Relative Violence in Islam and Christianity
By Nick Gier, New West Unfiltered 6-06-07
RELATIVE VIOLENCE IN ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY
Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho (ngier@uidaho.edu)
I'm writing a book on the origins of religious violence and my thesis is that there has been far more religiously motivated violence in the Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—than the Asian religions. Draft chapters can be viewed at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/orv.htm.
A person on our local list-serve Vision2020 had this to say about relative violence in Islam and Christianity: "Up to the eleventh century Islam had a sizable lead. From 1095 to 1291 the Church picked up the pace and nosed ahead. It was neck and neck till 1834 and the end of the Spanish Inquisition. After that Allah's chosen made it no contest." There are a few problems with this summary history.
Islam could not possibly have had any sort of lead before the 11th Century because Christianity had a very good head start. Under Theodosius I, being a pagan was a capital crime, and even Christians were arrested if they practiced even the most minor of pagan practices.
On December 25, 390, Theodosius ordered the slaughter of 7,000 pagans in Thessalonica. The British historian Hugh Trevor Roper called Theodosius "the first Spanish Inquisitor," and "the Christian monarch who introduced the world to religious totalitarianism."
Bishop Ambrose, who baptized St. Augustine, made Theodosius do penance for the atrocities at Thessalonica, but he still proclaimed that "Christ was now at the head of the [Roman] legions."
This reminds me of the sign outside a fundamentalist church in L.A., right after the invasion of Iraq: "Christ is our Commander-in-Chief." I'm assuming that our born-again president would have to agree with this demotion.
Under Muslim rule Jews and Christians were generally asked to offer a special tax, not their heads. The slaughter of 4,000 Jews in Muslim Granada in 1066 was the exception rather than the rule, and Jews generally had much better lives in Muslim Spain than anywhere else in Christian Europe.
In 1099, men, women, and children were slaughtered indiscriminately when Christian forces captured Jerusalem. An eyewitness reported that the Crusaders "rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered so long from their blasphemies."
When Saladin retook the city in 1187, Christians were only required to pay a ransom and then free to return home. Some of Saladin's officers paid for those who could not afford it, and about 7,000 others were sold into slavery.
In Muslim India Buddhist and Hindus were, incredibly enough, declared "People of the Book," and the tax on non-Muslims was only sporadically enforced and even more infrequently collected.
Most of the ancestors of Muslims in Pakistan, Bangladesh (especially here), India, Indonesia, and Malaysia freely converted to Islam. Areas in India where forced conversions were attempted are now the places where one finds the fewest Muslims per capita.
Some Mughal emperors ordered the destruction of Hindu and Buddhist temples, but local resistance and intimidated Mughal functionaries meant that relatively few temples were liquidated. Early Christian emperors were much more successful in destroying pagan temples, including the one in Alexandria that housed the finest library in the ancient world.
Curiously, the Vision2020 post above ended Christian atrocities in 1834, but during the Taiping Rebellion, Chinese Christian armies were responsible for killing 10-20 million people between 1852-1864. I would hazard a guess that more Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian temples were destroyed by the Taipings in 12 years than 600 years of Muslim rule in India.
Some have claimed that the Taipings were not really Christians, but that is simply not the case. They took great pains to eliminate Chinese religious influences; they enforced the 10 Commandments at the point of a sword; and they followed the Bible very carefully, including the prophecies in the Book of Revelation.
Short of Osama bin Laden getting several nukes and using them, militant Muslims have a long way to go to match the historical Christian kill rate.
Nick Gier taught religion and philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years. See his columns as the Palouse Pundit at www.NickGier.com.
Comments
I think the author is politically biased. Its ok he is biased but he seems to be glorifying the Mughal rule of India. Hindus were forcibly converted, tortured and women raped. There were no single muslim in Kashmir few centuries ago.
Thanks to the British who put an end to Islamic rule.
I did not mention the brutal Congolese war as I believe it to be a tribal conflict that had no religious motivation and ,therefore, no relevance to these discussions.
Just a further comment on the professor's column. The leader of the Taiping Rebellion was a total nut case and eventually committed suicide which is the most heinous sin in Christianity. This uprising didn't start as a holy war as the professor seems to suggest. There was great political, social, and economic unrest in China at the time.
Let me first start with a correction. Hong Xiuquan did not commit suicide; he died of an illness. He was no more a "nutcase" than any other religious visionary, including Jesus and Paul.
