Controversy rages about Pope's comments on Islam

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Here is a Vatican translation of the address Benedict XVI delivered to scientists at the University of Regensburg, where he was a professor and vice rector from 1969 to 1971. This is the version the Pope read, adding some allusions of the moment, which he hopes to publish in the future, complete with footnotes. Hence, the present text must be considered provisional:

Papal Address at University of Regensburg, September 12th 2006

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"The Pope could also have mentioned the violence of Christian crusaders against Muslim believers, but chose not to do so."

The Vatican is seriously concerned at the possibility of acts of violence being staged against the tiny city state situated in the heart of Rome, after a barrage of criticism from Muslims in many countries against Pope Benedict XVI.

Pope Benedict's critical remarks earlier in the week about jihad, or Islamic holy war, have been the subject of hostile comment in many Islamic countries.

Security has been discreetly stepped up around and inside the walled Vatican City, although Pope Benedict himself is not in residence there at the moment.

He is resting after his recent trip to Germany at the Papal summer villa at Castelgandolfo, in the Alban Hills 30km (20 miles) from Rome.

The outrage expressed by Muslim clerics and commentators at the Pope's quotation from a 600-year-old book containing the sayings of a Christian emperor of ancient Byzantium appears to have taken Vatican officials by surprise.

The emperor spoke of "the Prophet Muhammad's command 'to spread by the sword the faith he preached'."

The context of the Pope's quotation about the unreasonableness of spreading faith by violent means was an academic lecture on the relationship of faith and reason for professors and graduate students of the University of Regensburg in southern Germany, where the Pope once taught.

"God is not pleased by blood and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature... 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 of any kind or any other means of threatening a person with death," the Pope quoted the emperor as saying.

Within 24 hours, as news of the Pope's speech spread through the Islamic world, the protests started multiplying. An apology was demanded.

The Pope could also have mentioned the violence of Christian crusaders against Muslim believers, but chose not to do so.

The Pope had specifically stressed in his lecture that he was not giving a history lesson, but making a philosophical point.

At the end of November, Pope Benedict is due to visit Turkey, a secular, predominantly Muslim country. He has already come under fire from a leading Muslim cleric there who has accused him of prejudice and bias and called him "hostile and arrogant".

But on the day when there has been a changing of the guard in the upper echelons of the Vatican - with the arrival of an Italian cardinal, a former close aide of the Pope, to take up his new appointment of secretary of state - the number two position inside the Vatican, preparations for the Pope's visit to Turkey went ahead as usual.

The feeling inside the Vatican is that the storm aroused by the Pope's remarks will be quickly forgotten, when seen in their correct context.

Yet ambassadors of Muslim countries accredited to the Vatican (of which there are more than a dozen) are under instruction from their governments to press home their dissatisfaction at the way the Pope's officials have tried to brush off criticism and defend the pontiff.

In another gesture of friendship to the Muslim world the Pope has announced the appointment of a French prelate, born in Morocco when that country was a French protectorate, as his new foreign minister in charge of Vatican diplomacy.

The prelate, Monsignor Dominique Mamberti has in recent years been the Vatican's ambassador or nuncio in Algeria, Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia - all nations with large Muslim populations.

Vatican braces for Muslim anger

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Algerian Muslim Scholars Association asks the Pope to apologize

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Fareena Alam
Editor of Q-News, a Muslim magazine

"The media are giving the supposed "anger of the Muslim nation" too much coverage. Such insults are as old as Islam itself. The Prophet dealt with them with dignity. We must stop over-reacting ...

"A Muslim who truly lives according to the moral code of Islam - of justice, neighbourliness and compassion - will know that it is our greatest weapon against misrepresentation. Perhaps the Pope was 'merely quoting' the 14th-century emperor. Perhaps he did so because he actually shares this belief. If so, he is more ill-informed than we thought. I refuse to let such provocations shape the global faith agenda."

Muhammad Abdul Bari
Secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain

"The Muslim Council of Britain is deeply disturbed that the Pope ... quoted from the 14th-century Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus. The emperor's views about Islam were ill-informed and frankly bigoted.

"One would expect a religious leader such as the Pope to act and speak with responsibility and repudiate the Byzantine emperor's views in the interests of truth and harmonious relations between the followers of Islam and Catholicism.

"Regrettably, the Pope did not do so and this has understandably caused a lot of dismay and hurt throughout the Muslim world. We would hope that the Pope will clarify his remarks without delay."

Chris Doyle
Director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding

"It is difficult to see anything positive coming from these comments. What was the Pope aiming to do by promoting the words of what he termed an "erudite" emperor who claimed that everything that Muhammad provided was "evil and inhuman"? There were infinitely more constructive ways to make his point about violence than to quote the rant of a 14th century emperor ... The previous Pope did much to try to win hearts and minds in the Islamic world. In one stupid line the Pope ... sent Muslim-Christian relations back decades. [He] needs to apologise at once. What is so sad is that while there have been acute political tensions between western and Islamic leaders, until now there had not been confrontation between mainstream religious leaders."

