faith by the sword"?
What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.
WHY? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the "peoples of the book". In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll-tax, but were exempted from military service - a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion - because it entailed the loss of taxes.
Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by the sword" to get them to abandon their faith.
THE STORY about "spreading the faith by the sword" is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims - the reconquista of Spain by the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. I suspect that the German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables. That means that the leader of the Catholic world, who is a Christian theologian in his own right, did not make the effort to study the history of other religions.
Why did he utter these words in public? And why now?
There is no escape from viewing them against the background of the new Crusade of Bush and his evangelist supporters, with his slogans of "Islamofascism" and the "Global War on Terrorism" - when "terrorism" has become a synonym for Muslims. For Bush's handlers, this is a cynical attempt to justify the domination of the world's oil resources. Not for the first time in history, a religious robe is spread to cover the nakedness of economic interests; not for the first time, a robbers' expedition becomes a Crusade.
The speech of the Pope blends into this effort. Who can foretell the dire consequences?
هذا هو الرابط للمصدر باللغة الانجليزية:
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1159094813/
كما أن الموقع الأصلي لنشر المقال وفر نسخة مترجمة للعربية و هذا هو الرابط:
http://www.gush-shalom.org/arabic/archive/258.html
ـ[محمد سعيد الأبرش]ــــــــ[17 Oct 2006, 10:10 م]ـ
جزاك الله كل خير
ـ[أحمد بزوي الضاوي]ــــــــ[21 Oct 2006, 12:34 م]ـ
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم و الصلاة و السلام على سيدنا محمد المبعوث رحمة للعالمين.
أخي الفاضل: مساعد الطيار ـ حفظه الله ـ
السلام عليكم ورحمة الله و بركاته.
جزاكم الله خيرا، وتقبل الله أعمالكم.
وتقبلوا خالص تحياتي وتقديري.
والسلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته.