The Pope’s Byzantine Connection

by Karamatullah K. Ghori

Since Pope Benedict XVI’s irresponsible outburst against Islam and its Holy Prophet (P.B.U.H.), from a pulpit in his native Germany, the church votaries and apologists have rushed to damage -control. But the damage has been done, and grievously so. The Pope’s bluff has been called across the Muslim world; his spin-doctors have a near-impossible job on their hands to deal with its adverse fallout on the Christian-Muslim relations.

According to the Holy See and its mouthpieces hawking their version of the papal discourse, Benedict never meant to hurt Muslim sensibilities. They’re also at pains to insist that the papal remarks have been taken out of the context and given a twist. They couldn’t be more wrong on both counts.

The Pope knew exactly what he was talking about. The papal visits outside the Vatican and speeches at selected forums are meticulously prepared and choreographed. The Pope isn’t a political leader who may often face an impromptu audience and compelled to make off-the-cuff remarks. The speech he delivered at the University of Regensburg, in Munich, had been prepared in advance and the Pope knew exactly what he was going to say and to what audience.

It was Benedict’s quotation of the 14th century Byzantine Emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, the last-but-one of the Byzantine emperors, which has caused so much hurt to the world Muslims and triggered a wave of protests from Morocco to Indonesia. It wasn’t that Benedict thought of quoting Manuel II at the spur of the moment. The quotation formed the crux of his argument against Islam being a civilized, humane and peace-loving religion, and had obviously been picked out to buttress his own thesis to maximum effect.

Quoting from Manuel II’s dialogue, in 1391, with an unnamed Persian scholar, the Pope reported the emperor daring his Muslim interlocutor to ” show me just what Muhammad 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.”

Not even the most ardent votary of Benedict would suggest that he was, or ever intended to be, critical of the Byzantine emperor’s inflammatory comment. No, Benedict, in fact, went on to praise the emperor by adding that ” after having expressed himself so forcefully, the emperor goes on to explain in detail the reason why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable.”

Which gives complete lie to the Pope’s spin-doctors claiming that he has been quoted out- of context. Well, the context was precisely to malign the Prophet of Islam and slander his message of eternal peace. So, to lend a historical perspective to his argument he scooped out from his archives the most pungent observations of a Byzantine emperor and, provocatively, referred to him as ” the erudite (my italics) Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus.”

The Oxford dictionary of English Language gives the following meanings of the word, erudite: ” having or showing extensive scholarship; learned.”

Surely, Benedict must hold Manuel II in reverence and awe, or else he wouldn’t have prefaced the emperor’s remarks by complimenting him for his erudition.

Students of history would know how deep-rooted and avuncular is the Church of Rome’s infatuation with Byzantine-cradle of Christianity until the Turks from Central Asia snuffed it out in 1453. With the fall of Constantinople, modern Istanbul, exactly 28 years after the death of Emperor Manuel II in 1425, a formidable Christian bastion disappeared-a loss the Catholic Church hasn’t quite stomached, to date. Incidentally, Manuel II had been held captive by the Turks in his childhood and became an inveterate enemy of the Muslim and Turks in his formative years.

The Crusades were unleashed because of an unholy and calculated axis between the Church of Rome and the Byzantine Empire, based in Constantinople.

The valiant Seljuk Turks had overrun Anatolia by the middle of the 11th century and driven the Byzantium to the walls of Constantinople. It was one of Manuel II’s predecessors, Emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081-1118) who sent an SOS to Pope Urban II, then holding the Church of Rome in his thrall, to come to his aid and save the Byzantium from the ‘heathen Muslim hordes.’

Urban II was from France. So, just as Benedict chose his native Germany to launch his own offensive against Islam in the 21st century, Urban II, in the 11th century, also decided to move to his home turf in France to send out his call for the Crusades, or ‘Holy Wars.’

Appealing to the fanatic sentiment of an adoring home audience on that last Tuesday of November, 1095, in the southern French city of Clermont, Urban II opened his incendiary discourse with this sentence: ” A race absolutely alien to God has invaded the land of ChristiansŠ” This was as blatant a travesty of history as only a Pope presiding over a dark and ignorant Europe could conjure up. Mischievously papering over the fact that Muslims had been ruling over the Holy Land since the first half of the 7th century, Urban implied as if Muslims had just recently overrun ‘the land of Christians.’

Building further on his opening gambit, Urban painted as gory a picture of Muslims in Palestine as he could to inflame religious frenzy in his audience and caricatured the Muslims as ‘savages’ whose ‘oppressive rule’ had made life hell for Christians living there, negating the historical truth that both Christians and Jews had lived in complete harmony and security under the Muslim rule since Jerusalem was captured from the Byzantines in the reign of the Second of the Four ‘Enlightened Caliphs’ in 636 A.D.

From that day on, when Europe was set alight by Pope Urban’s call to shed Muslim blood, because Christ, according to the Pope, had sanctified it, Muslim bating and demonizing has been ingrained in the psyche of the west. Modernism or post-Modernism haven’t in the least doused the flames of hatred of Muslims and Islam lit nearly a thousand years ago with such fervour and abandon by the bearers of Christ’s cross.

