C
Caesar
Guest
I am working on this letter to the editor about the Pope’s lecture and the responses of Muslims.
What do you all think?
The Holy Father’s recent lecture at the University of Regensburg has drawn very sharp criticism from the Islamic world.
While this has angered many Muslims and non-Muslims alike, few people actually understood what the Pope was even talking about. The basis of his lecture was not Christian-Islamic relations. Nor was it about the differences in Catholic and Islamic theology. The Pope was speaking about Faith and Reason used theology from the Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Jewish and yes, Islamic traditions in his lecture. It must also be mentioned that the exact quote which drew the immediate anger from the Muslim world was not even from the Pope: “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”, is actually part of a dialogue from 1391 between the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos and a Persian philosopher. The medieval Emperor was referring to the historical fact that the prophet Mohammed, the founder of Islam, was a 6th century warlord who imposed the Muslim religion on the inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula through military force. The Pope’s lecture included this quote as part of a discussion on reason and the nature of God, not as a proclamation against Islam.
The Muslim world has taken this lecture as an insult, claiming it to be discriminatory and bigoted, and many Muslims have demanded an apology, while at the same time issuing discriminatory and bigoted comments of their own. Make note of the Turkish official linking the Pope to Adolf Hitler, and a picture circulating that calls for the Pope to be beheaded and refers to him as a “Swine and servant of the cross, worships a monkey on a cross, hateful evil man, stoned Satan, may Allah curse him, blood-sucking vampire.”.
.The products of the Holy Father’s lecture only serve to show us the extremism and hypocrisy of the radical Islamic leaders in the Middle East, and that once again the Media has blown an issue entirely out of proportion and missed the bigger picture
What do you all think?