Indonesia Update

What really happened indeed. Such fury, rage, and confusion in the last few days. I decided to dig deeper, and see if I can look back at the beginning.

Note: Prof. Juan Cole has discussed this in even more depth and details [ here ].

On Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to University of Regensburg in Germany on Tuesday, 12 September, he made remarks on Islam which has invoked Muslims anger. Comments such as the following are written on newspapers all over the world :

he (the emperor) addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: “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.”

Chaos ensued. Muslims all over the world protested heavily, and the unrest is growing closer by everyday to the level of the last Denmark-cartoon row. Yemen’s head of state was the first of his level to protest, threatening to evaluate their relationship with Vatican. Malaysia PM followed, asking Pope to apologize for his remarks. Others are following. update: a nun in Somalia was shot dead. Left alone, this situation will only continue to bring everyone down.

Vatican responded with a formal statement, quoted “The Holy Father is very sorry that some passages of his speech may have sounded offensive to the sensibilities of Muslim believers,”.
According to BBC’s Vatican correspondent, the speed at which Vatican responded shows how seriously they’re taking this, and the statement is as close as it can be to Pope’s own personal apology.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended Pope’s remark, saying that he’s been misunderstood, and the remarks has been taken out of context. Quoted : “It was an invitation to dialogue between religions and the Pope expressedly spoke in favour of this dialogue”.

Among all this rush, I wonder what really happened back then. All news so far are just showing comments and quotes. Not the full, unedited, speech. Would I ever know ?

Thankfully, as I’ve expected, BBC came to the rescue. They published a PDF document, containing the full transcript of the controversial speech. It’s available for download by clicking here. Finally we’ll be able to see for ourselves, whether all these rage are justified.

Unfortunately, it seems that indeed the Pope has made a few mistakes.

First, he has quoted a person, Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, which in turn has made at least an erroneous remark. The Emperor concluded, incorrectly, that Muhammad has commanded muslims to spread Islam by the sword.

Second, he quoted another person, French Islamist R. Arnaldez, which again actually is in error. Quoted : “who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word,”. The God, in Islam, is an entity that is most just, and therefore will not do such thing.

Third, the whole speech is an attempt to reconcile reason with religion. It gave an example of another religion which is incompatible with reason, and through the rest of it trying to convince that Christianity is not like that. Unfortunately, that “another religion” is Islam. And the “proof” that Islam is incompatible with reason is simply untrue.
As an example, quoted : “But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.”. As we can read for ourselves a lot of Ijma’, Islamic fatwa made on rational decisions, it’s easy to see that this is not the case. Islam is also already in peace with science from it’s very beginning, with experts on various topics showing up at all time.

The fourth mistake is Angela Merkel’s actually. The speech in the whole put more emphasis in encouraging dialogue between Christianity with modern science & reason - not with other religions, and not specifically with Islam.

The fifth mistake is done by everyone pointing their fingers on the resulting violence and said, “see? Muslims are violent”. It’s like when a few blondes are making silly comments and people concluded that all blondes are stupid. It’s called generalization.

The whole speech is making sense when we saw the context - the meeting was between the Pope and the representatives of science. It’s a very noble attempt to unify science and faith once more.

However, it’s undeniable that he has made mistakes along the way. And it’s in everyone’s best interest that Vatican does their best to rectify this.
I have faith that they will.

Update: The New York Sun claimed that Pope Benedict XVI is more cautious on its relationship with Muslims. While John Paul II has reconciliation policy with Muslims and backed it up with actions (visited a mosque in Syria, etc), Benedict XVI instead do things like demoting the expert on Muslim-relationship, arguing against Turkey inclusion in European Union (due to its Islamic roots), and so on.

This entry was posted Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 7:17 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.