Hong was trained and baptized by Hong Kong missionaries and they initially supported his holy war against the Ching Dynasty. There were explicit religious motivations in this holocaust. Please read my paper at http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/orv.htm or any recent work on the subject.
By the way, I do not agree with way that many Muslims segregate their women, just as I don't agree with the oppression of women in many fundamentalist churches.
Finally, I agree that numbers of dead and kill rate are not the real point, which is, I agree with you, the real reasons behind the killing. Here you might want to read my essay "Chilling Parallels between Christian and Islamic Fundamentalists" at http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/parallels.htm
There was horrible killing on both sides during the Partition.
Although there was lots of killing during the Muslim invasions of India, I was surprised to find in my research that the violence was mitigated by a number of factors, including the reciprocal violence of Hindu warriors such as Shivaji.
Please read my essay at http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/mm.htm and then tell me if you think I'm biased.
It seems to differ from your opinion and validate mine.
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/core9/phalsall/texts/chinhist.html
"By 1862 the movement was losing steam, weakened by internal strife and defections. Nanjing fell in July 1864 to the army of Gen. Tseng Kuo-fan, and Hung committed suicide. Sporadic resistance continued for four more years."
http://concise.britannica.com/ebc/article-9367302/Hong-Xiuquan
"His army of more than a million men and women soldiers captured Nanjing, which became Hong's new capital. Power struggles culminated in his leaving affairs of state to his incompetent older brothers; he withdrew and committed suicide in 1864 after a lingering illness."
Hung's mental illness:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0363-6917(195405)13:3<287:TMIOHH>2.0.CO;2-K
"Hung is known to have suffed an accute mental disturbance..."
There are many references to both his mental state and his suicide. However, I am sure you have your references as well.
Perhaps the professor is referring to the rebels, who were led by a guy who declared himself to be Jesus. Hate to break the news, but that's actually heresy and not Christian theology. It makes no sense to judge a religion by those who are clearly not a part of it.
I guess this is what happens when one reaches (and I mean really reaches) to support preconceptions.
If you were my student, relying solely on outdated summary entries on the internet, I would give you an incomplete and instruct you to go to the library and read the most recent scholarship on the subject.
Jonathan Spence's "God's Chinese Son" (Norton, 1996) has been widely praised as the best recent book on the Taipings. See the long review by historian John J. Riley at http://www.johnreilly.info/gcs.htm
Let me summarize his account of Hong's death found on page 325. Nanjing was under siege and the people were starving. Hong ordered the people to collect all the weeds and fungi within the city walls. He insisted that he would have the same diet as his subjects. He and most likely many others died of food poisoning.
The most recent book on the Taipings, Thomas H. Reilly ("The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom" [U.Wash., 2004) writes positively about the piety of the Taipings and praises their Christianity, even though he realizes that it is not completely orthodox. He says nothing about a suicide.
Historian John J. Riley (reference above) does not contradict Spence account of Hong's death: "When the city was finally besieged, Hong was asked what the people should do in the emergency. On the basis of the Book of Exodus, he advised them to eat manna. This he interpreted to mean stray weeds that grew in the streets and waste places of the city. He began to eat this diet himself. Whether for that reason or for some another, he died on June 1, 1864."
The Wikipedia entry appears to be the only encyclopedia that is up on the latest research: "Hong declared that God would defend Nanjing, but in June, with Imperial forces approaching, he died of food poisoning as the result of ingesting wild vegetables as the city began to run out of food."
If anyone knowledgeable about Chinese history mentions a "Chinese Christian army," they will immediately think of the Taipings, and they would not take the cheap shot that you did in your first paragraph.
Let me correct you on one important point. Hong thought he was Jesus' younger brother. The texts and accounts that we have demonstrate that Hong was absolutely strict in his belief that only God the Father was divine and that he and Jesus were not. I think that this is good philosophical theology, wisely avoiding the logical contradiction of a man-god.
Furthermore, Hong made it clear that Jesus was second in command and he had to obey his elder brother on every matter. In this matter Hong was not only a good Christian, but also a good Chinese son.
In my column and full essay (http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/taiping.htm) I show the points on which the Taipings were biblical. Many Catholics still believe that Lutherans and not Christians, and many Protestant have a mutual opinion.
Many people don't believe Mormons are Christians, but when they claim that Jesus Christ is their savior (just as Hong did), I will definitely not contradict them. I think that would be presumptuous and highly disrespectful.
I believe that Hong was more Christian than many Roman Catholics of his period, who had a lot of Buddhist influence, influence that Hong eliminated, along with most of the references to Confucianism and Daoism.
