WITH REFERENCE TO TREATMENT OF DISSENTERS WITHIN THE FOLD

 

 Quranic Foundations And Structure Of Muslim Society

3. WITH REFERENCE TO TREATMENT OF DISSENTERS WITHIN THE FOLD

In the age of Islam’s glory, religious fanaticism in respect of differences within the fold did exhibit itself there occasionally,^[1] as was natural in the case of a community for whom religion was the be-all and end-all of life. But it exhibited itself basically in the issuance of academic condemnatory-verdicts by the jurists, and went on a few occasions to the height of public burning of what was regarded as unorthodox religious literature. But the dimensions of mass barbarism and indescribable tortures which culminated in burning the dissenters at the stake forms the ‘pride’ of Christianity alone! 

 

Starting from the beginning of Christian political power, and then proceeding straight to Inquisition, we may project here very brief references just to give an idea of the brutality practised in respect of violation of the values of mercy and toleration in Christian history of the ages of Faith and Orthodoxy. 

 

With all his determined endeavour to minimise or explain away the evils that emerged in Christendom under the impact of the Church, Will Durant has been forced to say as follows (The Age of Faith, pp. 8, 46, 610, 735-784):

“… Once triumphant, the Church ceased to preach toleration…

“Constantius took theology more seriously than his father … ecclesiastics loyal to the Nicene Creed were removed from their churches, sometimes by the violence of mobs; for half a century it seemed that Christianity would be Unitarian, and abandon the divinity of Christ ^[2]… when Constantius ordered the replacement of the orthodox patriot Paul by the Arian Macedonius, a crowd of Paul’s supporters resisted the soldiery, and three thousand persons lost their lives. Probably more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in these two years (342-343) than by all the persecutions of Christians by pagans in the history of Rome. 

 

“… We hear of many heretics, but most of these admitted the basic tenets of the Christian creed…

“The Old Testament laid down a simple code for dealing with heretics: they were to be carefully examined; and if three reputable witnesses testified to their having ‘gone and served other gods’, the heretics were to be led out from the city and ‘stoned with stones till they die’ (Deut. 17:25) … According to the Gospel of St. John (15:6), Jesus accepted this tradition: ‘If anyone abide not in me he shall be cast forth as a branch, and shall wither; and they shall gather him up, and cast him into the fire, and he burneth.’… 

 

“… The Templars … aroused the envy, fear, and wrath of King Philip IV the Fair … A tribunal of prelates and monks loyal to the King examined the prisoners; they denied the royal charges, and were put to the torture to induce them to confess. Some, suspended by the wrists, were repeatedly drawn up and suddenly let down; some had their bare feet held over flames; some had sharp splinters driven under their fingernails; some had a tooth wrenched out day after day; some had heavy weights hung from their genitals; some were slowly starved. In many cases all these devices were used, so that most of the prisoners, when examined again, were weak to the point of death. One showed the bones that had fallen from his roasted feet … Several of them died in Jail; some killed themselves; fifty-nine were burned at the stake (1310), protesting their innocence to the end… 

 

“The most powerful of the heretical sects was variously named Cathari … Bulgari … and Albigenses, from the French town of Albi, where they were especially numerous … Innocent … gave him (Arnaud, head of Cistercian monks) extraordinary powers to make Inquisition throughout France, and commissioned him to offer a plenary indulgence to the king and nobles of France for aid … Philip Augustus allowed many barons of his realm to enlist … the same plenary indulgence was promised as to those who took the cross for Palestine … When the crusaders approached Beziers (in their heresy-hunt) … scaled the walls, captured the town, and slew 20,000 men, women and children in indiscriminate massacre; even those who had sought asylum in the church … when Arnaud, the papal legate, was asked should Catholics be spared, he answered, ‘Kill them all, for God knows His Own’ … Simon de Montfort … For four years Simon continued his campaigns, devastating nearly all the territory…  

