I‘ll start this post by saying that I would be the first to admit that anyone who accuses Islam of being inherently violent is obviously looking to stir up contention. I would also say you should have a good reason before bringing up historical debates that are sensitive to a culture that you don’t understand. That said, I’m really not seeing the uproar against the Pope right now.

For those who don’t know the story, the pope has stirred up violence in the muslim world by referring to a 14th-century debate on Christianity and Islam in which the Byzantine emperor referrs to Islam as having spread it’s doctrine through war. He quotes the passage he quotes as an entre into a discussion of the place of theology in the university. It facilitates a discussion of the Helenization of the church and of reason and faith in relation to the nature of God.

Quite frankly, the place of Islamic history in the Pope’s remarks is incredibly small. If anything, the import of his remarks is that coersion is antithetical to inter-cultural understanding, that religious understanding is important to this understanding, and that Christians need to be the ones to build bridges to those of other faiths, without coersion and with a mix of reason and religious understanding. By inference, the argument would be that coersion is an ineffective way of dealing with the difficulties we face in understanding the muslim world.

And yet, all that some can see is that he quoted a text that they don’t agree with. It’s like the earlier difficulties with the cartoons with the Bin Laden type in a turbin marked Islam with a bomb in it. The idea to me was that terrorists are trying to hide in their vioence behind the cloak of a religion. It was about deception, rather than the nature of islam.

I am a bit perturbed that the media has presented the issue with the Pope in a way that implies that the he should satisfy his critics by apologizing. Such apologies (The Pope has not given one. He has merely noted that he regrets the reaction to his words.) are not only insincere, they eat at the heart, I believe, of intellectual and spiritual honesty. If public figures give in to public calls for apologies for “ugliness” that they were not actually party to, it ends up amounting to intellectual mob rule. The Pope is a very important leader in the Christian world, and for him to admit to cultural bigotry when none was intended or even unintentionally implied would be irresponsible.

It is especially difficult to me because it has become commonplace to inveigh about the inherent violence of Christianity, the countless atrocities committed in the name of Christianity, etc. No one bombs mosques when this happens. No one calls for apologies from those who defame Christianity.

Most profoundly, I fear that the result of such backlash will be that people will be afraid to be subtle in adressing the issues of interface between Christianity and Islam, that we will begin to speak only in platitudes about one of the most important instances of inter-cultural understanding of our day. We will never be able to go beyond saying “those people aren’t really muslims” or “Islam is a religion of peace.” We will be unable to examine the multi-faceted natures of both Islam and Christianity. Part of the reason that I think people got upset is that the passage the Pope quotes is much easier to understand precisely because it is philosophically less rigorous than the rest of his remarks. The speech is worth a read if just because it says something about who the new Pope is. Whayever you think of his argument (and, frankly, I would need to do a good bit more reading to follow him in points), he is impeccably schooled and quite thoughtful about the issues involved. It just may be, though, that the world isn’t ready for such complexity, as I think the remarks on the above link show. There isn’t a good soundbite in the entire piece, and we don’t know how to deal with that.