Guardian Unlimited: The Pope and Islam

ROME: The Vatican
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The Pope and Islam

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.