Word: islam
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When Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an erudite Persian debated in 1391 about Islam and Christianity, Constantinople was under a siege that would eventually succeed, some decades later, in bringing down the last bastion of the Roman Empire. They argued about the balance of reason and faith, specifically in its application to proselytizing through force...
...Converts to Islam Re "Allah's Recruits" [aug. 28], the attraction of Islam is a bitter nostalgia for past times when women could be oppressed with arrogant impunity. The motivation is the same for fundamentalists of all times, places and denominations, whether their symbols are crescent moons or crosses. Denise Bonhomme Sunnyvale, California...
...Forced Argument on Forced Conversions Viewpoint: Kidnapped journalists converting at gunpoint. The Pope quoting a 14th century Byzantine emperor. The sudden focus on forced conversions to Islam reflects a fundamental misreading of that religion's history
...shifted the terms of a debate that has been dominated by either feel-good truisms, victimization complexes or hateful confrontation. He sought instead to delineate what he sees as a fundamental difference between Christianity's view that God is intrinsically linked to reason (the Greek concept of Logos) and Islam's view that "God is absolutely transcendent...
Benedict said Islam teaches that God's "will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality." The risk he sees implicit in this concept of the divine is that the irrationality of violence might thereby appear to be justified to someone who believes it is God's will. The essential question, he said, was this: "Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature ... always and intrinsically true...