Page 222 - Prophet Jesus (Pbuh): A Prophet Not A Son, Of God

220 Prophet Jesus (pbuh): A Prophet, Not A Son, of God

velopment:
In Poland, Hungary, and Transylvania, some Reform Protestant
Christians began asserting as a matter of faith, "God is one. There is
no god but God." Dangerous heresy in Christendom in those days.
Where did dead-defying statement come from?... In 1520s and '30s,
when Protestantism was still very new and trinitarian, the Islamic
Ottoman Empire conquered Croatia, Hungary, and Transylvania. 93
As expressed by many historians and Unitarian clergy, the reason
why this monotheistic sect located in Ottoman territories gained in

strength was because Islam brought a climate of tolerance. Susan Ritchie
of the North Unitarian Universalist Church emphasizes this fact in a ser-
mon entitled The Promise of Postmodernism for Unitarian Universalist
Theology:
Most moderate international historians accept not only that the po-
litical protection of the Ottomans allowed for the development of
progressive Protestantisms, but also that the infamous permissive-
ness of Ottoman administrative practice regarding local customs
and religions must have had some influence with regards to the
issue of toleration. 94

Islam's powerful monotheism was an enormous guarantee for anti-
trinitarian Christians, for within the Ottoman Empire they could express
their opinions freely, enjoy official tolerance, establish their own
churches, and reinforce the Christian monotheistic tradition.
The links between Islam and the Unitarian Church have attracted
the interest of researchers for hundreds of years. For example, in his The
Hungarian Protestant Reformation in the Sixteenth Century under the
Ottoman Impact, Alexander Sándor Unghváry concentrates on the impor-
tance attached to Islam by Servetus, an earlier proponent of monothe-

ism. In his work, based on the relationship between Socianism and
95
Islam, Mathurin Veyssiére de la Croze claims that the Unitarians of
Transylvania accepted the similarity between the oneness of God as