Commentary

From the NYSun:

If, as Turkey's senior Islamic official, Ali Bardakoglu, told the pope on his arrival, Islam is a religion of "vast tolerance" that rejects all violence and terror and "assumes that killing an innocent person is a heavy crime and sin," it is singularly extravagant of the Turkish government to assign an army of 15,000 security men to one frail old priest. How many divisions does it take to protect the pope?

If, as Mr. Bardakoglu also lectured the pope, it is "Islamophobic" to say that Islam "was spread over the world by the sword," why is it that almost all the major conflicts in the world today occur on the fault lines between Islam and other faiths? Even in Turkey, the most secular of Muslim countries, persecution has reduced the proportion of non-Muslims in the population from a majority in Byzantine times to less than 1% today. It is still a crime in Turkey to refer to the Armenian genocide. And it is still dangerous to be an observant Christian or Jew. Synagogues in Istanbul were attacked by Islamist terrorists in 1985 and 2003, killing scores and wounding hundreds of Turkey's tiny Jewish minority.

Benedict's Post-Secular Vision from the IHT by Phillip Blond and Adrian Pabst

The Pope, far from being sectarian, wants to inaugurate a new religious renaissance in Europe that opposes both secular and religious fundamentalism. This apostolic journey is of a piece with the logic of the Regensburg address, rather than a belated act of repentance for it.

Benedict opposes secularism because it is both absolute and arbitrary. In the name of being neutral with regard to values, secular ideology eliminates all rival world views from the public sphere. By denying the existence of objective moral truths, it elevates self- assertion as the measure of all things. Social life is reduced to the arbitration of conflicting self-interest — a process in which the most powerful always win.

Ultimately, this arbitrary absolutism produces a society ruled by an unholy alliance of utilitarian ethics and the proxy politics of the managerial class. This collusion destroys the very idea of common action and a binding collective discernment. Thus does the pope attribute the failure of Europe's common political project to the growing secularization of European culture.

Benedict's religious alternative is not some form of theocratic absolutism. On the contrary, the Pope is a staunch defender of secularity — the separation of church and state. Benedict wants to disentangle the church from the state, but without divorcing religion from politics, because only a religion freed from subservience to the state can save modern culture from itself.

Thus Benedict's true purpose in Turkey is that of uniting all the monotheistic faiths against a militant and self-consciously destructive secular culture. To that end he will seek a new political communion with Bartholomew I, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople — the symbolic leader of the world's 250 million Orthodox Christians. Even the Russian Orthodox patriarch, Alexei II, who rejected overtures by the late Pope John Paul II, has indicated that he would now welcome talks with Rome.

Nor are the pope's attempts to produce a concerted monotheistic alliance restricted to Christians. On the first day of his visit, Benedict quoted an 11th century pope, Gregory VII, who talked about the duties that Christians and Muslims owe each other "because we believe in one God."

Far from being anti-Muslim, the pope views Islam as a key cultural ally against the enlightenment liberalism that for him corrodes the moral core of Western society.

It is important to realize, however, that Benedict recognizes a mutual problem in this explicit project of religious realignment around shared critiques and common discernment. Secular conceptions of race, state and nation have corrupted all the faiths, too often turning them into a vehicle for nationalism or racism.

Accordingly, the denunciation at Regensburg of scripturally authorized violence by Islam is wholly in line with Benedict's call to the faiths to abandon their respective perversions. Hence the papal demand Tuesday that all religions "utterly refuse to sanction recourse to violence as a legitimate expression of faith."

It is a genuine cause for celebration that Benedict seeks to make common cause with other universal faiths to confront an aggressively supremacist Western culture of forced unbelief and relentless consumerism.

American Papist is doing the heavy lifting on links and such - go check him out.

Comments

[Patrick O'Hannigan]

Note how much in Mr. Bardakoglu's statement depends on the defintion of "innocent." By the reckoning of many Muslims (?) the pope is not innocent.

