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Islam and Democracy, a Secret Meeting at
Castelgandolfo
The synopsis of a weekend of study on Islam with the pope and his former
theology students. With two conflicting versions of how Benedict XVI views
the Muslim religion
by Sandro Magister
ROMA, January 23, 2006
�
Joseph Ratzinger has written little on the topic of Islam over the years.
But it is a topic very much on his mind, and all the more so since he became
pope. Last September, in Castelgandolfo (see photo), Benedict XVI dedicated
two days of study to Islam, behind closed doors, together with two experts
in Islamic studies and a group of his former theology students.
The news of the meeting leaked out, but until last January 5 nothing was
known about what was said there.
But on January 5, one of Ratzinger�s
former students who participated in the meeting, American Jesuit Joseph
Fessio, provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, and founder of
the publishing house Ignatius Press, gave an ample account of the meeting
during one of the most popular radio talk shows in the United States: the
Hugh Hewitt Show.
During the interview, Fr. Fessio also reported the thoughts expressed by the
pope in the course of the discussion. In Fessio�s
view, Benedict XVI holds that Islam and democracy cannot be reconciled.
But one of the other participants at the meeting, Samir Khalil Samir, an
Egyptian Jesuit and professor of Islamic studies at the Université
Saint-Joseph in Beirut and at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome,
when consulted by www.chiesa, gave a different interpretation of the pope�s
thought. In Fr. Samir�s
view, Benedict XVI holds that it is very difficult, but not impossible, to
reconcile Islam and democracy.
In his contribution to the discussion, the pope supposedly wanted to explain
precisely the reasons for this difficulty.
* * *
The meeting held last September in Castelgandolfo was the last in a series
of annual meetings with Ratzinger and his former students.
The first were held when Ratzinger was a theology professor in Ratisbonne.
When he became archbishop of Munich, they asked him to continue, and he
accepted. The same thing happened when he moved to Rome as the prefect for
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The meetings lasted a
weekend, and were usually held at a monastery. At the end of the meeting in
2004, the participants left with the topic for the following year already
chosen: Islam, or more precisely the Islamic concept of God. The two experts
who would introduce the discussion had also been selected: Fr. Samir Khalil
Samir and another Jesuit scholar of Islamic studies, Christian Troll, from
Germany.
In the spring of 2005 Ratzinger was elected pope and his former students
thought the meetings would come to an end. But that didn�t
happen. Benedict XVI told them that it was very important to him that they
continue. And they do continue
�
the theme chosen for the meeting in 2006 is the relationship between
Christianity and science.
* * *
Here are the central passages of the transcript of Fr. Joseph Fessio�s
radio interview with Hugh Hewitt:
�And
the Holy Father, in his beautiful calm but clear way, said...�
From: The Hugh Hewitt Show, January 5, 2006
JF: The main presentation by Father Troll was very interesting. He based it
on a Pakistani Muslim scholar named Rashan, who was at the University of
Chicago for many years, and Rashan's position was Islam can enter into
dialogue with modernity, but only if it radically reinterprets the Koran,
and takes the specific legislation of the Koran, like cutting off your hand
if you're a thief, or being able to have four wives, or whatever, and takes
the principles behind those specific pieces of legislation for the 7th
century of Arabia, and now applies them, and modifies them, for a new
society which women are now respected for their full dignity, where
democracy's important, religious freedom's important, and so on. And if
Islam does that, then it will be able to enter into real dialogue and live
together with other religions and other kinds of cultures.
HH: Is he an optimist about that happening?
JF: He is, but interesting, you know, all the seminars I recall with Joseph
Ratzinger, he'd always let the students speak. He'd wait until the end, and
he would intervene. This is the first time I recall where he made an
immediate statement. And I'm still struck by it, how powerful it was.
HH: And what did the pope say?
