Tolerance In Islam
TOLERANCE IN ISLAM
Abridged Version of the 1927
Lecture
by
Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall
Introduction
Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall
was an Englishman, an orientalist, and a Muslim who translated the meaning
of the Holy Qur’an. His translation was first published in 1930 and he
was supported in this effort by His Highness, the Nizam of Hyderabad (the
ruler of Deccan, in the South), India. Pickthall traveled extensively to
several Muslim countries, including Syria, Palestine, Turkey, Egypt, Arabia
and India. He spent several years in India and had interacted with the
Muslims of India.
The 1920s was a period of great intellectual and
political activity for the Muslims, particularly in India and Turkey. It
is an interesting coincidence that the two most popular translations of
the meaning of the Holy Qur’an into English were published from India or
with the support and encouragement of Muslims of India. Pickthall's translation
was published in 1930, which was followed by Abdullah Yusuf Ali's in 1934.
Yusuf Ali's translation was published in parts as they became available
over a period of many years ending in the complete translation and commentary
in 1934. Allama Abdullah Yusuf Ali was a native of India who later lived
in England and Pakistan. As with Yusuf Ali's translation, Pickthall's translation
has gone through many reprints and several publishers in the U.K., U.S.A.,
Pakistan and India.
Several Muslims of international fame visited India
in the 1920s. Muhammad Asad (former Leopold Weiss of Austria) also exchanged
views with internationally renowned Muslim poet and philosopher (Sir) Allamah
Muhammad Iqbal. As a result of his exchanges with Iqbal and Muslim leaders,
Muhammad Asad served as Pakistan’s alternative representative in the U.N.
Asad wrote two famous books “Islam at the Crossroads” and “Road to Mecca,”
which became very popular in the West, and translated the meaning of the
Qur’an.
In 1927 Pickthall gave eight lectures on several
aspects of Islamic civilization at the invitation of The Committee of “Madras
Lectures on Islam” in Madras, India. This was the second in the series,
the first one was held in 1925 on “The Life of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh).”
Parts of Pickthall’s lectures were made available in India at various times.
All of his lectures were published under the title “The Cultural Side of
Islam” in 1961 by Sh. Muhammad Ashraf Publishers, Lahore from a manuscript
provided by M.I. Jamal Moinuddin. The book has gone through several reprints
since then.
An abridged version of his fifth lecture on the “Tolerance
in Islam” is presented below. His long lecture frequently used quotations
from the Holy Qur’an to emphasize many points and to support his analysis
and conclusions. The major theme of his lecture is retained here. All of
Pickthall’s eight lectures draw upon his vast knowledge of Islamic history,
the Western religious, political and intellectual history through the ages,
and their reasons for rise and fall. The lectures are very enlightening,
analytically useful, and of great value even today. The curious reader
is encouraged to refer to the book “Cultural Side of Islam (Islamic Culture),”
published by Sh. M. Ashraf, Lahore.
An Abridged Version of Pickthall's
Lecture
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
Mohammadans and drove them as far as the gates of the city of Saragossa,
the Mohammadans went back and broke their idols.
“A Christian poet of the period says that Opolane
the “god” of the Mohammadans, which was kept there in a den was awfully
belabored and abused by the Mohammadans, 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 Mohammadans
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.
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 “Salam” (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 extant. 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 religions 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 did
not ask the people of the Scripture to become his followers. He asked them
only to accept the Kingdom of Allah, to abolish priesthood and restore
their own religions to their original purity. 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 priestcraft, 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'ah.
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 Sepulchre) 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 Sepulchre
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 Sepulchre 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 Sepulchre 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 Christians 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 Sepulchre, 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 Sepulchre - 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 strongly 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.
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