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A public indoor swimming pool near Regensburg has issued a ban on the burqini, which some Muslim women choose to wear for modesty. The ban was imposed after the pool in Neutraubling held a women-only swim day, the Mittelbayerische Zeitung reported last week. One young woman chose to swim and do water aerobics in a burqini, eliciting loud complaints from the other women there. The complaints reached the town officials, who decided to place a ban on the burqini as “non-typical” swim attire. …

Questions that need to be asked about Islam were asked by Pope Benedict nearly ten years ago.On a plane ride between Sri Lanka and the Philippines this week, Pope Francis made headlines while talking with reporters about the moral limits to free expression. The issue came up, of course, in the wake of the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in France, which Pope Francis has strongly condemned. The attacks in Paris — including one at a kosher deli — along with the slaughter that Boko Haram inflicts in Nigeria, the terrorist attack in the Lindt café in Sydney...

In the face of the offensive of radical Islam, Francis’s idea is that “we must soothe the conflict.” And forget Regensburg. With serious harm also to the reformist currents of Islam... It is impossible not to see in this the features of a “war of Islam” pushed to the extreme, fought in the name of Allah. It is illusory to deny the Islamic origin of this unbridled theological violence. This has been published even by the officially supervised “La Civiltà Cattolica,” only to be contradicted afterward by its fearsome director, Antonio Spadaro, the Jesuit who plays the role of Francis's...

- Ethics and Public Policy Centre Eight years later, the Regensburg Lecture looks a lot different. Indeed, those who actually read it in 2006 understood that, far from making a “gaffe,” Benedict XVI was exploring with scholarly precision two key questions, the answers to which would profoundly influence the civil war raging within Islam—a war whose outcome will determine whether 21st-century Islam is safe for its own adherents and safe for the world.

On the evening of Sept. 12, 2006, my wife and I were dining in Cracow with Polish friends when an agitated Italian Vaticanista (pardon the redundancy in adjectives) called, demanding to know what I thought of “Zees crazee speech of zee pope about zee Muslims.” That was my first hint that the herd of independent minds in the world press was about to go ballistic on the subject of Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Lecture: a “gaffe”-bone on which the media continued to gnaw until the end of Benedict’s pontificate. Eight years later, the Regensburg Lecture looks a lot different. Indeed, those...

Pope Benedict XVI lectured on faith and reason at the University of Regensburg in Germany in this Sept. 12, 2006, file photo. A quotation from a Byzantine emperor that the pope used in this talk provoked outrage in the Muslim world. Eight years ago this Friday, Sept. 12, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Bavaria in which he seemed to diagnose Islam as a religion inherently flawed by fanaticism. It was an undiplomatic assertion, to say the least — especially coming a day after the 9/11 anniversary — and it sparked an enormous...

Five years ago today (one day after 9/11’s fifth anniversary), a soft-spoken, 79-year-old former professor visiting his old university in Germany delivered a speech to a group of academics. In 30 minutes, it was all over. forty-eight hours later, the world exploded. To say that Benedict XVI’s Regensburg lecture was one of this century’s pivotal speeches is probably an understatement. It’s not every day a half-hour lecture generates mass protests and is subject to hundreds of learned (and not-so-learned) analyses for weeks on end. In retrospect, however, we can see Regensburg taught us many things. Leaving aside the response of...

His name is Magdi Cristiano Allam. For five years he has lived under guard, threatened with death. But his baptism has raised harsh criticism, against him and against Benedict XVI. The complete text of the accusation written by Aref Ali Nayed, architect of the letter of the 138 ROMA, March 28, 2008 – Three days earlier, in an audio message released over the internet, Osama bin Laden had accused "the pope of the Vatican" of having "a significant role" in fighting a "new crusade" against Islam. But nothing intimidates Benedict XVI. At the Easter vigil, on Saturday, March 22, the...

VATICAN CITY, JAN. 17, 2008 (Zenit.org).- The rector of Rome's Sapienza University announced that he will re-invite Benedict XVI to visit the institution. Renato Guarini affirmed this after the inauguration ceremony today that was supposed to have included a lecture given by the Pope. The Vatican announced Tuesday that the visit would be postponed, due to what the Pope's secretary of state called a lack of the "prerequisites for a dignified and tranquil welcome." A small protest that eventually reached the point of several students occupying the rector's offices motivated the Holy See to cancel the visit. The protestors called...

Because the kind of dialogue he wants is completely different. The pope is asking Islam to make the same journey that the Catholic Church made under pressure from the Enlightenment. Love of God and neighbor must be realized in the full acceptance of religious freedom by Sandro Magister ROMA, November 26, 2007 – The letter from the 138 Muslims addressed last month to Benedict XVI and to the heads of the other Christian churches received a spectacular collective reply in a message signed by 300 scholars and published in "The New York Times" on November 18. The message originated in...

