Eight years after a papal speech on Islam caused a furore, inter-faith relations are still tense
By B.C.
EIGHT years ago today, Pope Benedict XVI made a speech at a German university (pictured above) which caused a furore in the Islamic world. It was publicly condemned in Turkey and Pakistan; it prompted attacks on churches in the West Bank and Gaza; and it probably led to the killing of a nun in Somalia. The lecture also had some medium-term effects which were, arguably, more benign. It prompted Christian and Muslim leaders across the world to start a series of set-piece dialogues in the hope that unintentional provocation could be avoided in future. It's a sad reflection on the present state of the Middle East that some people, especially conservative Catholics, are saying that Benedict has been vindicated by history.
What exactly did the pope say? Part of his lecture was almost sentimental in tone; the pontiff was expressing his feelings as an elderly German scholar, known for most of his life as Joseph Ratzinger, who for a brief moment found himself back in the world of Teutonic academia where he had spent his best years. Inspired by this august setting, he plunged into the deep waters: the balance between faith and reason in Christianity and Islam, and the implications of that relationship for peace and violence. For Christians, he suggested, God could not be other than reasonable, and He could never bless violence as a way of compelling people's obedience. For Muslims, by contrast, God transcended all categories and was therefore subject to no such limit.
Benedict quoted, without endorsing, the words of a Byzantine emperor who declared that Islam's prophet had brought into the world "things only bad and inhumane, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." The pope went on to imply that the marriage between faith and reason, mediated through Greek philosophy, was an essential feature of Christianity; it was a mistake to think, as some modern theologians did, that Christianity could be stripped of its Hellenic accretions and reduced to an authentic core. Christianity was essentially "reasonable", and that might not be the case for Islam.
These are choppy seas for any theologian or historian of religion to navigate. In every faith that believes in divine revelation—the idea that at certain moments, God discloses essential truths about Himself or the universe—there is bound to be a tension between revelation and reason as methods of understanding the world. Christians and Muslims have found many different answers to that dilemma. It's probably true, on balance, that after much internal debate, Islamic thought from the Middle Ages onwards put more emphasis on divine revelation, while Christianity as it emerged in western Europe put more stress on reason. But that did not make the west Europeans behave more peacefully.
Over the centuries, Muslim thinkers have had a lot to say about reason, including the reasonableness of God; and many Christian texts—including the New Testament—stress the fact that God can utterly trump and render meaningless whatever passes for intelligent reason among unaided human minds.
Ironically, this is exactly the sort of thing that Christian and Muslim thinkers could and should talk about in a civilised way. They can't and won't agree on the question of when and to whom God definitively revealed himself—unless one or the other religion ceases to exist. But they do face common intellectual dilemmas, and they can interact constructively as well as destructively. Not all the exchanges between Christianity and Islam in the medieval era were as abrasive as the Byzantine emperor's dialogue quoted by Benedict.
His big failure of tact, perhaps, lay in making generalisations about Islam which relied on Christian commentaries, instead of letting Islamic sources speak for themselves. To any Muslim listener, his tone sounded "Orientalist" and condescending. But an indirect result of the furore was the "Common Word" initiative launched in 2007 by 138 Muslim scholars who invited their Christian counterparts to a debate on the subject of "love of neighbour and love of God"—and the resulting debate continues in universities like Yale and Cambridge.
None of that is much help, you might say, to people threatened by the nihilist fury of al-Qaeda or Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria. But ill-judged pronouncements in the world of academia can certainly have a negative effect on the streets. It would be nice to think that the opposite is also the case: that jaw-jaw is not merely better than war-war but at least a partial antidote.
