Francis and Benedict: Two popes, two divergent approaches to Islam
Two personal notes:
1.
As I pointed out before, Gabriel Said Reynolds, prominently cited in this article, is the co-author of one of the volumes published by the Islamic Translation Series that I conceived and, until 2012, led at Brigham Young University:
2.
I was lecturing about Islam on behalf of the area presidency in Australia and New Zealand back when Pope Benedict XVI delivered his controversial remarks at the University of Regensburg, as well as meeting with local political leaders, Muslim authorities, and so forth, and doing radio interviews. Very quickly, his comments became a focus of such interviews. Thanks to the miracle of the internet, I was soon able to read the original German text of his remarks, which, in my judgment and understood in context, weren’t nearly as inflammatory and negative as the press was reporting and as many Muslims were assuming. (I do think that he was perhaps surprised by the fact that the subtle nuances of an academic lecture by the intellectual Professor Joseph Ratzinger were lost on sensationalistic and unsubtle journalists, who were covering a speech by a former professor who had turned Pope.)
Anyway, I found it ironic that I, a Mormon Islamicist, was soon busy on various radio programs defending the head of the Roman Catholic Church, pleading with people to calm down and carefully read what he had actually said rather than merely some cherry-picked excerpts. His points were debatable, but they were intellectually serious, and they deserved intellectually serious responses.
Incidentally, I had to do one of my interviews by cell phone, pulled over at an ice cream place (to which Elder Louis Midgley and his wife had introduced me on a previous visit) alongside the (surprisingly noisy) road between Auckland and Hamilton, New Zealand. Every once in a while a truck would go roaring by. It was . . . unusual. But, while we were there, we enjoyed the ice cream.
Posted from Tel Aviv, Israel
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