this is not the best of the situation, but i have read karen armstrong’s work and i know that her ability to capture factual history, is accurate and is not questionable.
it is a good thing to see her state that to those who feel entitlement of downing the faith of Islam & its followers.
dushi
Karen Armstrong on The Pope’s Dangerous Remarks
We cannot afford to maintain these ancient prejudices
against Islam
The Pope’s remarks were dangerous, and will convince
many more Muslims that the west is incurably
Islamophobic
Karen Armstrong
Monday September 18, 2006
The Guardian
In the 12th century, Peter the Venerable, Abbot of
Cluny, initiated a dialogue with the Islamic world. “I
approach you not with arms, but with words,” he wrote
to the Muslims whom he imagined reading his book, “not
with force, but with reason, not with hatred, but with
love.” Yet his treatise was entitled Summary of the
Whole Heresy of the Diabolical Sect of the Saracens and
segued repeatedly into spluttering intransigence. Words
failed Peter when he contemplated the “bestial cruelty”
of Islam, which, he claimed, had established itself by
the sword. Was Muhammad a true prophet? “I shall be
worse than a donkey if I agree,” he expostulated,
“worse than cattle if I assent!”
Peter was writing at the time of the Crusades. Even
when Christians were trying to be fair, their
entrenched loathing of Islam made it impossible for
them to approach it objectively. For Peter, Islam was
so self-evidently evil that it did not seem to occur to
him that the Muslims he approached with such “love”
might be offended by his remarks. This medieval cast of
mind is still alive and well.
Last week, Pope Benedict XVI quoted, without
qualification and with apparent approval, the words of
the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II: “Show me
just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you
will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his
command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
The Vatican seemed bemused by the Muslim outrage
occasioned by the Pope’s words, claiming that the Holy
Father had simply intended “to cultivate an attitude of
respect and dialogue toward the other religions and
cultures, and obviously also towards Islam”.
But the Pope’s good intentions seem far from obvious.
Hatred of Islam is so ubiquitous and so deeply rooted
in western culture that it brings together people who
are usually at daggers drawn. Neither the Danish
cartoonists, who published the offensive caricatures of
the Prophet Muhammad last February, nor the Christian
fundamentalists who have called him a paedophile and a
terrorist, would ordinarily make common cause with the
Pope; yet on the subject of Islam they are in full
agreement.
Our Islamophobia dates back to the time of the
Crusades, and is entwined with our chronic
anti-semitism. Some of the first Crusaders began their
journey to the Holy Land by massacring the Jewish
communities along the Rhine valley; the Crusaders ended
their campaign in 1099 by slaughtering some 30,000
Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem. It is always difficult
to forgive people we know we have wronged. Thenceforth
Jews and Muslims became the shadow-self of Christendom,
the mirror image of everything that we hoped we were
not - or feared that we were.
The fearful fantasies created by Europeans at this time
endured for centuries and reveal a buried anxiety about
Christian identity and behaviour. When the popes called
for a Crusade to the Holy Land, Christians often
persecuted the local Jewish communities: why march
3,000 miles to Palestine to liberate the tomb of
Christ, and leave unscathed the people who had - or so
the Crusaders mistakenly assumed - actually killed
Jesus. Jews were believed to kill little children and
mix their blood with the leavened bread of Passover:
this “blood libel” regularly inspired pogroms in
Europe, and the image of the Jew as the child slayer
laid bare an almost Oedipal terror of the parent faith.
Jesus had told his followers to love their enemies, not
to exterminate them. It was when the Christians of
Europe were fighting brutal holy wars against Muslims
in the Middle East that Islam first became known in the
west as the religion of the sword. At this time, when
the popes were trying to impose celibacy on the
reluctant clergy, Muhammad was portrayed by the scholar
monks of Europe as a lecher, and Islam condemned - with
ill-concealed envy - as a faith that encouraged Muslims
to indulge their basest sexual instincts. At a time
when European social order was deeply hierarchical,
despite the egalitarian message of the gospel, Islam
was condemned for giving too much respect to women and
other menials.
In a state of unhealthy denial, Christians were
projecting subterranean disquiet about their activities
on to the victims of the Crusades, creating fantastic
enemies in their own image and likeness. This habit has
persisted. The Muslims who have objected so
vociferously to the Pope’s denigration of Islam have
accused him of “hypocrisy”, pointing out that the
Catholic church is ill-placed to condemn violent jihad
when it has itself been guilty of unholy violence in
crusades, persecutions and inquisitions and, under Pope
Pius XII, tacitly condoned the Nazi Holocaust.
Pope Benedict delivered his controversial speech in
Germany the day after the fifth anniversary of
September 11. It is difficult to believe that his
reference to an inherently violent strain in Islam was
entirely accidental. He has, most unfortunately,
withdrawn from the interfaith initiatives inaugurated
by his predecessor, John Paul II, at a time when they
are more desperately needed than ever. Coming on the
heels of the Danish cartoon crisis, his remarks were
extremely dangerous. They will convince more Muslims
that the west is incurably Islamophobic and engaged in
a new crusade.
We simply cannot afford this type of bigotry. The
trouble is that too many people in the western world
unconsciously share this prejudice, convinced that
Islam and the Qur’an are addicted to violence. The 9/11
terrorists, who in fact violated essential Islamic
principles, have confirmed this deep-rooted western
perception and are seen as typical Muslims instead of
the deviants they really were.
With disturbing regularity, this medieval conviction
surfaces every time there is trouble in the Middle
East. Yet until the 20th century, Islam was a far more
tolerant and peaceful faith than Christianity. The
Qur’an strictly forbids any coercion in religion and
regards all rightly guided religion as coming from God;
and despite the western belief to the contrary, Muslims
did not impose their faith by the sword.
The early conquests in Persia and Byzantium after the
Prophet’s death were inspired by political rather than
religious aspirations. Until the middle of the eighth
century, Jews and Christians in the Muslim empire were
actively discouraged from conversion to Islam, as,
according to Qur’anic teaching, they had received
authentic revelations of their own. The extremism and
intolerance that have surfaced in the Muslim world in
our own day are a response to intractable political
problems - oil, Palestine, the occupation of Muslim
lands, the prevelance of authoritarian regimes in the
Middle East, and the west’s perceived “double
standards” - and not to an ingrained religious
imperative.
But the old myth of Islam as a chronically violent
faith persists, and surfaces at the most inappropriate
moments. As one of the received ideas of the west, it
seems well-nigh impossible to eradicate. Indeed, we may
even be strengthening it by falling back into our old
habits of projection. As we see the violence - in Iraq,
Palestine, Lebanon - for which we bear a measure of
responsibility, there is a temptation, perhaps, to
blame it all on “Islam”. But if we are feeding our
prejudice in this way, we do so at our peril.
. Karen Armstrong is the author of Islam: A Short
History
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
the early conquests WERE inspired by religious zeal