CHAPTER FROM HISTORY: Inter-faith relations, then and now
By Ahmad Zafar Farooqi
IN view of the strained relation between the three major religion of the Middle East, it would be useful who study the nature of the relation between Muslim, Christian and Jewish, as they evolved in the 1400 years that Islam has existed.
At the time of Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) there were relatively few Christians in Arabia. Most of them were in Najran. However, there was a strong Jewish community in Madinah. Still, after Hijra, the Jewish tribes left. And the remaining, who had fled to Khaibar were also driven out of the Arabian Peninsula after the Battle of Khaibar.
In history, however, Jewish-Muslim relations have not been that strained. Their relations with the Muslims in Spain from the 8th century upto the 15th century were not only peaceful but also cordial. If one only remembered the name of Maimonides, the great Jewish scholar, one can understand the position of honour accorded to Jews by the Umayyad Caliphs of Spain. Jews were their main financiers.
When the Muslims were driven out of Spain by Queen Isabella and Kind Ferdinand in 1492, Jews too crossed the sea via Gibraltar along with their rulers. In fact, there had been no hostility between Muslims and Jews upto 1948. Of course this does not bring into account the behaviour of the Ottoman Turks who were not only harsh towards the Jews but also towards any Arab Muslim or Christians in Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Iraq and the Arabian peninsular. This was the main reason why the Arabs sided with the British, under the command of Colonel T.E. Lawrence and rose against the Turks during the First World War.
Even in 1948, the Jewish-Muslim conflict did not begin. At first the Jews of the land directed their attacks against the British occupiers. It was only after the British endured King Farooq of Egypt to attack the newly created Jewish state, with the help of out-dated and defective weaponry, that the Muslim-Jew conflict began and the defeat of the Arabs was ascertained.
After the defeat of 1948, and after Abdul Gamal Nasser came to power in Egypt, the Suez Canal episode of 1956-57 resulted in more Arab territory was lost. And eventually, in the six day war in 1967, precious pieces of Arab land, including Gaza, Golan Heights, the West Bank and all of Jerusalem was lost to Israel, because of a war started by Nasser. The fighting continues to date in the name of Intefada.
As for the Christiandom, its enmity against the Muslims began with the Crusades and of course earlier under King Charlemagne when the Muslims lost the Battle of Tours in France in the 8th century. Hostilities had subsided for a couple of hundred years after the conquest of Syria and Jerusalem by the Muslims. With the conquest of Constantinople in the 15th century, by Sultan Sulaiman of Turkey, hostilities became even greater. Europe was in a flurry, especially after the Turkish conquest of Greece, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, all the way up to Austria and Poland.
At that time the Muslims were an occupying power not only in Europe but also in Asia right upto China and the Philippines. All that the European countries like Portugal, Spain, Holland and British (late in France) could do was to form trading companies such as the East India Company.
After the downfall and decay of Muslim rule the era of colonialism began in history. However, by that time, the intellectuals of Europe had gradually began to learn and understand the spirit of the religion of Islam.
The scholars of Europe started praising Islam after the seventeenth century. We find the names of Herder, Goethe and Schiller praising Islam in Germany. Emil Ludwig, the biographer of the Emperor Napoleon has written that Napoleon was speaking of his preference of the religion of Islam to those around him, three days before his death.
Lamartine, who was a contemporary of Napoleon and a famous poet, writer and politician in France was also the Foreign Minister of France in his time, was invited to the Holy Land and Turkey by the Sultan. He wrote a book Histoire de la Turquie and also Voyage en Orient in which he describes Islam as “purified Christianity (le christianism purifie). He also refers to the Muslims as pious people, but according to him, their fatalism intrigues him. He found Muslims to be either imagining that they were only pawn’s on the chess-board, with Allah as the sole player or that they were the player being watched by a wary God, who after creating the Law, founded expedient to watch whether the Law was being followed (reward of Paradise) or being violated (punishment in Hell). In both cases, the God-man relationship, according to Lamartine, was passive.
The writer has surmised that the American Constitution written by Tom Paine in the 1770’s, was under the influence of the institution of the Caliph; no country in the world had at that time a President accept early Islam. In fact, Islam may have played an important role at that time when Goethe and Napoleon were alive. More recently American, Henry Grady Weaver, in his book Main Springs of Human Progress has described the advent of Islam as the second era of human progress, the first having commenced with the birth of the Prophet Abraham.
He said that, partly due to the wrong-doings of extremist and the religious and social illiteracy of the modern American mind, Islam is being associated with terrorism, an activity forbidden in the Islam practice in the early stages, as well as now.
