Between pope and prophet
The Muslim response to Pope Benedict’s address at Regensburg marks a
fresh chapter in the arrival of global Islam on the world’s political
stage
BY FAISAL DEVJI
Pope Benedict XVI’s citation of a medieval text
disparaging the Prophet Muhammad in his address at the University of
Regensburg on September 12, 2006 has allowed Muslims across the world to
mount yet another spectacle of their religion’s globalisation.
The statements, demonstrations and acts of violence
fuelling this controversy do not match the scale of those protesting the
Danish caricatures of Islam’s founder in February-March 2006. But the fact
that they should have occurred so soon afterwards and so much more rapidly
is telling given that nearly 20 years separated the cartoon controversy
from the first spectacle of Islam’s globalisation, which had as its cause
the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, in
1988.
That all these spectacles are concerned with the portrayal
of the Prophet Muhammad rather than with any adverse treatment meted out
to Muslims, their mosques or even the Koran is not accidental. The prophet
thus defended is not a religious personage so much as a model for Muslim
identification, which is why it is not blasphemy that is at issue here but
defamation, as is clear from the rhetoric of protesters throughout the
Islamic world.
Moreover, Muhammad brings his followers together in this
way because he represents a community whose global presence is mediated
neither by any religious nor any political authority, which is quite
unlike Roman Catholicism in this respect. Despite the political uses made
of these controversies by Muslim leaders, the prophet does not serve
merely as a channel for the political grievances of his devotees but
instead permits them a global voice for the first time in Islam’s history.
Globalisation’s addicts
As the slender reed upon which global Islam rests, the
prophet becomes also a lightning rod for any perceived insult. In fact,
such insults are even required to provoke the spectacle of Islam’s
globalisation and thus allow Muslims to see themselves as actors on a
planetary stage, perhaps because they tend to have so little voice in the
running even of their own countries.
Furthermore, these insults have themselves become global
to the degree that Muslim demonstrators take offence at books, images and
speeches only as they are represented in the media and not as texts to be
consulted in their own right. By refusing to consider these texts in their
original form, to say nothing of the contexts in which they portray the
prophet, Muslim protesters point to the irrelevance of such origins. Their
anger is informed by the very media portrayals it is directed against and
is unrelated to the intention of their authors.
When authors like Rushdie or Pope Benedict XVI are made
responsible for the offensive portrayals of Muhammad circulated in the
media, they are attacked not as individuals but as the media-enhanced
representatives of abstractions like the West, Christendom or Zionism.
However involuntary this representation may appear, the task of Muslim
protest is to compel such individuals to take responsibility for its
global effects.
Indeed such protest is concerned with holding specific
persons or groups accountable for these geographically dispersed and
institutionally unmoored abstractions, as if to demonstrate thereby the
universal interconnectedness that globalisation makes possible. So it is a
fitting irony that these Muslims arguably attend more closely to the
pope’s words, and even expect more of him, than many Catholics themselves
do.
As with the previous spectacles of Islam’s globalisation,
demonstrations against the pope’s words have secular rather than religious
meaning because they are occasioned only by the "hurt" caused to Muslim
feeling and make no claims about the truth of Muhammad’s revelation. By
recognising this hurt and responding to it in as secular a manner, the
pope undercut his own speech on the relationship of faith and reason at
Regensburg University by showing how difficult it is to use religious
language outside sectarian borders.
On the other side, the more violently Muslims protested,
the less secular their hurt became, since its expression now damaged the
very image of Muhammad’s character that his followers sought to defend. In
other words, by damaging their own cause these Muslims took leave of
secular reason without adopting a particularly religious reasoning in the
process. Maybe this is how the relationship of faith and reason that
Benedict XVI had addressed at Regensburg University manifests itself
outside the academic institutions of rich European democracies.
An even more interesting feature of the secularisation of
Muslim protest is its overwhelming rejection of the language of law.
Whether marked as sacred or profane, the vocabulary of legal transgression
and punishment has been left unpronounced and there have been no fatwas
issued as in the Rushdie affair. It is also significant that jihad, which
the pontiff had referred to in his speech, has not been declared against
him; this illustrates the multiple ways in which Muslim protest is
manifested globally.
