(...) Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so, they are offering worship to God. And they will do this because they have not known the father or me. John 16:2-3
Let us combine essence with existence, that is, let us look at what these two religions, Christianity and Islam, are in themselves with the history that each has written over the centuries since their inception. Of course, I write from my faith in Christ, the only Savior, the Way, the Truth and the Life for every human being, including Muslims; but I do not use faith as an argument; I hope to argue exclusively from the point of view of reason.
Fanaticism and violence
There are two concepts that have been perhaps misinterpreted, or interpreted in such a way as to satisfy, justify, and bless the thirst for power of some people. What is certain is that it was this "misinterpretation" of the concepts that wrote history and caused much bloodshed. I refer to the concept of JIHAD, which means effort, struggle, holy war and the concept of ISLAM which means submitting to the will of God.
As scholars say, JIHAD refers to the struggle that every human being must wage within himself against evil. The fact is that, historically, this inner struggle that was to remain interior has become an exterior struggle. In practice, this struggle has translated, and still translates today, into the struggle against those whom Islam considers as infidels, declaring a war against them that justifies itself because it is considered holy, supposedly for a good cause. At this time, they have not yet understood that "the ends do not justify the means".
Christianity also has its own version of holy wars, such as the Crusades. The first crusade was born in response to the request of the Christian Emperor of the East, Alexius I, to help him reconquer the holy city of Jerusalem and free the Eastern Christians from Muslim rule. However, it quickly became a way to halt the advance of the Muslims that threatened to end the Christian world. What began as a right to self-defence quickly turned into aggression, conquest, and massacre in the name of Christ.
ISLAM means submitting oneself to God; the basis of the Muslim religion lies in this submission which is symbolically represented by the physical posture that Muslims adopt when praying. This was the purpose of Jihad, the effort, the struggle to submit each one's personality to God; in fact, this is exactly what it means to worship God: to submit to his will.
As long as this principle did not depart from the personal sphere, as long as it remained reflective and intransitive, it was good and created no problems; but it is not this submission that history tells us about. Submitting oneself to God quickly turned into submitting others to one's version of God. Therefore, just as Judaism calls someone who is not a Jew a Gentile, Islam calls anyone who is not a Muslim an infidel.
Unlike Christianity which was born in an adverse world dominated by the Romans, and for five centuries was a clandestine religion that spread by the examples of the lives and preaching of Christians, Islam was born out of a belligerent conquest of Mecca and the forced submission to the new faith of the Christians and polytheists who lived there.
Islam quickly became confused with power and continued to spread not by preaching like Christianity, but by warlike conquests and trade. Muslims have in fact submitted the once Christian world to their faith: the southern and northern part of the Mediterranean Sea, by invading Europe from the west to as far as France and from the east to as far as Austria. Throughout the Middle Ages, they ravaged Europe, which closed in on itself into a feudal system.
After the Roman Emperor Constantine, Christianity became the state religion and as such, also used submission techniques not only in the torture of the Inquisition, but also as a form of evangelization.
In fact, to this day the Latin Americans accuse us of having evangelized Latin America more by the sword than by the crucifix; since the sword in the West has always been in the form of a cross, perhaps this is where the confusion comes from. Christianity has long abandoned these practices of violence that stayed in the Middle Ages; Islam still uses them today. Why?
Resentment against the Western Christian world
With the victory at the Battle of Lepanto between Christians and Muslims in 1571, Christian culture and civilization ended once and for all the constant threat of Islam and progressed to be what it is today, while Muslim civilization, whose peak had been reached with Averroes and Avicenna, stagnated into a medieval mentality.
The Muslim world has yet to recover from the resentment and hatred that this defeat had caused. This hatred motivates the actions of Al Qaeda, especially against the United States because the latter represents the Western world.
Currently, there is no traditionally Christian country that persecutes Muslims just because they are Muslims, while in traditionally Muslim countries, Christians are systematically persecuted: Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, etc.
Muslims in the West are protected under democracy and the right to freedom of religion; Christians in the Arab world have no such rights; they are at the mercy of fanaticism. Muslims in the West can build their mosques; Christians in the Arab world have no right to build churches or repair the existing ones, and in Saudi Arabia they cannot even wear a crucifix around their neck.
He who owes nothing has nothing to fear
We are never as violent as when we are fighting for our survival. While the Christian religion, which has been called into question by the French Revolution, the age of reason, the Enlightenment and lately by atheistic philosophies, has progressed and survived, the Muslim religion opposes all critical thinking from within and from without, and threatens anyone who dares to do so.
He who owes nothing has nothing to fear: this aggressiveness is nothing more than a way to hide the serious deficiencies from the philosophical, historical and theological point of view. Fuelled by oil and hatred against the West, the Muslim expansion is like a giant with feet of clay – one day when these deficiencies come to the light of reason, perhaps no stone will be left unturned.
According to Carl Jung, fanaticism is a way to stifle an inner doubt. This is how Jung explained the fanaticism of St. Paul against Christians before his conversion. St. Paul's inner doubt was between the security provided by the Old Law, a false security, and the freedom of grace that St. Stephen offered.
St. Paul found himself torn between these two ways of living. On the one hand, he was comfortable living within the familiar boundaries of the Old Law, and on the other, he was attracted to the sense of freedom as he realized that he could never satisfy all the demands of the law, and that even if he could, he had no security or guarantee of salvation that would make the coming of Christ dispensable if man could save himself.
It is evident, just by the way they still treat women as second-class citizens, that the Muslim religion was fine for the Middle Ages, but not for the world today. As today's way of thinking can inadvertently seep in from many sources even in Muslim countries, through the television, the internet, these countries feel intimidated and fear losing believers, they fear that their religion will not withstand the clash of reason, as Christianity had to endure, reformulating itself.
Consequently, they become aggressive against the West, which is governed by reason that infiltrates from all directions since reason is the only way to development and progress. Since the West is of Christian roots, they turn against Christians living in their countries, calling them traitors and Americans, even though Christianity existed before Islam. They call Christianity a foreign religion, when in reality it was established many centuries before the Muslim religion came to their countries.
Animals show their maximum aggression when they sense their existence threatened. In this aspect, humans are no different. Cats are peaceful animals and never turn against their owners unless the latter threaten them and they have no way to escape. This is how the Muslim religion feels trapped in the face of the Western world of Christian tradition.
There are no reasons to kill
As mentioned above, the temptation to impose our belief or idiosyncrasy on others was already evident in the apostles. Jesus rejects violence as a means to an end. He also rejects killing in the name of God, saying that whoever does so has never known Him or God. God is Love and God is Life, not hate and death. For Jesus there are no reasons to kill, there are only reasons to die.
The difference between Islam and Christianity is simple: Christians follow their Master who taught them to die for a cause and who Himself died for the sake of justice; Muslims follow their prophet who exhorted them to kill for a cause and who himself killed for a cause.
At a meeting of Indians against the British Empire, before India's independence, a Muslim incited violence, urging those present to kill the British. To which Mahatma Gandhi replied, "For this cause [India's independence], I am willing to die; there is no cause, however, for which I am willing to kill."
Conclusion: Throughout its history, Christianity has experienced moments of violence, fanaticism and intolerance; Islam, however, has not yet discovered tolerance, dialogue and peaceful coexistence with the civil society and other religions.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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