In Nazareth, a church (basilica) marks the
place where the angel announced to Mary that she was about to give birth to
Jesus, God's only-begotten son, the long-awaited messiah. This church is one of
the foci of Christian life in Palestine. However, the Christian community
in Palestine and the whole Middle East is dwindling, in percentage if not in
absolute figures, due to their observing more modern birth rates than their
Muslim countrymen, and due to the emigration of numerous young Christians who
see no future for themselves in a Muslim-dominated part of the world. Even in Nazareth the Muslims are now in a
majority, and with a Muslim-dominated "Palestinian Authority" now in
power, the local Muslim community feels confident enough for a showdown.
So, on 22
November 1999,
the foundation stone for a mighty and magnificent mosque was laid in a square
adjoining the church. The Christian community had planned the construction of a
Venice-type plaza there, to accommodate the numerous Christian and other
visitors from all over the world. After all, the sacred sites of Christianity
are not all that numerous, and those which exist deserve appropriate care. If
the Muslims really needed an extra mosque, they could have built it anywhere. A
diplomatic Saudi prince had even offered to finance the mosque if it were built
elsewhere, but his offer was spurned. By contrast, the place of the
Annunciation is not moveable, so Christians could not make any concessions
short of allowing the humiliation of their sacred site as but a
stand-in-the-way of the mosque. The Muslims would not see reason and went ahead
with their confrontational plan.
Most
Palestinian Christians find this development gruesome. According to local
Franciscan nun Sister Renee, "the Muslims want to trample and humiliate
the Christians. The minaret of the mosque will tower over the basilica".
(quoted by Salomon Bouman, De Standaard, 24-11-1999) The Pope came out in support of
the Christians of Nazareth, and ordered all Catholic churches in the Holy Land closed for two days in protest.
Yasser Arafat's PA formally distanced itself from the Islamic ceremony (in
order to curry favour with the Christian world so as to strengthen his own
diplomatic position vis-�-vis Israel), but did nothing to prevent it.
The presiding Muslim leader, Ahmad Abu Nawaf, was not troubled for taking a
defiant and confrontational stand, openly exulting in this Islamic
"victory".
The incident
must have reminded the Pope of the Muslim plans for building a mosque in Rome dwarfing the Pope's own Saint
Peter's Basilica. The Italian authorities disallowed this symbolic show of
strength but the five-star mosque which came up close to the Vatican is still impressive enough, and
contrasts mightily with the absence of any Christian place of worships for
hundreds of miles around Mecca. Because Saudi Arabia has declared the whole of its
territory to be a mosque, no expressions of non-Islamic devotion are allowed
there in any form whatsoever.
In the
circumstances, I cannot omit a vote of sympathy for the Palestinian Christians
who find themselves besieged by an arrogant Islamic movement. However, I also
want to propose to the Christian leadership, including the Pope and Indian
Church leaders like Bishop Alan de Lastic, a few points to ponder.
Christians
apologizing to Muslims
First of all,
Your Eminences, the last couple of years, the Catholic Church and many
Protestant Churches and Christian laymen's groups have been bending over
backwards to convince Muslims and others about their own heartfelt repentance
over the crimes committed by Christian states and institutions in the past
centuries, but it seems this has not moved the heart of the Muslim world.
The Pope
himself has said sorry for the Crusades, eventhough these were but a Christian
counteroffensive in a long-drawn-out war which Islam had unilaterally inflicted
on Christianity ever since Mohammed's failed invasion of the East-Roman Empire,
not long before his death in 632. Hardly four years later, after suppressing
the Arab national revolt against Islam (the Ridda, "return" to the
ancestral religion), Islamic armies invaded and occupied the Levantine part of
the Byzantine
empire,
and reduced Christians to third-class citizens without political rights. During
and after this blitz offensive by Caliph Omar in AD 636, many churches were
turned into mosques, Christians were sometimes forced to convert, but more
often put under structural pressure by the imposition of a toleration tax plus
a number of humiliating restraints on their rights.
Next came the
conquest of Christian North Africa, effectively destroying Christianity in Tunisia, Saint Augustine's homeland, and in the Maghreb. Then followed the conquest of
Christian Spain, the invasion of Christian France in AD 731 (mercifully crushed
by Charles Martel in Poitiers), the occupation of Christian
Sicily, and many other unilateral Islamic acts of aggression, including the
capture and sale of millions of Christians as slaves. The invasion of Byzantine
Anatolia by Muslim Seljuqs in Manzikert 1071 was one of the direct causes of
the Crusades. In spite of regrettable Christian excesses during the reconquest
of Jerusalem in 1099 (easily matched by Sultan Baybars' atrocities during the
Muslim reconquest of the Crusader states), the Crusades were a legitimate
attempt of the Christians to liberate their Holy Land forcibly occupied by the
Muslims. Somewhat like the Hindus trying to liberate Ayodhya from Islamic
occupation.
Strategically
speaking, the Crusades were a forward strike in a war in which Christianity had
so far been on the defensive. After the defeat of the Crusaders, the Islamic
world resumed the attacks, especially in the Balkans where one Christian nation
after another came under the Turkish yoke, and as late as 1689, the Turks laid
siege to Vienna. There is no doubt that Christian soldiers have
misbehaved during the conquest of Jerusalem and on other occasions, but so have
Muslim armies on numerous occasions, starting with Mohammed's own caravan raids,
murders of skeptics and massacres of recalcitrant tribes. For every Muslim
gentleman-conqueror (e.g. the Kurdish general Saladin who chased the Crusaders
from Jerusalem), there was a Muslim mass-murderer (e.g. the Mamluk
sultan Baybars who finished off the last Crusader strongholds).
All the same,
an ecumenical Christian group has even conducted a pilgrimage along the
Crusader route, a Walk for Reconciliation, everywhere offering apologies for
what Christians in the distant past had done to the Muslims. This proved to be
an exercise in self-ridicule, e.g. these self-flagellating Christian penitents
went to offer their apologies to the mayor of Istanbul for the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade, forgetting
that the city sacked by the Crusaders was a Greek Orthodox city where a Muslim
Turk like the present mayor would be the number one enemy. Constantinople was far more definitively sacked
by the Turks in 1453, and the Turkish mayor represented the Turkish occupation
force which has, unlike the Crusaders, destroyed the Greek character of the
city and nearly annihilated the millennia-old Greek presence in Constantinople and nearby Ionia. Addressing an apology for the
temporary inconvenience which the Crusaders had inflicted on the Greeks to a
mayor representing a conquering nation which definitively destroyed the Greeks
of Asia Minor: only Liberation theologians could be that silly.
So, if
apologies have to be tendered, let Muslim dignitaries start the exchange. Let
the mayor of Istanbul apologize to his Christian
visitors for representing a religion which killed and enslaved millions of
Christians. Let the Turks apologize to the Greeks for sacking and occupying
their capital, Constantinople. Better still, let them restore Constantinople to the Orthodox Christians. But
for now, the position is that the Muslim world is not even willing to refrain
from the provocation in Nazareth.