As with the Danish cartoon controversy, Muslim anger at
the pope’s citation does not follow the al-Qaeda line and in fact puts it
quite in the shade by setting another kind of agenda for Islam’s
globalisation. After all, the pope was asked for an apology so that
forgiveness might be extended him. However coercive in its violence, this
Muslim demand can be taken as an invitation to the kind of dialogue that
Benedict XVI called for in his speech and it should be seized upon as an
opportunity by all concerned. The meeting held at the Vatican between the
pope and diplomatic representatives from Muslim states on September 25,
2006 is a notable development in this regard.
Contrition and forgiveness are of course religious acts,
which is why their entirely secular deployment in this controversy becomes
significant. If it is not before god but Muslims worldwide that the pope
is meant to repent and not from god but these Muslims that he is to
receive forgiveness, then nothing separates such contrition from that
expressed by the Hollywood actor, Mel Gibson, for anti-Semitic remarks.
Yet there is a difference here that goes beyond the fact
of Muslim violence, which is that ethics provide the only language for
dialogue in a global arena whose lack of political institutions stands in
contradiction to humanity’s increasing interdependency. How else was the
head of the world’s largest religious organisation to communicate with
Muslims belonging to many organisations or none at all? Certainly not by
way of international organisations like the United Nations, which exist
only to express the voice of nation states.
The longing for Christianity
If Muslim anger appears to be so raw, this is because it
voices a global presence that remains as yet unmediated by any institution
or authority. And if Muslim hurt appears so intensely felt, this is
because it expresses disappointment at the supposed lapse of a religious
leader who had otherwise enjoyed considerable respect in the world of
Islam.
If not the pope himself, then certainly his title evokes
for many Muslims as well as Hindus and others a specifically Christian
aura of other-worldliness and sanctity, one that leads them to expect a
different kind of language from him. This is why Benedict XVI’s alleged
lapse into what seemed to be common prejudice was so shocking for Muslims
who (as it were) overheard the pope speak of their prophet since he did
not choose to address them while doing so.
That such a reaction has not even been afforded President
Bush, despite his much-resented talk of a "crusade" in the immediate
aftermath of 9/11, bears testimony to the specificity of Muslim
disappointment in Benedict XVI. It is as if the protesters were
acknowledging, with sadness as much as anger, that the pope too had to be
included in the ranks of those who would defame their religion.
What is extraordinary, given the steady diet they are fed
by the militants among them of Christianity’s crusading spirit, is that
Muslims should have expected anything different. So it is in fact a
hopeful sign that Muslims did not expect a description of Islam’s violence
from the head of a church that has contributed the words crusade and
inquisition to our vocabulary.
Writing in the aftermath of the second world war, the
political philosopher Hannah Arendt commented on the Vatican’s silence at
the doings of Nazi Germany, a state with which Rome operated a concordat.
Unlike those who would find the church as a whole culpable of
collaborating with fascism, Arendt not only pointed to the many priests
who risked and lost their lives defending its victims, she also made it
clear that the Vatican behaved in no way differently than any other state
when it came to protesting the extermination of the Jews. But this
precisely was Rome’s greatest betrayal, to behave in a secular rather than
a religious way, a betrayal that Arendt claimed lost the church an
opportunity to renew its own mission, as much as that of religion in
general, for a humanity that so urgently required it.
It is this very betrayal of what they see as the church’s
mission that Muslims are protesting today, just as they have done before
in celebrated instances like the Ayatollah Khomeini’s message to Pope John
Paul II in 1979. However disingenuous such expectations might be, they
derive rhetorical effect from the very real hope that even un-baptised
populations have of the world’s largest religious organisation.
It is the disappointment of this expectation that also
gives rhetorical force to Muslim dissatisfaction with the speedy
retractions and clarifications that have proceeded from the Vatican in
response to their protests. For, what appears to dissatisfy these
protesters are precisely the secular remnants in the pontiff’s carefully
couched apologies. Yet if, for all their rage, today’s protesting Muslims
have the audacity to expect Christian humility of the pope, this in no way
contradicts Benedict XVI’s own audacity in asserting the role of faith
within a secular dispensation. Such indeed was the import of his address
at Regensburg University.
Faith and good faith
A great deal has already been written about the complex
role that Islam and its prophet play in the pontiff’s now notorious quoted
remark, to say nothing of the position that Jews and Protestants also
occupy in it. What has so far gone unremarked is the pope’s use of
violence as a criterion to decide upon the truth of religion.
