Word: islamics
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What was remarkable about his recent address on Islam is what most critics missed. The bulk of his message was directed at the West, at its disavowal of religious authority and its embrace of what Benedict called "the subjective 'conscience.'" For Benedict, if your conscience tells you something that differs from his teaching, it is a false conscience, a sign not of personal integrity but of sin. And so he has silenced conscientious dissent within the church and insisted on absolutism in matters like abortion, end-of-life decisions, priestly celibacy, the role of women, homosexuality and interfaith dialogue...
...times how to govern our own lives, what right or business do we have telling others how to live theirs? From a humble faith comes toleration of other faiths. And from that toleration comes the oxygen that liberal democracy desperately needs to survive. That applies to all faiths, from Islam to Christianity. In global politics, it translates into a willingness to recognize empirical reality, even when it disturbs our ideology and interests. From moderate religion comes pragmatic politics. From a deep understanding of human fallibility comes the political tradition we used to call conservatism...
...What calls the phrase to mind is the plight of Robert Redeker, 52, a writer and high school philosophy teacher who has been under police protection and in hiding with his family since the newspaper Le Figaro published his op-ed piece about Islam on Sept.19. Entitled "Faced with Islamist intimidations, what should the free world do?," Redeker's article called the Koran "a book of extraordinary violence" that shows the prophet Mohammad to have been "a pitiless warlord, pillager, massacrer of Jews and polygamist." The very day the piece came out, Redeker started receiving e-mail death threats...
...death threats from Muslims outraged by criticism of their faith and prophet. British writer Salman Rushdie survived the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa only by adopting a quasi-clandestine existence. Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was gunned down on the street two years ago in Amsterdam for insulting Islam. His co-filmmaker, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, frustrated at living under constant police protection, resigned earlier this year from the Dutch parliament and moved to the United States...
...time, perhaps, the perceived contradictions between Europe's secular and religious traditions will wither away. Liberal values do not exclude religious practice; they can help it flourish. The reason Turkey's pro-Islamic government is so eager to join Europe, for example - and the reason it has been so disappointed by the opposition it has encountered on religious or cultural grounds - is that Europe's liberal traditions promise Turkey's conservative Muslims a degree of protection they do not have now. Europe has never - not even in the 1960s and '70s - been an entirely secular society. The need...