Word: benediction
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...find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached," the Pope explained, does not "in any way express my personal thought." And he refers offended Muslims to a previous apology by the Vatican Secretary of State, who said that Benedict had meant only "to undertake... certain reflections on the theme of the relationships between religion and violence in general...
...Maybe so. But to my eye, it seems that the part of Benedict's speech that deals with religious violence extends beyond Manuel's statement and is precisely a slap at Islam. The truly problematic text, in fact, is a mixture of quotes from the Byzantine emperor, his German translator Theodore Khoury, a medieval Muslim scholar named Ibn Hazm, and the Pope's own musings. In combination, they seem to suggest that Islam's idea of God is so oblivious to the virtue of reason that it tolerates unthinking violence in Allah's name...
...goes like this. Benedict quotes Khoury as saying that Islam understands God as "absolutely transcendent," so much so that the deity's "will is not bound up with any of our categories, even rationality." The Pope then quotes Khoury quoting "a noted French Islamist" paraphrasing Ibn Hazm, who lived in Cordoba during the 11th century, saying that "God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us." Got that? It's a lot of attribution, but I think that my colleague is correct when he concludes that "the risk...
...Mattson says that even the Islamic radicals whom she calls "the vigilantes" are not using the kind of thought process implied by Benedict when they plan their deadly acts. They present a number of arguments for suicide bombings and the killing of non-combatants, but none of them, at least explicitly, appeals to revelation over reason. Many of their assumptions are faith-based, but faith-based assumptions are involved, by definition, in any believer's acts. We may find the terrorists horribly unreasonable, but that doesn't make them avid footsoldiers in a philosophical Islamic war on reason...
...Benedict may wish to argue that somewhere in the minds of Islamic suicide bombers is an unstated understanding that if anyone tried to reason them out of their plans they would counter that logic had no role because this was the will of God. But that would be an assumption on his part. And that exposes the essential arbitrariness, at least for now, of the Pope's approach. If he wants to make an "essentialist" argument against Islam-that is, to suggest that there may be something in it that is intrinsically more friendly to fanaticism-then he needs...