(Continuing) Islamophobia in the Vatican

The Vatican remains Islamophobic. Despite a recent change in Vatican policy that emphasizes a diplomatic approach in dealing with the Muslim world (instead of a theological approach), recent comments by the Private Secretary to Pope Benedict XVI, Monsignor Georg Ganswein, show that anti-Islamic attitudes in the Vatican die hard.

From The Telegraph (UK):

The Pope's private secretary has given warning of the Islamization of Europe and stressed the need for the continent's Christian roots not to be ignored, in comments released yesterday.

"Attempts to Islamize the West cannot be denied," Monsignor Georg Gaenswein was quoted as saying in an advance copy of the weekly Sueddeutsche Magazin to be published today.

"The danger for the identity of Europe that is connected with it should not be ignored out of a wrongly understood respectfulness," the magazine quoted him as saying.

He also defended a speech that the Pope gave last year that linked Islam and violence, saying it had been an attempt by the pontiff to "act against a certain naivety".

In the speech during a visit to Germany in September, the Pope appeared to endorse a view, contested by most Muslims, that Islam's followers spread their religion in its early days by violence.

...

Recently, Joachim Meisner, the influential archbishop of Cologne, said in a radio interview that the "immigration of Muslims has created a breach in our German, European culture."

From Catholic Online:

“I believe that the speech in Regensburg,” he said, “is prophetic.” He added that the pope wrote his own speeches and that those remarks had not been edited.

The papal secretary said that the “harsh reactions” to the speech was “a big surprise, also to the pope.”

"The huge fuss that arose was because of newspaper reports that took a certain quote out of context and presented it as the pope’s personal opinion," he said.

The pope sought to speak to the fact that “no such thing” specifically defines Islam, Msgr. Ganswein said. “It does not have a voice that is obligatory and binding to all Muslims.”

"Under this term,” he said of Islam, “many different groups are put together that are partially hostile to each other, some even extremist, who refer their doings to the Quran and who use rifles for their goals.”

Juan Cole on Pope Benedict's Erroneous Speech About Islam

I came across some excerpts from Pope Benedict's recent speech a few days ago, primarily on red blogs that were cheering the Pope's statements about Islam, neither (the Pope and the bloggers) knowing that what the Pope had said was, in fact, erroneous. I hadn't had the time to write about these errors, but I've found that Professor Cole at Informed Comment has already done so. What follows is his entire post on the matter; he has done a very good job in correcting the Pope's errors. So much for papal infallibility. ;)


Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg University, which mentioned Islam and jihad, has provoked a firestorm of controversy.

The address is more complex and subtle than the press on it represents. But let me just signal that what is most troubling of all is that the Pope gets several things about Islam wrong, just as a matter of fact.

He notes that the text he discusses, a polemic against Islam by a Byzantine emperor, cites Qur'an 2:256: "There is no compulsion in religion." Benedict maintains that this is an early verse, when Muhammad was without power.

His allegation is incorrect. Surah 2 is a Medinan surah revealed when Muhammad was already established as the leader of the city of Yathrib (later known as Medina or "the city" of the Prophet). The pope imagines that a young Muhammad in Mecca before 622 (lacking power) permitted freedom of conscience, but later in life ordered that his religion be spread by the sword. But since Surah 2 is in fact from the Medina period when Muhammad was in power, that theory does not hold water.

In fact, the Qur'an at no point urges that religious faith be imposed on anyone by force. This is what it says about the religions:

' [2:62] Those who believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians-- any who believe in God and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve.'

See my comments On the Quran and peace.

The idea of holy war or jihad (which is about defending the community or at most about establishing rule by Muslims, not about imposing the faith on individuals by force) is also not a Quranic doctrine. The doctrine was elaborated much later, on the Umayyad-Byzantine frontier, long after the Prophet's death. In fact, in early Islam it was hard to join, and Christians who asked to become Muslim were routinely turned away. The tyrannical governor of Iraq, al-Hajjaj, was notorious for this rejection of applicants, because he got higher taxes on non-Muslims. Arab Muslims had conquered Iraq, which was then largely pagan, Zoroastrian, Christian and Jewish. But they weren't seeking converts and certainly weren't imposing their religion.

