خُذِ الْعَفْوَ
وَأْمُرْ بِالْعُرْفِ وَأَعْرِضْ عَنِ الْجَاهِلِينَ
"MAKE
due allowance for man's nature, and enjoin the doing of what is right; and
leave alone all those who choose to remain ignorant".[Quran;7:199]
Tolerance is the ability or willingness to tolerate the existence of beliefs, opinions, thoughts, feelings, habits, or behaviour that are different from your own, which you dislike or disagrees with.
Tolerance is the ability or willingness to tolerate the existence of beliefs, opinions, thoughts, feelings, habits, or behaviour that are different from your own, which you dislike or disagrees with.
In the eyes of history, religious toleration
is the highest evidence of culture in a people. It was not until the Western
nations broke away from their religious law that they became more tolerant, and
it was only when the Muslims fell away from their religious law that they
declined in tolerance and other evidences of the highest culture. Before the
coming of Islam, tolerance had never been preached as an essential part of
religion. If Europe had known as much of Islam, as Muslims knew of Christendom,
in those days, those mad, adventurous, occasionally chivalrous and heroic, but
utterly fanatical outbreak known as the Crusades could not have taken place,
for they were based on a complete misapprehension.
Innumerable
monasteries, with a wealth of treasure of which the worth has been calculated
at not less than a hundred millions sterling, enjoyed the benefit of the Holy
Prophet's (Muhammad’s) Charter to the monks of Sinai and were religiously
respected by the Muslims. The various sects of Christians were represented in
the Council of the Empire by their patriarchs, on the provincial and district
council by their bishops, in the village council by their priests, whose word
was always taken without question on things which were the sole concern of
their community.
The
tolerance within the body of Islam was, and is, something without parallel in
history; class and race and color ceasing altogether to be barriers. One of the
commonest charges brought against Islam historically, and as a religion, by
Western writers is that it is intolerant. This is turning the tables with a
vengeance when one remembers various facts: One remembers that not a Muslim
is left alive in Spain or Sicily or Apulia. One remembers that not a
Muslim was left alive and not a mosque left standing in Greece after the great
rebellion in l821. One remembers how the Muslims of the Balkan peninsula,
once the majority, have been systematically reduced with the approval of the
whole of Europe, how the Christian under Muslim rule have in recent times been
urged on to rebel and massacre the Muslims, and how reprisals by the latter
have been condemned as quite uncalled for.
In Spain under the
Umayyads and in Baghdad under the Abbasid Khalifas, Christians and Jews,
equally with Muslims, were admitted to the Schools and universities - not only
that, but were boarded and lodged in hostels at the cost of the state. When the
Moors were driven out of Spain, the Christian conquerors held a terrific
persecution of the Jews. Those who were fortunate enough to escape fled, some
of them to Morocco and many hundreds to the Turkish Empire, where their
descendants still live in separate communities, and still speak among
themselves an antiquated form of Spanish. The Muslim empire was a refuge for
all those who fled from persecution by the Inquisition.
The Western Christians, till the
arrival of the Encyclopaedists in the eighteenth century, did not know and did
not care to know, what the Muslim believed, nor did the Western Christian seek
to know the views of Eastern Christians with regard to them. The Christian
Church was already split in two, and in the end, it came to such a pass that
the Eastern Christians, as Gibbon shows, preferred Muslim rule, which
allowed them to practice their own form of religion and adhere to their
peculiar dogmas, to the rule of fellow Christians who would have made them
Roman Catholics or wiped them out.
The Western Christians called
the Muslims pagans, paynims, even idolaters - there are plenty
of books in which they are described as worshiping an idol called Mahomet or
Mahound, and in the accounts of the conquest of Granada there are even
descriptions of the monstrous idols which they were alleged to worship -
whereas the Muslims knew what Christianity was, and in what respects it
differed from Islam. If Europe had known as much of Islam, as Muslims knew of
Christendom, in those days, those mad, adventurous, occasionally chivalrous and
heroic, but utterly fanatical outbreak known as the Crusades could not have
taken place, for they were based on a complete misapprehension. I quote a learned French author:
“Every poet in Christendom considered a
Mohammedan to be an infidel, and an idolater, and his gods to be three;
mentioned in order, they were: Mahomet or Mahound or Mohammad, Opolane and the
third Termogond. It was said that when in Spain the Christians overpowered the
Mohammedans and drove them as far as the gates of the city of Saragossa, the
Mohammedans went back and broke their idols.
