We urge you Muslims wherever you are to hunt down the Pope for his barbaric statements as you have pursued Salman Rushdie, the enemy of Allah who offended our religion," he said in Friday evening prayers.
"Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim," Malin, a prominent cleric in the Somali capital, told worshippers at a mosque in southern Mogadishu.
Where is the Sura that says, "Do not read what the other has said before concluding he has insulted you?" I wonder. Nevertheless, I note that Salman Rushdie is still alive. Perhaps Benedict like Rushdie before him will have to seek refuge in Christopher Hitchens' apartment, bringing about the conversion only he doesn't know is inevitable.
As I said in a previous post, I have a sneaking feeling this incident will be one of those clarifying moments of history. Fr. Schall agrees, and I highly recommend you read his comments on the subject in full.
The scope of this lecture is simply breathtaking, but also intelligible to the ordinary mind. In watching my computer and listening to various colleagues the day after this address was given, I felt a kind of hush in the air. Something important had happened, something more than the ordinary went on in Regensburg, something that was addressed to the heart of modernism but also to Islam, our current enigma. When I read the lecture, I understood why.
He sets the scene, as it were:
Benedict, make no doubt, is the clearest and most incisive mind in the public order in the world today. This fact will not make everyone happy and will make not a few furious. Not everyone, as we are warned in our scriptures, is willing to accept the truth. We should not be naïve about this, nor should we despair of the truth because it is refused. It is a seed that will grow in good ground.
Lord, let that not be a prophesy of Benedict's martyrdom to Truth!
It is not without profound interest that the pope chose precisely a university in which to deliver this lecture. It is not an encyclical. It is not a "doctrinal" statement. It is not a homily. It is a lecture to a university faculty and to its students -- and not just to those in Regensburg sitting before him. In this sense it strikes at the very heart of the intellectual acaedia, to the intellectual sloth, of our time, to the refusal to think about the important things with the tools that we have been given.
A girlfriend's mother used to tell her growing up, "Use your head. It's not a decoration." At any rate:
with this lecture we are in heady academic surroundings. All is genteel. All is formal. All is, yes, "intellectual." But it is here where the real battles lie hidden. What we see in Regensburg are, after Deus Caritas Est, the second shots of the new pope at the heart of what is wrong in our world and its mind. These "shots," however, are designed to do what all good intellectual battle does, namely, to make it possible for us to see again what is true and to live it. The Regensburg Address, I suspect, will go down as one of those seminal and incisive analyses that tell us who we are and where we are. It will remind us of what we are by teaching us again to think about the God that the skeptics, the dons, the theological faculties, including Muslim faculties, have too often obscured for us. Civilization depends also on thinking rightly about God and man -- all civilization, not just European or Muslim. Such is the reach of this lecture.
