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2 Politics and the pontiff in a
Muslim land By Jeffrey Donovan
ANKARA - On a traffic-choked boulevard in
Ankara, in central Anatolia, the bleeping of car
horns and the rattle of buses mix with the
muezzin's airy call to evening prayer. Is this the
sound of a new Europe? Perhaps. But for Pope
Benedict XVI, who arrived in the city on Tuesday
for his first visit to a Muslim-majority country,
that's a problem.
"On the Islamic side -
from the average Muslim to the political Islamist
to the more radical extremist - they certainly
feel that his
apology [for remarks in
September in Regensburg, Germany, linking Islam
with violence] was not enough," said Turkish
political analyst Zeyno Baran. "A second group of
people are the nationalists in Turkey, and they
are upset with the pope because he has been
critical of Turkey and he is known to be opposed
to Turkey joining the EU."
A broad
agenda So controversial is the pope here
that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at first
made it clear he would not meet with him. While
Erdogan, under pressure, reversed course and
greeted the pope on his arrival, the question
remains: Why did a guest so apparently unwelcome
come anyway?
An easy answer is that he was
originally invited by the Orthodox patriarch of
Constantinople, Bartholomew I, with whom Benedict
will meet this week in Istanbul. But observers of
the Vatican believe the pope - an 80-year-old
German theologian known for his sharp intellect -
has a much broader agenda than merely improving
ties between Catholics and Orthodox Christians.
Part of that agenda is an attempt to help
spark Islamic theological reform. According to
this analysis, the pope's speech in Regensburg on
the necessary unity of faith and reason was aimed
as much at the secularized West as it was at the
Islamic world.
Some analysts argue that
literalist readings of 7th-century Islamic texts
are fueling extremist movements.
Robert
Moynihan, a medieval historian and editor-in-chief
of the magazine Inside the Vatican, had numerous
interviews with cardinal Joseph Ratzinger before
he became leader of the world's 1 billion
Catholics in April 2005.
An unwelcome
challenge? "There's no doubt in my mind,
he states it clearly, that Islam can evaluate when
a passage of the Koran was written: was one early,
was one later, was one in a certain context and
one in another," Moynihan said. "Those remarks in
the Regensburg speech make very clear that he's
inviting Islam to engage in a process of
self-evaluation and examination and of exegesis of
the Koran, which is extremely difficult,
controversial. But in my view, it's absolutely
clear that he's inviting them to engage in that."
But Muslims will likely find this a rude
invitation, said David Barchard, a British
Catholic and veteran Turkey expert with the Ankara
think-tank Tepav.
"It seems to be an
intrinsically Islamic concept, to see things in
terms of insults," Barchard said. "And as far as
they're concerned, his remarks came very, very
close indeed to insulting the holiest figure in
Islam. Now, you might say that's a kind of
dialogue, but I would regard it more as
confrontation."
Moynihan was more
sanguine. He read the pope's move as an attempt to
seize a role in the tense debate between the
Western and Islamic worlds. And he said the pope's
speech did just that, giving interfaith dialogue a
vital intensity and Benedict a "megaphone he
didn't have" before Regensburg.
"He is
going out with open arms to meet Islamic
scholars," Moynihan said. "They are writing
letters to him. They are visiting him in the
Vatican. They are now going to meet with him in
[Ankara], in Turkey. There's no figure in the West
who is more openly in dialogue with Islam right
now than the pope of Rome. So what the pope did
and why he did it [are] mysterious. But the effect
of it has been to catapult him into the key
interlocutor role."
New level of
dialogue The question is how he uses that
role. In Ankara, he was to meet with Muslim
figures including top cleric Ali Bardakoglu, the
current president of religious affairs of Turkey.
Ankara-based Felix Korner is a Catholic
priest and authority on Islamic reform theology in
Turkey. A German like the pope, Korner believes
the talks mark a sort of milestone.
"This
will be a new level of dialogue, which will also
certainly be institutionalized during this
meeting," Korner said. "We will then bring
together our various committees together on a
regular basis and things like that."
Other
issues here might be more divisive. Turkey's
sagging European Union bid is chief among them.
Barchard said there is resentment among
leaders here regarding
