A year ago, violent world-wide protests by Muslims erupted over the publication of cartoons of Mohammad, the founder of Islam, in a Danish newspaper, the Jyllands Posten. One year later, Muslims again became enraged over what they saw as a western attack upon Islam. The target of Islamic anger this time was Pope Benedict XVI himself – the most significant voice in western Christianity.

This September, Pope Benedict, in a speech at Regensburg University in Germany, discussed the historical relationship between Islam and Christianity and religiously inspired violence. The Pope condemned killing in the name of God and stated that such violence was "incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul". This is a welcome statement given the bloody history of monotheism. The Pope was of course indirectly attacking jihad or Islamic holy war. The Pope made his point by quoting a medieval Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, who, in a religious debate with a Muslim scholar, had argued Mohammad had brought nothing new but only evil and inhumanity by using violence to establish his new Islamic faith. It was the use of this quote – which the Pope clearly disowned – that caused the uproar amongst Muslims.

If the Pope was trying to hint at the violence by which Islam was spread, he could easily have relied on Islam's undisputed history. Early Muslim historians are very honest and clear about the rise of Islam. In the early 600s, Mohammad and his small band of followers, after fleeing Mecca for Medina when powerless, became increasingly ambitious as their military strength and wealth increased – wealth obtained from the looting of Meccan caravans and Jewish settlements.

As soon as Mohammad felt militarily confident, he took Mecca and then all of Arabia and in doing so he also exterminated Christianity and Judaism in the peninsula. To this day, based on Mohammad's example, only Islam is allowed within Saudi Arabia.

Mohammad died before his plans of expanding Islam outside Arabia could be realized. However, within 30 year after his death, his successors, had created an imperial empire, from North Africa to the borders of India and China. No empire is created without the subjugation and humiliation of the conquered peoples, violence, the imposition of a new ruling class and a dominant idealogy. The Arab Muslim empire was no different.

To be fair, the Pope should have mentioned Christianity's own appalling record in sanctioning racist violence in the name of the cross. The Spanish conquistadors certainly had the full blessing of the Catholic Church as they conquered and slaughtered entire civilizations in Central and South America. The critical and most daring question, then becomes whether Christianity and Islam conquered because their central texts demanded it or because the teachings were used to justify conquest?

The Muslim reaction to the Pope's speech was depressingly predictable. The Pope was even compared to Hitler and Mussolini by the Turkish AK ruling party. It is doubtful whether Hitler would agree that violence is against the soul's nature. While most Muslim spokesmen demanded only an apology from the Pope for the speech some demanded that he also denounce claims's about Mohammad's violence. The question whether Islam was spread by violence does not need the Pope's judgment. History is quite capable of answering this question. Islam is what the Koran, regarded as the literal word of God, says it is and what Muslims have done in the past 1,400 years.



The reaction of the western press again showed its ignorance and cowardice when it comes to discussing Islam or the hurt feelings of Muslims. There was no exploration of the record and hypocracy of those demanding a papal apology. The media seemed satisfied with the mechanics of the Pope's apology and displayed no curiosity about historical facts. The left displayed its usual knee-jerk reaction by regarding all criticism of Islam as an attack on Muslims. The language and moral framework in the West by which Islam can be objectively discussed is simply lacking or has been deliberately set aside.

Since the shameful Rushdie affair in the late 1980s, it seems that if Muslims scream hard and long enough, any debate on Islam is soon silenced, with apologies all around and another knife in the heart of free speech. While other faiths and idealogies are open to moral evaluation, Islam seems to be carving out an exclusive immunity in Europe. This appeasement is a formulae for cultural suicide and increasing future tension.

The Pope was right to apologize for any hurt personal feelings among Muslims but hurt feelings are not the standard by which free speech is measured. If, as the Vatican claimed, the Pope was encouraging a debate between the faiths, he could have started by asking for certain apologies from Muslim leaders.

The reason for one major apology the Pope should have demanded lies under his very nose. Rome, the spiritual home of Catholicism, has one of the largest mosques in Europe, funded by Saudi money and built with the full knowledge and acquiesence of the previous Pope, John Paul II. However, the Saudis, while funding mosques all over Europe, completely deny their non-Muslim minorities (mostly guest workers) religious freedom. No church or temple of any faith other than Islam may be built in Saudi Arabia and non-Muslims are barred from openly practicing their faith. The Vatican, in line with most western governments, stays silent over this Saudi abuse. Perhaps the Pope will find courage to demand that the Saudi and other Muslim governments apologize for this appalling treatment of non-Muslims.


The Pope should perhaps also have asked for an apology from Muslims for labeling non-Muslims as "kafirs" or infidels. The Pope could have really set the debate ablaze by demanding that Muslims disown the Koran's order to kill or convert the "infidel".

An apology is surely long overdue for Muslim silence over the second-class status of non-Muslims under Islamic sharia law. Under sharia, a non-Muslim may not testify against a Muslim nor may a non-Muslim man marry a Muslim woman. How is such discrimination not similar to Nazi Germany's Nuremberg laws which were aimed at humiliating and driving German Jews from public life.

Finally, the Pope could have asked for an explanation for the silence of Muslim governments over the genocide of Black Sudanese in Darfur at the hands of the Arab militias sponsored by the Islamic government in Khartoum. The same Sudanese government also engaged in a decades long war to exterminate Black Sudanese Christians and animists in southern Sudan. There is virtually no mention of these atrocities by Muslims.

Only when such questions are asked by political and religious figures, can a true and honest dialogue begin between Islam and the West – something all sides claim they want.