John Roughan: Pope's gutsy little grenade lobbed into war on terror

When cardinals meet to elect a Pope they spend most of their time on their knees. Their eventual decision, Catholics believe, is informed by a divine messenger, the Holy Spirit.

Last year, when the Vatican conclave elected red-blooded Cardinal Ratzinger to succeed John Paul II, liberals like my mother assumed the Holy Spirit had taken the day off. That suspicion was confirmed for her this week when Benedict XVI, as he called himself, had Muslims everywhere in uproar over words he used about their religion.

Mum and I have had many good debates over the years and this could be another.

I think the Pope was right to go on the offensive in this clash of civilisations that we didn't seek but increasingly cannot avoid.

Islam is almost the last subject most people in other civilisations want to know about. It is the youngest of the world's great religions and still looks primitive to Western eyes. What we notice of it, the subjugation of its women, the sexual repression, the burqas and beards, caps and prayer mats, the jihad, the fatwa, the constant jangling call to prayer, is simply repulsive to the Western mind and doesn't interest us.

No Muslim will be more acutely aware of this than those who live in Western countries or were educated in Western universities - Muslims like Osama bin Laden, Mohammed Atta and his co-pilots on September 11, 2001, and those who have been arrested since on suspicion of trying to emulate them.

The West is not going to defeat this threat with a war on terror that deliberately ignores the religious element and charitably absolves mainstream Islam of any responsibility for it.

The Pope has fired a shot into the heart of Islamic theology. His reference to the unreason of the sword was a poke not just at jihadists but at the incapacity of Islam to distinguish church and state.

In the process Benedict revealed himself to be a more human, intelligent and interesting figure than we had gleaned from the disapproving profiles at the time of his election. But you need to read more of his Regensburg address than the "evil and inhuman" passage widely reported this week.

He began: "It's a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium ..."

He recalled some lively exchanges between the staff of Regensburg's two theological faculties on the timeless questions of whether religion can be reasoned.

Then he said he was reminded of those days recently when he read a theologian who made reference to a dialogue between a Byzantine emperor and an educated Persian in the emperor's winter barracks near Ankara during a Turkish advance on Constantinople at the end of the 14th century.

The emperor, said Benedict, "addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that leaves us astounded, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: 'Show me what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached'."

The Pope has apologised for causing offence but has not retracted the point he was making, which might crudely be summarised as: a religion that employs force loses any claim to rational respect. The words evil and inhuman seem a fair description of forced conversion to me. I can think of no reason the Pope apologised for the offence they caused, except that it is a very Christian thing to do.

Pacifism, turn the other cheek, love your enemies, are the teachings that distinguish Christianity from its close relatives, Judaism and Islam. The three share ancestry and belief in a single deity but give pre-eminence to different human revelations.

The different values exemplified by the founders have had, and continue to have, a profound influence on the history and political culture - the civilisation - of the countries that subscribed to them.

It seems to me the essential tolerance of Christianity is a large part of the reason that the West is rich today.

Tolerance, open-mindedness, trust of relative strangers are the sources of free thinking, invention and science, trade, contract law and capital investment - all the components of the growth of Western prosperity since the Enlightenment.

Crucially, too, Christianity has from its beginning recognised a separation of powers ("Render unto Caesar...") that Islam does not. Sharia law makes no distinction between sacred and secular authority. There is no secular in Islamic life.

Cardinal Ratzinger said in an interview on the subject: "The Koran insists that the whole order of life be Islamic ... It [sharia] is opposed to our modern idea of society. One must understand that Islam is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a pluralistic society."

His Regensburg lecture did not mention hijackers, human bombers or kidnappers who celebrate their captives' conversions.

It was an implicit general rebuke to the ordinary law of Islamic states which forbids other religions from proselytizing and accepting voluntary (reasoned) conversions.

Islam's need of that sort of enforcement, Benedict suggests, deprives it of rational respectability.

Western rationalism, on the other hand, tends to deny respectability to all religion. The Pope urges the West to "engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur" and concludes: "It is to this breadth of reason that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures".

It was a gutsy little grenade to lob into the war on terror, possibly the first effective Western shot in a clash of civilisations.

We are a bit short of muscular religious confidence on our side but Pope Benedict has it in abundance. If he can lead the way like this, religious and civil liberty could win the argument. That, in the end, would do Muslims a power of good.