“A Christian poet of the period says that
Opolane the “god” of the Mohammedans, which was kept there in a den was awfully
belabored and abused by the Mohammedans, who, binding it hand and foot,
crucified it on a pillar, trampled it under their feet and broke it to pieces
by beating it with sticks; that their second god Mahound they threw in a pit
and caused to be torn to pieces by pigs and dogs, and that never were gods so
ignominiously treated; but that afterwards the Mohammedans repented of their
sins, and once more reinstated their gods for the accustomed worship, and that
when the Emperor Charles entered the city of Saragossa he had every mosque in
the city searched and had "Muhammad" and all their Gods broken with
iron hammers.”
That was the kind of
"history" on which the populace in Western Europe used to be fed. Those
were the ideas which inspired the rank and file of the crusader in their
attacks on the most civilized peoples of those days. Christendom regarded the
outside world as damned eternally, and Islam did not. There were good and
tender-hearted men in Christendom who thought it sad that any people should be
damned eternally, and wished to save them by the only way they knew -
conversion to the Christian faith.
It was not until the
Western nations broke away from their religious law that they became more
tolerant; and it was only when the Muslims fell away from their religious law
that they declined in tolerance and other evidences of the highest culture.
Therefore the difference evident in that anecdote is not of manners only but of
religion. Of old, tolerance had existed here and there in the world, among
enlightened individuals; but those individuals had always been against the
prevalent religion. Tolerance was regarded of un-religious, if not irreligious.
Before the coming of Islam it had never been preached as an essential part of
religion.
For the Muslims, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are but
three forms of one religion, which, in its original purity, was the religion of
Abraham:
Al-Islam, that perfect Self-Surrender to the Will of
God, which is the basis of Theocracy. The Jews, in their religion, after Moses,
limited God's mercy to their chosen nation and thought of His kingdom as the
dominion of their race.
Even Christ himself, as several of his sayings show,
declared that he was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel and
seemed to regard his mission as to the Hebrews only; and it was only after a
special vision vouchsafed to St. Peter that his followers in after days
considered themselves authorized to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles. The
Christians limited God’s mercy to those who believed certain dogmas. Every one
who failed to hold the dogmas was an outcast or a miscreant, to be persecuted
for his or her soul’s good. In Islam only is manifest the real nature of the
Kingdom of God. [“whereas those who have attained to faith and do righteous
deeds, and have come to believe in what has been bestowed from on high on
Muhammad - for it (Qur’an) is the truth from their Sustainer – (shall attain to
God's grace) He will efface their (past) bad deeds, and will set their hearts
at rest” (Qur’an;47:2)].
The two verses (2:255-256)
of the Qur’an are supplementary. Where there is that realization of the
majesty and dominion of Allah, there is no
compulsion in religion. Men choose their path - allegiance or opposition -
and it is sufficient punishment for those who oppose that they draw further and
further away from the light of truth.
What Muslims do not generally consider is that this law
applies to our own community just as much as to the folk outside, the laws of
Allah being universal; and that intolerance of Muslims for other men's
opinions and beliefs is evidence that they themselves have, at the moment,
forgotten the vision of the majesty and mercy of Allah which the Qur’an
presents to them.
In the Qur’an I find two meanings (of a Kafir), which become one the moment that
we try to realize the divine standpoint. The Kafir in the first place, is not the follower of any religion. He
is the opponent of Allah’s benevolent will and purpose for mankind - therefore
the disbeliever in the truth of all religions, the disbeliever in all
Scriptures as of divine revelation, the disbeliever to the point of active
opposition in all the Prophets (pbut) whom the Muslims are bidden to regard,
without distinction, as messengers of
Allah.
