Pope Benedict XVI Islam Controversy

The Regensburg lecture or Regensburg address was delivered on 12 September 2006 by Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg in Germany, which sparked international reactions and controversy. The lecture entitled " Faith, Reason and the University – Memories and Reflections" (german: Glaube, Vernunft und Universität – Erinnerungen und Reflexionen).

The controversial comment originally appeared in the seventh of the 26 ''Dialogues Held with a Certain Persian, the Worthy Mouterizes, in Anakara of Galatia'', written in 1391 as an expression of the views of Emperor Manuel II, one of the last Christian rulers before the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, on such issues as forced conversion, holy war, and the relationship between faith and reason. The passage, in the English translation published by the Vatican, was:

In his lecture, the Pope, speaking in German, quoted a passage about Islam made at the end of the 14th century by Byzantine (Eastern Roman) emperor Manuel II Palaiologos. Many Islamic politicians and religious leaders protested against this passage the pope quoted, and which they perceived as an insulting mischaracterization of Islam.BBC News Article: "Pope sorry for offending Muslims"
last accessed 17 September 2006 Mass street protests were mounted in many Islamic countries. The Pakistani parliament unanimously called on the Pope to retract "this objectionable statement".

The Pope maintained that the comment he had quoted did not reflect his own views. His statement has been included as a footnote in the official text of the lecture available at Vatican website:

Pope Benedict XVI's lecture

The lecture on faith and reason, with references ranging from ancient Jewish and Greek thinking to Protestant theology and modern secularity, focused mainly on Christianity and what Pope Benedict called the tendency to "exclude the question of God" from reason. Islam features in a part of the lecture: the Pope quoted a strong criticism of Islam, a criticism Pope Benedict disclaimed as being stated with an "unacceptable" "startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded".

The author of this criticism was the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (or Paleologus) in a 1391 dialogue with an "educated Persian" (who remained unnamed in all the dialogues), as well as observations on this argument made by Theodore Khoury, the scholar whose edition of the dialogue in question the pontiff was referencing. Pope Benedict used Manuel II's argument in order to draw a distinction between a Christian view, as expressed by Manuel II, that "not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature", and an allegedly Islamic view, as explained by Khoury, that God transcends concepts such as rationality, and his will, as Ibn Hazm stated, is not constrained by any principle, including rationality, although it is known in Islamic thought that this does not imply the intended meaning as used by the editor.

As a part of his explication of this distinction, Pope Benedict referred to a specific aspect of Islam that Manuel II considered irrational, namely the practice of forced conversion. Specifically, the Pope (making clear that they were the Emperor's words, not his own) quoted Manuel II Palaiologos as saying: ''"Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only bad and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."''

The pontiff was comparing apparently contradictory passages from the Qur'an, one being that "There is no compulsion in religion", the other being that it is acceptable to "spread the faith through violence". The pontiff argued the latter teaching to be unreasonable and advocated that religious conversion should take place through the use of reason. His larger point here was that, generally speaking, in Christianity, God is understood to act in accordance with reason, while in Islam, God's absolute transcendence means that "God is not bound even by his own word", and can act in ways contrary to reason, including self-contradiction. At the end of his lecture, the Pope said, "It is to the great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures."

Key paragraphs

Quoted below are the three paragraphs (of sixteen total) which discuss Islam in Pope Benedict's lecture :

Initial reactions

Political leaders

Africa

* – Foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said: "This was a very unfortunate statement and it is a statement that shows that there is a lack of understanding of real Islam. And because of this we are hopeful that such statements and such positions would not be stated in order to not allow tension and distrust and recriminations to brew between the Muslim as well as the west." The Vatican envoy was also summoned."In quotes: Muslim reaction to Pope"
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