Clash of faiths as pope visits Turkey
Pastor Dale Morgan
Clash of faiths as pope visits Turkey*
POSTED: 1511 GMT (2311 HKT), November 24, 2006
PARIS, France (Reuters) -- The ghosts of pontiffs past -- the
charismatic John Paul II, the kindly John XXIII, the merciful Benedict
XV -- will haunt professor Benedict XVI in Turkey next week during his
first visit to a Muslim country as pope.
Living on the bridge between Christianity and Islam, the Turks have seen
Roman Catholic leaders come and go -- and they think much less of this
one than his predecessors.
Further into the Muslim heartland, sheikhs and scholars in Egypt, Saudi
Arabia and Pakistan are even more dismissive of Benedict for what they
felt was an insult to Islam in a speech he gave two months ago in his
native Germany.
The November 28 to December 1 trip, organized around talks with the
spiritual head of Orthodox Christianity in Istanbul, has turned into an
encounter with an Islamic world worried that he is rolling back decades
of Catholic-Muslim dialogue.
"He should follow in the footsteps of his predecessor John Paul, who was
against the theory of the clash of civilizations," Qari Hanif Jallundri,
a senior official for a large network of madrasas (Koran schools) in
Pakistan, said in a typical comment.
Cemal Usak, a Turkish Muslim active in inter-faith dialogue, noted
Benedict had no real experience of Islam whereas Pope John XXIII spent a
decade as a Vatican diplomat in Istanbul.
The once-Christian city has shown what it can do for popes it admires,
naming a street after John XXIII and erecting a statue to Pope Benedict
XV to honor his humanitarian work caring for Turkish troops wounded in
the First World War.
What upsets Muslims is that Benedict pokes at some open wounds that
divide Christianity and Islam while earlier popes looked past them to
stress what unites the two faiths.
John Paul kissed a Koran and said Christians and Muslims prayed to the
same God. Pope John, papal nuncio (ambassador) in Turkey from 1935 to
1944, used to say "I love the Turks!"
By contrast, Benedict opened his Regensburg speech by quoting a
Byzantine emperor who argued that Islam was violent and irrational. The
Pope went on to say true religion joins faith and reason, a link he
implied that Islam lacked.
The speech triggered a wave of protest in the Muslim world. Benedict
denied any insult to Islam and apologized for any misunderstanding, but
did not retract his words.
For many Muslims, that threw dialogue back to square one.
"We have said from the beginning that the pope should apologize for the
insult he inflicted on Islam," said Mohammad Hussein, grand mufti of
Jerusalem and Palestinian territories.
"The hurt he caused Muslims is not going to be solved with such visits,
even if he visited every single Muslim country," said Mohsen al-Awajy, a
prominent Saudi preacher.
"Pope Benedict seems to have Islamophobic views, unlike Pope John Paul,
who was much more tolerant," Elham Fathi, assistant editor of the widely
read IslamOnline.net, said in Cairo.
Even Muslims keen on continuing a dialogue with the Vatican, such as
Turkey's Usak or Algerian philosopher Mustapha Cherif, say Benedict has
misunderstood Islam.
"I hope he's a fast learner," Usak said. Cherif, who met the Pope this
month, called him "a man of dialogue" and added: "All we want is that he
understands and doesn't repeat what he said."
One problem is that Benedict will speak not only to the world's 1.3
billion Muslims but also its two billion Christians, many of whom also
worry about violence by radical Islamists.
"My readers were, for the most part, very supportive and pleased with
what Benedict said in Regensburg," said Amy Welborn, who runs the
popular U.S. Catholic blog Open Book.
They also appreciated his call to Western Christians to reject a narrow,
modern version of reason that he said shuts out faith and strips away
the ethical foundations of society itself.
"They would like to see more Muslims have the same attitude toward their
own faith, and particularly how that faith is lived out in the modern
world," she said.