Either a faithful Muslim exhorts the use of the sword to spread his faith, or he does not. The critics of the pope speak as if it were plain as day that such sentiments are deplored by licensed voices of Islam, but of course the matter is not so easily disposed of. If a Christian leader were to pronounce the need to eliminate a country whose religious leaders were dogmatically misled, that leader would be disowned by the larger Christian community. But Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the leader of a powerful nation in the Middle East who continues to call for the elimination of Israel. And we can't even satisfy ourselves by saying, "Well, our Byzantine emperor had his number, all right!"
The great unanswered question in modern political thought is: Who speaks for Muhammad? To ask this isn't to ask for a direct line to the prophet, let alone to God. It is a temporal question, answered, in Catholic Christianity, by: the pope.
The ugly fact of the matter is that the faith espoused by some very big-time practitioners today is one or another radical variant of Islam. The Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam rules in Saudi Arabia, and an offshoot of it in Egypt. In Iran, the regnant faith is a radical Shiite Islam.
But who is to say, nowadays, what is the authentic voice of the Islamic exegesis? There is no Islamic Council that can speak with authority in these matters. And surely what the pope was attempting to say, or should have been attempting to say, was that behavior of certain kinds has no warrant to excuse itself simply by citing someone's interpretation of the Quran.
But to delve into that question becomes, ironically, more difficult rather than less since the pope's speech at Regensburg, and for this the pope could legitimately apologize.
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