9/11 marked crucial turn in Vatican-Muslim relations

VATICAN CITY (RNS) A few weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Pope
John Paul II invited Muslim leaders to an interfaith prayer summit in
Assisi, Italy, the site of a dramatic interfaith peace gathering he had
hosted 15 years earlier.

In the shadow of 9/11, John Paul said, the world needed to hear from
Muslims and Christians that "religion must never be a reason for
conflict, hatred and violence."

Catholic-Muslim dialogue took on a new intensity and sense of
urgency. And then came the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, in
2006.

Speaking in his native Germany on Sept. 12, 2006, John Paul's
successor, Pope Benedict XVI, was delivering a scholarly address on the
Western tradition of faith and reason. He quoted a medieval Byzantine
emperor who described the teachings of Islam's Prophet Muhammad as "evil
and inhumane" and "spread by the sword."

One could almost hear Catholic-Muslim dialogue come to a screeching
halt.

The statement sparked Muslim protests worldwide, some of them
violent, including the burning of churches and the murder of a nun.
Turkey's top Muslim cleric said the speech revealed "the hatred in
(Benedict's) heart."

The speech, and the reaction to it, revealed deep tensions between
the world's two largest religions, and complicated the delicate task of
building understanding on both sides.

Benedict later acknowledged Muslims' "understandable indignation" at
the quotation, but insisted that he had not meant to endorse the
offending words, nor to show disrespect to the Quran, which he described
as the "holy book of a great religion."

After an exchange of high-profile letters, Benedict convened an
unprecedented three-day Vatican summit in Nov. 2008, but participants
say the problem of religiously inspired violence continues to haunt the
dialogue process.

What's more, they say, geopolitics has only made things more
difficult.

Mohammad Sammak, secretary of the Christian-Muslim Committee for
Dialogue in Beirut, Lebanon, said the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was
seen by many Muslims as another crusade by the Christian West against
Islam. That perception was reinforced, Sammak said, by the arrival of
Christian "evangelical missionaries" on the heels of invading troops.

No world leader was more outspoken or tireless in his opposition to
the Iraq war than John Paul, but the pope's position went underreported
in the Arab media, Sammak said, leaving the Vatican guilty by
association in the minds of many Muslims -- including an extremist
minority inclined to violence.

"Muslim fundamentalists do not recognize the difference between
different traditions of Christianity," Sammak said. "To them, all
Christians are the same."

As a result, Iraq's ancient Christian minority of an estimated 1.2
million (the majority of them Chaldean Catholics in communion with Rome)
became a target for Islamist militants. According to the CIA, as many as
half of Iraq's Christians have fled the country since 2003.

Iraq's dwindling Christians underscored the plight of Christian
minorities across the Muslim world, who often suffer from terrorism,
official discrimination, or both.

More recent attacks on Christians in Muslim-majority Pakistan, Egypt
and Malaysia have made the issue an even greater priority for the
Vatican, said John L. Esposito, a professor of Islamic studies at
Georgetown University and author of "The Future of Islam."

Yet in many ways, the Vatican finds its twin efforts to improve
relations with Islam and advocate for beleaguered Christian minorities
are hampered by the effects of Benedict's 2006 remarks.

The Rev. Vittorio Ianari, head of Muslim relations at Rome's
Community of Sant'Egidio, said the Regensburg speech spawned an
atmosphere of mistrust and resentment that persists in some of the most
influential Islamic circles.

Ianari said that those sensitivities help explain the hostile Muslim
reaction last January after Benedict denounced the "vile and murderous"
New Year's Day killing of 21 people by a car bomb outside a Christian
Coptic church in Alexandria, Egypt. In response, Cairo's renowned
Al-Azhar University suspended talks with the Vatican.

Even this year's pro-democracy "Arab Spring" has proven to be
complicated for both sides.

Esposito said Al-Azhar's harsh response was aimed at deflecting
criticism of Egypt's then-President Hosni Mubarak, who controlled the
country's religious leaders and regularly manipulated them for political
ends.

Since Mubarak's fall in February, attacks on Christian churches in
Egypt have only increased, leading many Christians in the Muslim Middle
East to rue the pro-democracy movements. Syrian President Bashar Assad,
for instance, has enjoyed public support from leaders of his country's
Greek Melkite Catholic Church during his brutal suppression of
pro-democracy protests.

Ianari, however, said Christians should cheer the current political
transformation of Arab countries, since it could allow the church to
"turn the page" in its dialogue with Islam.

"Liberty and democracy offer Muslims a great opportunity to rethink
their faith in a renewed world," Ianari said. "We should watch with
sympathy, because this is an opportunity to build an element fundamental
to dialogue: reciprocal trust."