The Qur’an repeatedly claims to
be the confirmation of the truth of all religions. The former Scriptures had
become obscure, the former Prophets appeared mythical, so extravagant were the
legends which were told concerning them, so that people doubted whether there
was any truth in the old Scriptures, whether such people as the Prophets had
ever really existed.
Here - says the Qur’an - is a Scripture whereof there is
no doubt: here is a Prophet actually living among you and preaching to you. If
it were not for this book and this Prophet, men might be excused for saying
that Allah’s guidance to mankind was all a fable. This book and this Prophet,
therefore, confirm the truth of all that was revealed before them, and those
who disbelieve in them to the point of opposing the existence of a Prophet and
a revelation are really opposed to the idea of Allah's guidance - which is the
truth of all revealed religions. Our Holy Prophet (pbuh) himself said that the
term Kafir was not to be applied to anyone who said “Salaam” (peace)
to the Muslims. The Kafirs, in the
terms of the Qur’an, are the conscious evil-doers of any race of creed
or community. I have made a long digression but it seemed to me necessary, for
I find much confusion of ideas even among Muslims on this subject, owing to
defective study of the Qur’an and the Prophet's life. Many Muslims seem to
forget that our Prophet had allies among the idolaters even after Islam had
triumphed in Arabia, and that he “fulfilled
his treaty with them perfectly until the term thereof.” The righteous
conduct of the Muslims, not the sword, must be held responsible for the
conversion of those idolaters, since they embraced Islam before the expiration
of their treaty.
So much for the idolaters of
Arabia, who had no real beliefs to oppose the teaching of Islam, but only
superstition. They invoked their local deities for help in war and put
their faith only in brute force. In this they were, to begin with, enormously
superior to the Muslims. When the Muslims nevertheless won, they were dismayed;
and all their arguments based on the superior power of their deities were for
ever silenced. Their conversion followed naturally. It was only a question of
time with the most obstinate of them.
It was otherwise with the people who had a respectable
religion of their own - the People
of the Scripture - as the Qur’an calls them - i.e., the people who
had received the revelation of some former Prophet: the Jews, the Christians
and the Zoroastrians were those with whom the Muslims came at once in contact.
To these our Prophet's attitude was all of kindness. The Charter which he granted to the Christian monks of Sinai is in
existence. If you read it you will see that it breathes not only goodwill
but actual love. He gave to the Jews of Medina, so long as they were faithful
to him, precisely the same treatment as to the Muslims. He never was aggressive
against any man or class of men; he never penalized any man, or made war on
any people, on the ground of belief but only on the ground of conduct.
The story of his reception of Christian and Zoroastrian
visitors is on record. There is not a trace of religious intolerance in all
this. And it should be remembered - Muslims are rather apt to forget it, and it
is of great importance to our outlook - that our Prophet asked the people of
the Scripture to accept the Kingdom of Allah, to abolish priesthood and thus
restore their religions to their original purity. Islam (surrender to Will of
God), the religion preached by all prophets. The question which, in effect, he
put to everyone was this: “Are
you for the Kingdom of God which includes all of us, or are you for your own
community against the rest of mankind?” The one is obviously the way
of peace and human progress, the other the way of strife, oppression and
calamity. But the rulers of the world, to whom he sent his message, most of
them treated it as the message of either an insolent upstart or a mad fanatic. His envoys were insulted cruelly, and even slain.
One cannot help wondering what reception that same embassy would meet with from
the rulers of mankind today, when all the thinking portion of
mankind accept the Prophet's premises, have thrown off the trammels of priest
craft, and harbor some idea of human brotherhood.
But though the Christians and Jews and Zoroastrians
refused his message, and their rulers heaped most cruel insults on his envoys,
our Prophet never lost his benevolent attitudes towards them as religious
communities; as witness the Charter to
the monks of Sinai already mentioned. And though the Muslims of later
days have fallen far short of the Holy Prophet's tolerance, and have sometimes
shown arrogance towards men of other faiths, they have always given special treatment to the Jews and Christians.