On the surface this is an extraordinary argument for
Benedict XVI to make, not only because it goes against centuries of
Catholic tradition, but also because it is secular to the core. Violence
can only become a criterion of religious truth, or rather of untruth, if
it is separated from the argument of secular betterment. Non-violence, in
other words, can demonstrate religious truth only if it is good in its own
right quite apart from any reason of utility. And this is a promise the
church does indeed possess in doctrines like the sanctity of life; though
to be fulfilled it needs to be extended from abortion and euthanasia to
execution and war.
The point of this controversy is not that Muslims have
misunderstood the pope, that Benedict XVI has misunderstood the Prophet
Muhammad or that either party has acted out of hatred and prejudice.
However true or false any of these points may be, the controversy’s great
irony is that the pontiff’s Muslim protesters should engage so fully with
the argument of his speech. They did so not by providing an illustration
of what happens when faith and reason are separated but rather by
demonstrating how difficult it is for anyone, including the pope himself,
to move beyond the language of secularism. This indeed is the crisis of
religion to whose resolution Benedict XVI has dedicated his papacy.
It is telling in this respect that the leader of a
venerable church, the world’s largest religious organisation, should
broach the subject of religion’s crisis by referring to Christianity’s old
rival, Islam. Whatever his intent in doing so, the pope’s invocation of
Muhammad is remarkable for the importance it accords the prophet, doing
Islam a perverse honour thereby.
Has not Islam taken control of the language of faith by
posing as its most fervent exemplar in the sacrificial spectacles of its
globalisation? And was not this position held, not so long ago, by the
Roman Catholic church, which gloried in the mystery of doctrines that
surpassed reason? Today these mysteries, of transubstantiation and
consubstantiation, to say nothing of papal infallibility, have been placed
under the fervid star of Islam, even in Catholicism’s European homeland.
But it is precisely this situation that makes the kind of
dialogue Benedict XVI has called for at all possible, if only by showing
us how intertwined these religions are with each other as well as with
secularism. This dialogue can be seen occurring in the extraordinary
importance that the pontiff’s address accords the prophet and his
revelation as well as in the corresponding importance that Muslims have
accorded the speech. But given that it is occurring among large masses of
people in an uneven global arena lacking any institutions of its own, it
would be foolish to expect such dialogue to be conducted in parliamentary
or academic fashion. Indeed the pope himself has made it very clear – the
Vatican meeting on September 25 notwithstanding – that he attaches little
value to interfaith dialogue of this kind.
In his Regensburg address the pontiff described Europe as
Christianity’s spiritual homeland though he knows, of course, that the
majority of Christians, and indeed Catholics, live outside this partial
continent. By explicitly forsaking the desire to return to Christianity’s
Asian origins and even to "the God of Abraham and Isaac", Benedict XVI
could not have been so crude as to reject his religion’s Jewish heritage.
By criticising Muslim and Protestant attempts to recover the moral
transcendence of this heritage, as signified in the story of Abraham’s
sacrifice – which, like the reference to Muhammad, was literally and
metaphorically "put in quotation marks" by being cited from another text –
he seemed only to be asking Christian Europe to remain true to its own
past.
But this Hellenistic past, the pope well knows, was shared
by Judaism and Islam as much as it was by Christianity. Indeed this
largely pagan heritage could be possessed by none of these religions
because it was external to all three and even to Europe itself within its
current geographical boundaries. Might the pontiff’s speech be heard as an
invitation for Europe to contribute her own history to the dialogue of
faith and reason, one in which all Europeans, however defined, could
participate?
Perhaps this is too charitable a reading, but whatever the
case, his boldness in turning to Europe’s pagan past requires more
attention than has been given the pontiff’s address even by his staunchest
supporters. In yet another irony, then, the pope’s radical agenda has been
registered and taken most seriously by the Muslim protesters whom Benedict
XVI has to thank for the unprecedented interest that his speech has evoked
among Roman Catholics themselves.
The universal interconnectedness that globalisation makes
possible means that the dialogue called for by the pope has already begun.
But despite the fact that it has the whole world as its stage, this
dialogue possesses no space of its own, for being global in dimension it
can be conducted neither in the seminary nor the madrassa, to say
nothing of the university.
This is also a dialogue that finds no place in the
national and international politics of our time. So it occurs on the
street and in the media, in demonstrations and sound bites rather than in
treatises and contracts. n
(Excerpted from the complete article. Faisal Devji is
assistant professor of history at New School University, New York. His
writing includes Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality,
Modernity, C. Hurst, 2005 and Cornell University Press, 2005.)
http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-europe_islam/pope_prophet_3940.jsp
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