Tariq Ramadan
Author of Western Muslims and the Future of Islam

"He has said it before - that Muslims should tackle the issue of jihad and violence, but the way it was done was a bit clumsy.

"If you follow the whole lecture, though, his message is very worrying. He is saying we have to redefine what Europe is all about ... to reduce the past and neglect Islamic participation. Many Islamic values are in the west. All that we knew about Aristotle in the middle ages was coming from Averroes [the 12th-century scholar in Islamic Spain].

"It's worrying to say that Islam is disconnected from rationality."

'Such insults are as old as Islam'

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This was no casual slip. Beneath his scholarly rhetoric, the Pope's logic seemed to be that Islam is dangerous and godless:

John Paul II's pontificate was largely defined by his relationship with a global conflict between west and east. Last Tuesday evening, in a badly judged speech before a home crowd of Bavarian academics, Benedict XVI may well have set the parameters of his own period as Pope, pitching himself into a debate over Islam that has prompted outrage throughout the Muslim world.

"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." These were not the Pope's words, but those of an obscure Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologos, back in the 14th century. And yes, the Pope did make it clear he was offering a quotation. Even so, these words fell from the lips of the spiritual leader of a billion Christians without anything like enough qualification. There was no phrase distancing himself from the claim that Muhammad was responsible for evil. It's little surprise, therefore, that the remarks have roused anger and demands for a personal apology.

Christopher Tyerman's latest book on the Crusades, God's War, argues persuasively that analogies between the Crusades and the present global conflict are often overdrawn and historically dubious. That may be so. But it's an argument that doesn't cut much ice with millions of Muslims. After all, it was one of Benedict's predecessors, Urban II, who first summoned a Christian jihad against Islam. And it's born-again Christians who have been at the forefront of support for the invasion of Iraq, the occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel, and the whole "reorganisation" of the Middle East - a catastrophe in which many thousands of Muslims have lost their lives.

Any comments by a Christian leader that touch upon this wound are bound to be interpreted from every possible angle. The Pope must have known this. If millions of Muslims were offended by the scribblings of a few unknown Danish cartoonists, it's pretty obvious the enormous potential for harm that might flow from a few ill-judged comments by the vicar of Rome.

Furthermore, the Pope has form on all of this. Just a few months before he was elected, he spoke out against Muslim Turkey joining the EU. Christian Europe must be defended, he argued. It didn't go down well at the time with Muslim leaders. But what makes his comments from Bavaria doubly insensitive is that Munich and its surrounding towns are home to thousands of Gastarbeiter, many from Turkey, who are often badly treated by local Germans and frequently subjected to racism. It won't be lost on them that Manuel II ran his Christian empire from what is now the Turkish city of Istanbul. And reference to that time, in circumstances such as these, has the unmistakable whiff of Christian triumphalism.

For the most part, the Pope's address was a scholarly exercise that sought to challenge the idea that rationality is intrinsically and necessarily secular. We must "overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable", he insisted. Most Christians would agree. But even here there was a sharp criticism of Islam buried beneath the scholarly rhetoric. For the Pope argued that in Muslim teaching, because "God is absolutely transcendent", He is "not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality". In other words, there is no reasoning in or with Islam. Which, surely, is another way of the Pope saying how dangerous he thinks Islam is.

This is why the Pope's remarks look rather more than just a slip or a casual mistake. The speech concludes with a further reference to the views of the Byzantine emperor: " 'Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God,' said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures."

Blog sites have been buzzing with the thought that the Pope may have the president of Iran in mind when he speaks of Manuel's Persian interlocutor. But we don't need to speculate upon a contemporary casting for this speech to recognise its dangers. For in claiming that Islam may be beyond reason, and then to claim that to act without reason is to act contrary to the will of God, is pretty close to the assertion that this religion is godless. And that's not how different faiths ought to speak to each other - especially when we all have each other's blood on our hands.

As it is written: "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?"

The unmistakable whiff of Christian triumphalism

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The Pope perhaps did not imagine that an erudite lecture delivered to the university where he once taught that included a reference to a dialogue between a 600-year-old Byzantine emperor and a Persian Muslim would become the latest spark to reignite the tension between Islam and Christianity. But even if Benedict XVI, despite his reputation for meticulous preparation, had failed to appreciate the impact of his thoughts, his advisers should have. Urbane and intellectual as he is said to have been, Manuel II Palaeologus (1350-1425) was hardly an impartial observer of Islam. As a boy, he had been held prisoner by the Turks, and his dialogues took place as his inheritance lay in jeopardy to the Ottoman empire, and his capital under siege. No academic impartiality lay behind the assertion, repeated by the Pope in his lecture in Regensburg earlier this week, that all that was new in Muhammad's thought was "evil and inhuman", citing conversion under threat of the sword as an example. The Pope used this to kick off a discussion of God and reason rather as a parish priest might casually preface his Sunday homily with a reference to the storyline of EastEnders. It is unsurprising that it caused offence.

