Reply #11: Context is everything! But who has time to check the context [View All]

[Henny Penny]

themselves these days... good job we have the media to fill it in for us.

On a side issue it really annoys me when people say "Muslims are furious about x,y and z".. After all there many many Muslims and I'm sure their views on a lot of issues are very different.

Its all too easy to get a cleric or politician from any group to react in the "right way" to a quote that has been taken so far out of context that it now sounds like a deliberate gross insult as opposed to an interesting aside in a dry enough lecture to a bunch of academics. And when they continually tell us that Muslims are furious about anything it crystallises the view of Muslims in many people's minds as inherently angry and unreasonable.

In my view everything about this story sucks. But again here is the context for those who missed it...

Speech starts:

"Faith, Reason and the University
Memories and Reflections



Your Eminences, Your Magnificences, Your Excellencies,
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once
again to give a lecture at this podium. I think back to those years when, after a
pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of
Bonn. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary
professors.....

*********snip***********

"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
presumably 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 those of his Persian interlocutor. 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 between - as they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the
Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention to discuss
this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself
rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - 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 (*4V8,>4H - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury,
the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that
surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to the experts,
this 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 addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about
the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "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, after having expressed himself so forcefully, 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", he
says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (F×< 8`(T) 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...".