The Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement Blog

One of the challenges in the book – Consumer Guide to God, is whether concept of God can survive on logos alone; minus its preceding mythos i.e. can a religion survive without a mythology. Islam does pass this logos test, but not Christianity, which is obvious in the story of crucifixion, bodily resurrection, God having a son, the very existence of a Pope living in a palatial Vatican etc. To add to this mythology is the process of canonization, where the humans of this world are able to determine the status of the people in the next world, as to whether they are saints or just ordinary mortals and if someone is in heaven or hell (see this link), while keeping in mind that the same popes had previously sold land in the heavens to its parishioners (indulgences).

The news story in Al-Jazeera points to the fact that to find mythology one does not have to dig into the pages of Greco-Roman history. All one has to do is walk to the nearest church or switch on the TV to witness the mythological rituals in Vatican, which at times are more fantastic than the stories of Zeus and Hercules.

Suddenly history gets created in which – “Pope Francis has created the first saints of his reign, canonizing … 800 Italian Christians who refused to convert to Islam and were killed by Ottoman Turks in the 15th century.” [Al-Jazeera link above]

It would be waste of time to even discuss if there were forced conversions under Islam because the history tells us otherwise e.g. Jews and Christians thrived under Muslim rule in Spain and so did the Hindus in India. It is only evokes curiosity in the reader’s mind as to if Italy ever was under Ottomans for them to forcibly convert Italians to Islam and kill the reluctant that got canonized today? It is against Quranic doctrine to forcibly convert anyone to any religion, including Islam. There is no compulsion in religion (Quran 2:256). Bottom-line, there cannot be forced or coerced conversion into Islam, while the opposite has happened more frequently than the Vatican will admit.

Will Catholic Church even consider canonization of hundreds of thousands of Jews and Muslims in Europe who were killed or expelled for their faith? I wonder if the Vatican Popes have turned the leaves of their own recorded history or they are deliberately blind to the fact that Muslims in history should had been conferred the rights of citizenship in Spain where they were living as citizens for about 8 centuries (711-1492) and then eliminated by Reconquista in 1492 and the Inquisition made the peninsula completely Catholic. Sicily was a Muslim majority island (827-1091). Muslims in Sicily were wiped off by Norman invasion in late eleventh century and the remaining were interned in a colony in Lucera, southern Italy, by Frederick II in 1224, and then exterminated soon thereafter his death. Muslims populations in France along with others (Jews, Huguenots, Cathars) were expelled repeatedly in 1010, 1182, 1306, and finally in 1394. After the Battle of Poitiers and Tours in 732, fought between Muslims of Spain and Charles Martel’s armies, the Muslims established their settlement in Fraxinet (modern day La Garde-Freinet, near Saint-Tropez, in Provence) in southeast France. Fraxinet was destroyed between 975 and 983 by the Christian armies. [Excerpted from Issue 51]