There might have been less protest had Benedict a clearer record in favour of dialogue with Islam. As a cardinal in the Holy See, he was known to be sceptical of John Paul II's pursuit of conversation. One of his earliest decisions as pope was to move archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, one of the Catholic Church's leading experts on Islam, and head of its council on interreligious dialogue, away from the centre of influence in Rome, and send him to Egypt as papal nuncio. Benedict has spoken publicly of Christianity as the cornerstone of Europe and against the admission of Turkey into the EU. But he has also accepted an invitation from Turkey's president to make the first-ever papal visit in November. That visit, which could have been a symbol of his commitment to the reconciliation and respect between religions of which he has also spoken, may now be at risk. The Pope has lived a cloistered life, rarely exposed to the unholy nuances of world politics. He needs advisers around him who are. However, the Vatican has apologised. That should be enough for what was almost certainly nothing more than an ill-judged remark. For there is a second strand to this argument. There cannot be dialogue without rigor and openness. The Muslim world should also take pains to be thoughtful in its response, and perhaps less quick to take offence.

Papal fallibility

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Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg University, which mentioned Islam and jihad, has provoked a firestorm of controversy.

The address is more complex and subtle than the press on it represents. But let me just signal that what is most troubling of all is that the Pope gets several things about Islam wrong, just as a matter of fact.

He notes that the text he discusses, a polemic against Islam by a Byzantine emperor, cites Qur'an 2:256: "There is no compulsion in religion." Benedict maintains that this is an early verse, when Muhammad was without power.

His allegation is incorrect. Surah 2 is a Medinan surah revealed when Muhammad was already established as the leader of the city of Yathrib (later known as Medina or "the city" of the Prophet). The pope imagines that a young Muhammad in Mecca before 622 (lacking power) permitted freedom of conscience, but later in life ordered that his religion be spread by the sword. But since Surah 2 is in fact from the Medina period when Muhammad was in power, that theory does not hold water.

In fact, the Qur'an at no point urges that religious faith be imposed on anyone by force. This is what it says about the religions:

'[2:62] Those who believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians - any who believe in God and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.'

See my comments On the Quran and peace.

The idea of holy war or jihad (which is about defending the community or at most about establishing rule by Muslims, not about imposing the faith on individuals by force) is also not a Quranic doctrine. The doctrine was elaborated much later, on the Umayyad-Byzantine frontier, long after the Prophet's death. In fact, in early Islam it was hard to join, and Christians who asked to become Muslim were routinely turned away. The tyrannical governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, was notorious for this rejection of applicants, because he got higher taxes on non-Muslims. Arab Muslims had conquered Iraq, which was then largely pagan, Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish. But they weren't seeking converts and certainly weren't imposing their religion.

The pope was trying to make the point that coercion of conscience is incompatible with genuine, reasoned faith. He used Islam as a symbol of the coercive demand for unreasoned faith.

But he has been misled by the medieval polemic on which he depended.

In fact, the Quran also urges reasoned faith and also forbids coercion in religion. The only violence urged in the Quran is in self-defense of the Muslim community against the attempts of the pagan Meccans to wipe it out.

The pope says that in Islam, God is so transcendant that he is beyond reason and therefore cannot be expected to act reasonably. He contrasts this conception of God with that of the Gospel of John, where God is the Logos, the Reason inherent in the universe.

But there have been many schools of Islamic theology and philosophy. The Mu'tazilite school maintained exactly what the Pope is saying, that God must act in accordance with reason and the good as humans know them. The Mu'tazilite approach is still popular in Zaidism and in Twelver Shiism of the Iraqi and Iranian sort. The Ash'ari school, in contrast, insisted that God was beyond human reason and therefore could not be judged rationally. (I think the Pope would find that Tertullian and perhaps also John Calvin would be more sympathetic to this view within Christianity than he is).

As for the Quran, it constantly appeals to reason in knowing God, and in refuting idolatry and paganism, and asks, "do you not reason?" "do you not understand?" (a fala ta`qilun?)

Of course, Christianity itself has a long history of imposing coerced faith on people, including on pagans in the late Roman Empire, who were forcibly converted. And then there were the episodes of the Crusades.

Another irony is that reasoned, scholastic Christianity has an important heritage from Islam itself. In the 10th century, there was little scholasticism in Christian theology. The influence of Muslim thinkers such as Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Avicenna (Ibn Sina) reemphasized the use of Aristotle and Plato in Christian theology. Indeed, there was a point where Christian theologians in Paris had divided into partisans of Averroes or of Avicenna, and they conducted vigorous polemics with one another.

Finally, that Byzantine emperor that the Pope quoted, Manuel II? The Byzantines had been weakened by Latin predations during the fourth Crusade, so it was in a way Rome that had sought coercion first. And, he ended his days as a vassal of the Ottoman Empire.

The Pope was wrong on the facts. He should apologize to the Muslims and get better advisers on Christian-Muslim relations.

Pope gets it wrong on Islam