Catholic–Muslim Dialogue that can change the world

Islam and the West

16 Dec 2008, NewAgeIslam.Com

Catholic–Muslim Dialogue that can change the world

2. Paris: Jews, Muslims protest in Paris 3. Jerusalem: French-Muslim leaders in Israel 4. The Moderate Muslims of Kosovo by Michael van der Galien 5. Italy: Muslims protest mosque moratorium 6. Interview of Nihad Awad: American Muslims are becoming more involved in the 7. Political and social life of USA-director of CAIR 8. How Europe Escaped Speaking Arabic by Michael Novak 9. London: British Muslims must follow law of the land: Sir Ghulam Noon Compiled by Syed Asadullah    ------------------ Catholic–Muslim Dialogue that can change the world The Catholic–Muslim forum that the Pope has now inaugurated can be a mechanism through which such misunderstandings can be avoided and where constructive engagement can take place. By H. A. Hellyer, December 11, 2008 Recently Pope Benedict XVI met with a delegation of signatories to the Common Word, a document that seems to have taken the world by surprise. The dialogue that contributed to the Common Word was initiated in the aftermath of Pope Benedict's statements on Islam in Regensburg, Germany and has transformed that negative episode in Christian–Muslim relations into a positive one. Never before has there been such a coterie of different Christian and Muslim groups from such high levels willing to participate in dialogue and discourse. After all the Common Word events thus far, there has been a spirit of warmth and a belief in future co-operation. There were two historic meetings prior to the signing of the actual document – the first at Yale University last July, which focused on Evangelical Christianity. The second event was at Cambridge University and engaged with the Anglican Communion directly. At that event the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, met with figures such as the Mufti of Egypt and Dr Ali Goma'a. Make no mistake – these events are making history. But we also have to ask: What is the need for a Common Word? Is this really the discussion of our time? Dialogue between the West and the Muslim world is vital for a variety of reasons, political, economic, cultural and historical. But one may ask further – is the West really a Christian West? Or are we characterising the West, which is arguably post Christian, in a way that does not bear much resemblance to reality? Particularly when looking at the meeting in the US, one can understand the relevance of dialogue between Christians and Muslims. After all, the US was historically influenced by particular forms of Christianity, and also a country where Christian adherents are incredibly active in the public sphere. Perhaps the US is less of a Christian nation and more a modern one, but one cannot deny the relevance of a document like the Common Word for that country. The last two meetings, first with the Anglican Communion and the Roman Catholic Church, are in Europe – the birthplace of Western civilisation. What characterises Western civilisation as distinct from pre-modern Christian civilisation is precisely the shift in the public focus from the sacred to the secular. The Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution – the periods that created the conditions for modernity – represented departures from Europe's religious orientation. The West became secular as it became modern – so, the question remains, is the Common Word, a discussion between Christians and Muslims, really the appropriate discussion for these times? To answer this question we must find out what "secular" really means. Religion may have a future within some interpretations of secularism but not within others. We can see examples of how this could work in the US and in many other secular states in Africa, South America or Southeast Asia. Religion may have less relevance in some places than in others, but believers continue to exist in cultures that have varying degrees of secularism and the success of dialogues such as the Common Word is vital to them all. We have seen how religion can be involved in catastrophic misunderstandings, such as the affair around the Pope's original comments at Regensburg about Islam. At the very least, the Catholic – Muslim forum that the Pope has now inaugurated can be a mechanism through which such events can be avoided and where constructive engagement can take place. And for Europeans there is also something at stake. Contemporary European political philosophy has come around to the idea that there must be a respect for diversity within unity – this is the main point of multiculturalism. Within this philosophy, however, there is an ongoing uncertainty: In a Europe that requires unity on national and continental levels, what will the moral and ethical basis of that unity be? In days gone by, it would have been the values of the Church – but we appear far past that today. One of the Catholic participants from the Vatican argued that good relations between Catholics and Muslims could serve as an argument against atheism in a religiously apathetic Europe. As a European, I wonder if the Common Word can serve as an argument for an alternative, proactive sacred worldview that can become an inspiration for a moral and ethical foundation, uniting people of all faiths. So, perhaps, this will be one of the side effects of the Common Word – to help heal a Europe that is still searching for herself. And finally, for Muslims, this discussion is also incredibly important. One of the reasons that the Catholic Church has been so reluctant to engage with Muslims in the past is that they never knew who to communicate with. For a hierarchical institution like the Vatican, the seemingly vague nature of religious authority in the Muslim world appeared chaotic. But there are systems of religious authority in Islam, even though they are more decentralised than one might expect. The same people behind the Common Word were also behind the Amman Message, which sought to define religious authority according to the historical traditions of Islam. One of the ancillary benefits of this process may be a renewed understanding of religious authority among Muslims, not only for religious dialogue with the Vatican, but in many other realms. We shall have to wait and see, but things are certainly looking better on the horizon. Dr. H. A. Hellyer is a Fellow of the University of Warwick and Founder-Director of the Visionary Consultants Group. He is a signatory to the Amman Message and the Common Word. This piece first appeared in the National (UAE). Source: http://www.altmuslim.com/a/a/a/2885/ ------------------------------------ Jews, Muslims protest in Paris December 15, 2008 Paris (JTA) -- Jews and Muslims marched through Paris to show outrage at the