Islam and Christianity

to Bâb-i Âli with a coffin with their pen -cases in it. Moreover,
they exploited the bigots -whom we shall discuss later-, by
beguiling those idiots into iterating here and there that the press
would bring “blasphemy against Islam”. In order to solve this
problem, the Ottoman Sultan Ahmad [1]
III, who realized that
these seditious people had been trying to use Islam as a means for
their own advantages, got the help of his Grand Vizier, Damat
Ibrahim Pasha, and received a fatwâ [2] about the press from the
Shaikh-ul-Islâm, the greatest dignitary of the Islamic religion. The
fatwâ given by the time’s Shaikh-ul-Islâm, Abdullah Effendi, is
written in the two hundred and sixty-second page of Bahjat-ulfatâwâ,
as follows:
“It has been decreed through this fatwâ that it is permissible
and quite good to establish the press, wherewith books of
knowledge, science and ethics will be printed in great numbers in
a short time; useful books will be obtained cheaply and
disseminated far and wide.” This fatwâ would suffice to show
how wrong it was to assert that the press would be blasphemous.
The word “bigot” is used above to mean a man who tries to foist
his vulgar, ignorant, and corrupt ideas and political convictions in
the name of religious knowledge. They convey Islamic
knowledge wrongly to get everybody to accept their corrupt
views and heretical convictions. Some of them get their power
from the title they possess, some from the laws they took shelter
under, but mostly by exploiting the beliefs of the Muslims.
Dragging large masses of people with them, they cause agitation,
rebellion, civil war and the breaking up of the country into
different states. The most harmful and the most dangerous of
them are the religious ones, the bigots of science (fake scientists)
and the political ones who try to defile the nation’s belief and
moral qualities by propagating religion reforms, foreign
ideologies, and non-sunnî Muslims, in order to obtain property,
money or position. As a result they corrupt the nation’s faith and
morality. These seditious people (bigots) can be classified into
three groups:
1- Ignorant bigots are those who think of themselves as
intelligent and scientific, even though they lack both religious and
secular knowledge. They cause dissension and can be easily
[1] Ahmad Khân; passed away in 1149 (1736 A.D.)
[2] Answer which is given by an Islamic savant to Muslims’ questions.
Sources, references have to be appended to the fatwâ.
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