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 September 12 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 needs 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 20 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.
The writer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries
