Monday, September 18, 2006

Comparative theology

Theology is no science, it is a discipline that is self-serving for each religion. There are three takes on the Pope's foray into comparative theology: (1) his public talks are carefully crafted so that he must have known how that particular little quotation from the 14th century would be received in the Muslim world; (2) even the Pope and his advisors could not have forseen the strength of the reaction, given the relatively innocuous nature of the point he was making and the tendency to over-reaction in the Muslim world; (3) by castigating Mohammed for spreading his religion "by the sword" he was leaving Christianity open to the same criticism, given how Christianity was also spread.
Newspapers are full of parallel articles each focussing on one of these reactions. Overall, the impact is that Pope Benedict XVI is far more aggressive on this point than his predecessor. In a way he is right, what do you make of a religion that reacts to an accusation of being violent by rioting, burning flags (Israeli and American?), blowing up Churches and even killing a nun in Somalia. Four churches were fire-bombed on the West Bank and two in Gaza. What is even more odd is that these were mostly Greek Orthodox churches, meaning that the culprits make no distinction between distinct Christian sects. Also, a Greek Orthodox Bishop was quoted as saying that the Muslims who did this were ignorant. I wonder if he would say the same thing the next time Muslims riot and attack Jewish properties and people.
What the Pope was actually trying to say is that violence has no place in religion, and this goes for forced conversions (which Catholics used routinely) as well as terrorism. In that respect he is right, and his making this point is a measure of how far Catholicism has come in the past 40 or so years. That is not to say that all Catholics have changed, witness Mel Gibson's anti-Semitic tirade as characteristic of a certain group of drunken Catholics.
There are two points that need to be made to Muslims: (1) Islam was spread by the sword, and this is not just my opinion, but that of Bernard Lewis, one of the world's leading experts on Islam, as well as our own local expert Livia Bitton-Jackson, who has lectured here on the origins of Islam. In the Koran it describes how when Mohammed was rejected in Mecca he raised an army in Medina and then went back and conquered Mecca, the so-called Hajira, that is considered the beginning of Islam. Also, note that Islam means "submission" and people tend to submit more readily when they have a sword at their neck. How else did Islam spread so quickly from Arabia, within a century becoming an Empire from Spain in the West to India in the East. And then it collapsed leaving a legacy of violent struggles. (2) The reaction to the Pope's point and the resort to terrorism by Muslim radicals only goes to proove the point, that Islam is fundamentally a violent religion, that seeks to replace all other religions, and needs to evolve into a peaceful and tolerant religion before there can be peaceful coexistence. Before then talk of peaceful coexistence is wish fulfillment.

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