Indeed the Laws for their special treatment form part of the Shari’a.
In Egypt the Copts were on terms of closest friendship
with the Muslims in the first centuries of the Muslim conquest, and they are on
terms at closest friendship with the Muslims at the present day. In Syria the
various Christian communities lived on terms of closest friendship with the
Muslims in the first centuries of the Muslim conquest, and they are on terms of
closest friendship with the Muslims at the present day, openly preferring
Muslim domination to a foreign yoke. There were always flourishing Jewish communities in the Muslim
realm, notably in Spain, North Africa, Syria, Iraq and later on in Turkey.
Jews fled from Christian persecution to Muslim countries for refuge. Whole
communities of them voluntarily embraced Islam following a revered rabbi whom
they regarded as the promised Messiah but many more remained as Jews, and they
were never persecuted as in Christendom. The Turkish Jews are one with the
Turkish Muslims today. And it is noteworthy that the Arabic-speaking Jews of
Palestine - the old immigrants from Spain and Poland - are one with the Muslims
and Christians in opposition to the transformation of Palestine into a national
home for the Jews.
To turn to the Christians,
the story of the triumphal entry of the Khalifah
Umar ibn al-Khattab into Jerusalem has been often told, but I
shall tell it once again, for it illustrates the proper Muslim attitude towards
the People of the Scripture....The Christian officials urged him to spread
his carpet in the Church (of the Holy
Sepulcher) itself, but he refused saying that some of the ignorant
Muslims after him might claim the Church and convert it into a mosque because
he had once prayed there. He had his carpet carried to the top of the steps
outside the church, to the spot where the Mosque of Umar now stands - the real
Mosque of Umar, for the splendid Qubbet-us-Sakhrah, which tourists call the
Mosque of Umar, is not a Mosque at all, but the temple of Jerusalem; a shrine
within the precincts of the Masjid-al-Aqsa,
which is the second of the Holy Places of Islam. From that day to this; the
Church of the Holy Sepulcher has always been a Christian place of worship,
the only things the Muslims did in the way of interference with the Christian's
liberty of conscience in respect of it was to see that every sect of Christians
had access to it, and that it was not monopolized by one sect to the exclusion
of others. The same is true of the Church
of the Nativity of Bethlehem, and of other buildings of special
sanctity.
Under the Khulafa-ur-Rashidin and the Umayyads, the true
Islamic attitude was maintained, and it continued to a much later period under
the Umayyad rule in Spain. In those days it was no uncommon thing for Muslims
and Christian to use the same places of worship. I could point to a dozen
buildings in Syria which tradition says were thus conjointly used; and I have
seen at Lud (Lydda), in
the plain of Sharon, a Church of St. George and a mosque under the same roof
with only a partition wall between. The partition wall did not exist in early
days. The words of the Khalifah Umar proved true in other cases; not only half
the church at Lydda, but the whole church in other places was claimed by
ignorant Muslims of a later day on the mere ground that the early Muslims had
prayed there. But there was absolute liberty of conscience for the Christians;
they kept their most important Churches and built new ones; though by a later
edict their church bells were taken from them because their din annoyed the
Muslims, it was said; only the big bell of the Holy Sepulcher remaining. They
used to call to prayer by beating a naqus,
a wooden gong, the same instrument which the Prophet Noah (pbuh) is said to
have used to summon the chosen few into his ark.
It was not the Christians of
Syria who desired the Crusades, nor did the Crusades care a jot for them, or
their sentiments, regarding them as heretics and interlopers. The latter word
sounds strange in this connection, but there is a reason for its use.
The great Abbasid Khalifah
Harun ar-Rashid had, God knows why, once sent the keys of the Church of
the Holy Sepulcher among other presents to the Frankish Emperor, Charlemagne. Historically, it was a
wrong to the Christians of Syria, who did not belong to the Western Church, and
asked for no protection other than the Muslim government. Politically, it was a
mistake and proved the source of endless after trouble to the Muslim Empire.
