The Pope was not attacking Islam

Piers Paul Read says that the controversial nature of the Pope’s address has been missed in the furore over Muslim sensitivities: he was daring to equate Europe and Christendom

When he delivered his lecture on ‘Faith, Reason and the University’ in Regensburg last week, Pope Benedict XVI said some provocative and contentious things. His comment on Islam was only one of them, and was by no means the most significant; but quoting the judgment of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus that certain aspects of Islam were ‘evil and inhuman’ was the most arresting and has caused a worldwide furore.

Some have criticised Pope Benedict for being tactless; others on the grounds that what the emperor Manuel II said is not true. The Pope himself has said that he does not share the emperor’s view of Islam, but there can be no doubt about the facts of the matter: Islam, for all its many admirable qualities, was a religion that proselytised with the sword. Mohammed promised paradise for those who died in battle and booty for those who did not. The promise, apparently, still stands: ‘We tell the worshipper of the Cross that you and the West will be defeated,’ the Mujahedin Shura Council of Sunni Muslims of Iraq said in response to the Pope’s lecture. ‘May God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahedin’ (Times, 19 September).

Such sentiments may not be shared by most Muslims, but the growth of Islamic fanaticism has driven many Christians out of Iraq. The Christian community there, which dates from the 1st century, has halved since the fall of Saddam Hussein and, with the prospect of democracy leading to a Shia theocracy and Sharia law, it may not survive.