Connect Eddie HoltPope Benedict XVI has certainly caused dissension with his quotes about Muslims and violence. He may have been simply naive but that seems unlikely.
He is, after all, politically experienced - granted, not as Pope - but as a man who has been at the heart of the Catholic Church for a long time. However, if he wasn't naive, what might have been his purpose in provoking Muslim anger? A common Irish reaction has been that the Muslim response - effigy-burning, street demos, communal fury - makes the Pope's point. Perhaps it does, yet if we recall, for instance, British "gags" about alleged Irish stupidity and the typically chiding, patronising and utterly galling follow-up to protesters of "oh, don't be so thin-skinned", we might better understand Islamic reaction.
Clearly, a power relationship is at issue. It might or might not be true that Islam has a propensity towards violence; experts differ. But when the Christian West invades Muslim lands and kills tens of thousands of people, it's probably wise to look at ourselves. Arguing that free speech is most in need of protection - "I'll criticise Christianity and I'll criticise Islam too" - can be disingenuous.
It can be disingenuous because it prioritises free speech above other notions of what, for want of better words, let's call the "sacred" or simply the "revered". Not being Muslim, it's impossible - literally impossible - to understand Islamic ideas and feelings of sacredness or reverence because revered symbols, words or objects are always culture-specific.
Sure, it often seems Muslims are too easily offended and prone to extreme denunciations - including even death by fatwah. Yet Islamic reaction to perceived insults shows at once its vibrancy and its insecurity. In contrast, in Europe and throughout the rest of the "white world", even non-believers are, with few exceptions, cultural Christians. Although societies in these places are now materialistic and largely secular, the inheritance of Christian belief colours our reactions.
To us, Islam often appears backward and its adherents too much in awe of clerics. Mind you, until quite recently (perhaps still among the more bone-headed and bigoted) the Protestant British used to view the Catholic Irish similarly. To the British, the Irish were priest-ridden; to the Irish, the British were immoral heathens. Both positions were about defining and maintaining identity.
That, I believe, is what this latest row is really about: identity. Yes, it was Muslims who flew planes into New York's World Trade Center and Washington's Pentagon. Then again, Irish people regularly planted bombs in Britain. But few people - unless they're naturally aggrieved or perhaps Tory madmen - blame all Irish people for the bombs and neither should we blame all Muslims.
Pope Benedict XVI fears that the world is becoming a "dictatorship of relativism". He said so in April 2005. Relativism is a doctrine that knowledge is relative, not absolute. He may have a point but the alternative - absolutism - seems more likely to lead to dictatorial stances. It is, after all, despotic. Anyway, it's a row that has been going on since time began.
Popes and ayatollahs have unavoidable interests in stressing the benefits of absolutism. Without absolutist positions on all sorts of human matters, such clerics could be diminished.
The Catholic Church insists it's the one true Church but devout Muslims hold similar views about Islam. It always comes back to questions of competing absolutisms.
In 1997, as Cardinal Ratzinger, the current Pope angered Buddhists by calling their religion an "auto-erotic spirituality" (spiritual masturbation?) that "offers transcendence without imposing concrete religious obligations". He also predicted that Buddhism would replace Marxism as the Catholic Church's main enemy in the 21st century. He really does not like relativism.
Given his remarks about Muslims, Buddhists and Jews (at Auschwitz, he argued that the real victims of the Holocaust were God and Christianity), he clearly has little sympathy for other faiths. You could argue that, as Pope, Benedict is true to his absolutist ideals, but such determined Catholic triumphalism seems out of place these days.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the Vatican rejected liberation theology because it borrowed from Marxism. Now it is asserting an absolutism that most Catholics find difficult to accept. When, at Regensburg University, Benedict XVI made his remarks about Muslims, he must have known, given current relations between Christendom and Islamic societies, that trouble was likely.
Few people in the culturally Christian West want to be ruled by Islamic mullahs. The literalism of punishments - beheadings, amputations, stonings to death - under sharia law are, quite frankly, repulsive to most of us. But the absolutism of the current head of the Catholic Church on women priests, homosexuality and rock music, for instance, is not endearing either.
It may be that the Pope's purpose (or, at any rate, his lack of concern) in provoking Muslim anger was to assert Catholic absolutism. Most religions, including Catholicism and Islam, have experienced great difficulty in coming to terms with 19th- and 20th-century modernism. It looks like they're still struggling at the outset of this century. Benedict XVI is not helping.