An Overdue Dialogue
It took 18 months after his controversially perceived lecture at Regensburg University for coming to the conclusion that he has to meet the clerical representatives of Islam for further clarifications. In an open letter signed by 38 Muslim scholars and leaders the Holy Father had been invited for a friendly dialogue of the two major monotheistic faiths some time ago. Now he wants to talk with them. Pope Benedict XVI, who had travelled to Istanbul last year (Byzantium, as he still called it) and there had visited the Blue Mosque, was very reluctant in apologizing for his not really helpful quotation of a 14th Century Byzantine Emperor who had criticized Islam and had called it violent and irrational. It must be remembered that in what is called the Middle Ages in the West, a dark and inhumane era when plague and other epidemics were depopulating much of Europe, it was Islam which had preserved the Greek philosophers’ knowledge. The countries in the Middle East and beyond then represen...