desecration of more than 500 Muslim and up to 20 Jewish graves. The French Jewish-Muslim Friendship group organized Sunday's march, which included local elected officials, imams and rabbis. About 100 people participated in the demonstration. Between Dec. 7 and 8, on the eve of the Muslim holiday Id al-Adha, a suspected group of neo-Nazis sprayed racist slurs on military gravestones in a northern France cemetery. Muslim tombs were targeted twice in the same cemetery near Arras in the past two years. The protest called for peace and underlined the links between Jews and Muslims. "There are so many things uniting the Jewish and Muslim communities," said Bernard Kanovitch, a leading member of the Jewish umbrella group CRIF, to a crowd at the Place de la Bastille. "What shocks us isn't just that this happened again, but also the number of tombs," he added. Investigators are still working to apprehend the vandals. On Dec. 12, more than 2,000 people gathered at the Notre Dame de Lorette cemetery to hear community and political leaders condemn the crime. Source: http://jta.org/news/article/2008/12/15/1001541/jews-muslims-protest-in-paris --------------- French-Muslim leaders in Israel December 15, 2008 Jerusalem (JTA) -- French-Muslim leaders are visiting Israel. The group is scheduled to meet with President Shimon Peres and new immigrants, as well as visit the Western Wall. Participants include a police commissioner, the president of the French Young Entrepreneurs group, the general director of a French television and radio station, and the diplomatic adviser of the French president for North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Arab world and Israel. The visit is under the auspices of the American Jewish Committee's Project Interchange, which is designed to give the participants an overview of contemporary Israel and a better understanding of the country's political, historical and religious context, as well as regional issues. Source: http://jta.org/news/article/2008/12/15/1001555/french-muslim-leaders-are-visiting-israel -------- The Moderate Muslims of Kosovo By: Michael van der Galien, December 15th, 2008 As a Muslim, I am starting to detest the term "moderate Muslim." The term somehow indicates that if one merely uses the word "Muslim" to describe an adherent to Islam one means radical or at least fundamentalist. After all, if 'moderate' is normal, why name it? We use the term radical or extremist or fundamentalist Muslim to emphasize the radical nature of the individual we describe. This, in effect, makes clear that the far majority of Muslims are not extremist in any way, for the distinction would not be made if such were the case. Nonetheless, 'moderate' Muslim is used rather often to describe those I consider "Muslim." Those who use it often do not have ill intentions so I will not lambaste my friend Michael J. Totten for using the term in his latest article for City Journal, which happens to be a must read about the 'moderate Muslims' of Kosovo. Totten explains that Kosovo's population is majority Muslim, but that most Kosovars consider themselves Albanian (most Kosovars are Albanians) or Kosovar first and foremost, Muslim second. Seldom did he see a woman covering herself up, as so many women living in Arab countries do. Alcohol was sold and drunk just like in any Western country. In short: Kosovars may be Muslim, but they are modern and Western oriented nonetheless. Some Wahabbis - the Saudi extreme version of Islam which forces women to cover up, implements the Sharia strictly in some ways, encourages terrorism against non-Muslims, etc. - are trying to change the 'moderate' nature of Kosovo's Islam, but they are having little to no success making converts: the far, far majority of Kosovars do not want to have anything to do with a religious ideology of hatred, divisiveness, intolerance, backwardness and violence. Strangely enough, the quest to 'find' 'moderate Muslims' continues unabated nonetheless. Certain factions, especially 'conservatives' in the West, will read Totten's article, link to it, think about it for 10 seconds, and they'll go on to write a post tomorrow, or a comment at a blog, wondering where all those 'moderate Muslims' are and why they never speak out against terrorism committed by extremist Muslims. These 'moderate Muslims' can, however, be found everywhere, from Turkey to Azerbaijan, from Azerbaijan to Kosovo, from Kosovo to Indonesia, from Indonesia to Iran (many Persians are more 'moderate' than many think), and from Iran to the West. The only excuse not to see them is blindness. Of course, some will then wonder why it is that these Muslims do not declare some kind of religious war on the extremists. The answer to that question is perfectly worded by a person Totten talked to in his article for City Journal: moderate Muslims do not fight religious wars. They do not do so per definition. They fight 'secular' wars: for freedom, equality and democracy. When they side with non-Muslims in a war, they do so not because they want to 'purify' Islam but because they consider extremists to be a danger to their lives, liberty and family. But if they would fight 'religious wars' or wars out of religious motivation they would no longer be 'moderate.' This is why it has been so important for the United States and its allies to explain that both the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq were not of a religious but secular nature. Bush has certainly succeeded in doing so in Kosovo, but a lot remains to be done in the other 'moderate Muslim countries' mentioned earlier. Source: http://www.poligazette.com/2008/12/15/the-moderate-muslims-of-kosovo/ ----------- Italy: Muslims protest mosque moratorium Dec 15, 2008 Italy's Interior Minister Roberto Maroni of the anti-immigrant Northern League met with protests after proposing a moratorium on the building of mosques in the wake of arrests on Dec. 2 of two Moroccans suspected of plotting terrorist attacks—one of whom was a preacher at an "unofficial" Milan mosque. The left-wing opposition and Italian Muslim leaders criticized the proposed legislation, which would halt the building of mosques without state oversight. A high-ranking Vatican official, Msgr. Gianfranco Ravasi, the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, said he was in favor of allowing new mosques provided the state could ensure they would be used for religious purposes. "Rome's Grand Mosque is the only official mosque in Italy, so a moratorium on the construction of future mosques is futile," said the Association of Muslim Intellectuals in Italy's president, Gianpiero Vincenzo. "It is far more important to regulate the various 'cultural centres' where Muslims in Italy have to gather for prayers because there are no more suitable