>The words of Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg in Germany on September 12, 2006 have caused much controversy and have offended the sensibility of the Muslims around the world.

As a result of the Pope’s speech, Muslims leaders called for the death of the Pope, a nun was shot dead in Somalia by Islamic gunmen and two West Bank Christian churches were hit by firebombs.

The Muslim world has protested widely against the Pope’s speech. In London, a group of Muslims carried placards attacking the Pope with words such as “Pope go to Hell.” Others protested outside a Roman Catholic Church waving slogans aimed at offending the sentiments of Christians such as “Jesus is the slave of Allah.”

Even in American, some people have criticized the Pope and condemned the God of Christianity for being a violent God. Some have even asked for an apology from the Pope.

What is the most amazing thing in all this reaction against the Pope’s speech is that most of the people criticizing the Pope have never actually read the Pope’s speech. Most of what they know about the speech is what they have heard from others or what they have seen on television.

Below is an excerpt of the Pope’s speech and the section that has offended the sensibility of the Muslim world. Read the text of the Pope’s speech and judge carefully what the Pope said.

That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.

I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on – perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara – by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.

It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor.

The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur’an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between – as they were called – three “Laws” or “rules of life”: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur’an.

It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point – itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole – which, in the context of the issue of “faith and reason”, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.

In the seventh conversation [text unclear] edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: “There is no compulsion in religion”.

According to the experts, this is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war.

Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “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”.

The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God”, he says, “is not pleased by blood – and not acting reasonably … is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. 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 decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident.

But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practise idolatry.

At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?

When the Pope’s words are read in the context of the complete text of his speech, the words are not offensive. What do you think?

To read the complete text of the speech given by Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg in Germany on September 12, 2006, click here or here.

To read the statement of the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey supporting the Pope on Islam and violence, click here.

Claude Mariottini
Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary

Tags: Pope, Pope’s Speech , Muslims, Islam