Are fanatic Islamists finally overreaching themselves?

For quite a while, the fanatic Islamists have been in the catbird seat. No matter what they did, as long as it was directed against (a) Israel; (b) George Bush; (c) America; (d) the American military; (e) the West; or (e) disrespectful cartoons, the West gave them a free pass, ignoring all of the genocidal rhetoric and actual violence. I wonder, though, if the attack against the Pope isn’t a case of overreaching. I certainly hope that it is.

As I’m sure you know, Pope Benedict gave a speech to a scholarly conference in which he lauded Western civilization’s reliance on reason as an essential element in approaching faith. As a way to illustrate this fact, he reached back to a report about a 14th Century debate in Constantinople between the Emperor and a respected Muslim scholar. Benedict’s talk is so clear, I’ll let him take it from here:

[E]ven in the face of such radical skepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on– perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara– by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was probably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than the responses of the learned Persian.

The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur’an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship of the three Laws: the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Qur’an. In this lecture I would like to discuss only one point– itself rather marginal to the dialogue itself– which, in the context of the issue of faith and reason, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: There is no compulsion in religion. It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat.

But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels,” he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words:

Show me just what Mohammed 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.

The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.

God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats… To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death….

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.

(And, yes, I know that, in times past, various branches of the Christian faith have breached this adherence to reason, and opted for violence. The fact that people don’t live up to their ideals, though, doesn’t mean that the ideals are meaningless. Witness the fact that no modern Christians use coercion to convert.)

In other words, to give context to a still valid and relevant 14th Century argument about the nexus between faith and reason, the Pope restated an attack against the long-standing Muslim practice of converting people at swordpoint. In addition to being an interesting piece of scholarship, I strongly believe that the Pope’s point is a valid and tactful attack against forced conversion, something that continues today (witness how their captors forced Centanni and Wiig to convert or face death). In other words, in a peaceable, scholarly way, the Pope challenged a principle — a bad principle. The Pope did not attack anyone directly, nor did he call for any attack on any people or nations.

As you all know, the usual Muslim response was swift and extraordinarily ugly. The usual gang of Muslims around the world called for the Pope to be decapitated, protested outside of churches with signs calling for the world to submit to Islam, and murdered a nun who spent her life working for the poor. As NPR (NPR!) explicitly reported, Al Qaeda in Iraq not only condemned the Pope, it announced its goal of having the entire world bow to Islam. I can’t find a link to the NPR top-of-the-hour squiblet, but here’s Al Qaeda’s announcement:

The group said Muslims would be victorious and addressed the pope as “the worshipper of the cross” saying “you and the West are doomed as you can see from the defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and elsewhere. … We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose head tax, then the only thing acceptable is a conversion (to Islam) or (killed by) the sword.”

It seems to me that Muslims may finally have picked the wrong target. I wonder if it’s any coincidence that today the L.A. Times ran an Op-Ed column in which Sam Harris, a self-identified die-hard liberal and anti-Bush person, castigates liberals for using Bush Derangement Syndrome as an excuse for intentionally blinding themselves to the evil that is Muslim fascism. You should definitely read the whole thing, but I’ll include here a few choice quotations:

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that “liberals are soft on terrorism.” It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a “war on terror.” We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.

***

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

Every day, we’re getting stories about leading liberal lights who are starting to figure things out. (I’ll dig around a little for the liberal British group that just announced itself taking the West’s side in the war against Islamic fascism.) Maybe, just maybe, we’re seeing the tipping point.

UPDATE:  Check out the “Pals No More — II” segment in Best of the Web Today.  It’s a little more on the tipping point issue.