venues," said Vincenzo. (AKI, NYT, Dec. 4) Source: http://www.ww4report.com/node/6521 ---------- American Muslims are becoming more involved in the political and social life of USA-director of CAIR Dec 15, 2008 Interview of Nihad Awad, National Executive Director of Council on American Islamic relations (CAIR) with Near East Department of Trend News Question: Council on American-Islamic Relations is one of the famous Muslim organizations in the USA. Which problems of Muslims are mainly considered by your organization? Answer: The Council on American-Islamic Relations'primary goals are to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding. Question: How much is possible to protect the Islamic traditions and values in consideration the passive activity of American Muslims in the U.S. social life? Answer: We have been defending Muslim's and people of other faith's rights in America since we started CAIR in 1994. Today, we have about 35 offices in major cities and states where Muslims live. I believe there is no conflict between Islamic traditions of freedom, equality and justice and those same values in America. These values are universal. I also see that American Muslims are becoming more involved in the political and social life and that makes our job much easier. Our studies show that American Muslims are a diverse group. Most of them are involved in public and civic life. Question: How Muslims can find a way to escape their minority status and play a central role as U. S. Citizens? Answer: Like other people who have been through this path before us, American Muslims are showing strong signs of engagement. In this presidential election for example, 95 percent of eligible American Muslim voters have voted in this important election, that's the highest voter turn out in American Muslim history, 89 percent voted for Barack Obama, apparently they want change. For the first time there are two Muslim members of the US congress. This is the right way for every group of people in America to be involved in the process. Positive change takes time and patience.  American Muslims are America is a country where freedom of religion is granted to all people and protected by the systems of laws that have been developed for more than 200 years. However, religious and ethnic minorities in America had struggled over generations to protect their rights and freedoms. Today, American Muslims are the latest minority in that chain of struggle in America's history. American Muslims feel at home in America despite the enormous amount of ignorance about Islam in society. Question: In your opinion, will the Muslims be able to extirpate the Islamophobia by the way of dialogue? Is it possible, taking into account that Islamophobia is widely spread in the West? Answer: Islamophobia is an irrational fear of Islam and Muslims. Its an old phenomenon but with a new name. There is an active and organized small minority of those who spread fear of Islam in the West through their anti-Muslim rhetoric and propaganda using their media, websites, and articles. But also I have to say that  that while we condemn those in the 'Fear Industry' who distort facts about Islam, we also have to condemn those few Muslims in the world who have caused great harm and damage  through their un-Islamic actions to the image of Muslims. In the end as we all know the minorities on both sides have to be isolated and the majority of people on both sides have to engage in dialogue. Islam is the faith of moderation and mercy, but from our experience in America, most of our fellow American know little or nothing about the basics of Islam and what Prophet Mohammed's message of mercy is. People fear the unknown. The more information we share about Islam, the more people understand it and respect it. Question: How do you estimate the role and cooperation of the western Muslim organization, especially in the USA? Answer: The role American Muslims can and should play is vital to America and the Muslims World. As the new Obama Administration is mapping hopefully, a new era with the Muslim World, American Muslim expertise and voice should be heard and utilized, otherwise America will continue to repeat mistakes abroad and at home. American Muslims stand ready to help. America is blessed with the calibre and talent its Muslim population posses. We have more than 3000 American Muslim organizations in the United States mainly Mosques, schools and social entities.  The most recent ones are the political and Youth oriented bodies. There is cooperation among themselves through their coordinating councils at the state and national levels. Source: http://news-en.trend.az/important/exclusive/1370977.html ------------------------ How Europe Escaped Speaking Arabic                          By Michael Novak  December 11, 2008   The Western world has never taken Islam with the full seriousness it has earned. Down through history, once Islamic armies have conquered a land, with very few exceptions, that land has remained Muslim. A Christian will wish in vain that the great circle of Christian lands around the Mediterranean (and on up into Syria, Iraq, Iran, and northwards into Georgia) had not fallen irretrievably into Muslim hands, most of them before 732 A.D. For Christians who think that the future of the world favors movement in their direction, a study of the latent dynamism of Islam is not a little unsettling. Edward Gibbon, finishing up his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-78), was able to imagine how easily serene little Oxford could have been dominated by tall Islamic minarets before his birth, and the accents in its markets would have been Arabic: " . . . the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet" (469). Gibbon was writing about the decisive battle of Poitiers in 732 A.D., when at last a Christian leader, Charles Martel ("Charles the Hammer"), drove back the Muslims from their high-water mark in Western Europe with such force that they went reeling backwards into Spain. From there, it took Spain another 750 years--until 1492--to drive Islamic armies back into North Africa, whence they had invaded. Even so, the Islamic terror bombers who just a few years ago killed more than a hundred commuters in Madrid did so (they announced) to avenge the Spanish "Reconquista" of 1492. For Islam, to lose a territory once Muslim is to incur a religious obligation to wrest it back. It had been a marvel in 732 that a mere one hundred years earlier, Mohammed had launched his army from Medina, to conquer in rapid fire so many of the most glorious capital cities of Christianity--Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Hippo, Tunis, Carthage, and then all of Spain. More amazingly still, Muslims went very quickly further into the Far East than