Pope Benedict

Two articles on the subject follow my comments;
1. Christian Rage and Muslim Moderation
2. Don't turn faith into a hollow competition of numbers

I have been writing and re-writing the definition of a peace maker. "A peace maker constantly seeks to mitigate conflicts and nurtures goodwill for peaceful co-existence. His or Her words and actions do not make things worse, but bring some sense and understanding to the situation. God wants us to live in peace and harmony with his creation; indeed that is the purpose religion." Indeed, peace making is the duty of a religious person.

Did Pope's conversion event on Easter, mitigate or aggravate the conflict? With all due respect to his holiness, his words have not been that of a peace maker. There have been three incidents where his non-action or silence would have been better. The revival of comments made by the Emperor Constantine he delivered in Germany irritated his counterparts in Muslim world, then revising the prayer that was not kosher and now this. What was the need to make the conversion on Easter? Provoke?

His holiness Pope Benedict knew darn well, that Muslims will jump up and down and scream to his reactions. As a holy man, was that necessary? What is the gain? What is the need to ruffle the feathers? It is a shame that those Muslims react so wildly towards his words, they need to get in control of themselves and not let the Pope make them dance. If the Pope had not said the things he said, not done the things he did, would there have been a crisis?

http://www.foundationforpluralism.com/WorldMuslimCongress/Articles/Pope-Baptizes-A-Muslims-on-Easter.asp

Mike Ghouse

1. Christian Rage and Muslim Moderation
By Christophe Dicky in Newsweek
http://www.newsweek.com/id/129237

Despite recent provocations against Islam in the West, many Muslims seem weary of the same old tit for tat.

Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 11:35 AM ET Mar 27, 2008

Pope Benedict XVI, an exiled Egyptian journalist, a bleach-blond Dutch parliamentarian and Danish cartoonists all have something in common with a Teddy bear named Mohammed. They have been at the center of that seething storm called Muslim rage in the last few months, and, with the exception of Mohammed T. Bear, they appear to be testing that anger to see if it will erupt … yet again.

If it does, the crisis could peak just as Benedict begins his visit to the United States in mid-April. As he preaches world peace before the United Nations, once more we'll witness scenes of books and flags and effigies burning in the world of Muslims. If precedent holds, rioters may die in Kabul, a nun could be murdered in Somalia, a priest might be gunned down in Turkey. All this is all too predictable, as provocateurs like the peroxide blond must certainly know.

And yet, this time the shockwaves may amount to nothing more than ripples. If the satellite networks allow their lenses to zoom back from the book burners, they may discover there's no raging crowd there, just the usual collection of unemployed malcontents on any street in Karachi. And what is most important, we may find that the Muslims of this world are just as weary of this sorry spectacle—maybe even more so—than the Christian, Jewish and secular publics in the West.

There are several signs of change, and not always from the usual suspects.
In Turkey, the once militantly secular government is now dominated by the AK Party, which has Islamic roots and recently passed a constitutional amendment that ended the ban on women wearing Muslim headscarves at state universities. Yet the same government is supporting theological scholarship intended to modernize—and moderate—traditional Islamic teachings. An initiative run out of the prime minister's office is re-examining interpretation of the Qur'an itself as well as the Hadith, or sayings of the Prophet. Fadi Hakura, an expert on Turkey at Chatham House in London, recently told the BBC, "This is kind of akin to the Christian Reformation. Not exactly the same, but if you think, it's changing the theological foundations."

In Lebanon, Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah once was known as the spiritual leader of Hizbullah and of its suicidal shock troops, who blew up American Marines and diplomats in Beirut in the early 1980s. Today, instead of calling the faithful to arms in response to perceived Western insults, Fadlallah calls on Muslim intellectuals, elites and religious scholars to work through the media and political organizations as well as "legal, artistic and literary" channels.

Fadlallah tells the faithful that the goal of Westerners who commit "aggressions against the Muslim world's sacred symbols" is to create a rift between Muslims and Western societies—and to isolate those Muslims who live in Western societies. He decries those Muslims he calls takfiri who claim they are fighting heresy with violence. He says they play into the hands of Islam's enemies. He even calls for "a united Islamic-Christian spiritual and humanitarian front."

In Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah was pushing an agenda of political and religious moderation even before he assumed full control of the country in 2005. The kingdom still holds to the ultraconservative Sunni religious dogmas known as Wahhabism, and the monarchy's legitimacy is tied to its custodianship of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest sites in Islam. That won't change. But Abdullah has fired 1,000 of the Muslim prayer leaders on the government payroll and decreed that the 40,000 who remain must be retrained to make sure they are not stoking radical violence.

