We’ll have more than a few articles on the Catholic Pope’s controversial assertion of Catholic dogma tomorrow [seriously - good stuff - watch this space all through tomorrow], but just real quick, the entire editorial in order:
There is more than enough religious anger in the world. So it is particularly disturbing that Pope Benedict XVI has insulted Muslims, quoting a 14th-century description of Islam as “evil and inhuman.”
More on this specific issue tomorrow and a little lower in this post, but for now: the only way to make anything nontrivial out of this sentence is to read into it the suggestion that either the anger Muslims are expressing or the insult they’ve taken area denials of Pope Benedict’s statements. This would be a thuggish demand, of course, to never have to hear anything they don’t like, even if it’s true. We’re quite willing to entertian historical evidence that 14th-century Islam was not “evil and inhuman,” but we’re also quite sure that “religious anger” and “insulted Muslims” does not constitute such evidence. If the poor babies have a problem with the description let them either deny it or go read a self-help to boost their self-esteem.
In the most provocative part of a speech this week on “faith and reason,” the pontiff recounted a conversation between an “erudite” Byzantine Christian emperor and a “learned” Muslim Persian circa 1391. The pope quoted the emperor saying, “Show me just what Muhammad 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.”
It’s the NYT so we don’t expect them to have anyone on staff who understands anything about religion, but the least they could do is call someone on a rolodex or something. There’s nothing really provocative about that conversation other than an antiquated quote from an era when people talked like that (they should see how Arthur Conan Doyle treats race in Imperial Britain!). The most provocative part of the speech was obviously the shot that he took at Protestants (in a German university that has two theology faculties for a reason, mind you) – we honestly thought that he was going to finish the move linking “sola scriptura” to the metaphysical “radicalism [of] Reformers” with a warning to his listeners about what happens when you try to immanentize the eschaton. It was that unsubtle. That there’s also a very sound way to interpret the speech as making Protestants and not Muslims the contemporary targets of the Christian emperor, both insult and injury were obviously present. And yet there is a marked shortage of Lutherans threatening to kill the Pope, and unless we’ve missed something since we began writing this post, the Swiss government is not considering pulling their Ambassador.
Muslim leaders the world over have demanded apologies and threatened to recall their ambassadors from the Vatican, warning that the pope’s words dangerously reinforce a false and biased view of Islam.
Wow, an over the top threat to leave because you don’t like what someone said about you – it’s almost like the Vatican has a Camp David-style peace deal with them to keep the Muslim ambassadors there. Maybe Vatican II did open up a new age of potential Jewish-Catholic interfaith dialogue.
For many Muslims, holy war – jihad – is a spiritual struggle, and not a call to violence. And they denounce its perversion by extremists, who use jihad to justify murder and terrorism.
It’s getting trite to point out that those Muslims must be the silentest majority in the history of counting (how’re those forced Gaza-conversion condemnations coming?). So instead, we’ll point out that the first sentence in the article is really worried about “religious anger”, and we’re quite sure that they’re not worried about the anger of the dark-matter-like Muslims for whom jihad is a spiritual struggle. Unless they’re spiritually struggling to burn effigies of the Pope. Which, we concede, is a possibility – but one that we’re doubtful the NYT recognizes. So we’re comfortable calling this part of their chiding “disingenuous”. Oh, also it’s obviously and deeply wrong, but why bother going outside for facts when there are plenty of internal inconsistencies in just seven paragraphs.
The Vatican issued a statement saying that Benedict meant no offense and in fact desired dialogue.
Which they should not have done, since people already knew that Benedict meant no offense. This isn’t about a real slight or even an imagined slight – it’s about feigning an imagined slight to highlight that not even the world’s most powerful men are allowed to get anywhere near describing Islam as violent. Almost like there’s a campaign of intimidation going on that demonstrates exactly what it seeks to prevent anyone from articulating.
But this is not the first time the pope has fomented discord between Christians and Muslims. In 2004 when he was still the Vatican’s top theologian, he spoke out against Turkey’s joining the European Union, because Turkey, as a Muslim country was “in permanent contrast to Europe.”
“Fomented discord”, huh? Yeah, that Pope JP II – always “fomenting discord”. At least he took the NYT’s advice preemtively and suffered the insult of sitting down while Assad preached to him about how the Catholics and Muslims are on the same side because the Jews killed Christ. It was his little way of letting Muslims see that, as the Editors say, “words can heal”.
