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Pakistani Muslims hold placards to condemn remarks made by Pope Benedict XVI
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September 16, 2006, 07:30
Muslims yesterday deplored remarks made by Pope Benedict on Islam and many of them said the Catholic leader should apologise in person to dispel the impression he had joined a campaign against their religion. The furore prompted several thousand flag waving Palestinians to march in the Gaza Strip in protest against the Pope's comments.
"This is another Crusader war against the Arab and Muslim world," said Ismail Radwan, Hamas official, as he addressed some 5 000 chanting demonstrators. Pakistan's National Assembly, parliament's lower house, unanimously passed a resolution condemning the Pope's comments.
In a speech in Germany on Tuesday, the Pope appeared to endorse a Christian view, contested by most Muslims, that the early Muslims spread their religion by violence. The 57 nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the world's largest Muslim body, said quotations used by the Pope represented a "character assassination of the Prophet Mohammad" and a "smear campaign".
Pope's speech might be a prelude to a new Vatican policy towards Islam: OIC
"The OIC hopes that this campaign is not the prelude of a new Vatican policy towards Islam ... The OIC also hopes that the Vatican will issue statements that reflect its true position and views on Islam and Islamic teachings," it said.
The Pope on Tuesday repeated criticism of the Prophet Mohammad by the 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who said everything Mohammad brought was evil "such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The Pope, who used the terms "jihad" and "holy war" in his lecture, added "violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul".
Vatican defends the Pope's speech
"The Pope of the Vatican joins in the Zionist-American alliance against Islam," said the leading Moroccan daily Attajdid, the main Islamist newspaper in the kingdom. "We demand that he apologises personally, and not through Vatican sources, to all Muslims for such a wrong interpretation," said Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, a Beirut-based Sayyed, one of the world's top Shi'ite Muslim clerics.
Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesperson, defended the Pope's lecture and said he did not mean to offend Muslims. A high-ranking Church source expressed fears for the Pope's safety, saying: "While I think the controversy will go away, it has done damage and if I were a security expert I'd be worried."
Apology
The Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab world's largest group of political Islamists, demanded an apology from the Pope and called on the governments of Islamic countries to break relations with the Vatican if he does not make one. - Reuters
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