The keys sent, it is true, were only duplicate keys. The Church was in daily
use. It was not locked up till such time as Charlemagne, Emperor of the West,
chose to lock it. The present of the
keys was intended only as a compliment, as one would say: “You and your
people can have free access to the Church which is the center of your faith,
your goal of pilgrimage, whenever you may come to visit it.” But the Frankish
Christians took the present seriously in after times regarding it as the title
to a freehold, and looking on the Christians of the country as mere interlopers,
as I said before, as well as heretics.
That compliment from king to
king was the foundation of all the extravagant claims of France in later
centuries.
Indirectly it was the foundation of Russia's even more extortionate claims, for
Russia claimed to protect the Eastern Church against the encroachment of Roman
Catholics; and it was the cause of nearly all the ill feeling which ever
existed between the Muslims and their Christian Dhimmis.
When the Crusaders took
Jerusalem
they massacred the Eastern Christians with the Muslims indiscriminately, and
while they ruled in Palestine the Eastern Christians, such of them as did not
accompany the retreating Muslim army, were deprived of all the privileges which
Islam secured to them and were treated as a sort of outcasters. Many of them
became Roman Catholics in order to secure a higher status; but after the
re-conquest, when the emigrants returned, the followers of the Eastern Church
were found again to be in large majority over those who owed obedience to the
Pope of Rome. The old order was reestablished and all the Dhimmis once again enjoyed their privileges in accordance with the
Sacred Law (of Islam). But the effect of those fanatical inroads had been
somewhat to embitter Muslim sentiments, and to ting them with an intellectual
contempt for the Christian generally; which was bad for Muslims and for
Christians both; since it made the former arrogant and oppressive to the latter
socially, and the intellectual contempt, surviving the intellectual superiority,
blinded the Muslims to the scientific advance of the West till too late.
The arrogance hardened into custom, and when Ibrahim
Pasha of Egypt occupied Syria in the third decade of the nineteenth century, a
deputation of the Muslims of Damascus waited on him with a complaint that under
his rule the Christians were beginning to ride on horseback. Ibrahim Pasha
pretended to be greatly shocked at the news, and asked leave to think for a
whole night on so disturbing an announcement. Next morning, he informed the
deputation that since it was, of course, a shame for Christians to ride as high
as Muslims, he gave permission to all Muslims thenceforth to ride on camels.
That was probably the first time that the Muslims of Damascus had ever been
brought face to face with the absurdity of their pretentions. By the beginning
of the Eighteenth century AD, the Christians had, by custom, been made subject
to certain social disabilities, but these were never, at the worst, so cruel or
so galling as those to which the Roman Catholic nobility of France at the same
period subjected their own Roman Catholic peasantry, or as those which
Protestants imposed on Roman Catholics in Ireland; and they weighed only on the
wealthy portion of the community. The poor Muslims and poor Christians were on
an equality, and were still good friends and neighbors.
The Muslims never interfered
with the religion of the subject Christians. (e.g., The Treaty of Orihuela, Spain, 713.) There was never
anything like the Inquisition or the fires of Smithfield. Nor did they
interfere in the internal affairs of their communities. Thus a number of small
Christian sects, called by the larger sects heretical, which would inevitably
have been exterminated if left to the tender mercies of the larger sects whose
power prevailed in Christendom, were protected
and preserved until today by the power of Islam.
Innumerable monasteries, with a
wealth of treasure of which the worth has been calculated at not less than a
hundred millions sterling, enjoyed the benefit of the Holy Prophet's Charter to
the monks of Sinai and were religiously respected by the Muslims. The various
sects of Christians were represented in the Council of the Empire by their
patriarchs, on the provincial and district council by their bishops, in the
village council by their priests, whose word was always taken without question
on things which were the sole concern of their community.