Alexander the Great ever had. Even today, in the eyes of influential Muslims, the expansion of Islam (although it covers a huge swathe of geography) is far from finished. The religious obligation at the heart of Islam is to conquer the world for Allah, and to incorporate it all into the great Islamic Umma. Only then will the world be at peace. Submission to Allah is the reason why the world was created. In any case, Islam began making war on the Christian world from the very first moments of its birth. For a thousand years afterward, it fell to southern Europe, and in particular the Pope, to give active military resistance to the "Saracens" (as the Islamists came to be known in the West). From 632 A.D. until about 1292, Arab nations led the Muslim onslaught on the West. After that, the Turks established their dominion (the caliphate) over most of the Arab world. For hundreds of years a huge sea war ensued for control of the Mediterranean. But war by land was not called off. The Turks expanded their empire in all four directions on the map. For more than a century they made attempt after attempt to take down the largest and richest of the Christian capitals, Constantinople, whose walls they finally breached in 1453. There followed great plunder, huge fires of destruction, the desecration of Christian basilicas and churches, murder, torture and thousands of Christian men, women, and children marched off in long lines toward slavery in the East. A long line of great warrior-sultans sponsored Turkish advances in shipbuilding, gunnery, military organization, and training. By the mid 1550s, they had slowly conceived of a long-term offensive, a pincers movement first by sea and then by land, to conquer the whole northern shore of the Mediterranean. They first launched a massive sea attack in 1665 on the crossroads of the Mediterranean, the strategically placed island of Malta, and were repelled after an epic siege (which in itself is one of history's great stories). Their penultimate aim was to take all Italy; then all Europe. The northern pincers movement by land was aimed at an attack up through the Balkans for the conquest of Budapest and then, in a northeast arc into Slovakia and Poland. In this way, the Muslim forces would essentially encircle Italy from the North. Because by 1540 the Reformation was separating the Christian nations of the north from Rome, the Sultans soon recognized that the Christian world would no longer fight as one. The next hundred years or so would be the most fruitful time since Mohammed to fulfill the destiny of Islam in Europe. The Preliminary Battles on Malta (1565) and at Famagusta (1571) Each new caliph of the Islamic empire was expected to expand the existing Muslim territories, in order to fulfill the mission given Islam, and to gain for the leader the necessary popularity and legitimacy. So it was that in the pleasant springtime of 1571, an entire Muslim fleet under Ali Pasha was ordered by the Sultan to seek out and destroy Christian dominance of the Mediterranean Sea, all the way up to Venice. During the summer, Ali Pasha raided fort after fort along the Adriatic Shore, picked up thousands of hostages as slaves, and sent at least a small squadron to blockade for two or three days the approaches to St. Mark's Square in Venice, not least to plant a seed of terror about worse things to come. Meanwhile, another large Muslim force soon conquered Cyprus, most practicing ritual cruelties on the defeated population of Nicosia, setting fire to churches, beheading the older women, and marching all younger Christians of both sexes into slavery. The Muslim armies then headed north for the fortress of Famagusta, the last Venetian stronghold on the island, the "extended arm" of the trading posts and protective forts of the Venetian navy in the entire eastern Mediterranean. An army of 100,000 opened the siege, against a force of 15,000 behind the walls. Under the energetic general-ship of the elderly General Marcantonio Bragadino, the small band of defenders held out for week after week, despite receiving more than 180,000 incoming cannonballs. The defenders ran so short of food that in the end they were eating cats, until they consumed their last one. The Muslim general was outraged by the length of the siege, which had already cost him 80,000 of his best men, despite the fact that Famagusta's fate was sealed from the first days. Yet there were still long days and sometimes nights of hard hand-to-hand fighting just outside the walls. Muslim losses kept getting fully replenished by sea, and the Muslim forces grew stronger even as the Christians got down to their last six barrels of gunpowder, and had only four hundred men still able to fight. On August 1, General Bragadino finally accepted surrender terms, which guaranteed safe passage of all his men to sail home to Venice, and safety to all citizens of the walled city. He walked with the full scarlet regalia of his office out from the walls and down to the tent of the Alfa Mustafa, the victorious commander. There the two leaders conversed. Then something went wrong, and Mustafa grew visibly angry and called for his men to behead the full complement of 350 survivors who had laid down their arms to march out with Bragadino. All 350 bleeding heads were piled up just outside Mustafa's tent. Mustafa then ordered Bragadino's ears and nose chopped off, and forced the man to go down on all fours wearing a dog's collar around his neck, to the jibes, mockery, and horror of the onlookers. Bags of earth were strapped over Bragadino's back and he was made to carry them to the walls of the fortification, and to kiss the earth each time he passed Mustafa. As the old man grew fainter from the loss of blood from his head, he was tied to a chair, put in a rope harness and hoisted up to the highest mast in the fleet, so that all survivors of the city might see his humiliation. Then Bragadino's chair was dropped in free-fall into the water and brought out again. The tortured Venetian was led in ropes to the town square and stripped. At a stone column (which still stands today), Bragadino's hands were tied outstretched over his head, and an executioner stepped forward with sharp knives to carefully remove his skin, keeping it whole. Before the carver had reached Bragadino's waist, the man was dead. His full skin was then stuffed with straw, once again raised up to the highest mast, and sailed around to various ports as a trophy of victory, and finally taken back to Istanbul for permanent exhibition. Meanwhile, Don Juan had put the Christian fleet of some 200 vessels on course toward Lepanto, where Ali Pasha was refitting his vessels in the safe protection of an impregnable harbour. On board the Christian ships, the Spaniards were under secret orders