This rejection of religious syncretism makes Hong's claim to Christianity much more credible than the Rev. Moon, who proudly proclaims that in addition to being a Presbyterian, he is also a shaman, a Confucian, and a Buddhist. I believe Hong is a Christian, but Moon is not.
Only God decides whom he will favor. Any other position undermines the sovereignty and freedom of God.
As I said, I am sure you have your sources. Revisionism to fit a particular viewpoint is nothing new. Hung was Mao's hero and model. To see a socialist revision to make Hung a hero is not at all surprising and does not invalidate the other accounts.
Hung was a nut case. Mixing religion to mask his mental instability ony compounds the problem. Christians of the 1850's did not kill millions of people in acts of justified genocide. To compare Hung to Jesus Christ, as you have done, leaves me shaking my head. How many people did Jesus order exterminated?
Maybe it's just me, but I see a very clear anti-Christian bias in your writings.
I believe that I have offered this challenge to you before, but I will repeat it. Please read at least the first chapter of my book "God, Reason, and the Evangelicals" at http://www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/gre.htm.
Then tell me honestly if you think I have anti-Christian bias. I would not have been elected President of the Pacific Northwest American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature in 2003 if I had such a bias. Upwards of 40 percent of the papers at our conferences come from conservative evangelical schools.
There are two types of historical revisionism. The type that Spence and other good historians do is that they revise earlier opinions according to new facts. The bad form is the one for which you accuse them. How dare you impugn the integrity of professionals who must undergo the keen scrutiny of blind review and open debate at professional conferences.
By the way, using the Wade-Giles transliteration for Chinese is usually a sign that you are dealing with outdated materials. It is Hong Xiuquan not Hung Hsiu-ch'uan. The Wade-Giles has survived only because of political animus against Mainline China by Taiwanese and Hong Kong scholars.
How do you define "nut case"? Unless the "nut case" characterization includes anyone who seizes upon the alleged words of an imagined God to impose their world view on others, I don't think your characterization is helpful.
My question is especially relevant because you leverage that characterization to minimize the impact of human rights attrocities committed by a historical christian figure.
Would your definition of "nut case" include people who believe a giant purple teddy bear established mandates of acceptable and not acceptable behavior? Certainly any person who believes this goes away in a straight jacket for a long time.
Would your definition of "nut case" include people who believe some other imagined deity established mandates of acceptable and not acceptable behavior? Hmmmm?
Would your definition of "nut case" include muslims who hold women to a lower class of rights than men based on the word of Allah?
The point is, how should one go about distinguishing between "nut cases" and all the other people in the world who have decided that the word of an unproven and otherwise imagined deity is the ultimate truth????
When human behavior is based on mutual respect and compassion, rather than the maleable and potentially self serving words of imagined deities, the human situation will have moved forward. Until then, we are stuck in the dark ages of religious strife.
And while I personally think that you are correct in pointing out that the contemporary trajectory of human behavior reflects more favorably on christians than others, this is only because "moderate" christians have begun to selectively ignore or "re-interpret" the alleged word of God (Deuteronomy as one example). Thus, this contemporary trajectory has nothing to do with christianity itself. Rather, secular notions of how to respect and treat other people have begun to affect how christians interpret or flat out ignore the word of God.
My question is especially relevant because you leverage that characterization to minimize the impact of human rights attrocities committed by a historical christian figure.
Would your definition of "nut case" include people who believe a giant purple teddy bear established mandates of acceptable and not acceptable behavior? Certainly any person who believes this goes away in a straight jacket for a long time.
Would your definition of "nut case" include people who believe some other imagined deity established mandates of acceptable and not acceptable behavior? Hmmmm?
Would your definition of "nut case" include muslims who hold women to a lower class of rights than men based on the word of Allah?
The point is, how should one go about distinguishing between "nut cases" and all the other people in the world who have decided that the word of an unproven and otherwise imagined deity is the ultimate truth????
When human behavior is based on mutual respect and compassion, rather than the maleable and potentially self serving words of imagined deities, the human situation will have moved forward. Until then, we are stuck in the dark ages of religious strife.
And while I personally think that you are correct in pointing out that the contemporary trajectory of human behavior reflects more favorably on christians than others, this is only because "moderate" christians have begun to selectively ignore or "re-interpret" the alleged word of God (Deuteronomy as one example). Thus, this contemporary trajectory has nothing to do with christianity itself. Rather, secular notions of how to respect and treat other people have begun to affect how christians interpret or flat out ignore the word of God.
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