[Katrina]

Philip Blond totally (and probably knowingly if he is not as ignorant as he sounds) misrepresents the views of Benedict. In Italy and elsewhere in Europe, the Pope is concerned NOT to make common cause with Islam, but to bring on board those liberal and enlightenment-type thinkers who value the tradition of Catholic reason rather than left-wing ideologies. Blond has this Pope so backwards that one is suspicious of a plot by Anglicans to repay the Pope for not clasping Rowan to his bosom the other day. The Pope is interested in the future of Christianity in Europe, not in some faked up 3 in one monotheism.

[Father Elijah]

Congratulations to Philip Blond and Adrian Pabst's article in the International Herald Tribune on (Pope) Benedict's Post-Secular Vision! I have seldom seen such on-target commentary on what Pope Benedict is really doing! Alleluia and praise God!

[Dan]

I agree with Father Elijah.

[Dennis]

"...as Mr. Bardakoglu also lectured the pope, it is 'Islamophobic' to say that Islam "was spread over the world by the sword..."

This is typical Muslim-speak. Blatantly lie about historical facts that everyone knows, i.e. that Islam was largely spread through Arab and then Turkish imperial conquest, and then claim that those who oppose the sanitised Muslim view are simply "Islamophobes".

Of course, we can't rely on the mainstream media to do any deep fact-checking or ask any really tough questions - their default sympahty goes to whoever claims victim status most vociferously. Time magazine's historical timeline last week of Christian-Muslim interactions is a case in point: They jumped from the founding of Islam - which they tellingly described simply as having been "revealed to Muhammad" (no qualifier such as "according to Muslims" or "Muslims believe", etc., thus Time explicitly endorses the Muslim view regarding the origin of Islam) - to the Crusades which they say the Western Christian world launched "against Islam" (note again the telling phrase "against Islam" as such, not simply against Islamic imperialism, agression, desecration of Christian holy sites, etc.). Time completely left out several hundred years of violent Islamic imperial expansion and anti-Christian antagonism leading up to the Crusades, instead making it appear as though, a propos of nothing, those vile Christians just decided one day to go to war against peaceful innocent Muslims minding their own business. A disgraceful, but all too typical performance from the MSM.

This is the same kind of twisted thinking that allows Muslims to profess to be outraged that the Pope might visit the Hagia Sophia - and, God forbid, actually pray there! - because to do so is alleged to express a "Western imperialist desire to re-claim the church", thus ignoring the fact that the Muslims themselves took the Church through imperial conquest and desecrated it by turning it into a mosque. Since when is desiring to re-claim stolen property "imperialism"?

The Muslims need to learn that "tolerance" is a two-way street - and we need much more emphasis on reciprocity when it comes to issues of human rights and religious freedom. Muslims can't denounce so-called Western "imperialism" and "intolerance", while ignoring and white-washing Islam's own history of violent imperialist jihad (a history that is ongoing in many arts of the world) and intolerance (both historical and current in most Muslim majority countries) for believers in other religions.

[Kahraman]

what you guys hold to be historic facts are mere propaganda, lies and myths.
The synagogue and bank bombings killed and wounded many more muslim Turks than it did jewish Turks.
You are blaming the victims for the actions of the terrorists.

I believe that Turks have throughout history have been extremely tolerant of other religions and cultures often incorporating many aspects from the territories they ruled. However, the Turks have also probably killed more muslims in their history then the crusades and Western imperialism combined.
Muslim Turks are a lot more peaceful than Buddhist Turks and Christian Turks. Islam survived for a long time despite the Turks.

Examples:

A)The buddhist Turks under the leadership of the Mongol Djenghiz Khan killed millions of Arabs, Persians, and muslim Turks, but never forced them to convert to buddhism. A century later most of the buddhists actually converted to Islam.

B)The ottomans, although themselves nominally muslims, married into Byzantine and Serbian orthodox christian nobility, and had very little muslim subjects.
They fought many wars against majority muslim states in Anatolia, against the Safewid state of Iran and the Mameluk state of egypt. Their most loyal troops were their christian soldiers. When they lost a battle, the ottomans retreated back to Europe, to their main base.

C) The Ottomans only mellowed out a bit after the conquest of Eastern Anatolia, Egypt and Syria all the muslim scholars came to Istanbul to preach Islam to the Ottomans. This is when the majority christian Turkey of the middle ages turned into the majority muslim Turkey we have today.