RU 50/2005 - ALGERIA

- ALGERIA: Is the god Allah of Islam the same as the Holy Trinity of the Christians? His Excellency Mgr. Louis PAVY, bishop of Algiers, answers as follows:

* To start with, "the one who pretends to be Allah's prophet, Mahomet, should have letters of credenza", that is prophecy, miracles and the integrity of his whole life... "We cannot find anything of that with Mahomet, a man of depredation and blood who preaches his doctrine at the stroke of scimitars, while spreading death over one third of the earth known at that time."

* A prophet? "He didn't even know how to guess that one day he would die by poison given to him by submissive hands".

* And miracles? "Mahomet repeats ad nauseam that Moïse, Christ and the other prophets made miracles, precious testimony for our faith, but that he himself is not due to make some: he is only in charge of preaching; here we have the confession of his impotence and therefore of his imposture and his falsity." "Incidently, says Mgr Pavy, I read the narration of his 18 miracles, related by the Arabian authors. They are meaningless phenomena, like puerile tales, or at most like pieces of legerdemain that would make laugh our tricky magicians... Sometimes there are trees which are walking around, stones which are speaking and other absurdities which we would be ashamed to report here. That's all his baggage of thaumaturge!" And by lack of arguments and miracles, Mahomet makes believe that "the miracle of miracles is the Koran, prodigy that would exceed in beauty all human artifacts..."

* "4 or 5 chapters of the Koran are rather pleasantly turned, I agree; but... how can 5 chapters compensate the stupendous absurdities, the orderless maxims, the bizarre hieroglyphs, the ever present futilities and the flagrant contradictions that fill the 114 chapters of this indigestible volume?"

* "In the Koran I didn't find anything very new. Nearly everything, except for the infamies, is borrowed and deformed. What is true is from the Pentateuque and the Gospel; what is false, from the Talmud, the Arabian or Sabean legends, or from the apocryphal gospels... However, one wants to reveal as fresh nutrition from Heaven what is already old on the earth, and what can be found at the bottom of the mud!"

* "The saber is not an argument for human intelligence."

* "Because Jesus had chosen 12 apostles among his disciples, Mahomet chose 12 of them among his sectarians; that's why a writer of the Middle Age called him 'the copyist of God'".... "Instead of the sweetness, benignity, spirit of peace and forgiveness, voluntary poverty, humility, and the love of Jesus' sufferings, you see spring up from Mahomet duplicity, cruelty, thirst of enjoyments, loot, domination, vengeance, and pride, at their highest paroxysm."

* "Why would I be obliged, pursues Mgr. Pavy, to say nothing about his 21 wives that he allowed to himself, after having committed everyone to only 4 of them, without counting the 4 concubines, and that infamous law which grants to him any Moslem woman whose heart would tend towards him", even if it was a little girl of 8 years age?... "Therefore, Mahomet is not God's messenger."

* "The Koran expresses, with pompous words, the lofty ideas of the natural virtues, and at the same time the Koran releases overtly the bridle to the most violent and sulfurous addictions... It suppresses remorses while introducing fatalism... Mahomet, loser by the flesh, accepts like a divine law his absolute domination by his most dishonorable instincts."

* "Mahomet borrows from each of the existing religions of his time a portion of its doctrines, and by this irregular amalgam he pretends to treat tactfully the Christians, Jews, Sabeans, and idolaters; from all of this he forms his credo, achieving it by this supreme aphorism: 'There is only one God, and Mahomet is his prophet'... He bases himself on a mix-up of doctrines, crowned by his personal pride"... "But the truth is not a property of which one can abandon one portion, in the supposed interest of peace".

* "The Koran denies Christ's divinity."

* "Is the god of Mahomet the true God? No! Did the false prophet therefore fabricate a new god? No! He did with his god what he did with all the rest, a bizarre assembly of the most opposite qualities; he arranged it by his way of doing".

* "His unique god, my brothers, is so weak that he doesn't dare to swear by himself!... His unique god is the cruellest of the tyrants, since he himself makes everything in the human person, even the sin, since he orders to all to believe to the new revelation of the Koran, and declares at the same time that he doesn't want the infidels to find the faith. His unique god is a god without heart; he doesn't love, and he doesn't ask for love!"

* The god of Mahomet "changes the eternal beauty of the heaven into a place of prostitution, whose orgies exceed in multiple and sterile lubricity everything that idolatry itself, in its most abject forms, could have dreamed of. The god of the Islam is, in his eager weakness, such a disgusting being that if the regular authority of public morals would meet anyone similar to him in our streets, he would be arrested on the spot in order to hide him from the eyes of the public, which, alas!, is already very compliant! And that would be the true God?"

* "Oh, no, no, this is not the true God, the God of the heaven and the earth, the God of the nations, the God of the prophets, Moïse's God, Christ's God... This is not You, oh Saint Trinity, that this man fought so violently. This is not You, oh Holy Father, oh Eternal Verb, oh Spirit of light and charity! This is not You, Jesus, the salute and the life of my soul... This man, Mahomet, didn't know you, he didn't know how to love you. Forgive me, Lord, if, for the defense of your name, I spoke of another god than you!"

* "The Islam is a supposed religion that certain Frenchmen yet surround by much respect... What moral is that one, my brothers, of which your bishop doesn't dare to expose the principles, even for flogging them?"

* The morals of Islam? "The association of blood to pleasure, of war to the infidels, permanent war, war that must last until their total extermination, or submissiveness to the tribute."

* "While reading the Gospel, I learned how to pray; while reading the Koran, I didn't learn anything; and the Moslem, I am quite sure, learn there only to repeat hollow and empty formulas. I would be tempted to say that such a prayer is an outrage, since it is addressed to a god who doesn't exist, or who exists with attributes which are all opposite to those that lends him the doctrine of the Moslem."

* And science? "Science appeared, with them, like a meteor; it remained, with ourselves, like a sun whose fire constantly nourishes the activity of the human intelligence... What progress did they make in agriculture? None! And, while our monks reclaimed Europe, the Moslem abandoned to barrenness our beautiful provinces of Syria and Africa, so fertile and populated at the time when Islam invaded them."

* "And the family? The husband is, in Islam, a capricious despot, the spouse a slave; no instruction, even elementary, for her; no mosques where to pray before she becomes old."

* The advices of Mgr. Pavy how to convert the Moslem who are surrounding us? "Don't bring war, but peace; not the license of the domestic roof, but the purity and the inviolability of the Christian marriage; no vengeance, but the forgiveness; no despairing fatalism, that compromises the power of God and his mercy as much as the human liberty, but that mild resignation which makes the Christians consider the tears like precious pearls, and the painful thorns like as many blossoms added to Christ's Crown. Amen."

Extracted from the sermon pronounced by Mgr. Louis Pavy, bishop of Algiers, in the cathedral of Algiers during Lent of... 1853. - (ru; cf. J.P.Migne, 1844-1892. 84, 1856, col. 1257-1287).