 

“… Compared with the persecution of heresy in Europe from 1227 to 1492, the persecution of Christians by Romans in the first three centuries after Christ was mild and humane procedure. Making every allowance required of an historian and permitted to a Christian, we must rank the Inquisition, along with the wars and persecutions of our time, as among the darkest blots on the record of mankind, revealing a ferocity unknown in any beast.”^[3]

 

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[1] This phenomenon should actually be traced to Jewish-Christian influence, which came through the very large number of converts from Judaism and Christianity, including the priests of those faiths, entering the fold in the very early days of Islamic history and forming a part of the Muslim community larger than that of the descendants of the original Muslims. As for Islam, it is committed to positive struggle for the triumph of Truth on the basis of sublime spiritual and moral principles and does not countenance the negative attitude of persecution.

[2] Mark the confession, in support of what the Qur’an has proclaimed, that the original monotheistic religion preached by Jesus was replaced with its paganised version by the Christian Church—and that through the force of arms ! In respect of paganisation, readers may also refer to pages 216, 217 in the foregoing.

[3] To quote Will Durant: Besides “burning at the stake”, which was the mode of killing the condemned persons (op. cit., p. 783), “the worst tragedies of the Inquisition were concealed in the dungeons rather than brought to light at the stake” (op. cit., p. 783). In crushing one dissident movement alone, i.e., the Albigensian ‘heresy’ one million men, women and children were massacred. (vide Newsweek, “Massacre of the Pure”).

Source

to be continued . . . . . 

Quranic Foundation & Structure Of Muslim Society In The End Times

A CONTINUATION OF ARABIC-ISLAMIC CIVILISATION

 

 Quranic Foundations And Structure Of Muslim Society

MODERN CIVILISATION:

 

A CONTINUATION OF ARABIC-ISLAMIC CIVILISATION

The present civilisation is, in respect of its merits, the continuation of the Islamic civilisation, with the difference that theocentricism, integralism and comprehensiveness have dropped off under the stress of certain well-known historical circumstances, culminating in its transformation into a purely sensate civilisation. However, its tragic inadequacy and diseased condition is now taken notice of by all sane-thinking Westerners, together with the necessity  of adopting the Islamic philosophy of civilisation for restoring the balanced accommodation of all the values and thereby reverting to the original Islamic civilization from which it sprang up. The thick curtain of hatred against Islam, nurtured assiduously for centuries by a scheming priesthood, is the only obstacle. But the goodness of human nature is bound to win the day, and the yearnings of the human soul for Truth and Beauty and Justice are bound to attain realisation. The light of reality has already begun to shine forth, as manifested in the following considered judgment of Prof. H.A.R. Gibb, the famous British orientalist:

 

“… in its foundations we have seen that Islam belongs to and is an integral part of the larger Western society. It is the complement and counterbalance to European civilisation, nourished at the same springs, breathing the same air. In the broadest aspect of history, what is now happening between Europe and Islam is the reintegration of western civilization, artificially sundered at the Renaissance and now reasserting its unity with overwhelming force. The student of history, though fearfully conscious of the pitfalls of analogy, cannot help recalling two earlier (though even then not the earliest) moments in this secular process of creative interaction between the two halves of the western world. It was the glory and the greatness of the Roman Empire that it united them under its imperium and that from that unity were born the spiritual forces which have governed the course of Western history ever since. Halfway between that age and ours occurred the first great intellectual adventure of Islam, when it absorbed the heritage of Hellenism and brought it to a new flowering, the seeds from which contributed to the Renaissance in Europe.