to avoid fighting, only to keep their honour by going along, while urging reasons to turn back. By contrast, when a fast corsair dispatched from Famagusta arrived to deliver the tale of the last dishonours visited on General Bragadino and his 350 surviving soldiers, the blood of the Venetians boiled. They now allowed no question of turning back. They were determined to avenge the horrors suffered by their comrades in arms. The young Don Juan was buoyed by this new resolve. Now he would be able to keep the vow he had made to Pope Pius V, to seek out and destroy the threatening enemy. The young admiral--he was twenty-two when he became commander of this fleet--felt confident in his battle plan. He had taken care to have his whole fleet rehearse their roles in the quiet seas of the Adriatic, just before turning toward Lepanto. Don Juan and many of his men spent much of the night before battle in prayer. The fate of their civilization, they knew, depended on their good fortune on the morrow. The uncertainties of the changing winds and choppy seas, and the speed of the two onrushing lines of ships rapidly closing on each other, would erupt in unpredictable havoc. The odds against the Christians in ships were something like 350 ships to 250. But the Christians had a secret weapon. The Greatest Sea Battle in History: Lepanto, October 1571 For more than three years Pope Pius V had laboured mightily to sound alarms about the deadly Muslim build-up in the shipyards of Istanbul. The sultan had been stung by the surprising defeat of his overwhelming invasion force in Malta in 1565. The savagery of Muslim attacks on the coastline villages of Italy, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece was ratcheted upwards. Three or four Muslim galleys would offload hundreds of marines, sweep through a village, tie all its healthy men together for shipment out to become galley slaves, march away many of its women and young boys and girls for shipment to Eastern harems, and then gather all the elderly into the village church, where the helpless victims would be beheaded, and sometimes cut up into little pieces, to strike terror into other villages. The Muslims believed that future victims would lose heart and swiftly surrender when Muslim raiders arrived. Over three centuries, the number of European captives kidnapped from villages and beaches by these sea pirates climbed into the hundreds of thousands. The reason for this kidnapping was that the naval appetite for fresh backs and muscles was insatiable. Most galley slaves lived little more than five years. They were chained to hard benches in the burning Mediterranean sun, slippery in their own excrement, urination, and intermittent vomiting, often never lying down to sleep. The dark vision that troubled the pope during the late 1560s was of even more horrible calamities to befall the whole Christian world, bit by bit. But unity in Europe was hard to find, and even more scarce was the will to fight for survival. Finally, Don Juan of Austria, the younger brother of the King of Spain, an illegitimate son, stood erect and summoned allies to repel the much-anticipated Muslim advance. He aimed at leading a large fleet to go after the new Muslim fleet pre-emptively, before they could depart from their home seas. Having seen Muslim ferocity first hand, the Venetian public was eager to contribute a fleet to the task. Their support was crucial, for Venice was in those days the shipbuilding and gunnery capital of the world, producers (for a profit) of the most innovative, most versatile, stoutest, and most seaworthy armed vessels in the world. The best sea captains of Venice were the most eager to avenge their friends and fellow citizens. For years, Venice had preferred peace with the Muslim East, in order to carry on their lucrative international trade. Now there was a cause that took precedence over the traditions of commerce. Genoa, too, contributed a fleet under their famous but now elderly Admiral Andrea Doria, these days a less bold warrior despite the glory of his earlier exploits. The Knights of Malta, the premier sea warriors of the time, offered their small but highly skilled fleet in support of the Pope's appeal, and agreed to work cooperatively with Don Juan. The latter, whom his contemporaries described as a modest and humble man, characteristically set aside his own ego for the sake of the cause that engaged him. He pledged to the armada a large contingent supplied by Spain and Portugal. By the end of September 1571, eager to get their job done before winter turned the seas choppy and unfit for battle, the four distinct parts of the Christian fleet sailed past Italy, hugging the coasts, sending teams of observers to land to pick up the latest intelligence on the Muslim force. Finally, they learned that an enormous Muslim fleet, nearly 100 ships larger than their own, was sailing near to land toward the Gulf of Lepanto. No more talking, Don Juan told his leading admirals; now, battle. Keeping the Knights of Malta in reserve just a short distance behind the main battle line, Don Juan assigned the impassioned Venetians the important left flank, with its leftmost ships close to the shore line. He himself commanded a hundred vessels at the center. In plain sight was his capitol ship, the Real, its banners of leadership visible to all. To the right flank he assigned the venerable Andrea Doria and the Genoese fleet. The plan was to hold his ships in as long and straight a line as seamanship in a besetting wind would allow, while heading directly for the Muslim line. At his front, however, Don Juan placed a nasty surprise for Ali Pasha. Six new, taller, sturdier ships packed with cannons (especially in the bow) and heavily laden with lead and shot placed themselves a mile forward of the Christian line. They looked flat on top, like merchant ships. No one had ever seen such ships before. They lacked a bow rising up skywards, the one necessary weapon for vicious ramming. For the purpose of these new galleasses, as they were called, was not to ram oncoming ships but to blast them with an array of cannons. Their shot could carry a mile with great accuracy. When the galleasses turned sideways, they could blast with even more cannons, designed for shorter ranges, often aiming their cannon just at the waterline of their foes. They had the power to sink a smaller, lighter, faster Muslim galley with a single burst. At first, the two fleets spotted each other on the horizon as single masts, then small numbers, and only as the two fleets closed to about two miles of each other could any one of the two hundred thousand sailors, marines, and janissaries on board catch a glimpse of the lines and dispositions of the fleets. The Muslims preferred to attack in a crescent rather