The pope was trying to make the point that coercion of conscience is incompatible with genuine, reasoned faith. He used Islam as a symbol of the coercive demand for unreasoned faith.

But he has been misled by the medieval polemic on which he depended.

In fact, the Quran also urges reasoned faith and also forbids coercion in religion. The only violence urged in the Quran is in self-defense of the Muslim community against the attempts of the pagan Meccans to wipe it out.

The pope says that in Islam, God is so transcendant that he is beyond reason and therefore cannot be expected to act reasonably. He contrasts this conception of God with that of the Gospel of John, where God is the Logos, the Reason inherent in the universe.

But there have been many schools of Islamic theology and philosophy. The Mu'tazilite school maintained exactly what the Pope is saying, that God must act in accordance with reason and the good as humans know them. The Mu'tazilite approach is still popular in Zaidism and in Twelver Shiism of the Iraqi and Iranian sort. The Ash'ari school, in contrast, insisted that God was beyond human reason and therefore could not be judged rationally. (I think the Pope would find that Tertullian and perhaps also John Calvin would be more sympathetic to this view within Christianity than he is).

As for the Quran, it constantly appeals to reason in knowing God, and in refuting idolatry and paganism, and asks, "do you not reason?" "do you not understand?" (a fala ta`qilun?)

Of course, Christianity itself has a long history of imposing coerced faith on people, including on pagans in the late Roman Empire, who were forcibly converted. And then there were the episodes of the Crusades.

Another irony is that reasoned, scholastic Christianity has an important heritage drom Islam itself. In the 10th century, there was little scholasticism in Christian theology. The influence of Muslim thinkers such as Averroes and Ibn Rushd reemphasized the use of Aristotle and Plato in Christian theology. Indeed, there was a point where Christian theologians in Paris had divided into partisans of Averroes or of Ibn Rushd, and they conducted vigorous polemics with one another.

Finally, that Byzantine emperor that the Pope quoted, Manuel II? The Byzantines had been weakened by Latin predations during the fourth Crusade, so it was in a way Rome that had sought coercion first. And, he ended his days as a vassal of the Ottoman Empire.

The Pope was wrong on the facts. He should apologize to the Muslims and get better advisers on Christian-Muslim relations.

The Pope's got an E-Mail Address!

Just don't send him porno spam or ebay phishing scam e-mails! :)

benedictxvi@vatican.va

An Open Letter to Zai

Zai had written: "I hope I am not one of those desafinado..."


Zai:

Salaam 'alaikum.

No, I don't consider you to be among the "desafinado" Muslims (and never have). To me, the desafinado are the "progressives" except that, to me, their rhetoric isn't "progressive," but confused. After a few years away from the US, living in a Muslim community in SE Asia, and seeing the American Muslim community from afar, I've come to the conclusion that the desafinados:

* are poorly educated in Islam
* lack the educational resources (facilities, teachers, books, you name it)
* overly rely upon the Qur'an (a bad habit from their Christian upbringing) and barely rely upon the Sunnah
* don't have the community support or history to help guide them (it takes a village, ya know ;) )
* are guided by certain elements of Western culture (or worse, their nafs) in interpreting Islam

And this problem isn't limited to Islam. Just this evening, I came across the following quotation by Cardinal Ratzinger, one of the current frontrunners to become Pope: "We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." I'm not sure Ratzinger's "dictatorship of relativism" is relevant here, but I think the latter part of the sentence ("...which has as its highest goal...") is completely relevant. (I've been impressed by Ratzinger in the past few days, but I'm not sure I want him to become Pope - Islamic-Catholic relations might go backwards if he does.)

Anyway, I digress... :)