JF: Well, the thesis that was proposed by Father Troll was that Islam can
enter into the modern world if the Koran is reinterpreted by taking the
specific legislation, and going back to the principles, and then adapting it
to our times, especially with the dignity that we ascribe to women, which
has come through Christianity, of course. And immediately, the Holy Father,
in his beautiful calm but clear way, said well, there's a fundamental
problem with that, because
he said in the Islamic
tradition God has given his word to Mohammed, but it's an eternal word. It's
not Mohammed's word. It's there for eternity the way it is. There's no
possibility of adapting it or interpreting it, whereas in Christianity, and
Judaism, the dynamism's completely different, that God has worked through
his creatures. And so, it is not just the word of God, it's the word of
Isaiah, not just the word of God, but the word of Mark. He's used his human
creatures, and inspired them to speak his word to the world, and therefore
by establishing a Church
in which he gives authority to his followers to carry on the tradition and
interpret it, there's an inner logic to the Christian Bible, which permits
it and requires it to be adapted and applied to new situations.
I was... I mean, I wish I could say it as clearly and as beautifully as he
did, but that's why he's pope and I'm not, okay? That's one of the reasons.
One of others, but his seeing that distinction when the Koran, which is seen
as something dropped out of heaven, which cannot be adapted
or applied, even, and the Bible, which is a word of God that comes
through a human community, it was stunning.
HH: And so, is it fair to describe him as a pessimist about the prospect of
modernity truly engaging Islam in the way modernity has engaged Christianity?
JF: Well, the other way around.
HH: Yes. I meant that.
JF: Yeah, that Christianity can engage modernity just like it did... the
Jews did to Egypt, or Christians did to Greece, because we can take what's
good there, and we can elevate it through the revelation of Christ in the
Bible. But Islam is stuck. It's stuck
with a text that cannot be adapted, or even be interpreted properly.
HH: And so the pope is a pessimist
about that changing, because it would require a radical reinterpretation of
what the Koran is?
JF: Yeah, which is it's impossible, because it's against the very nature of
the Koran, as it's understood by Muslims.
HH: And so, even the dialectic that was the Reformation is not possible
within Islam?
JF: No. And then a second thing which he did not say, but which I would have
said, I might have said at the time, is that... and this is from a Catholic
point of view, there's no one to interpret the Koran officially. the
Catholic Church has an official interpreter, which is the Holy Father with
the bishops.
* * *
So, according to Fr. Fessio�s
account, Benedict XVI sees Islam as incompatible with democracy.
But according to another participant at the same meeting, Jesuit scholar of
Islamic studies Samir Khalil Samir, the pope is less pessimistic. According
to this account, the pope sees a meeting between Islam and democracy as
possible, but �on
the condition of a radical reinterpretation of the Koran and of the very
conception of divine revelation.�
On the second day of the discussions
in Castelgandolfo, speaking as an expert, Fr. Samir developed precisely this
aspect of the question.
This is not a merely theoretical dispute. Each of these interpretations has
significant geopolitical repercussions. America�s
overall strategy in Iraq and the greater Middle East is founded precisely
upon the possibility of democracy�s
birth and growth in those Muslim regions.
It also involves the future of Muslim
immigrants in Europe. An Islam reconciled with democracy would allow their
integration. An Islam incapable of distinguishing between God and Caesar
would trap them in a state of
�alienation.�
This is what Ratzinger wrote some years ago in one of his rare comments on
Islam, in three pages of the book-length interview
�The
Salt of the Earth,�
published in Germany in 1996 and in the United States the following year, by
Ignatius Press, the publishing house of Fr. Joseph Fessio.
It is the passage reproduced below. It should be read with the awareness
that almost ten years, dense with events and further reflections, have
passed since then.
�Shari�a
shapes society from beginning to end...�
by Joseph Ratzinger
I think that first
we must recognize that Islam is not a uniform thing. In fact, there is no
single authority for all Muslims, and for this reason dialogue with Islam is
always dialogue with certain groups. No one can speak for Islam as a whole;
it has, as it were, no commonly regarded orthodoxy.
And, to prescind from the schism between Sunnis and Shiites, it also exists
in many varieties. There is a noble Islam, embodied, for example, by the
King of Morocco, and there is also the extremist, terrorist Islam, which,
again, one must not identify with Islam as a whole, which would do it an
injustice.
