Muslims and Christians: A History Of Strife

By Hartmut Kaiser
12 October 2007, Friday
MeriNews

Muslims and Christians share more than a thousand years of religious conflicts. Intolerance led to mistrust. It is this mistrust, coupled with narrow mindedness, which is responsible for the clash of civilisations. A review.

THE THREE MONOTHEISTIC religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, share many common features: all of them believe in only one god, though they have different names for him (Jhwh/Allah), all three believe in an afterlife and in resurrection, and all three revere Jesus Christ and his mother, Maria. The Old Testament is a holy scripture to all three of them.

When the Arabs were expanding their empire, from 800 AD until around 1500 AD, they spread their religion with them. At the same time in Europe, in the Dark /Middle ages, the Christian monarchs tried to observe a rule: Christian soldiers must never raise their weapons against fellow Christians, except for the infidels.

They regarded the Muslims as infidels (and the Muslims regarded the Christians as infidels in return) and fought bloody battles against them in the Spanish reconquista, Andalusia (Southern Spain, Sicily and Malta, all had been under Islam until the Christians regained these countries).

After the reformation and the rise of Protestantism, in the thirty years war from 1610 until 1640, Christians fought against Christians because the Catholics as well as the Protestants believed that they had the true faith and that those on the other side were dissenters.

Napoleon was one of the first European rulers who had no respect for and fear of the Christian faith, so he let his soldiers battle against other Christian nations. In all the successive European wars, Christians were on both sides of the battle lines, e.g., the World Wars.

It has to be stated, though, that most of the European rulers in the World Wars were Christians only in name (like Adolf Hitler, who jailed many priests in concentration camps) or even atheist (like Joseph Stalin). Many of the young soldiers among the tens of millions who perished in the Second World War, took solace in prayers and in their Christian faith, while they suffered in the war.

After 1945, the western world and especially Europe experienced a growth in agnosticism, atheism and indifference towards Christianity.

Yet the election of George W. Bush in the United States and the support of Christian preachers for the Republican Party brought back military battles based on different religious persuasions. As a revenge for the attacks of September 11, the United States military and the CIA launched the wars and invasions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.

They cooked up the existence of weapons of mass destruction and claimed that they intended to spread democracy by the use of military power.

Yet the reason for these wars was the quest for oil as well as fear and hatred of Islam, based on the Christian faith of the US administration and the vast majority of the American people.

Present day Europe experiences another kind of conflict between Muslims and Christians:

Muslims (immigrants or descendants of immigrants and converts) want to build mosques in cities like Cologne, Munich and Berlin in Germany. This has sparked a very emotional political debate and some politicians, especially those of the Christian Conservative German party (CDU/CSU), have battled for the erection of mosques with all the means they have.

Fears of an Islamic Europe are very widespread and they are the cause of many acts of intolerance committed by Christians against the Muslim minority.

Each side is convinced that they have the right faith - the Christians accuse the Muslims of not respecting women’s rights, and the Muslims accuse the Christians of abusing alcohol and having lax sexual morals.

The battle of the faiths is a never-ending story.