Outcry over Pope's comments on Islam

CAIRO - Muslims today 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 Hamas official Ismail Radwan 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".

"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".

"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 Beirut-based Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, one of the world's top Shi'ite Muslim clerics.

Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi defended the Pope's lecture and said he did not mean to offend Muslims.

"It was certainly not the intention of the Holy Father to undertake a comprehensive study of the jihad and of Muslim ideas on the subject, still less to offend the sensibilities of Muslim faithful," Lombardi told Vatican Radio.

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.

The Sheikh of al-Azhar, one of the Sunni Muslim world's most prestigious seats of religious studies, said: "The Azhar asserts that these statements indicate clear ignorance of Islam.

"They attribute to Islam what it does not contain," the sheikh, Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, said in a statement on MENA.

In Iraq, the Pope's comments were condemned at Friday prayers by followers of radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

"This is the second time such an offence has been give before Ramadan," said Sheikh Salah al-Ubeidi, one of Sadr's aides, referring to last year's publication of cartoons in a Danish paper sparking violent Muslim protests around the world.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel told Bild newspaper the aim of the Pope's speech had been misunderstood.

"It was an invitation to dialogue between religions ... What Benedict XVI emphasised was a decisive and uncompromising renunciation of all forms of violence in the name of religion," she was quoted as saying in an article to appear on Saturday.

The Koran endorses the concept of jihad, often translated as holy war, but Muslims differ on conditions for it, with some saying it applies only for self-defence against external attack.

- REUTERS