Yes, there may be less here than meets the eye. When I talked to Hakura on the phone Wednesday morning, he cautioned that the Turkish rethink of Islam is rooted in national traditions and might be a hard sell in the Arab Middle East. Fadlallah may be enthusiastic about reconciliation with Christians, but on his Web site he still presents himself as an implacable foe of what he calls Israel's "Zionist project that is based on violence, arrogance and despise [sic] of other countries." A highly placed Saudi friend assured me the other day the so-called "retraining" of Saudi Arabia's retrograde imams really would be more like "a dialogue" to discuss the best ways to preach.

Islam, like any faith, has plenty of violent fools and fanatics. Certainly it is hard to credit the judgment or intelligence of anyone in Sudan connected with the arrest of British expatriate schoolteacher Gillian Gibbons a few months ago. You'll recall she made the nearly fatal mistake of letting her class of seven-year-olds in Khartoum name a Teddy bear Mohammed. To the kids, many of whom were named Mohammed themselves, the name just sounded friendly and cuddly. Sudanese authorities claimed Gibbons was inciting religious hatred and insulting the Prophet. Eventually she apologized and they released her—against the wishes of the mob calling for her death.

But even with many qualifications and reservations, in my view the conciliatory trends in Islam make an interesting contrast with renewed provocations coming out of Europe.
There's no use wasting much space on the Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders, the dyed blond with ugly roots who is promoting a film he says will prove his belief that "Islamic ideology is a retarded, dangerous one." What to say about a politician reminiscent of Goldmember in an Austin Powers film who claims the Qur'an should be banned like Adolph Hitler's "Mein Kampf"? No Dutch television network will show his little movie, and it seems nobody has seen it, but Wilders promises he will put it on the Internet before the end of this month. I suggest he wait until April Fools'.

Danish cartoonists and editors previously unknown to the wider world garnered international attention when they published caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005 that brought on bloody riots in several Muslim countries in 2006. Having sunk once again into obscurity, the editors decided to publish one of the cartoons again last month, reportedly after the arrest of an individual plotting to kill the cartoonist. Great idea. Take one man's alleged crime and respond with new insults to an entire faith.

The most problematic event of late, however, was Pope Benedict's decision to baptize the Egyptian journalist Magdi Allam in Saint Peter's on the night before Easter, thus converting a famously self-hating Muslim into a self-loving Christian in the most high-profile setting possible. Perhaps Benedict really thought, as the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano opined, that the baptism was just a papal "gesture" to emphasize "in a gentle and clear way religious freedom." But I am not prepared to believe for a second, as some around the Vatican have hinted this week, that the Holy Father did not know who Allam was or how provocative this act would appear to Muslim scholars, including and especially those who are trying to foster interfaith dialogue.

Ever since 2006, when Benedict cited a medieval Christian emperor talking about Islam as "evil and inhuman," and the usual Muslim rabble-rousers whipped up the usual Muslim riots, more responsible members of the world's Islamic community have hoped to restore calm and reason. And now this. "The whole spectacle, with its choreography, persona and messages provokes genuine questions about the motives, intentions and plans of some of the pope's advisers on Islam," said a statement issued by Aref Ali Nayed, a spokesman for 138 Muslim scholars who established the Catholic-Muslim Forum for dialogue with Rome earlier this month.

Bishop Paul Hinder, the Vatican's representative in Arabia, was reluctant to criticize the pope, of course, but when I reached him in Abu Dhabi Wednesday morning he clearly had reservations about the way Allam was received into the Church. He said that local Christians took him aside at Easter services and asked him "why it had to be done in such an extraordinary way on a special night." Hinder contrasted Allam's conversion to Catholicism with former British prime minister Tony Blair's, which "was done in a private chapel."
"What I cannot accept is if it is done in a triumphalistic way," said Hinder. That is, if Allam were not declaring only his personal beliefs but intentionally demeaning the faith of Muslims. Yet it is hard to read the spectacle of his conversion otherwise, because that's exactly the tone in which Allam writes. He has made his career portraying Islam as a religion that terrorizes. Allam says he has lived in hiding and in fear for years because of reaction to his columns in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Serra, which regularly denounce excesses by Muslims and praise Israel. Allam converted to Catholicism, he says, as he turned away from "a past in which I imagined that there could be a moderate Islam." Speaking as if for the pope, Allam told one interviewer in Italy, "His Holiness has launched an explicit and revolutionary message to a church that, up to now, has been too prudent in converting Muslims."

