http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14866559/site/newsweek/?GT1=8506
A Pope's Holy War
By quoting a 14th-century Christian emperor on an 'evil and inhuman' Islam,
Benedict XVI ignites a global storm. What was he thinking?
Franco Origlia / Getty Images
Controversy: Benedict XVI in Munich
By Jon Meacham
Newsweek
Sept. 25, 2006 issue - The setting was familiar, the occasion, the speaker
thought, fitting. At three in the afternoon last Tuesday, after a quick ride
from lunch in the Popemobile, Benedict XVI began a lecture in the Aula Magna of
the University of Regensburg in Germany. As Joseph Ratzinger, the pope spent
much of his life in the country's academic milieu; as he spoke to a gathering
of scientists in the hall, he reminisced about his teaching days at the
University of Bonn. "There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers,
philologists ..." Benedict said early in an address on faith and reason. Citing
a conversation between a 14th-century Christian Byzantine emperor and an
Islamic Persian, Benedict quoted Manuel II: "'Show me just what Mohammed
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.'"
Within days Benedict found the globe engaged in a "lively exchange," but it was
not, one suspects, the exchange the pope had in mind. The Pakistani parliament
voted to condemn him; the leading Shiite cleric in Lebanon asked for a personal
apology. "He is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as
Hitler and Mussolini," said Salih Kapusuz, the deputy head of Turkey's
governing party, and officials there suggested the pope should reconsider a
trip planned for November.
Channi Anand / AP
Fighting Words: Protesters in India denounced the pontiff
The Vatican soon issued a grandly titled "Declaration Concerning Pope's
Regensburg Address." "It was certainly not the intention of the Holy Father to
undertake a comprehensive study of the jihad and of Muslim ideas on the
subject, still less to offend the sensibilities of the Muslim faithful," said
papal spokesman Federico Lombardi. If the goal, in Lombardi's words, had been
to articulate "a clear and radical rejection of the religious motivation for
violence," then Benedict failed.
The pope's intentions in discussing "holy war" were presumably good-he
approvingly quoted an early Qu'ranic "surah" (chapter), which says "there is no
compulsion in religion"-and he was right to raise the issue of how to confront
and combat the religious extremism that gives rise to terror and violence.
Sadly, though, he did so clumsily and obliquely, and, far from opening a
constructive conversation, instead exacerbated tensions between Christianity
and Islam. The episode also marks the first widely noted break with the spirit
of the papacy of Benedict's beloved predecessor. A reassuring pastor, John Paul
II was the first pope to visit a mosque (in Damascus, Syria, in 2000), and he
managed to project an air of ecumenicism while holding fast to the fundamentals
of faith and doctrine. "This is clearly not John Paul II," says R. Albert
Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in
Louisville, Ky. "It's a very different direction for the papacy, and reflects
Benedict XVI's worries about secularism, Islam and a declining Christian vigor
in Europe."
Much of the Regensburg address was a meditation on faith and reason, the roots
of religiously inspired violence and the need for believers to see God as a
figure of love. Roughly put, his argument was this: to Benedict, Islam's
conception of God so stresses God's will that God can be understood to command
the irrational.
For the pope, the Christian encounter with the classical world married faith
and reason and thereby precluded, in principle, such misunderstandings of the
nature of the God of Abraham, a nature that is, according to this argument,
rooted in love and reason, not the will to dominance. Seen in such a light,
"jihad," which means "struggle," can too easily be taken literally (as a call
to violence against others) rather than figuratively (as many Muslim scholars
argue it should be).
In the stormy aftermath of the address-on Saturday two churches in the West
Bank were bombed-the Vatican argued that the real point of the lecture was to
be found in this sentence: "A reason which is deaf to the divine and which
relegates religion into the realm of subcultures," Benedict said, "is incapable
of entering into the dialogue of cultures." In a post-Regensburg statement,
Paul Cardinal Poupard, president of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious
Dialogue, said, "Readers will find that this central theme is far more
important than the introductory citation of the Emperor Manuel II ..."
Then why did Benedict quote the emperor in the first place? The most likely
answer is that, no matter what the Vatican says now, the pope believes in
having what the Catholic theologian and papal biographer George Weigel calls "a
hard-headed conversation" about the role of faith in the life of the world. "He
knew exactly what he was doing," says Weigel. "He is saying that irrational
violence is displeasing to God. The question Benedict is putting on the table
is: 'Does a significant part of Islam have the capacity to be self-critical?' "
Finding a way for the children of Abraham to live together in something
approaching peace a perennial challenge, and Benedict understands that. "We
must seek paths of reconciliation and learn to live with respect for each
other's identity," he told a Muslim audience in Cologne last year. There was no
such language at Regensburg. He did say Manuel II's words were "startlingly
brusque," and made certain the audience understood he was reading a quotation,
but the pope must have known his words would carry. And by speaking of jihad
without alluding to Christianity's dark history of violence in the name of
God-the Crusades, forced conversions, pogroms, the Inquisition-Benedict seemed
to be denouncing Islam while failing to acknowledge that any religion,
including his own, can be manipulated and perverted to evil ends. "It is very
hard to construe the pope's remarks in a benign way," says William A. Graham,
the dean of the Harvard Divinity School. "Historically, there is no more basis
for arguing that Islam is irrational than there is for arguing the same about
Christianity or Judaism. In all three you can find tremendous discussion about
revelation and reason, and there are people in all three who have landed
outside the rational. Islam has bloody borders right now, but Christianity has
certainly been bloody, as has Judaism in its more extreme forms."
Two years before he became pope, Benedict published a book entitled "Truth and
Tolerance," in which he wrote that "religion demands the making of
distinctions, distinctions between different forms of religion and distinctions
within a religion itself, so as to find the way to its higher points." One of
the pities of Regensburg is that he made no such distinctions about Islam.
Is the ideology of hate that fuels Al Qaeda and its fellow travelers evil? Yes,
it is, and too few Muslim leaders have spoken out against it in compelling and
memorable terms. An Islamic reformation in which the young are educated to
understand faith through critical thinking would, one hopes, push the forces of
violence ever farther to the margins. History offers some consolation. "Islam
spread far more thoroughly by proselytizing than by the sword," says Graham.
And the tradition most ruthlessly excluded in the first few centuries of the
faith was one devoted to extreme violence, the Kharijites.
Going forward, the pope could usefully consult the words of another powerful
Christian leader: "And given that Islam and Christianity worship the one God,
Creator of heaven and earth, there is ample room for agreement and cooperation
between them," the leader said three months after September 11. "A clash ensues
only when Islam or Christianity is misconstrued or manipulated for political or
ideological ends." The leader? John Paul II.
With Edward Pentin in Rome
Update: Pope Benedict XVI said Sunday that he was "deeply sorry" about the
angry reaction to his recent remarks about Islam, which he said came from a
text that didn't reflect his personal opinion. "These [words] were in fact a
quotation from a medieval text which do not in any way express my personal
thought," Benedict told pilgrims at his summer palace of Castel Gandolfo,
outside Rome, according to a report by The Associated Press.
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