than a straight line, but the winds at their back and tricky tides from the shoreline to their north forced them to straighten up their lines. Those who gazed on the massive array of ships and sails were filled with awe. On deck, one of those to be wounded in this battle, the great author Miguel de Cervantes wrote of "the most noble and memorable event that past centuries have seen." Just over six hundred ships in two amazingly orderly lines, each stretching three miles from end to end, silently bore down on one another as the distance between them closed. The Muslim fleet outnumbered the Christian fleet by nearly a hundred ships. A sense of destiny weighed upon all who watched and waited. The huge green battle flag of Allah--his name embroidered on it in Arabic some 29,800 times--marked out the tall capital ship Sultana, on which the fearsome young admiral Ali Pasha held command. Pasha was puzzled by the six more or less flat barges out in front of the Christian lines. His own armed soldiers were reliant mostly on clouds of arrows. His sailors had mastered the arts of ramming, and disgorging massive boarding parties onto the enemy's slippery decks, then beating down their defenders by a sort of fierce land warfare out on the open seas. In those days, sea warfare was like land warfare, only carried out on open decks side-by-side instead of in open fields. Ship was lashed to ship, sometimes a dozen together. Hand-to-hand combat was the key. There is no point here in giving the whole narrative of the battle. Suffice it to say that in the center the volleys from the galleasses out in front destroyed one Muslim vessel after another. Masts snapped, the oars of the galleys were shattered, and huge holes opened up the thin wooden sides of the galleys to the boiling sea. The Muslim ships that were not sunk were easily boarded by the Christian ships coming alongside, built a little higher, and amply supplied not only with boarding nets but, even more important, with ranks of the old-style predecessors to rifles--the arquebuses--directing point-blank rifle balls into the unarmored flesh of Muslim archers. It is true that in a few cases whole clouds of Muslim arrows felled many in the Christian ships, including the great Venetian admiral Marcantonio Bragadino shot in the eye. Mostly, the Christian warriors wore the latest in body armour, which often repelled wooden arrows harmlessly. Nonetheless, at least one Christian ship was later found aimlessly afloat, with every single man dead or wounded. At the last, the two capital ships Real and Sultana clashed head-on, and Don Juan led the final boarding party which in its ferocity drove Ali Pasha to the aft poop, where he soon fell with a bullet in his eye. The Muslim admiral's head was cut off and borne aloft on a pike to be mounted on the bow of the Real. The seas around were filled with cloaks, caps, struggling bodies, the vast wooden wreckage of battle, and large splotches of red blood. On the Christian left, the Venetians attacked with almost blind rage and broke the line of the Muslim right with relative ease. They were aided by a revolt of the galley slaves on board a number of Muslim vessels, who in the explosions on board had their chains broken, and poured up on deck swinging their chains to left and right. So great was the Venetian fury that even after the battle, many of its sailors spent hours using their pikes to kill Muslim sailors and soldiers struggling in the sea. They tried to excuse their bloodlust by saying that they never wished to see those individuals sailing against the West again. In four hours the battle was over. More than forty thousand men had died, and thousands more were wounded, more than in any other battle in history, more even than at Salamis or, in years to come, at the Somme. Never again did the Muslim fleets pose a grave danger to Europe from the South, although of course Muslim fleets kept busy expanding their bases on the African coast, harassing Western ships and territories across the Mediterranean. Technology especially that pioneered by Venice and by ocean-going Portugal and Spain had made the decisive difference. As Victor Davis Hanson writes, it was to capitalism that the victory was owed, for it was open markets that spurred competition to keep improving gunnery and ships, and it was the great merchant and commercial cities that built these new technologies. After Lepanto, the arts of gunnery replaced the arts of the bow and arrow, however deadly for many centuries those weapons had proved to be. Ships were made stouter, taller, more able to carry heavy armaments--and new methods had to be sought to replace locomotion by galley slaves.   As news of the great victory of October 7 reached shore, church bells rang all over the cities and countryside of Europe. For months, Pius V had urged Catholics to say the daily rosary on behalf of the morale and good fortune of the Christian forces, and above all, a successful outcome to the highly risky pre-emptive strike against the Turkish fleets. Thereafter, he declared that October 7 would be celebrated as the feast of "Mary, Queen of Victory." A later pope added the title "Queen of the Holy Rosary" in honour of the laity's favourite form of prayer. All over the Italian peninsula, great paintings were commissioned--whole galleries were dedicated--to honouring the classic scenes of that epic battle. The air of Europe that October tasted of liberties preserved. The record of the celebrations lives on in glorious paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, and many others. The Northern Pincers and the Siege of Vienna, September 1683 Of necessity, our consideration of the Battle of Vienna must be briefer than our attention to Lepanto. But many of the same forces were at play as before, only this time by land, not by sea. The Protestant nations regarded the expanding Ottoman Empire as a Catholic problem. Few Catholic nations took the Muslim threat as seriously as it deserved. The French, in particular, had become used to buying off the Turks with trade and commerce, rather than resisting them in war. The French even preferred the defeat of their most dreaded rivals, the German-speaking Austrians. The nation Germany did not yet exist, only a number of smaller political units--Brandenberg, Saxony, Bavaria, and others, some Protestant and some Catholic. And so the Muslim overland advance through the underbelly of Europe seemed not only relentless but mostly unopposed. The sultan of all Islam, Mehmet IV, spent his days in his unrivalled harems and on his huge hunting territories, some of them as large as nation-states. Thousands of mostly Slavic serfs were required to service his hunting party, in part by driving deer and other game animals his way. To uphold his obligations