Allam claims he is hoping his public embrace of Catholicism will help other converts to speak out in public. But that hardly seems likely. The more probable scenario is that others will feel even more vulnerable, while Allam's books, like many Muslim-bashing screeds that preceded them, climb the best-seller lists.

Unless—and this really would be news—the Muslim world just turns the page.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/129237
________________________________

2. Don't turn faith into a hollow competition of numbers
MONA ELTAHAWY
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
March 27, 2008 at 7:19 AM EDT

Is the Pope playing hardball with Osama bin Laden?

In a March 19 audio recording, the al-Qaeda leader accused Pope Benedict XVI of leading a "new crusade" against Islam. The accusation was outlandish and no doubt aimed at giving Osama bin Laden a leg up onto the bandwagon of current affairs upsetting some Muslims, including the notorious Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and a yet-to-be-released anti-Islam film by a right-wing Dutch politician.
A few days later, however, the Pope seemed to oblige Osama bin Laden by baptizing a prominent Egyptian-born Italian Muslim in a Vatican Easter service beamed live to millions across the world.

When you have extremists from all sides scrambling for air time, determined to jump-start that very "clash of civilizations" they alone benefit from, surely the Pope would have been well advised to avoid playing into Osama bin Laden's hands?

Pope's baptism of convert from Islam denounced
Pope baptizes Italy's most prominent Muslim

By focusing so much attention on Magdi Allam's conversion, the Pope appeared to be engaging in a petty one-upmanship unbefitting the religious leader of more than a billion Catholics.

It was especially frustrating given that, on March 15, the first Catholic church opened in Qatar, and a Vatican official confirmed it was in talks with Saudi Arabia to build its first church - the Saudi kingdom being the only country in the region that bars non-Muslim houses of worship. (This last has been especially galling, considering the hundreds of thousands of expatriate workers from many faiths who keep Saudi Arabia running. Granted, it also makes it easy to deflate the double standards of Saudi officials when they condemn Denmark or the Netherlands for cartoons or a film, reminding them that Muslims in both those countries can publicly proclaim their faith in ways non-Muslims in the Saudi kingdom can only dream.)
But back to the Pope: What is achieved by his public gloating over a conversion? I am just as incensed when I hear Muslim leaders boast that Islam is the world's fastest growing religion. So what? How sad that faith has become a hollow competition of "my numbers versus yours."

Let me be clear - everyone has the right to convert to any religion they want. Magdi Allam was clearly unhappy with Islam, which he attacked frequently in his writings. I want to be even clearer in my condemnation of any death threats that he or any other convert receives should they decide to leave Islam. We are taught as Muslims that there is no compulsion in faith, and our clerics should convey that message.
But those of us who call for freedom of worship, and who condemn threats of violence against those who choose another religion, are certainly not helped when the leaders of those other religions seem to exploit a conversion to score points. The Vatican seemed to want to have it both ways, holding up Magdi Allam as some kind of victory for Catholicism while, at the same time, claiming it was a private matter of faith.
I hope Magdi Allam finds peace in his new faith, but I agree with Rev. Christophe Rou�ou, the French Catholic Church's top official for relations with Islam, who told Reuters: "I don't understand why he wasn't baptized in his hometown by his local bishop."

This Pope seems to relish unnecessary run-ins with Islam. In a lecture he gave in 2006 in his native Germany, the Pope quoted a medieval text that described Islam as violent and irrational. This was rich coming from the leader of a church with its own bloody history. Of course, it certainly didn't help that, in response, some Muslims staged angry demonstrations living up to that offensive description.

Interestingly, the Pope sought to make amends when he visited Turkey's Blue Mosque and prayed toward Mecca with its imam. And he is due to meet Muslim representatives later this year. Muslim scholars and leaders had written to the Pope and other Christian authorities after the fallout over his speech, urging dialogue between the two faiths for the sake of the "survival of the world."

I long ago gave up waiting for clerics of any kind to save the world, but I'd much rather they sit and talk to each other than boast over who's joined their team.
If the Pope wants to play a numbers game, there is another equation he should keep in mind. The bin Ladens and Geert Wilders - the latter being the Dutch politician behind the above-mentioned anti-Islam film - appeal to minorities at opposite ends of a spectrum of hate.

As the head of a much bigger flock, Pope Benedict should wield his responsibility with more wisdom.

Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning New York-based journalist and commentator, and an international lecturer on Arab and Muslim issues

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080327.wcopope27/BNStory/specialComment/