Recently, Pope Benedict quoted a long-forgotten Byzantine Emperor to take a swipe at Islam. Here is what he quoted, from a long lecture presented to a largely academic audience:
"Show me just what Muhammad 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."
The response has been predictably pugnacious. Rioters and rabble-rousers are scarring the world as we speak; even India has not been spared.
The Pope has a proclivity to attack other faiths. If I may be permitted a shameless plug, Jaishree and I cautiously spoke out against some of his remarks directed at Hinduism and Buddhism when he was first appointed to Catholicism’s highest office.
The Pope’s speech was irresponsible not only because it fomented animus in other religious communities, but also because it lead to the persecution of minority Christians in non-Christian countries. A nun was killed over this.
Also, no religion is without blood on its walls. Christianity has had an aggressive history of violence as well, and in the interest of fairness and proper contextualization, he should have pointed this out. Then again, he is not exactly impartial in the matter, so perhaps that is expecting too much.
He does get some props for apologizing, sort of, and for initiating dialogue with the representatives of Muslim countries.
So what is the Pope up to? As far as I can tell, the current Pope’s project is to provincialize Christianity, to reinvigorate it as a moral and spiritual force in its European homeland. As we all know, Christianity is not exactly thriving in Europe. The Enlightenment attenuated its political and moral legitimacy, and attendant scientific revolutions made a mockery of its truth claims. Islam has entered Europe through immigration (after a long period of absence, due, in some part, to banishment), and if there is any vitality in European faith, it is in Islam and the various "southern" Christianities brought to Europe by immigrants from Third World countries.
The Pope is not attempting to engender a transglobal Holy War, but reinitiating a specifically religious critique of Islam from within the European citadel; it is directed at the "godless" Europeans who have succumbed to secularism and, in his view, a tendency to assign equal standing to all religious faiths.
He is wise enough to know that his words would reverberate far beyond Europe. The karma of bad deeds caught up with him.
