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NEWS & LETTERS, October-November 2006Our Life and Timesby Kevin A. Barry and Mitch Weerth Pope’s bigotryPope Benedict XVI has generally hewed to the line of his equally reactionary predecessor, Pope John Paul II, but not on Islam. Where John Paul II sought dialogue, Benedict has looked for confrontation. In 2004, while still a cardinal, he said that Turkey should be denied admission to the European Union because Islamic culture is "in permanent contrast to Europe." Last year, he gave a papal audience to the late Oriana Fallaci, a former leftist whose anti-Islamic diatribes—"the sons of Allah breed like rats," and others—have earned almost universal condemnation. Then in September, Benedict attacked Islam in a major speech on secularism, faith, and reason. He quoted a 1391 statement by a Byzantine emperor to the effect that what Muhammad added to biblical teaching were "things only evil and inhuman," among them spreading the faith by violence (jihad). Benedict went on to state that while Christianity is "shaped by Greek philosophy," for Islam "God is absolutely transcendent" and "not bound up with any of our categories, even rationality," here referring to writings of the Catholic theologian Adil Theodore Khoury. Thus, he claimed not fundamentalist Islam, but Islam as a whole, is both violent and irrational, while Christianity is not. So much for the crusades, or the rationalist philosophers and scientists of medieval Islam, like Averroes, Avicenna, and Alfarabi! As an erudite intellectual, Benedict surely knows better, and he also knows the type of violent reaction such words would provoke from a religious community that has its own share of fanatics. He got that reaction in good measure, and then duly "clarified" his statement, saying that he had been quoting others, not agreeing with them, "regretting" any offense. Why, then, in his original speech did he not express his disagreement with those he quoted? We suspect that Benedict wishes to play to anti-Muslim sentiment in Western Europe, where the Roman Church has suffered a dramatic loss of membership. He may also be looking for support in Eastern Europe, in places like Russia and the Balkans, where Orthodox Christian communities have their share of Islam haters. The overall effect, though, is to throw another match into the powder keg that today constitutes relations between the Arab/Muslim world and the West. |
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