Through Force or Faith? — Page 24
?— A Reply to Pope Benedict XVI 24 shall be summoned to its final reckoning, it is neither irreverent nor unreasonable to admit that Mohammed was indeed an Apostle of God. ( History of the Moorish Empire in Europe, by S. P. Scott, vol. 1, pp. 126–127, pub- lished in 1904 by J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia and London ) There are many quotes but I shall shorten it. Ruth Cranston writes in ‘World Faith’: Mohammad never instigated fighting and bloodshed. Every battle that he fought was in rebuttal. He fought in order to survive and he fought with the weapons and fash- ion of his time. Fashions in brutality change, as in everything else. It seems almost incredible now that in 1917 people were shocked at the killing of civilians in wartime. Certainly no ‘Christian’ nation of 140,000,000 people who today dispatch 120,000 helpless civilians with a single bomb can look askance at a leader who at his worst killed a bare five or six hundred. The slayings of Prophet of Arabia in a benighted and bloodthirsty age of the seventh century look positively puerile compared with our own in this ‘advanced’ and enlightened twentieth. Not to mention the mass slaughter by Christians during the Inquisition and the Crusades-when, Christian warriors proudly recorded, they ‘waded ankle-deep in the gore of Moslem infidels’. (Ruth Cranston, World Faith, p. 55, Ayer Publishing, 1949)