Pope’s appeal for dialogue backfires

There is such a thing as being too clever by half. Pope Benedict is a case in point. He is a former academic and last week he addressed a university gathering in Germany.

In this congenial environment, he delivered a nuanced address on the subject of faith and reason, snappily titled Three Stages in the Program of De-Hellenisation. The gist is that belief in God is entirely consistent with human reason and the Greek spirit of philosophical inquiry. By using the reason God gave us, we become, in a way, more like him. If the Pope had stuck to quoting Plato to illustrate his point, he wouldn't now be in the position of, as the British Muslim News put it, alienating a billion Muslims.

His mistake was to cite a series of dialogues between a learned 14th-century Byzantine emperor and a scholarly Persian Muslim about the truth of their respective religions, probably written while Constantinople was being besieged by the Turks.

Emperor Manuel II Paleologus referred during the dialogues to the Koran's teachings about spreading the faith by the sword. And this, said the emperor, could not come from God because violence was the opposite of reason, and God cannot act contrary to reason.

What interested the Pope was the emperor's insistence that God's nature meant that he cannot act irrationally. Pope Benedict quoted verbatim from the emperor's words: "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."

And this remark, which the Pope described as "rather marginal to the dialogue itself", was what almost every prominent Muslim has seized on. It wasn't so much that the remarks were lost in translation from the German — it was the quotation marks.

The fact that the Pope cited the adjectives "evil and inhuman" was taken as evidence that he agreed with them.

As a British Muslim youth organisation, the Ramadhan Foundation, said crossly: "If the Pope wanted to attack Islam he should have been brave enough to say it personally without quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor."

In fact, the Pope was out to attack something different — the contemporary, secular idea that faith is simply a matter of personal opinion. If he's having a go at anything, it's not Islam, it's the notion that religion is incompatible with independent thought.

The reaction from the Islamic world hasn't been what you might call measured. Admittedly, it was easy to take the Pope's remarks out of context, given that it takes a bit of effort to track down his address in full, or indeed to understand it. But not impossible — yet few have made the effort. 

The speech itself suggested that the Pope understood that there are nuances to the Islamic idea of jihad. He cites an early verse in the Koran that "there is no compulsion in religion". And in respect of the verses that exhort Muslims to take up arms for the faith he notes that there are differences between Muhammad's treatment of Christians and Jews, and of pagans.

If you're looking for a real critique of Islam in the speech, there is one in the text. The Pope suggests that the Islamic idea of God is so transcendent that he cannot be seen in terms of human reason. He cites one medieval Islamic scholar who says that God is entirely remote from our rational categories.

This may not sound like much to get worked up about, but Benedict sees this as the opposite of the Christian way of looking at faith and reason.

As for the Pope's notional Islamophobia, he's had rather a good record until now in terms of the issues that agitate Muslims. He was sympathetic to their reaction to the Danish cartoons, and he opposed the conflict in Lebanon and the war in Iraq.

The irony of this row is that it is the opposite of what the Pope was trying to achieve. Benedict ended his speech by hoping for a new dialogue between the sciences, religions and cultures "which is so urgently needed today".

It looks, from this miserable episode, as if you can only have a conversation that deals — however remotely — with Islam on Muslim terms. Not much of a dialogue, then.