CALLOUS ENGAGEMENT WITH MOSLEMS

Faith, Reason and Infallibility
Shaykh Riyad Nadwi, Ph.D., Arab News

"A lecture by Pope Benedict XVI entitled “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections” at the University of Regensburg last Tuesday has caused another uproar among Muslims worldwide and the tension seems set to increase.

Having read the official transcript of the lecture released by the Libreria Editrice Vaticana (2006) to the global media, I was not surprised, given the new global neocon principle of callous engagement with Muslims, to see a modern philosophical treatise predicated on medieval insensitivity. I believe that if the pope has been reading and believing the scaremongering publications rolling off the neocon printing press in North America (e.g. Bat Yo’er’s Eurobia) he would, indeed, think it appropriate to quote Manuell II Paleologus when he said “show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman...”.
The difficulty, however, is that there is an enormous chasm between the principle of callous engagement and that of reasoned philosophical discussion. Among the many arguments offered in the lecture, one in particular epitomizes this point. The main thrust of the lecture was a call to widen the scope of reason in Western academia so that it allows space for the Divine. The pope argued that:

“Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.”

It is impossible to reconcile this argument, which stresses the existence of the “world’s profoundly religious cultures” seeing Western philosophy “as an attack on their most profound convictions” and the need for “entering into the dialogue of cultures”, with the quote from Manuell II unless we place it in the context of the current global hysteria about Islam and Muslims. Let us not forget that the lecture was being delivered on Sept. 12, a day after the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 “anomaly”. The potency of the philosophical arguments in the lecture would not have been weakened had the pope omitted the Manuell II quote or relied on evidence much closer to his realm. For instance, there are the papal bulls (e.g. the Ad abolendam) ordering many inquisitions, which eventually led Cardinal Cisneros in 1499 to coerce 50,000 Muslims of Granada into mass baptisms. Those who refused were deported to Africa or were systematically eliminated. Those people were not foreigners or black (as the etymology of the word “Moor” suggests) but natives of Spain who had accepted Islam because of what they encountered of its beauty and justice. Had the followers of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) brought “things only evil and inhuman”, more than ninety percent of the native inhabitants would not have adopted Islam voluntarily as history testifies they did."

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