"I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on, perhaps in 1391, by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.

The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Koran. . . In the seventh conversation the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that Sura (Koranic chapter) 2, 256 reads: ‘There is no compulsion in religion.’ According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Koran, concerning holy war . . . He addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence, saying: ‘Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’

The emperor, having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. ‘God,’ he says, ‘is not pleased by blood — and not acting reasonably . . . is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats . . . To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons, or any other means of threatening a person with death . . .’ The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this is self-evident.

But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? . . . John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, with logos. Logos means reason and word — reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, between genuine enlightenment and religion . . . This inner rapprochement between biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history . . .

Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, took on its historically decisive character in Europe. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur — this is the programme with which a theology grounded in biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. ‘Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God,’ said Manuel II, according to his under-standing of God. It is to this great logos, this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures."

Times Recommends

• Obama: the world can expect better of America
• Gulp! Mystery killer threatens French oyster
• Secret of Northn Lights key to space safety