to Islamic expansion, however, Mehmet stirred himself to choose Kara Mustafa to be general of all his forces in the final conquest of Hungary, Slovakia, and the south of Poland -- the greatest of all ventures on which the sultan's historical reputation would rest. The sultan directly warned Mustafa not to try to take Vienna, for doing so would arouse the West to retribution. He gave Mustafa the long green cord of the Prophet to wear around his neck, both to signal the importance of his commission, and to warn him that failure meant that he must be hanged--must even hang himself. For the drive northward, Kara Mustafa sent messengers throughout Anatolia, through Greater Syria, and out to the scores of Muslim nations from Morocco to India. He marched northwards with an ever-increasing army of more than three hundred thousand, many on horseback as cavalry to spread terror in advance of his main forces, other scores of thousands in his supply trains. This huge army took some five months to occupy Budapest, rest, and then push on northwards. They swatted resistance away like flies, and sometimes bypassed walled cities that refused instant surrender, to deal with them later with special severity. By July 7, they were in sight of Vienna, which in those days was a walled and heavily fortified city, well designed by its military engineers to lay down fields of fire by which each strong point could assist its neighbours. Compared to today, Vienna within its walls was a small city, and yet large enough in those terrorized days to admit refugees from nearby villages who hurriedly sought safety. For the next weeks the sultan's armies kept tightening the ring they had established on all sides of Vienna. Both Mustafa with his green cord around his neck and the leader of the Viennese defence, General Lubomirski, now knew that they were fighting to the death. Meanwhile, the Turks launched massive engineering works, including many honeycombed tunnels beginning from long distances away, out of sight, and burrowing underneath strong points and vulnerable walls that ground troops might breach. These veteran and highly skilled sappers--the best in the world--dug all the way underground both to the wide moats at the base of the walls and still further underground to the very center of Vienna. Beginning in mid-August, without any warning, huge explosions tore gaping holes in one strongpoint after another, and sometimes beneath homes in the very center of the city. The twenty thousand or so warriors within the city fought with great determination and intelligence to drive back the screaming, bloodthirsty men who were storming through the breaches, while all around them Viennese civilians rushed to make repairs to the breaches in the walls. The Christians also sallied forth themselves, often at night, to drive far into the Turkish lines to blow up engineering devices and stockpiles of gunpowder. Relentlessly, the Turks kept heaving up huge mounds--small mountains--of earth and sand just outside the walls, from which fire might constantly be poured down into the doomed city, from above its walls. With every Muslim attack, fewer and fewer Christian soldiers were left to repel them. In late August, supplies of meat ran out, and the population was reduced to eating horses and stray dogs. A very strict rationing of water became necessary. The elderly began to die off from starvation. Meanwhile, the Christian relief forces were belatedly and all too slowly advancing from the north in four separate columns, from Catholic Germany and from Poland, to lift the siege. For nearly forty miles around the beleaguered city, Muslims had ravaged the land, and sent refugees fleeing by foot in all directions. Thus, making use of captured Muslim cavalrymen and foot soldiers, as well as the fleeing Christians, the Germans and the Poles picked up enough intelligence to learn that their best chances lay to the southwest, through the Vienna Wood. It would be hugely difficult terrain for cavalry, and also for quick forced marches by the infantry. But one other factor spoke for that line of attack: the supply trains and Mustafa's luxurious tents, with their splendid harems and rich treasury, were also located on that side of Vienna. The approaching Christian generals met together to go over the plan of attack, and then rapidly set off to their southwest, far enough from the city to advance mostly undetected. At intervals, back in Vienna, Mustafa had messages in German tied to dozens of rocks, which he had his catapults shoot over the city walls. One such message read:     Surrender now and you will be saved. Open your gates, turn your churches over to us and lay down your arms, and no one will be killed. If you resist the will of Allah, your leaders, and all of them, will be slain. Able men and women will be sold into slavery. You will be allowed no rights of worship, and your mighty walls will be thrown down. Fight and you die! Surrender and you live! For more than four hundred years, hundreds of Christian villages and cities had received such messages. The duplicity and primitive brutality of Muslim conquerors were well known to hundreds of thousands of Christian families, through the fate of relatives in other overrun communities. Nevertheless, sometimes terror overwhelmed them and they surrendered. At Vienna, behind fearless and determined leaders, they chose to die fighting rather than to surrender. So the issue inside Vienna became whether food and gunpowder would give out before the long-promised army of relief would arrive. Dauntless messengers slipping in and out of Vienna kept hope at least flickering. The commander in Vienna promised he could hold out until September 1. The advancing army of relief replied that they would need almost two weeks more than that. Only gritted-teeth determination could bridge that gap in time. One thing the Muslim armies were not trained to do, as were the Christian armies of that time, was to fight on two fronts--against the city ahead and against any oncoming forces that might arrive to break the siege. For this, Kara Mustafa relied on his mobile cavalry, some twenty thousand Tatars from the Asian steppes in camp about twenty miles south of Vienna. Because of the density of the Vienna Wood to the southwest of the city, this was the one region which the cavalry could cover only lightly. Still, if even small bands of mounted Tatars had infiltrated the hills and valleys of the Wood, no Christian soldiers could have made it through the narrow passes. Unaccountably, Mustafa forbade the Tatar leader to launch an attack on the Wood. King Sobieski of Poland had drawn the privilege of advancing on the right flank, right through the heart of the Vienna Wood. His army's double-time March through the Wood was arduous, by