Islam's chance to show its quality
Islam must not fritter away in angry rhetoric an opportunity to affirm to the world its superiority as a creed. It also has a chance of distancing itself from the violence practised by those few malcontents who follow the al-Qaeda banner.
Pope Benedict's call for a 'dialogue of cultures', at the University of Regensburg, gave the scholars and theologians among a billion Muslims just this chance. Sadly, however, none of the angry rejoinders identified the 14th century emperor Manuel II Palaeologus of Constantinople - whom the Pope quoted without endorsing - as an early loser in what is nowadays called the 'clash of civilisations'. No Christian ruler knew Muslims better, or had greater cause to hate them, than Manuel - whose empire the Ottoman Turks overran.
Pope Benedict is a teacher, theologian and strategist, and his speech eulogised the 'concept of reason and its application'. He would probably have liked erudite Muslim clerics to pick up the gauntlet and engage him in debate on the contrast between reason and force.
As he rightly said: 'Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul.' His adversaries could have retorted that the Catholic Church's Inquisition used the same methods that the Pope deplores as 'evil and inhuman'. An earlier pontiff, Innocent IV, authorised torture as a means of extracting recantations before the convicted were burned at the stake.
Muslim spokesmen could also have recalled that the Catholic Church blessed the seven Crusades against the Turks and Saracens. Or that one of the titles of King Juan Carlos of Spain - 'His Most Catholic Majesty' - recalls papal appreciation of a predecessor who defeated Spain's last Moorish kingdoms, forcibly converting Muslims. All this is of the stuff of history, providing the context in which Pope Benedict invited debate. He was following in the footsteps of Manuel, who engaged in lengthy discussion with a learned Persian and wrote a book comparing Christianity with Islam. Manuel cultivated friends among his Turkish enemies, who held him hostage for several years. They forced him to swear allegiance to the sultan, and even to lead his troops to help the Ottoman ruler subdue people of his own race and religion in the free Byzantine city of Philadelphia.
Two other facts are worth stressing.
First, before becoming pope, Cardinal Ratzinger was prefect of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith - the relatively new name for the Holy Office of the Inquisition. Methods change, but robust faith and the sense of mission endure.
Second, Yugoslavia's disintegration confirmed that the Vatican's political role did not end with medieval Europe. Pope John Paul II hailed Croatia as the 'rampart of Christianity'. The Vatican and Germany recognised it (also the other breakaway republic, Slovenia) before the European Union did.
Islam could also retort that no institution should be judged out of its historical context and that, like the Inquisition, the Muslim proselytising Manuel mentioned reflects a certain period in history. An additional defence is that al-Qaeda terrorists do not speak for the entire Muslim community, or ummah, and that Islam has no recognised central authority like Catholicism.
The world has much to gain from an orderly ecclesiastical debate that might help to explain some of the motivations for more than 2 billion Catholics and Muslims. A dialogue of cultures might reinforce 'the rationality of faith' - but of all faiths, not just one - that the Pope invoked in his controversial address.
Sunanda Kisor Datta-Ray is a former editor of The Statesman in India
