AZG Armenian Daily #180, 21/09/2006

Article

THE POPE AND ISLAM

On a scale of one to ten, Pope Benedict XVI’s first
attempt at an apology was barely a 3. He said nothing
himself, but on Saturday Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone
told the world that "The Holy Father is very sorry
that some passages of his speech may have sounded
offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers."

That didn’t stop the protests that have been building
in the Muslim world since the Pope gave the speech on
12 September to an academic audience in Germany, so on
Sunday he tried again. Speaking from his summer
residence at Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome, he said:
"I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries
to a few passages of my address at the University of
Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the
sensibility of Muslims."

That won’t stop the protests either, because he really
isn’t sorry for what he said. He’s sorry for "the
reactions in some countries" to his remarks, but he
implicitly stands by what he said in Regensburg. So is
the new pope really anti-Muslim? After the 9/11
attacks five years ago, the former Cardinal Ratzinger
told Vatican Radio that "it is important not to
attribute simplistically what happened to Islam" —
but then he added that "the history of Islam also
contains a tendency to violence." True enough, but
Christianity has its own history of violence: the
Crusades, the Inquisition, the religious wars that
devastated Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and
several other detours from the path of peace and
tolerance.

Just before he became pope last year, Benedict
declared that Turkey should not be allowed into the
European Union because its Islamic culture is
incompatible with the "Christian" culture of Europe.
But the real case for the prosecution rests on his
invitation to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci to
visit him at Castel Gandolfo last September.

It certainly wasn’t a religious visit, since Fallaci
(who died last week) was an atheist, and her fame as a
war correspondent and interviewer was decades behind
her. But she carved out a second career as the most
extreme anti-Muslim writer in Europe, producing two
best-selling books since 2002 that vilified Muslims as
dirty sub-humans who multiply "like rats," and
portraying Islam as an irrational religion that breeds
hatred. The title of her second-last book, the one
that presumably inspired the Pope’s invitation, was
"The Force of Reason," whose core argument was that
the West is rational and reasonable, whereas Muslims
aren’t. And there was Benedict in Germany last week,
saying exactly the same thing. What a coincidence.

In his speech, Benedict quoted from the 14th century
Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who told a
Persian visitor that "spreading the faith through
violence is something unreasonable…God is not
pleased by blood." So far, so good — but then Manuel
asked his Muslim visitor: "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." Benedict quoted
that, too, without any further comment.

He ended his speech, four and a half pages later, by
quoting the emperor again: " ‘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….It is to this great logos, to
this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in
the dialogue of cultures." in other words, you Muslims
are unreasonable people, but if you do it our way,
then we’ll finally get somewhere.

So now we know that the new pope is a parochial and
intolerant man — but anybody who paid attention to
Cardinal Ratzinger’s previous career knew that
already. "God’s Rottweiler" was the late Pope John
Paul II’s favourite hit-man, reducing Karol Wojtyla’s
critics in the Catholic hierarchy to a sullen silence
or driving them out of the Church altogether. Now he
is in a position to do much more damage.

Pakistan’s parliament has unanimously passed a
resolution condemning the Pope’s speech. Seven
Christian churches in the occupied Palestinian
territories have been bombed, set ablaze or shot at. A
Catholic nun has been shot to death in Somalia. Most
Muslims are well aware that violence is an
inappropriate way to protest against accusations that
Islam is a violent faith, but why do they even care
what the Pope says?

Benedict need a few lessons in manners, but the real
reason for the uproar is that so many Muslims feel
under attack by the West. Two Muslim countries have
been invaded by the United States and its allies since
9/11, and another, Lebanon, has been bombed to ruins
by Israel with full support from the US and Britain.

At least twenty times as many Muslims have died in
these brutal wars as the number of Americans who died
in the 9/11 attacks, and almost none of them had
anything to do with that terrorist atrocity. So the
suspicion grows among Muslims that all this is not
really about 9/11 at all, and almost any minor insult
to Islam from the West — cartoons in a provincial
Danish newspaper, a foolish quote by an arrogant pope
— is enough to trigger outrage from Morocco to
Indonesia.

We haven’t achieved a full-scale "clash of
civilisations" yet, but we’re making progress.

By Gwynne Dyer