narrow valleys and slow but deep summer streams. Late on September 11, just as his men were making their initial contact with the Turkish outposts, and the final battle began to be joined, the King formed a resolution to attack on the morrow as swiftly and with as much surprise as possible, to overwhelm Mustafa's bodyguard of cavalry and rush on with force as close to the supply trains as he could, and to conclude the matter on the next day. In the rough terrain where his troops broke out from the Wood on September 12, Sobieski held his famed hussars back. They were his best, his ultimate, weapon. For hours all day long, left, center, and right flanks of the Christian army advanced far more steadily than expected, although the hand-to-hand fighting was furious, and the Turkish lines were yielding only a yard at a time. The last four hundred yards took an immense effort, but the Christian forces reached open ground with less than an hour of daylight left. This is when Sobieski made a huge gamble and boldly released his much-feared hussars. These famous horsemen wore special caps with strips of leather flying behind them in the wind, lined with feathers like the headdresses of American Indians, and the wind whistled through the leather with an eerie tone. As they charged across the open land the low, melancholy wail of the wind through their feathers frightened the Arabian horses--and their Turkish riders, too. The sheer speed and force of the Polish hussars was too great and too surprising to be resisted. Mustafa escaped, but his tents and treasury were captured (one of his green velvet tents sit now in the Czartoryskis Museum in Krakow). The Muslim lines nearby broke, and their men began looting Mustafa's rich supply wagons and pleasure tents on their panicky flight southward. The entire Muslim ring surrounding the city melted away, back whence it had come. Mustafa, slowed by a bad wound to his eye, was rushed southward by his remaining bodyguards. From the first moments of crushing defeat he began plotting his reports to the sultan, shifting the blame onto one of his subordinates. Yet as the Christians pursued the once-great Muslim army down through Hungary, retaking one city after another from Muslim control, and in effect laying the groundwork for the future Austro-Hungarian Empire, the sultan's anger against Mustafa finally exploded. Mustafa recognized what must happen. He was hanged on December 25, 1683, by the green cord that he had worn round his neck, a little more than three months after he had imagined he had Vienna in his grasp. Thus, once again, this time by land, the Muslims had attempted to fulfill the Prophet's command to spread Islam to all corners of the world decisively, with force. The sultans had long had the advantage of an enormous standing army ready for all seasons, and swiftly added to when larger ambitions demanded. This time, however, the siege-lifting battle outside the walls of Vienna marked the high-water mark of Muslim power. After September 11-12, 1683, that power kept receding, on into modern times. Still, it should surprise no one that the date chosen to bring the new resurgence of modern Muslim ambition to the whole world's attention was also September 11, 318 years after 1683. The announcement came in the vivid orange bursts of blossoming flame and dark black smoke from two of the tallest towers of the West's financial capital. Muslim memory runs very deep, and so does the Muslim imperative to conquer the world for Allah, not just by force of arms but by conversion to Islam. The West has always refused to give this long and deeply rooted Muslim threat against the West's own soul the sustained attention it requires. Nonetheless, four centuries after Lepanto, three centuries after Vienna, today in most of the capitals of once-Christian Europe, there are more Muslims attending services in mosques on Fridays, than Christians at worship on Sundays. In some ways, the pluralism of the West is a blessing, even an advantage to the West--and yet its profoundest historical weakness lies in its own divided spirit. The ultimate issue between Islam and the West is not military force. It is the depth of intellect and engagement. In matters of the spirit, we seem always to become tongue-tied, as if lacking in spirited confidence. We do not insist on presenting better arguments in recognition of the inalienable rights to human liberty that our totalitarian opponents deny. Mere secular force will not do, when the fundamental battle is spiritual. Thus, the same movie seems to be played over and over. That is the historical record, it seems, at least in regard to October 7, 1571, and September 11-12, 1683, after Lepanto, and after Vienna. Revisiting a topic from the first Bradley Lecture Series in 1988-1989, Michael Novak delivered the fourth instalments of AEI's twentieth-anniversary Bradley Lecture Series on December 8, 2008. Video, audio, and more information are available at www.aei.org/event1775/. Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at AEI.  Source: http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.29055/pub_detail.asp ----------------------------- British Muslims must follow law of the land: Sir Ghulam Noon LONDON: Muslims settling down in the UK must not demand parallel Sharia law in the country and follow the law of the land instead, leading NRI entrepreneur 'Curry King' Sir Ghulam Noon has said. "Those who are complaining about Sharia law should follow the rules of the land. If you want Sharia law then go to the country where it is prevailing. This is my message," Noon said at the launch of his autobiography, 'NOON, With a View'. The 72-year-old Sir Noon, who narrowly survived the recent terrorists' attack in Mumbai, said the UN should deal with the scourge of terrorism and cautioned that unless something drastic was done, the country which is harbouring terrorists would have to pay a heavy price. He also said that religion does not sanction violence and terrorists have no religion. "Quran says if you kill one human being, you are killing humanity and if you save one, you are saving the humanity," said Sir Noon. Narrating his brush with death when terrorists struck the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai on November 26, Sir Noon said he, his brother and two others were to dine at the Hotel's restaurant which came under attack but they decided at the last moment to have their dinner in their room. He said this was the fourth time he had narrowly escaped death. He had earlier escaped a road accident as a 22 year old in India before surviving an air crash in Baghdad in 1972. Subsequently, he also survived a bomb blast in a taxi near the same Taj Hotel in Mumbai. http://newageislam.org/NewAgeIslamArticleDetail.aspx?ArticleID=1054 ---