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Article: Benedict's misreading.(Pope Benedict XVI )
- Article from:
- The Christian Century
- Article date:
- May 15, 2007
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2007 The Christian Century Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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HAVING BEEN a student of Islamic philosophy and teacher of Islam for a quarter century, I was baffled by the skewed presentation of Islam that Pope Benedict XVI offered in his speech at Regensburg, Germany, in September 2006. As a student paper, it would have failed for lack of organization.
One cannot use remarks that a 14th-century Byzantine emperor made about the place of violence as opposed to reason in Islam--remarks made in the face of Constantinople's imminent demise--to illustrate (by contrast) a general thesis about the way Christianity (and not Islam) has relied on reason as developed in the Hellenic world. The tutor would say: you have too much going ...