Because the Church had sanctified the unsheathing of the sword by marrying it with the cross, in an organized campaign of rapine and mayhem against Muslims, for no fault or provocation on the part of the victims, it was deemed tactical to project Islam as a savage and barbaric religion ‘alien to Christian God.’

Likewise, the prophet-hood of Prophet Mohammad (P.B.U.H.) had to be tarred by blaspheming him and calling into question the authenticity and sanctity of his divine message. He was caricatured as a fake and false prophet, a pretender who preached, in the eyes of the Church, heresy against the message of Christ. That campaign of calumny, too, has thrived consistently through centuries since the Crusades. It received a boost- in- the- arm in the heyday of European colonialism and has been given its latest booster injection in the wake of 9/11. The Protestants and Born-Again Evangelists may hate the Catholics in inter-Christian matters but are at one in hating the world of Islam.

The timing of Pope Benedict’s calculated assault against the citadel of Islam is noteworthy. It came on the day- after the 5th anniversary of the cataclysmic 9/11. George W. Bush, no less a crusader in his ardent championship of America’s right to dictate its Christian-based neo-con agenda to the Islamic world, had delivered, from Ground Zero in New York, a typically jingoistic sermon of ‘staying the course’ in his open-ended ‘war against terrorism’ and came out swinging as always as a modern-day incarnation of the medieval Christian crusaders against the ramparts of Islam.

Karen Armstrong, one of the very few voices of moderation and sanity in the present -day febriled and paranoid west, has rightly lamented and denounced the Pope’s short-sighted tactic to strike common cause with the likes of Bush as a dangerous ploy that could only widen the gulf between Muslims and Christians.

The Pope cleverly chose the venue to punch home his ill-disguised hatred against Muslims and their beloved Prophet from a friendly platform in Munich, Bavaria, where the vestiges of Nazism are still nostalgia, and where the German neo-Nazi racism is most strident. That Teutonic-based racism, is often manifested vociferously and provocatively against tens of thousands of Turkish Gastarbeiters (guest- workers) who have been trying to put down roots in and around Munich for decades but are still shunned and ostracized as second- class citizens.

Ironically, the Pope is still scheduled to visit Turkey in November. What message, one wonders, was he trying to send his putative hosts? That he’s besotted with the memory of Byzantium and hero-worships those whose life mission was enmity and hatred of Turks only because they happened to be the followers of Islam?

Those who have been keeping tabs on the way Vatican and the global enterprise of Catholicism has been steered by Pope Benedict in the one year since he succeeded John Paul II are convinced that his agenda is diametrically antithetical to his illustrious predecessor’s.

John Paul II was a bridge-builder between the three revealed Abrahamic religions-Islam, Christianity and Judaism-in the strict sense of the word. It was perhaps his Polish roots that imbued him with a life-long mission of peace. The Poles suffered through centuries as victims of imperialist lust of the Russians and the expansionism of the Prussians who boxed them in from east and west and almost obliterated Poland as a nation-state.

Pope Benedict’s Teutonic genes must egg him on to pursue, instead, an aggressively assertive mission to replace John Paul’s pacifism. He has done away with the institution of a regular, annual, dialogue between eminent scholars and theoreticians of Abrahamic faiths, which was so dear to Johan Paul II. One of the first acts of Benedict, after donning the mantle of Pope, was to remove Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald at the head of Council of Inter-religious Dialogue, instituted by John Paul. Fitzgerald, who was a close confidant of the late Pope, was then dispatched to Cairo to become papal nuncio there.

Even if one were to give all the benefit of doubt to Pope Benedict, which he clearly doesn’t deserve, one can’t paper over the stark reality that he’s not inclined as readily to strike common cause, wherever possible, with Islam as his predecessor was. Benedict seems more viscerally attuned to join forces with the Bush neo cons to take on Muslims on every front, as spiritual adjunct to Bush’s open-ended war against terrorism, which was initially described by its commander-in-chief as a ‘new Crusade.’ The sword and the cross are coming together, again, on one platform, which doesn’t bode well at all for peace in this century.

Crusade or not, it reinforces the gut feeling on the Muslim street globally that the so-called ‘war on terror’ is, in reality, ‘war on Muslims and Islam’. Its progenitor, President Bush, may go on protesting, pro forma and ad nauseam, as he did again at this year’s inaugural UN General Assembly, that it isn’t the case but the man on the street can’t be convinced by plain sophistry and casuistry. To him, actions speak louder than words. He believes what he sees with his own eyes, on global television, day in and day out. And what shapes his perception and conventional wisdom is that it’s Muslims only who are being hunted like beasts of prey from Afghanistan to Iraq to Lebanon to Israeli-occupied Palestine.

What he sees is that Muslims are being typecast, from east to west, as violent, uncivilized and unfit to belong to the comity of modern nations. This is what Pope Urban II preached in the 11th century, and this is precisely what Pope Benedict is sermonizing in the 21st. With the likes of Bush and Benedict acting as his recruiting agents, Osama bin Laden can sit back and relax, wherever he may be.

Originally published in Dawn.