Incidentally, and at this point we know we’re kind of getting pedantic, but is there an argument that 40 million Muslims from Europe’s thousand-year enemy – and enemy whose military Europeans have repeatedly and heroically fought – is not in permanent contrast to Europe? We’re not even committed to that argument – globalization has weird and very quick effects. But an argument other than “it hurt Muslims’ feelings” is very noticably absent – as if it alone suffices.
A doctrinal conservative, his greatest fear appears to be the loss of a uniform Catholic identity, not exactly the best jumping-off point for tolerance or interfaith dialogue.
Imagine a world in which there was something more important than dialogue with another faith – like asserting a justification for why your faith is the correct faith. Not even asserting a justification for your faith – which we thought was going to be the NYT argument – but the attempt to literally preserve the faith that you are the spiritual leader of. Almost like something that a brilliant theologian-turned-Pope might do in a speech at a university (this is just surreal at this point though – they’re blaming the leader of the Catholic faith for trying to prevent the loss of Catholic identity because it prevents interfaith dialogue!! Even if that was a reasonable calculus – which it. is. not. – don’t you need a faith before you can even have interfaith dialogue? Bridging faiths isn’t like State Department and European negotiations with rogue states – the process itself doesn’t manage to substitute for actual content).
And don’t insult our intelligence by pointing out that the jihadist problem is also that they lack tolerance, and so the Pope is like the jihadists. The Pope expresses his belief in the superiority of his faith by tracing how the neo-Platonist trace in Aristotelian empiricism meant that the historical development of science qua falsification was limited by a horizon that it pointed to but could not access. The jihadists express their belief in their faith’s superiority by slitting the throats of Jews on camera – and then selling those tapes to millions of other Muslims.
The world listens carefully to the words of any pope. And it is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly. He needs to offer a deep and persuasive apology, demonstrating that words can also heal.
… and here we get to one of tomorrow’s main themes: the world doesn’t listen to the words of the Bishop of Rome because he’s a guy in a big hat. They listen to him because he’s a spiritual leader to a lot of people who actually believe what he says, and believe in what he says. Catholics insisting that Catholicism is right will not agree with Muslims insisting that Islam is right. When the Pope gives a very reasoned argument for his conviction that Catholic interpretation is superior, the NYT drips with condescension at the “tragic and dangerous” results and chides him like a small child (admitting that the man who leads billions might have been “careless” – how big of them). When terrorists give their demonstrations for their conviction that Islamic submissions is superior, the NYT ‘contextualizes’ their actions by pointing to poverty, historical dynamics, Iraq, Bush, Saudi Arabia, etc, and then chides us like small children.
Here’s the thing: the Pope doesn’t have to apologize to people who are hurt by arguments. If the New York Times editorial staff thinks that they can make a convincing argument for why the Muslim conception of Allah does not imply a transcendent God and a contingent metaphysics, they’re more than free to do so. But if they can’t explain why the Pope was wrong, they should do us all a favor and stop pretending that they have any right to play schoolyard traffic cop, forcing mean old Catholicism and Judaism to let Islam play kickball with them.
To observe that someone said something that hurt someone else’s feelings is not the same as proving that they should apologize. Enough of this absurd idea that nothing can be allowed to upset the temperamental Muslim Street. If someone has a reason why there was a factual or logical error in Pope Benedict’s speech, let’s hear it. The intellectual struggle for history and civilization is not a therapy session. Not liking an argument doesn’t make it wrong. Not being able to justify irrational beliefs is often frustrating. But to assert that the Pope should apologize to fanatics because they’re too illiterate, too uneducated, or too insane to understand or answer him is deeply perverse – it’s either a new low of appeasement or evidence for the permanence of the idiot self-esteem affirmation sensibilities of previous decades. Probably both.
UPDATE: Sorry, one more thing: the NYT is now judging historical descriptions of religions as permissible or impermissible based on their potential to insult modern adherents of those religions. We’ll be watching for their daily editorials demanding apologies form Muslim, European, and American politicians who link modern-day America and Britain to the Crusades. Because that’s “insulting” and there’s “more than enough religious anger in the world”. And no, it doesn’t matter if the insult is meant “carelessly”. The NYT had better be demanding “deep and persuasive apologies” – maybe not in each and every case, but certainly once in a while. And under no circumstances will we ever expect to see the NYT endorse that description by using it to explain why Muslims are trying to blow up American bridges, tunnels, and people.
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