Tenjin (天神) The god of scholarship, he is the deified Sugawara no Michizane. Gorr the God Butcher appears as a playable character in Marvel: Future Fight. Why does God require faith? The Muslim anthropologist Talal Asad puts it this way: “Theology, being in language, is part of culture”-which is to say that, if “culture” is open to discussion, so is God. Riḍā was a strong exponent of Islamic vanguardism, the belief that Muslim community should be guided by clerical elites (ulema) who steered the efforts for religious education and Islamic revival. Benedict, in the course of their conversation, maintained that “the rational or ethical or religious formula that would embrace the whole world and unite all persons does not exist; or, at least, it is unattainable at the present moment.” By that definition, almost any dialogue that does not include a shared definition of the rational, the ethical, or the religious becomes impossible. In Iran, where Christians and Jews are officially tolerated as “people of the Book,” the President not only denies the Holocaust but wants Israel “wiped off the map.” In Iraq, as many as half the country’s Christians have fled in the past three years-because of the war, but also because of the religious hatred that the war has unleashed.

He has also repeated many of his past accusations about Jewish involvement in the transatlantic slave trade and exploitation of Black labor in the cotton trade-accusations he has attempted to bolster by promoting multiple anti-Semitic books, including a second volume of the NOI’s anti-Semitic 1991 work, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. But it may be that the price of reciprocity with militant Islam is unacceptable, given that it now seems to involve a demand that Christians recast Islam’s jihadist past and its particularly bloody present into something spiritually savory. He is the only one adding fuel to the fire of hatred and division among the religions.” He threatened to “boycott the Vatican” and added that “stopping the interfaith dialogue is the least that can be done.” In Europe, the Islamist threats are far more serious, and certainly more inclusive; the fatwas arrive by e-mail, and the police count among their everyday duties the job of guarding people, most of them Muslims, on jihadist hit lists.

America sits on top of the world with no one to touch her killing and maiming at will. Feisal Abdul Rauf, a well-known Egyptian Sufi imam who sits on the board of New York’s Islamic Center and leads an interfaith initiative “to heal the relations between the Islamic world and America,” told me, “I read that speech, and reread it, and it was not very philosophically coherent. John Paul II avoided it, on his travels, by saying, in effect, “I go for the country, not the religion.” Benedict has pretty much made it a precondition for relations between the Vatican and the Muslim world. The question of reciprocity is hardly new, but it was never a priority at the Vatican before Benedict’s reign. In the course of the next weeks, the Vatican Web site doctored a few phrases of the Regensburg speech. Rauf was one of the few Muslim leaders who appealed for calm and tolerance after the Regensburg speech. It is his conviction that Christian faith is demonstrably “rational.” That was the argument of his Regensburg speech, and, much more impressively stated, of his long dialogue with Habermas about reason, religion, and the “dialectics of secularization.” Habermas has always maintained that secular morality-morality negotiated in and by civil society-can, and should, provide humanity with a governing ethos.

At the time, Orthodox Christians like Paleologus had almost as much to fear from Catholic armies as from Muslim ones; and his Persian friend had certainly as much to fear from Ottomans as from Christians. But as the Catholic Encyclopedia said, in 1910, in its chapter on Logos, “Hellenic speculations constitute a dangerous temptation for Christian writers”-even when the writer happens to be Pope. Sheikh Mahmoud Ashour, of the Islamic institute at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, spoke for many of his colleagues when he said, after Regensburg, “Islam is innocent of everything mentioned by this Pope. The Orthodox Church had been counting on Turkish membership in Europe as a kind of protection, and Benedict’s earlier statements about Turkey being “in permanent contrast to Europe,” along with the local fury over Regensburg, had left all Christians in the East vulnerable. It is worth remembering that Manuel II Paleologus, the Byzantine emperor who got the Pope into so much trouble in Regensburg, was having a theological dialogue with his Muslim guest-or thought he was.