You can't make omelets ...
In a scholarly lecture delivered on 12 September, the Pope formerly known as "Eggs" quoted from a dialog believed to have occurred in 1391 between the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos and a Persian scholar in which the Emperor stated:
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.Reference to this was enough to cause an outbreak of violence on the Muslim street and lead to a condemnation of Il Papa as an Islamophobe, or worse. The whole episode is replete with irony. In the light of the Catholics' own chequered history in Asia, the Americas, Africa and elsewhere, the idea of the Bishop of Rome citing text even slightly critical of the idea of spreading faith by the sword is laughable. Admittedly the Universal Church has had a better history of late and has condemned violence fairly consistently, particularly the use of biblical injunctions as rationalisations for violent, even terroristic, actions against medical centres offering advice on pregnancy termination or offering termination services themselves. But you don't have to go very far back to find church-inspired violence by Catholics against Jews, Muslims, pagans and, indeed, other Christians. A second irony of the use of a quotation from a Byzantine Emperor, who was after all an adherent of the orthodox, rather than catholic, interpretation of Christianity. It was the Fourth Crusade, inspired by Pope Innocent III, which, in 1203-1204, sacked Constantinople - while allegedly on its way to fight Muslims in the Holy Land. Part of the justification for the actions against Constantinople was the hope of winning the Empire back from the orthodox to catholic belief system - a quintessential example of spreading faith, or at least ending schism, by the sword. Further, in the light of the scholarship exhibited by Eggs and the reference to the scholarship of Manuel II Palaiologos, it is most ironic that it was Catholic Crusaders who, in their sacking of the city, did for the libraries that stored most of the classic texts that had survived the Romans (Caius Julius Caesar at Alexandria, for example), the dark ages, the Muslim incursions, and the effluxion of time. (Admittedly the Mongols were responsible for the final indignity - in their sack of the Muslim intellectual capital Damascus half a century later.)
So much for the layered irony of the background. You cannot but pause to wonder at the way in which the extremists now seem to control the agenda in the Islamic world - and in the West. Reasonably inoffensive comments in an otherwise unremarkable speech lead to attacks on churches and church people - including the egregious murder of a nun in Somalia. In response, the usual suspects in the West use the reaction to condemn Islam generally - comparable to blaming Christianity as a whole for every fire-bombing of an abortion clinic.
First written: October 2006
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