A Priest's Letter to the Pope

One of the prominent priests of the Catholic Church in Italy wrote a letter to the Pope. In that letter he said: if you could only see the state of our Christian men. He was talking about al-fursān, the knights. The Christian church used to send these knights to raid the Muslim world. They would go to the Holy Land; these were very powerful small bands of horsemen, and they would dispatch them to the Muslim world to cause corruption.

And by the way, they were causing corruption not only on land; it also happened at sea. Do you know who the pirates were — how the pirates were founded, and whom they were fighting? Piracy — the whole issue of piracy and pirates at sea, which we see so many cartoons and movies about — was started and invented to fight the Muslims in the Mediterranean Sea.^* That is how piracy started. Because the Mediterranean Sea was an Islamic sea for a very long time: al-ʿAbbāsiyyūn, and then al-ʿUthmāniyyūn, were the power in the Mediterranean Sea. So these pirates would go and raid the Muslim merchants who were travelling in the Mediterranean Sea.

Anyway, this priest wrote a letter to the Pope. He said: if you could see how our men try to dress like the Muslims, and they learn Arabic, and they write poetry of romance and love in Arabic better than the Arabs. Because the Muslims at that time were strong. So you find that the weak is always trying to imitate the strong. And now things have reversed: now the Muslim is trying to imitate the ones who are strong.

But the Muslim should always believe that strength is from Allah and honour belongs to Allah: al-ʿizzatu lillāhi wa li-rasūlihī wa lil-muʾminīn. Allah (swt) says all honour belongs to Allah, and to His Messenger, and to the believers. What we are going through now is a temporary state. It is not permanent.