To turn to the Christians, the story of the triumphal
entry of the Khalifah Umar ibn al-Khattab (ra) 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.
 |
|
Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem
- 1858 |
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.
| 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. |
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 Bly 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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