Muslims believe that there are no intermediaries between God and the creation that he brought into being by his sheer command, “Be.” Although his presence is believed to be everywhere, he is not incarnated in anything. He said that “Islam has defined its own catalogue of human rights, which differs from the Western catalogue” and from the West’s understanding of the “self-subsistent values that flow from the essence of what it is to be a man”-values that may not be readily apparent beyond “the Christian realm” or “the Western rational tradition.” What he does seem to admire about Islam is its insistent presence at the center of most Muslims’ lives. Still, not even a Jesuit could explain what the Pope intended when he addressed a group of theologians at the University of Regensburg in September, beginning a speech that could best be described as a scholarly refutation of the so-called Kantian fallacy-Kant’s distinction between rational understanding and apprehension of the sublime-with a question posed by a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor to a Persian guest at his winter barracks near Ankara. They had received copies of his speech at six in the morning of the day he gave it, and, at ten, they assembled in the university’s makeshift pressroom and informed the Vatican spokesman, a Jesuit priest and Vatican Radio director named Federico Lombardi, that the passage was going to be incendiary.

” Politi told me, adding that when the Pope had gone to Auschwitz to speak, last May, “we got copies of that speech, too, and it never mentioned the Shoah, so we said, ‘Hey, where is Shoah? Father Lombardi, a soft-spoken man who at the time was only two months into his job as the Vatican’s official spinner, told me, “I don’t know the intentions of the Pope. How well do you know this icon who has sold 70 million albums worldwide? It is well known that Benedict wants to transform the Church of Rome, which is not to say that he wants to make it more responsive to the realities of modern life as it is lived by Catholic women in the West, or by Catholic homosexuals, or even by the millions of desperately poor Catholic families in the Third World who are still waiting for some merciful dispensation on the use of contraception. Arab armies were at the gates of Poitiers, in central France, in 732-only a hundred years after the Prophet died and more than three hundred and fifty years before the start of the First Crusade-and southern Spain was still under Islamic rule in the fifteenth century, some two hundred years after the knights of the Ninth Crusade straggled home.

The Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, at Oxford, described this “counterproductive game” in late September, when he wrote that Muslim leaders who lend their voices to an angry mob protesting a “perceived insult to their faith” might well reflect on the consequences of “manipulating crises of this kind as a safety valve for both their restive populations and their own political agenda.” Ramadan has roots in Egypt (where his grandfather founded the Muslim Brotherhood) and in Europe (where he was born and raised), and he has cultivated a reputation as a kind of mediator between the Muslims of those two worlds, an interpreter of one to the other. Across the U.S., NOI businesses by 1970 included grocery stores, dress shops, dry cleaners, bakeries, and restaurants which provided food, cooked meals, and clothing to both Muslims and non-Muslims at affordable prices. There are more than a billion Catholics in the world, and more than a billion Muslims. Later, six more states likewise recommended the addition of a Bill of Rights, and the idea was also endorsed by Jefferson and Madison.

James Turner Johnson. Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Traditions. He views the world through a strictly theological frame, and his judgments about Islam, however defiant or reductive they sometimes sound, have finally to do with the idea of Theos-God-as he understands it. But Benedict is the first Pope to have developed what could be called an active theological policy toward Islam, as opposed to, say, a military or political one-“the first really functioning Pope in the post-September 11th world,” Daniel Madigan calls him. Sheikh Abu Saqer, the head of the Salafiya Jihadiya movement in Gaza, called angrily for the conquest and conversion of Rome: “This is a crusader war against Islam, and it is our holy duty to fight all those who support the Pope. And never mind that he doesn’t seem to like much about Islam, or that he has doubts about Islam’s direction. But many of the Vatican correspondents who, like Politi, travelled to Regensburg with Benedict doubt that there was anything accidental or inadvertent in the citation.