On a visit to his native Germany, Pope Benedict XVI weighed in Sept. 12 before an audience at Regensburg University, where he once taught, on the contentious issue of rapport between Islam and the West.
Calling for a “genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today,” he began his speech by quoting a 14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, in a conversation with a “learned Persian” on Christianity and Islam — “and the truth of both.”
But the words he quoted from the emperor were: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” He went on to say that violent conversion to Islam was contrary to reason and thus “contrary to God’s nature.”
His point being that the fideism that characterizes Islam, a concept of God that reduced him to pure will unrelated to rationality, is the cause of Islam’s social lethargy. why Islam has never been hospitable to science, or at least those aspects of Greek thought that go beyond the practical.