Iraqi Reformist 'Abd Al-Khaliq Hussein: A Hands-On Lesson in Tolerance for Muslims, From Pope Benedict XVI In a December 20, 2006 article titled "A Hands-On Lesson in Tolerance for Muslims, From Pope Benedict," posted on the liberal website Elaph, Iraqi reformist columnist 'Abd Al-Khaliq Hussein ridiculed Muslims who had responded to Pope Benedict XVI's statements on the role of violence in the spread of Islam with threats and violence of their own. In his article, he also set out the Arab and Muslim world's human rights violations and discrimination against religious minorities, and held up Europe and the Pope himself...

A welcome development. Folks, according to the Catholic News Service (CNS)......International Islamic scholars published an open letter to Pope Benedict XVI, taking issue with what they described as mistakes and oversimplifications of Islam in a recent papal speech to German academics. The cordial critique of the pope's speech was offered in a "spirit of open exchange," said the 38 Muslim leaders who signed the text. It was published online Oct. 15 by Los Angeles-based Islamica Magazine.The meat in the CNS report is found in these paragraphs:The pope had also quoted an Islamic thinker, Ibn Hazm, on the idea that in...

An extraordinary thing happened a week ago. Thirty-eight Muslim scholars and chief muftis, from across the Muslim world, jointly replied to the Pope's speech at Regensburg (and more have associated their names with this document, since). It was presented to the Vatican's envoy at Amman; the full text in English is available through the Islamica magazine website, the Catholic website, Chiesa, and elsewhere. I look through the list of signatories, and they are a "who's who" of the learned leaders of a faith that has always aspired to be led by its most learned. --snip--The signatories renounced and condemned violence...

The Regensburg Effect: The Open Letter from 38 Muslims to the Pope Instead of saying they are offended and demanding apologies, they express their respect for him and dialogue with him on faith and reason. They disagree on many points. But they also criticize those Muslims who want to impose, with violence, “utopian dreams in which the end justifies the means” by Sandro Magister ROMA, October 18, 2006 – One month after his lecture at the University of Regensburg, Benedict XVI received an “open letter” signed by 38 Muslim personalities from various countries and of different outlooks, which discusses...

Adamant in Our Support of the Pope A friend of mine offered a tongue-in-cheek reflection about the recent flare-up of Islamic fanaticism concerning the Pope’s remarks. “There is a large group of picketers in front of the Cathedral demanding that the Pope apologize for Notre Dame's loss to Michigan this past Saturday!” Right on! But that humorous portrayal of a protest indicates that there are humane ways for decent people to handle their differences, and killing innocent people is not one of them. Quite frankly I’m disgusted by barbarians acting in the name of God. When savages burn the pope...

IN A BRILLIANT lecture at the University of Regensburg last week, Pope Benedict XVI made three crucial points that are now in danger of being lost in the polemics about his supposedly offensive comments about Islam. The pope's first point was that all the great questions of life, including social and political questions, are ultimately theological. How we think (or don't think) about God has much to do with how we judge what is good and what is wicked, and with how we think about the appropriate methods for advancing the truth in a world in which there are profound...

“Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim.” Those were the words of Sheikh Abubakar Hassan Malin to a gathering of Muslims in Mogadishu on Friday, September 15, 2006. On Saturday, Palestinians wielding guns and firebombs attacked five Christian churches in the West Bank and Gaza. On Sunday, September 17, in London, outside Westminster Cathedral, Anjem Choudary addressed a demonstration and said that those who insulted Islam “should be subject to capital punishment.” These were among the reactions to a speech given by Pope Benedict XVI at Regensburg University, in Germany on Tuesday,...

.... The Muslim protesters are actually being highly ungrateful. When the embassies of Denmark were being torched earlier this year, Rome managed a few words of protest about … the inadvisability of profane cartoons. In almost every confrontation between Islam and the West, or Islam and Israel, the Vatican has either split the difference or helped to ventriloquize Muslim grievances. Most of all, throughout his address to the audience at Regensburg, the man who modestly considers himself the vicar of Christ on Earth maintained a steady attack on the idea that reason and the individual conscience can be preferred to...

Meaningless apology 9/19/2006 3:28:00 PM GMT   (AFP Photo) Pope Benedict XVI greets pilgrims and faithful in the courtyard of his summer residence  Fury continues over radical remarks made by Pope Benedict XVI last Tuesday in a speech during a pilgrimage to his native Germany in which he linked the noble faith of Islam to violence and terrorism, quoting a 14th-century Christian emperor who said that Prophet Mohammed's command to spread Islam by the sword had produced "evil and inhumane" results.Earlier this week and following mass protests that broke out across the Muslim and the Arab world, the pope...

The pope said things Muslims need to hear about faith and reason. It's a familiar spectacle: furious demands for an apology, threats, riots, violence. Anything can trigger so-called Muslim fury: a novel by a British-Indian writer, newspaper cartoons in a small Nordic country or, this past week, a talk on theology by the head of the Roman Catholic Church. In a lecture on "Faith and Reason" at the University of Regensburg in Germany, Benedict XVI cited one of the last emperors of Byzantium, Manuel II Paleologus. Stressing the 14th-century emperor's "startling brusqueness," the pope quoted him as saying: "Show me...