An important point, however, is [...] that the interplay of society,
politics, and religion has a completely difference structure in Islam as a
whole. Today's discussion in the West about the possibility of Islamic
theological faculties, or about the idea of Islam as a legal entity,
presupposes that all religions have basically the same structure, that they
all fit into a democratic system with its regulations and the possibilities
provided by these regulations. In itself, however, this necessarily
contradicts the essence of Islam,
which simply does not have the separation of the political and religious
sphere which Christianity has had from the beginning.
The Koran is a total religious law, which regulates the whole of political
and social life and insists that the whole order of life be Islamic. Sharia
shapes society from beginning to end. In this sense, it can exploit such
partial freedoms as our constitution gives, but it can't be its final goal
to say: Yes, now we too are a body with rights, now we are present just like
the Catholics and the Protestants. In such a situation, it would not achieve
a status consistent with its inner nature; it would be in alienation from
itself.
Islam has a total organization of life that is completely different from
ours; it embraces simply everything. There is a very marked subordination of
woman to man; there is a very tightly knit criminal law, indeed, a law
regulating all areas of life, that is opposed to our modern ideas about
society. One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a
denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society.
When one represents the situation in those terms, as often happens today,
Islam is defined according to the Christian model and is not seen as it
really is in itself. In this sense, the question of dialogue with Islam is
naturally much more complicated than, for example, an internal dialogue
among Christians.
The consolidation of Islam worldwide is a multifaceted phenomenon. On the
one hand, financial factors play a role here. The financial power that the
Arab countries have attained and that allows them to build large Mosques
everywhere, to guarantee a presence of Muslim cultural institutes and more
things of that sort.
But that is certainly only one
factor. The other is an enhanced identity, a new self-consciousness.
In the cultural situation of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
until the 1960s, the superiority of the Christian countries was industrially,
culturally, politically, and militarily so great that Islam was really
forced into the second rank. Christianity
�
at any rate, civilizations with a Christian foundation
�
could present themselves as the victorious power in world history.
But then the great moral
crisis of the Western world, which appears to be the Christian world, broke
out. In the face of the deep moral contradictions of the West and of its
internal helplessness
�
which was suddenly opposed by a new economic power of the Arab countries
�
the Islamic soul reawakened. We are somebody too; we know who we are; our
religion is holding its ground; you don't have one any longer.
This is actually the feeling today of
the Muslim world:
The Western countries are no longer capable of preaching a message of
morality, but have only know-how to offer the world.
The Christian religion has abdicated; it really no longer exists as a
religion; the Christians no longer have a morality or a faith; all that's
left are a few remains of some modern ideas of enlightenment; we have the
religion that stands the test.
So the Muslims now have the consciousness that in reality Islam has remained
in the end as the more vigorous religion and that they have something to say
to the world, indeed, are the essential religious force of the future.
Before, the shariah and all those things had already left the scene, in a
sense; now there is a new pride. Thus a new zest, a new intensity about
wanting to live Islam has awakened. This is its great power: We have a moral
message that has existed without interruption since the prophets, and we
will tell the world how to live it, whereas the Christians certainly can't.
We must naturally come to terms with this inner power of Islam, which
fascinates even academic circles.
__________
The book from which this selection was taken:
Joseph Ratzinger,
�Salt
of the Earth. The Church at the End of the Millennium,�
an interview with Peter Seewald, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1997.
__________
The complete transcript of the radio interview with Fr. Joseph Fessio:
> The Hugh Hewitt Show, January 5, 2006
__________
On this website, on this topic:
> From Lepanto to Baghdad, There�s
a Road that Leads through Rome (19.12.2005)
> Death or Freedom for the Apostates? The Counter-Fatwa of the Liberal
Muslims (30.11.2005)
> How and Why Iraq Is Teaching a Lesson to the World
� And to the Church
(31.10.2005)
> Trying Democracy in Baghdad, with the Vatican's Blessing
(8.11.2004)
> Islam Plus Democracy: The Lewis Doctrine Makes Inroads at the Vatican
(4.5.2004)
Other articles:
> Focus on ISLAM
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Go to the English home page of
> www.chiesa.espressonline.it, to access the latest articles and
links to other resources.
Sandro Magister�s
e-mail address is
s.magister@espressoedit.it
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