It’s The Pope’s Fault

good, reaching out to Muslims and helping them win the battles for ideas against the extremists, he has created division and fuelled fanaticism.

The chances of dialogue look pretty thin if any criticism of Islam is greeted with riots and threats of violence. You can’t have a discussion with those who have no intention of shifting from an absolute belief in their rightness and everybody else’s wrongness, and who appear only to be interested in the degree of offence that they believe has been caused them.

And how is this business of the Pope “reaching out to Muslims and helping them win the battles for ideas against the extremists” meant to work exactly, if he’s not allowed to utter one word which might cause offence to those extremists? It limits his options somewhat. Surely the relationship between Islam and violence is a topic of genuine concern, and one that the Pope might reasonably be expected to comment on. It seems to me – and presumably seemed to the Pope – a less confrontational way to introduce the topic, to quote a source dating back several hundred years, and use that as a point of departure, rather than to state upfront the obvious truth that many Islamic clerics nowadays embrace violence with relish. So – an opening for dialogue. There was, and still is, an opportunity for Muslims to take up the dialogue, but it’s hardly the Pope’s fault if that opportunity’s been turned down in favour of the easier option of outrage. It seems clear enough that, on one side at least, there’s no interest whatever in dialogue: merely an interest in being offended.

Other letters are so stereotypical as to make one wonder if they’re parodies (but then so much that’s been written on this topic over the past few days has that feeling, not least the contributions from Guardian regulars Madeleine Bunting and Karen Armstrong). We get an Imam explaining that “Islam is a religion of peace” (so all those instances of violence in the name of Allah are doctrinally impossible, and therefore didn’t happen) and further contributions on how wonderfully tolerant Islam was in Spain, and, that old favourite, how it’s “as well for us to remember the contribution that Islam has made to Western civilisation.” That last – but of course – from a Reverend.