has an important heritage drom Islam itself. In the 10th century, there was little scholasticism in Christian theology. The influence of Muslim thinkers such as Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Avicenna (Ibn Sina) reemphasized the use of Aristotle and Plato in Christian theology. Indeed, there was a point where Christian theologians in Paris had divided into partisans of Averroes or of Avicenna, and they conducted vigorous polemics with one another.

Finally, that Byzantine emperor that the Pope quoted, Manuel II? The Byzantines had been weakened by Latin predations during the fourth Crusade, so it was in a way Rome that had sought coercion first. And, he ended his days as a vassal of the Ottoman Empire.

The Pope was wrong on the facts. He should apologize to the Muslims and get better advisers on Christian-Muslim relations.”

The greatest irony I find is that I had to quote Juan Cole, a Christian to defend the position of Islam- even the statement made by the Organization of Islamic Countries doesn’t come close to above. One of the best things that Muslim scholars living in the west could do is to start a dialogue with the youth in Islamic countries- blogs are one effective mean. Akbar Ahmed, Sayyid Hussain Nasr, Hamza Yousuf, Jeffrey Lang, Tariq Ramadan, Yousuf Islam , Murad Hoffman and Timur Kuran are you listening. Minaret of Freedom has a blog coverage of news items but not much analysis.

Related;
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Pope and Islam: 'Non Mea Culpa'
How Pakistan's rape reform ran aground
Losing the war on Afghan drugs

Germans reconsider religion

'Rottweiler' bares teeth- “First, he has done it before. At Auschwitz, in May, he appalled many Jews by passing up what they saw as a historic opportunity for a German pope to apologise for the Roman Catholic Church's conduct in World War II. The second factor is that the Pope has indicated he favours a tougher line in his church's dealings with Islam.”

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Doha Debate

Best of the Spiritual Classics;Highlights from our Spiritual Classics series, with sacred writings from Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism, through Christianity and Islam, to the wisdom texts of Confucius and the holy book of the Sikhs