With regard to the respect for
monasteries, I have a curious instance of my own
remembrance. In the year 1905 the Arabic congregation of the Greek Orthodox
Church in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, or Church of the Resurrection as it is locally called, rebelled
against the tyranny of the Monks of the adjoining convent of St. George. The
convent was extremely rich, and a large part of its revenues was derived from
lands which had been made over to it by the ancestors of the Arab congregation
for security at a time when property was insecure; relying on the well known
Muslim reverence for religious foundations. The income was to be paid to the
depositors and their descendants, after deducting something for the convent.
No income had been paid to anybody by the Monks for more
than a century, and the congregation now demanded that at least a part of that
ill-gotten wealth should be spent on education of the community. The Patriarch
sided with the congregation, but was captured by the Monks, who kept him
prisoner. The congregation tried to storm the convent, and the amiable monk
poured vitriol down upon the faces of the congregation. The congregation
appealed to the Turkish government, which secured the release of the Patriarch
and some concessions for the congregation, but could not make the monks
disgorge any part of their wealth because of the immunities secured to Monasteries
by the Sacred Law (of Islam). What made the congregation the more bitter was
the fact that certain Christians who, in old days, had made their property over
to the Masjid al-Aqsa - the
great mosque of Jerusalem - for security, were receiving income yearly from it
even then. Here is another incident from my own memory. A sub-prior of the
Monastery of St. George purloined a handful from the enormous treasure of the
Holy Sepulcher - a handful worth some forty thousand pounds - and tried to get
away with it to Europe. He was caught at Jaffa by the Turkish customs officers
and brought back to Jerusalem. The poor man fell on his face before the
Mutasarrif imploring him with tears to have him tried by Turkish Law. The
answer was: "We have no jurisdiction over monasteries," and the poor
groveling wretch was handed over to the tender mercies of his fellow monks. But the very evidence of their toleration,
the concessions given to the subject people of another faith, were used against
them in the end by their political opponents just as the concessions granted in
their day of strength to foreigners came to be used against them in their day
of weakness, as capitulations.
I can give you one curious instance of a capitulation,
typical of several others. Three hundred years ago, the Franciscan friars were
the only Western European missionaries to be found in the Muslim Empire. There
was a terrible epidemic of plague, and those Franciscans worked devotedly,
tending the sick and helping to bury the dead of all communities. In gratitude
for this great service, the Turkish
government decreed that all property of the Franciscans should be free
of customs duty for ever. In the Firman (Edict) the actual words
used were "Frankish missionaries" and at later time, when there were
hundreds of missionaries from the West, most of them of other sects than the
Roman Catholic, they all claimed that privilege and were allowed it by the
Turkish government because the terms of the original Firman included them. Not only that, but they claimed that concession as a right, as if it had been won for them
by force of arms or international treaty instead of being, as it was, a free
gift of the Sultan; and called upon their consuls and ambassadors to
support them if it was at all infringed.
The Christians were allowed to keep their own languages
and customs, to start their own schools and to be visited by missionaries to
their own faith from Christendom. Thus they formed patches of nationalism in a
great mass of internationalism or universal brotherhood; for as I have already
said the tolerance within the body of Islam was, and is, something without
parallel in history; class and race and color ceasing altogether to be
barriers.
In countries where nationality and language were the same
in Syria, Egypt and Mesopotamia there was no clash of ideals, but in Turkey,
where the Christians spoke quite different languages from the Muslims, the
ideals were also different. So long
as the nationalism was un-aggressive, all went well; and it remained un-aggressive
- that is to say, the subject Christians were content with their position - so
long as the Muslim Empire remained better governed, more enlightened and more
prosperous than Christian countries. And that may be said to
have been the case, in all human essentials, up to the beginning of the
seventeenth century.
Then for a period of about eighty years the Turkish
Empire was badly governed; and the Christians suffered not from Islamic
Institutions but from the decay or neglect of Islamic Institutions. Still
it took Russia more than a century of ceaseless secret propaganda work to stir
ups spirit of aggressive nationalism in the subject Christians, and then only
by appealing to their religious fanaticism.
