Documents of the Right Word

It will be pertinent here to write about those who are hostile
towards Christianity and why they attack it and to explain that
these attacks cannot be directed towards Islam.
Christianity, which lost its divine value altogether during the
time of Constantine the Great, became a means for political
advantages. The clergy opened bloody wars against non-
Christians. They forced everybody to become a Christian blindly.
Luther went to extremes in these crazy attacks. He was furiously
angry with any religion, any nation that was not Protestant.
Missionary organizations, on the other hand, tried to confuse
everyone, mislead everyone’s conscience and then propagandized
Christianity through new articles each day. Christian attacks,
which were compatible neither with knowledge nor with science
and which were perpetrated sometimes with bloodshed and
sometimes through deceit, incurred great hatred towards
Christianity in Europe in the eighteenth century. It was written
that priests were deceiving the people, forcing them to believe in
superstitions and striving to enslave everybody to their ideas. But
this enmity did not remain directed against the Christian religion
only. There appeared those who attacked every religion. Instead
of seeing that the priests’ evil deeds originated from the defilement
and alteration in the religion, they thought it originated from
religion. Without studying religions, they attributed the evils
inherent in Christianity to religion and attacked religions. One of
those who went the furthest in their enmity towards religion was
Voltaire. Like Luther, he, too, slandered Islam and, thinking that
our Master Rasûlulah (sall-Allâhu ’alaihi wa sallam) was as Luther
described him, he spoke ill of him. Without studying Islam, these
people, too, like Christians in general, attacked all religions.
For the first time in the nineteenth century,Von Herder, a
German, said that bearing enmity against religions blindly was as
wrong as Christianization by force. He put forward the necessity to
study religions, particularly Islam. Thus, people in Europe began
to understand Muhammad’s (’alaihi ’s-salâm) life and the
astonishing superiorities of the lightsome way shown by Islam for
the administration of individuals, families and societies. Carlyle, a
British thinker, praised Muhammad’s (’alaihi ’s-salâm) life, moral
qualities and accomplishments under the heading A Hero Who is
the Prophet in his book The Heroes, which he wrote in 1841. In
this book he wrote, “An exalted person who administered
hundreds of millions of people for twelve centuries and who
caused the establishment of civilized States in the East and in the
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