It rained on His Holiness’s speech and blessing, soaking many of his respectful audience, but the Pope’s globally-televised… well, sort of retraction, apparently fell on deaf Muslim ears.
Pakistan had been the first to furiously react, summoning the Papal Legate in Islamabad, and its parliament passing a vote of angry censure.
No wonder, all of London’s suicide-bombers (except one, a teen-aged Jamaican convert), who exploded bombs in the Tube – the underground trains – and exploded a London bus on July 27, 2005 – last year – were British-born citizens of Pakistani descent. Most of the 21 suspects originally arrested last August 9 for allegedly plotting to blow up commercial airlines bound from British airports for the United States, were – hello – also British citizens of Pakistani origin!
President Pervez Musharraf may have allied his country with the US on September 14, 2001 a few days after 9/11 – rejecting his old friends in the Taleban – but he’s having trouble restraining the militant and fundamentalist Islamists in his country, or keeping Osama bin Laden and his Taleban allies from skipping in and out of the Pushtun region in his northwest, with impunity.
There have already been two almost successful attempts on General Musharraf’s life. Additionally, his recent orders for all "foreign students" (mostly Arabs) to be sent away from Pakistan’s madrassahs (religious schools) and for the madrassahs themselves to adopt a more practical curriculum, aside from exclusively Qu’ranic studies are being defied by the imams and mullahs.
It’s increasingly clear that the nation carved out of old colonial India by its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, at midnight on August 11, 1947 (at that time with close to 80 million Muslims comprising its population) remains as he called it The Land of the Pure."
In sum, purely and sometimes violently devoted to Islam.
Jinnah died on September 11, 1948 and was buried in the heart of Karachi, his birthplace. He was called Quaid-I-Azam, the Great Leader – and his strongly anti-Hindu spirit (he detested the late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and the antipathy was mutual) and rejection of Christians, the distrusted "Angleez" – although he studied for the Law in London and sported English clothes and even a monacle – suffuses today’s Pakistanis as well.
Interestingly enough, Jinnah had been born on Christmas Day in 1878, the first of seven children.
Life is full of such ironies.
As for the Holy Father’s so-called "offensive" remarks at the tail-end of his otherwise triumphant tour of his native Germany, he should have been more careful. Six months ago, the entire Islamic world had violently reacted to the publication of a few cartoons in an obscure Danish newspaper which Muslims fumed had insulted the Prophet Muhammad. What more any remarks which could be construed insulting to the Prophet from the head of the Catholic Church which has 1.3 billion adherents throughout the world!
Oh, Papa Ratzi! The Pope’s remarks may not have been intended to be either malicious or provocative – but now Christians and Christian churches will be savaged in many Muslim countries. Egypt has withdrawn its ambassador from the Vatican and others will probably follow suit.
By golly, the Muslims all over the umma have discovered the power of rage and going berserk. What will they do? Threaten to bomb all Christians and burn down their embassies and consulates? Somehow, a cap must be put on all these explosions of awful, mob-generated violence. The trouble is that every criticism is being interpreted as a conspiracy against Islam. Alas, Jihad has become the most fashionable war-cry of Muslims all over this troubled planet.
Sanamagan. The blood-letting of the Crusades was centuries ago – so enough already.
The Pope, in his "apology," stated that the ancient Byzantine quotation he had mentioned did not represent his own personal thinking – and added it was time for dialogue between Islam and Christianity. In the aftermath of the backlash against the Pope’s perceived "criticism" of the Prophet (for "there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet") there’s little hope for that – for the moment.
Yet, as a non-cleric and amateur historian, who could blame the Byzantines for their negative view of the Muslims and their Prophet? Over the centuries, since the Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in 312 (his mother, Sta. Monica, had "discovered" the shards of the true Cross on which Jesus was crucified), Constantinople – renamed "Istanbul" after the Muslim Turks conquered Byzantium – had become the arsenal and reliquary of the Christian Faith.
Among the holic relics "registered" to have been carried in procession and the dedication of Constantinople (named after the Emperor, whose immense statue had been placed atop a tall column of porphyry more than 100 feet tall) were "crumbs of bread from which Christ had fed the five thousand" on the Mount of Beatitudes; the crosses on which the two thieves had been crucified on either side of Jesus at Calvary; the alabaster box which contained the ointment with which Mary Magdalene had anointed Jesus’ feet; and a fragment of the "true Cross."
In any event, a great church was erected called the Church of the Holy Wisdom, Haghia Sophia, and filled with such relics. The pieces of the Cross were, historians say, kept in a chest on a golden altar. There, too, were allegedly other relics of the Passion – the Crown of Thorns, and Sponge, and slabs from the Tomb of rock.
Byzantium’s Emperor Alexis Commenus was reputed to have written to Robert, Count of Flanders, somewhat boastfully, in 1095, of the rich spiritual treasures of his kingdom, already being called the "New Jerusalem."
He declared: "You will find more of it at Constantinople than in the entire world, for the treasures of the Basilicas alone would be sufficient to furnish all the churches of Christendom and all their treasures cannot together amount to those of St. Sophia, which riches have never been equalled even in the Temple of Solomon."
Don’t reproach the Byzantines for their anti-Muslim feeling – and polemics. In the spring of 670, a large fleet of small vessels crammed with Muslim warriors appeared in the Hellespont, sailed down the Bosthorous, and attacked Byzantium. Unsuccessful at first, the Arabs built a fortified Camp close to the city and assaulted it each spring from 671 to 676. In one assault, as many as 30,000 were killed. The Byzantines fought the Arabs on land and sea. In the late spring of 717, a huge Arab army of 80,000 men once more attacked but was repelled by the Byzantines’ invention of "Greek fire," an early form of napalm, which devastated and incinerated the ships of the invading Muslims.
A month later, a fleet of 1,800 boats full of soldiers with 20 larger warships from Egypt sailed into the Sea of Marmara. This time the assault was much fiercer by land and water, but again the Byzantines managed to repel them, with a loss by the attacker of 20,000 lives.
The historian Sebeos, reviewing these repeated attacks beginning in the 7th century well described the threat that Islam represented: "For just as arrows fly from the well-curved bow of a strong man toward the target, so are the Arabs who come from the Sinai desert to destroy the entire world with hunger, the sword, and great terror."
Finally, a Turkish army under Sultan Mehmet II in 1453, swarmed over the walls, massacred everybody including the Emperor himself, but kept alive the little boys to be brought up as Muslims – to form a special guard when they grew to manhood named the Janissaries.
I’ve been to Istanbul three times, touring much of Turkey on one trip, and traveling to Ankara to pay my respects at the imposing marble mausoleum of the great Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, the Father of Modern Turkey (he was one of my boyhood heroes) – but the Byzantines’ curse of the Muslims, indeed, came true. Very little remains of Christianity in Turkey – the hundreds of Christian churches are but a memory – and the great Church of Haghia Sophia is now a Muslim mosque (indeed, an exhibition for tourists).
Where are the Christian "relics"? Nowhere to be found.