After the eighty years of bad
government came the era of conscious reform, when the Muslim government turned
its attention to the improvement of the status of all the peoples under it. But then
it was too late to win back the Serbs, the Greeks, the Bulgars and the Romans.
The poison of the Russian religious-political propaganda had done its work, and
the prestige of Russian victories over the Turks had excited in the worst
elements among the Christians of the Greek Church, the hope of an early
opportunity to slaughter and despoil the Muslims, strengthening the desire to
do so which had been instilled in them by Russian secret envoys, priests and
monks.
I do not wish to dwell upon this period of history,
though it is to me the best known of all, for it is too recent and might rouse
too strong a feeling in my audience. I will only remind you that in the Greek War of Independence in 1811,
three hundred thousand Muslims - men and women and children - the whole
Muslim population of the Morea without exception, as well as many thousands in
the northern parts of Greece - were wiped out in circumstances of the most
atrocious cruelty; that in European histories we seldom find the slightest
mention of that massacre, though we hear much of the reprisals which the
Turks took afterwards; that before
every massacre of Christians by Muslims of which you read, there was a more
wholesale massacre or attempted massacre of Muslims by Christians;
that those Christians were old friends and neighbors of the Muslims - the
Armenians were the favorites of the Turks till fifty years ago - and that most
of them were really happy under Turkish rule, as has been shown again and again
by their tendency to return to it after so called liberation.
It was the Christians outside
the Muslim Empire who systematically and continually fed their religious
fanaticism: it was their priests who told them that
to slaughter Muslims was a meritorious act. I doubt if anything so wicked
can be found in history as that plot for the destruction of Turkey. When I say
“wicked,” I mean inimical to human progress and therefore against Allah's
guidance and His purpose for mankind. For it has made religious tolerance
appear a weakness in the eyes of all the worldlings, because the multitudes of
Christians who lived peacefully in Turkey are made to seem the cause of
Turkey's martyrdom and downfall; while on the other hand the method of persecution
and extermination which has always prevailed in Christendom is made to seem
comparatively strong and wise.
Thus religious tolerance is
made to seem a fault, politically. But it is not really so. The victims of
injustice are always less to be pitied in reality than the perpetrators of
injustice. From
the expulsion of the Moriscos dates the degradation and decline of Spain.
San Fernando was really wiser and more patriotic in his tolerance to conquered
Seville, Murcia and Toledo than was the later king who, under the guise of Holy
warfare, captured Grenada and let the Inquisition work its will upon the
Muslims and the Jews. And the modern Balkan States and Greece are born under a
curse. It may even prove that the
degradation and decline of European civilization will be dated from the day
when so-called civilized statesmen agreed to the inhuman policy of Czarist
Russia and gave their sanction to the crude fanaticism of the Russian Church.
There is no doubt but that, in the eyes of history, religious toleration is
the highest evidence of culture in a people. Let no Muslim, when looking on the
ruin of the Muslim realm which was compassed through the agency of those very
peoples whom the Muslims had tolerated and protected through the centuries when
Western Europe thought it a religious duty to exterminate or forcibly convert
all peoples of another faith than theirs - let no Muslim, seeing this,
imagine that toleration is a weakness in Islam. It is the greatest strength of
Islam because it is the attitude of truth. Allah is not the God of the Jews
or the Christians or the Muslims only, any more than the sun shines or the rain
falls for Jews or Christians or Muslims only.
[Extract from an abridged version of the
1927 Lecture of Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, Compiled by Dr. A. Zahoor; by Dr. Z. Haq]
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Extremism, Terrorism & Jihad:
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Humanity, Religion, Culture, Science, Peace
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Peace Forum Network
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Humanity, Religion, Culture, Science, Peace
A Project of
Peace Forum Network
Peace Forum Network Mags
Books, Articles, Blogs, Magazines, Videos, Social Media
Overall 2 Million visits/hits
Peace Forum Network
Peace Forum Network Mags
Books, Articles, Blogs, Magazines, Videos, Social Media
Overall 2 Million visits/hits