In Search of Islamic Lights

Once again, Muslims around the world are outraged about a supposed slight by the West— and by the Pope no less.

The context in which Benedict XVI spoke the words that sparked ire in the Islamic world seems utterly ironic. The lecture was titled “Faith, Reason, and the University” and presented at a renowned German university, Regensburg. More importantly, the speech was an enlightened analysis of faith and reason in the modern world.

Before getting into the flesh of his argument, the Pope recalled his days of teaching. He remembered the “profound sense of coherence,” and the weekly debates with fellow scholars from other creeds and dogmas. Indeed, he even fondly quoted a former colleague complaining that Regensburg had two full faculties (one Catholic and one Protestant) devoted “to something that did not exist: God.”

Nonetheless, the Pope is guilty…of quoting a civilized debate in a less civilized time than our own.

When Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an erudite Persian debated in 1391 about Islam and Christianity, Constantinople was under a siege that would eventually succeed, some decades later, in bringing down the last bastion of the Roman Empire. They argued about the balance of reason and faith, specifically in its application to proselytizing through force.

Essentially, Benedict XVI was debating freely and openly like Manuel II and his Persian interlocutor had once done. Drawing from other speeches given during his Bavarian escapade, and last year’s encyclical letter entitled Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”), we can conclude the once-called “rottweiler” Cardinal Ratzinger molded into a truly ecumenical pontiff. He quotes enlightened philosophes, concelebrates with rabbis and patriarchs, and is quite fond of neo-Platonic reasoning in his homilies. He even repeatedly quotes passages in the Qur’an. In short, he seeks to bring the Church closer to other religions in building a Christianity more akin with Christ’s teachings than the one that ordered the Crusades and the Inquisition long centuries ago.

But this week has put it all to a test. Ecumenism, open forums, and the coexistence of faith and reason have been jeopardized by violence from leading Muslims, just as if the Danish cartoons had been reprinted. And the irony of it all matters little when compared to its consequences.

Educated Muslim scholars are right to deny Muhammad’s teachings were violent, but they should be more concerned about their brothers in faith than with folks in Rome, Paris, or Berlin. An Iranian hardliner like Ahmad Khatami opined that Benedict and Bush have “united in order to repeat the Crusades.” If those words do not seem extreme enough, Salih Kapusuz, from the governing Turkish party AKP expressed that the Pope “is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini.” And protesters in London carried signs reading, “Allah will conquer Rome.”

In the end, words remain words, and our Western tradition of freedom of expression should protect them all. But the reactions in the Muslim world did not end there. On Sunday night, churches in Palestine burned with Molotov bomb cocktails. The same day Benedict expressed regret for the world’s reaction to his words, a nun in Africa was shot four times in the back in an attack reportedly related to the speech. Sister Leonella Sgorbati was 65 years old, and worked at a Somali children’s hospital far away from her Italian homeland. If the reactions to the Danish cartoons are any guide, this is merely the beginning.

Extremist Islam is on everybody’s mind thanks to the Sept.11 anniversary and the thwarted plane attacks in Britain just over a month ago. And if this were not enough, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can always be trusted to provide enough spice for any recipe. As he calls for revisionist “scholarly” conferences about the Holocaust (with insulting cartoons to go along), he has repeatedly expressed that the only permanent solution for the Middle East is the “elimination of the Zionist regime.”

How is that for balancing faith and reason? The misguided portrayal of Islam in our world does not spring from an enlightened scholar discussing ecumenism and peaceful dialogue, but from the barbarians that burn and kill with pens or swords.

The Pope’s speech—which most of these protesters never bothered to read— closed with an remarkable thought the obtuse Byzantine emperor Manuel would have never allowed: He said debates about faith should return to the rational stage of a university. Just like Regensburg; just like our own campus.

And from places like these, we need to cry out for a movement like the European Enlightenment to sweep away Muslim extremism. Judeo-Christianity had to go through processes like the Enlightenment and the Reformation before it could reach a point where the Catholic Pope quotes Nietzsche, publicly opposes holy wars, and encourages scholarly dissent while seeking to repair antique schisms.

These are the lights and philosophical perspectives that Islam needs today. Islamic politicians and thinkers can call for an apology should they feel wronged, but virulent reaction will only self-fulfill the prophecy of a destructive Islam, and further taint the image of the Prophet. Only with a show of restraint can peace truly be upon him, and us all.

Pierpaolo Barbieri ‘09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Eliot House.