The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Of Conversions

Of Conversions
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Monday, April 2 2007, 20:09:49 (CEST)
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It’s very hard to credit stories of people steeped in one faith, in one set of traditions passed down from their ancestors, converting willingly to an entirely different faith with its own set of traditions. To the people first hearing about Christianity, Jesus and the Hebrews he came from might just as well have been from outer space. One can follow the logical progression from Hebrew to Christian, indeed it’s the path Jesus took…or even from Hebrew to Christian to Muslim…but for anyone, especially any culture, not steeped in Hebrew tradition, to all of a sudden adopt something so foreign to its own ways and beliefs simply on hearing this “good news” is just too much to swallow.

Here again we have over 1000 years of recent history which tells us how people really reacted when hearing the Christian message; they remained unmoved and unconvinced. One has to conclude they responded no differently from the very beginning, that is; they were always indifferent and unconvinced until some combination of force and violence was applied. Indeed the common denominator shared by those who “converted”…maybe even willingly, seems to be their proximity to and treatment at the hands of the Roman Empire. Life back then, even before the Romans, was short and harsh. With the addition of Roman arms and rule it perhaps became unbearably so.

Martin Luther says the Christian faith must be divine because of the solace it affords human beans…that only God could have designed such a “hope”. But it would be very easy to make up a religion with that criterion…that is if a religion is to be seen as god-inspired simply because it relieves the torture humans apply to one another. One could promise relief from the thumb-screw to anyone who would agree to believe in the divinity of a boiled egg, or a cup of coffee, or my god Mugwhump, if such belief saved one’s thumb.

The Romans made life even shorter and more brutal on millions of people in the over 100 nations they subjugated and put to work and exploited for the benefit of a couple of thousand top Romans. There was effectively no escape from Rome, except in death( and soon they could even pursue you into the afterlife). Under these horrific circumstances people might choose to believe in a religion that told them to render unto Caesar, because they had no choice anyway, until death not only set them free but promised, as a reward for obedience, to place them above their rulers in an unheard of paradise where all would be cream and cookies forever.

They might have chosen “willingly” to convert to such a “faith” and “hope”…but even under these circumstances it would be hard to imagine people feeling so friendly to this religion once the Romans themselves put it to work for their empire…so that not only were the Romans making the rules on earth but they next got to decide on who and how their subjects qualified for paradise…and true to Roman form, if you didn’t like their way of living on earth, they could kill you…and next, if you didn’t like their way of getting you to heaven, they would also kill you and, additionally, make sure you couldn’t get in. One would think that would have been the end of willing conversions to the “package deal” they made of the Imperial Roman Christian religion…and it probably was.

Muhammad wasn’t of Hebrew stock, so far as anyone knows. Neither was he a Christian, though he came into contact with members of both religions…or one religion and its sect. For a man who was presumably pagan and from an entirely different background to found a religion which claimed to grow from and complete the other two is, well, is strange to say the least.

The “genius” of Islam, as a religion and not as an inspirational force, is the manner in which it dealt with conversions in order to “grow and spread”…. For all that we hear of Islam’s violence and killing of those who refused to convert to it, the truth is rather different. It was Christians who murdered people of different faiths just for their different faith…as they murdered each other for expressing the slightest variation of their one religion, or refusing to be “converted”. There’s really no need to dredge all that up again. And, when for a brief moment the Hebrews had the chance, they too went to killing their own people for refusing the “universality” of their new god, Yahweh.

But what was Islam’s record….given that here and there all human beans have been rat bastards. By and large how did Islam deal with Jews and Christians? For one thing, as a theocracy, Islam realized it could not force non-Muslims to live under its own sharia law. The very fact that Jews and Christians have survived in Muslim lands all these centuries means Muslims did not try to forcibly convert what soon were to be minority communities they could very easily have wiped out for their resistance to Islam. Instead they allowed “freedom” in religion…which meant people were free to practice the religion they were born into and pass that religion onto their own offspring.

What Christians, with their pain-in-the-ass “apostolic” evangelical tradition mean by “freedom” in religion is that they are free to bang on your door at all hours insisting you listen to their “good news” and goddamn you to hell if you , just as freely, refuse. This is one-sided freedom…the freedom given to oneself to force another to forego his own freedom…the freedom to be let alone in one’s religious beliefs….which is what Muslims allowed to Christians and Jews.

To guarantee such freedom of conscience to Jews and Christians and others, the Muslims adopted the millet system from the Sasanians…which allowed Jews and Muslims to be ruled by their own religious laws and traditions. What could be more reasonable, humane or fair? Granted there were disadvantages that went along with it because non-Muslims were effectively shut out of the mainstream…but did they want to be in it? While Muslim farmers and peasants were drafted to fight in the wars of their leaders, non-Muslims were allowed to remain at home, with their families, tilling the soil or busy in their shops….all for a small fee to be paid in lieu of military service. One wonders how many Muslim fathers and sons and husbands would have been glad to be so excused from war?

As Dr Joseph points out, for the handful few Muslims who converted to Christianity, thousands of Christians converted to Islam…and neither did it because of any force applied…the Christians converted because, for one thing, Islam wasn’t that far away from Christianity…as Christianity wasn’t that far from Judaism. Muslims accepted Abraham as the common ancestor of them all…they accepted the Jewish prophets and laws and revered Jesus as well as his mother….all Muhammad did was claim to bring the latest word from the same god…to correct some of the abuses of Christianity…as Jesus claimed he was improving on the message of the earlier Jewish prophets. Add to this the very practical fact that conversion to Islam allowed converts to fully join and be a part of the dominant majority and one can at least see a reason for converting….especially when the distance traveled is not so far. It isn’t like going from Hottenetot to Christian, to go from Christian to Muslim…

The Muslims were no doubt as interested in increasing their numbers as were the Christians. But their manner of doing it was far more humane and wiser too. They allowed time to take its course…they refused to kill, outright, any Christians or Jews who would not instantly convert…neither did they kill them just for their religion but, on the contrary, they held those religions in high esteem. Instead they made a place for them in their own theocratic state…they allowed them to live and work and care for their families, even sparing them the disruptions and cost of military service…they allowed them to practice their faith, they allowed them to be ruled by their own clerics and traditions. What more could they have done in the way of respecting the religious beliefs of these non-Muslims?

They had to make some distinction, however, so they imposed a dress code which wasn’t always applied…and they charged a most reasonable tax, which conferred a benefit as well. One could say they shrewdly allowed greed and financial considerations to take their slow toll on their Christian and Jewish subjects…but was that really so bad? All in all, one can see many good reasons for Christians and Jews choosing Islam, when it was the religion of the dominant majority especially and also since it claimed to be the continuation of the other two…but even before then because it offered a way out of the brutal squabbling and greed of bishops and their violent retainers.

And, finally, it was under the millet system that Nestorians had their greatest freedoms and guarantees, as a specific sect. The collapse of that system and the growth of the nation-sate, ruled “democractically” by numerical majorities has meant the loss of any special privileges, for every minority…unless it is “special” to be treated equally, for a change.



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