The Pope's Speech is Not All About Violence in Islam

What the Pope Meant

The recent controversy over Pope Benedict XVI’s comments on Islam in a major lecture at Regensburg University in Germany last week has once again showed that there is little religious commonality between the Christian and Muslim worlds, and for reasons mostly unstated in the mainstream media. There is no commonality between the two religions not because Islam is inherently a violent religion, and Christianity is a peaceful one. Instead, there is no commonality because the underlying basis of what religion actually is differs in both groups. The Pope, in his speech, illustrated that he believed that reason is something exogenous to religion (faith). He states in his speech that Christianity gained reason during its early days because of the beneficial input of Greek philosophical thought. With this premise, the Pope believes that the Christian religion has reason. And Islam, which did not experience a similar input, has no reason. The crux of his message was the since Christianity is a reasonable religion, then the increasingly secular Western world should embrace it within the purview of science, instead of rejecting Christianity as is happening in Europe.

Pope’s Views on Islam

The Pope, who is the highest religious leader in the Christian world, has decided to emphasize on the difference between Islam and Christianity by claiming that the roots of Christianity is reason while the roots of Islam is not. He has chosen to do this at this particular time for a reason. His quote from a Byzantine emperor, “Show me just what Muhammed 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”, is yet another Western attempt to draw a link between acts of terrorism in the world today to Islam, the religion.

If the Pope were any other person, it would not have mattered so much. That he is the representative face of the Christian world; it forces one to pay close attention to what actually was said. The Pope would not be as bold as to state something that the Christian (or Western) world does not already believe in. Therefore, it makes absolutely no sense for the Muslim world to demand an apology from the Pope. Such a demand is demeaning to Muslims because it is akin to forcing someone to declare something aloud while retaining something else in the heart.

Muslims Should Not Ask for An Apology

The Muslim demand for an apology has resulted in a non-apology. The Pope has said: “At this time, I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought”.

The Pope is a thinking man, and a man of his age and wisdom, does not lightly pick quotations for a speech randomly. The quotation was picked because it expressed the Pope’s own thoughts on the topic of his speech that day “Faith is Reason” – Christianity is a reasonable and non-violent religion and Islam is not.

Pope’s Speech is Not about Violence in Religion

But it is in my opinion that a careful reading of the Pope’s words shows that the difference between Christianity and Islam is NOT in its attitude towards violence (one only has to look at Europe’s bloody history to dismiss the notion of Christianity as a peaceful religion), but rather in its conception and understanding of faith. The Pope very carefully explains in his speech how the early Christians incorporated Greek philosophical thought into Christianity. The Christian conception of reason in faith stems from the Greek tradition of philosophical thought. The Pope admits that the Christian faith benefited from the “mutual enrichment” between Christian thought and Greek thought; that is, the Christian faith benefited positively from the input of a man-made construct. The Pope called this an encounter between “genuine enlightenment and religion”. It is important to note that the Pope views the teachings in Greek philosophical thought as genuine enlightenment, not the teachings of Jesus Christ.

The Pope also mentions in his speech that Islam views God as absolutely transcendent. He says: “His (God) will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry”.

Reason is Endogenous to Islam

The Pope is absolutely right in his reading of Islam’s view of a transcendent God. God indeed cannot be bound by a man-made category, or construct. When the rationality we speak of is a man-made construct, then God cannot be bound up by it. Clearly, God’s will is final, and if he were to even will us to be idol worshippers, that would be the case. But clearly, that is not his will, as evidenced by the multitude of prophets he has sent mankind over time. But, if the rationality we speak of is divine, then that is God’s rationality that we speak of, not a man-made rationality

The Pope spends the rest of his speech on the problem of defining only that which “results from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements” as scientific. He states that humanity would be reduced when religious and ethical questions are considered as having no place within the collective reason of science.

What he says on this is profound: “The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate”.

I would agree with him; he is absolutely right that man-made constructs cannot frame a reasonable, ethical and moral society. And Christianity, as he himself has defined, is a combination of Jesus’ teachings and man-made constructs and elements, such as the Greek thought. It is a modified, man-made religion.

And Muslims have a revealed religion that is all-encompassing; Islam does not require “genuine enlightenment” from the minds of men because it far surpasses what Man can come up with. There is a difference in a society that depends on the changeable man-made constructs for its ethical and moral foundational structure, and a society that has unchangeable transcendent principles as its foundational structure.

And therein, lays the difference between the two.