 

“The process could not end there. It is going on before our very eyes, on a wider and vaster scale, though the contrast offered by the Islamic world as a whole to the amazing technical progress of Europe may still blind us to it: and it may be that the sequel will be the same, that we must wait upon the Islamic society to restore the balance of Western civilization upset by the onesided nature of that progress … At all events Islam stands side by side with Europe in distinction from the true Oriental societies of India and the Far East … for the fullest development of its cultural life, particularly of its spiritual life, Europe cannot do without the forces and capacities which lie within Islamic society…

 

“Within the Western world Islam still maintains the balance between exaggerated opposites. Opposed equally to the anarchy of European nationalism and the regimentation of Russian communism, it has not yet succumbed to that obsession with the economic side of life which is characteristic of present day Europe and present-day Russia alike. Its social ethic has been admirably summed up by Professor Massignon: ‘Islam has the merit of standing for a very equalitarian conception of the contribution of each citizen by the tithe to the resources of the community; it is hostile to unrestricted exchange, to banking capital, to state loans, to indirect taxes on objects of prime necessity, but it holds to the rights of the father and the husband, to private property, and to commercial capital. Here again it occupies an intermediate position between the doctrines of bourgeois capitalism and Bolshevist communism’. 

 

“But Islam has a still further service to render to the cause of humanity. It stands after all nearer to the real East than Europe does, and it possesses a magnificent tradition of inter-racial understanding and co-operation. No other society has such a record of success in uniting in an equality of status, of opportunity, and of endeavour so many and so various races of mankind … Islam has still the power to reconcile apparently irreconcilable elements of race and tradition. If ever the opposition of the great societies of East and West is to be replaced by co-operation, the mediation of Islam is an indispensable condition. In its hands lies very largely the solution of the problem with which Europe is faced in its relation with the East. If they unite, the hope of a peaceful issue is immeasurably enhanced. But if Europe, by rejecting the cooperation of Islam, throws it into the arms of its rivals, the issue can only be disastrous for both.”^[1]

 

Besides the above judgment of H.A.R. Gibb, the verdict of Arnold J. Toynbee, the fanatical crusader against Islam and zealous upholder of Christian cause, is also worthy of note. He says (Civilisation on Trial, London, 1957; pp. 87, 88, 205-209):

 

“What value are we to place on Islam ourselves? … Islam’s creative gift to mankind is monotheism and we surely dare not throw this gift away … Islam remains, with a mighty spiritual mission still to carry out … (italics, present writer’s). 

 

“Two conspicuous sources of danger—one psychological and the other material—in the present relations of this cosmopolitan proletariat (—i.e, westernised humanity—) with the dominant element in our modern Western society are race consciousness and alcohol; and in the struggle with each of these evils the Islamic spirit has a service to render which might prove, if it were accepted, to be of high moral and social value. 

 

“The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding moral achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue … It is conceivable that the spirit of Islam might be the timely reinforcement which would decide this issue in favour of tolerance and peace.  

 

“As for the evil of alcohol, it is at its worst among primitive populations in tropical regions which have been ‘opened up’ by Western enterprise … the fact remains that even the most statesmanlike preventive measures imposed by external authority are incapable of liberating a community from a social vice unless a desire for liberation and a will to carry this desire into voluntary action on its own part are awakened in the hearts of the people concerned. Now Western administrators, at any rate those of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ origin, are spiritually isolated from their ‘native’ wards by the physical ‘colour bar’ which their race-consciousness sets up; the conversion of the natives’ souls is a task to which their competence can hardly be expected to extend; and it is at this point that Islam may have a part to play. “In these recently and rapidly ‘opened up’ tropical territories, the Western civilization has produced an economic and political plenum and, in the same breath, a social and spiritual void… 

 

“Here, then, in the foreground of the future, we can remark two valueable influences which Islam may exert upon the cosmopolitan proletariat of a Western society that has cast its net round the world and embraced the the whole mankind; while in the more distant future we may speculate on the possible contributions of Islam to some new manifestation of religion.”

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[1] Whither Islam?, London 1932, pp. 376-379. (Italics, present writer’s).

Source

to be continued . . . . . 

Quranic Foundation & Structure Of Muslim Society In The End Times