The Pope tries to walk back his anti-Muslim polemic

Pope Benedict XVI (aka, Ratzinger I, Papa Ratzi) has caught quite a bit of criticism of the ill-considered portion of his Regensburg speech last weekend in which he approvingly quoted a medieval Christian polemic against the Prophet Muhammad for having brought nothing but evil and inhuman things into the world.  He first apologized for the fact that Muslims were upset with him, a classic non-apology apology.  He later extended it to something more but not quite an apology, saying he didn't actually agree with the quote he used - although he clearly was using it in an approving context in the speech.

Dear Lord, what's next?  Pretending I
don't think Jews are "Christ-killers"?

The San Francisco Chronicle editorialized on A papal apology 09/19/06:

It's rare - almost unheard of - for a pope to apologize for personal remarks, yet that's what he had to do.

Given that precedent, that's probably about as much of a retraction as we'll see from Papa Ratzi.  The editorial concludes:

The Vatican's rarely used spin machine went into overdrive, producing days later a brief statement from the pope that he was "deeply sorry.'' His own thinking was nothing like the quote, he said. He wanted a "frank and sincere dialogue'' about religious differences.

It's hard to know if he'll get such a discussion going. All of the field pieces of public opinion in the Mideast rolled into position and blasted away at the episode. There were riots and effigy burnings.

Pope Benedict has plans for a November trip to Turkey, a largely Muslim nation where the Byzantine emperor once reigned. His contrite message that he was sorry for last week's speech is a first step. The upcoming visit gives him a chance to speak his mind clearly about Islam.

There are other indications, though,that Ratzinger may not think that highening Christian-Muslim religious tensions is entirely a bad thing.  For instance, Pope remarks reveal harder stance by Peter Gould BBC News 09/16/06:

One of the first signs of a toughening of the Vatican's stance came with the removal from office of Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald.

The British-born cleric ran a Vatican department that promoted dialogue with other religions. A distinguished scholar on Arab affairs, he was an acknowledged expert on the Islamic world.

The decision by Benedict XVI to remove him from his post, and send him to Egypt as papal nuncio, was widely seen as a demotion.

Some wondered about the wisdom of the move.

Father Thomas Reese, a Jesuit scholar and an authority on the workings of the Vatican, told the BBC news website of his concerns: "The Pope's worst decision so far has been the exiling of Archbishop Fitzgerald," he said in an interview in April this year.

"He was the smartest guy in the Vatican on relations with Muslims. You don't exile someone like that, you listen to them.

"If the Vatican says something dumb about Muslims, people will die in parts of Africa and churches will be burned in Indonesia, let alone what happens in the Middle East.

"It would be better for Pope Benedict to have Fitzgerald close to him."

It's important to keep in mind what is happening, though.  Juan Cole writes in Khamenei's Conspiracy Theory Links Pope to Bush's Crusade, Informed Comment blog 09/19/06

In fact, I don't know of any major mainstream Muslim leader or institution that has called for a violent response. The tiny guerrilla cells in Iraq don't count. This point is worth stressing, because of the false allegation that Muslims have in some normative way responded with violence. There has been almost none of that, despite a handful of regrettable incidents, and even the peaceful demonstrations have been tiny for a community of 1.4 billion. 150 people came out in Basra, a city of over a million.

Tina Beattie in Pope Benedict XVI and Islam: beyond words OpenDemocracy.net 09/18/06 takes a nuaned look at Ratzinger's speech, givinghim creditfor emphasizing the importance of reason in religious matters.  But she suggests that it's difficult to understand how he would have made a mistake of this kind:

 All this can be argued even before we come to the defamatory quotation which Benedict saw fit to include: the emperor is alleged to have said: "Show me just what Mohammed 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." This part of the quotation is superfluous to the pope's argument, so why did he include it?

There have been numerous ingenious attempts to argue that, as he was quoting from another source, he was not expressing his own opinion. But he does not sufficiently distance himself from the sentiments expressed in the quotation, although it has been pointed out that the German version of the speech describes this comment as "astoundingly harsh - to us surprisingly harsh", which in the English translation is rendered more mildly as "startling brusqueness". Nevertheless, some readers could justifiably be left with the sense that perhaps our contemporary Pope does not find this an entirely inaccurate description of Muhammad and his followers, so that this lecture may give us a revealing glimpse of Benedict's own prejudices.
 

Tomás de Torquemada (1420-1498) who was also "harsh" toward Muslims, and Jews, too

I provided both English and German texts of the relevant passage in an earlier post.  The Vatican's official English version says, "he [the Emperor being quoted] addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness".  The German version says, "wendet er sich in erstaunlich schroffer, uns überraschend schroffer Form", which Beattie has translated correctly.  Still, I agree with her characterization that one could hardly conclude from the original speech that the Pope was disagreeing with the quotation he was using.

Bradley Burston, on the other hand, writes in Ha'aretz that The Pope did us all a favor 09/19/06:

There is no way of knowing why a Holy Father would say such a thing. ...

There is no way of explaining why the Holy See, having sparked Muslim ire worldwide, and having already decided to issue an unprecedented apology, would content himself with an expression of regret worthy of the most Polish of Jewish mothers, the equivalent of "What kind of person reacts this way to things like what I said?"

Unless, somewhere inside, he meant what he said in the first place.

But I don't find his argument terribly convincing that "getting it out into the open" is wonderfully healthy:

Maybe it's time we opened up the little box of horrors inside every one of us. The one full of what we truly believe. ...

Opening the box, in this sense, does not mean simply collecting the venom in order to throw it into the face of those who vex us, annoy us, oppose us, believe in other faiths or political movements.

It does not mean, for example, firebombing churches to defend Islam from charges that it is a religion of violence. It does not mean advocating the wholesale slaughter of Muslims in order to make sure that a Holocaust does not recur.

It means opening the box so that we can examine what's in there, for good and, often, ill. Expose it, for once, to light and air.

The Pope is the leader of the largest Christian organization in the world, the Catholic Church.  He shouldn't be careless or deliberately inflamming religious tensions with pre-Reformation and pre-Enlightenment polemics against Islam and Muslims.