The Pope and Islam.(Pope Benedict XVI)

These are fierce theological times. It should come as no surprise that the Vatican and Islam are not getting along, or that their problems began long before Pope Benedict XVI made his unfortunate reference to the Prophet Muhammad, in a speech in Regensburg last September, and even before the children of Europe's Muslim immigrants discovered beards, burkas, and jihad. There are more than a billion Catholics in the world, and more than a billion Muslims. And what divides the most vocal and rigidly orthodox interpreters of their two faiths, from the imams of Riyadh and the ayatollahs of Qom to the Pope himself, is precisely the things that Catholicism and Islam have always had in common: a purchase on truth; a contempt for the moral accommodations of liberal, secular states; a strong imperative to censure, convert, and multiply; and a belief that Heaven, and possibly earth, belongs exclusively to them.

It is well known that Benedict wants to transform the Church of Rome, which is not to say that he wants to make it more responsive to the realities of modern life as it is lived by Catholic women in the West, or by Catholic homosexuals, or even by the millions of desperately poor Catholic families in the Third World who are still waiting for some merciful dispensation on the use of contraception. He wants to purify the Church, to make it more definitively Christian, more observant, obedient, and disciplined--you could say more like the way he sees Islam. And never mind that he doesn't seem to like much about Islam, or that he has doubts about Islam's direction. (His doubts are not unusual in today's world; many Muslims have them.) The Pope is a theologian--the first prominent theologian to sit on Peter's throne since the eighteenth century. He views the world through a strictly theological frame, and his judgments about Islam, however defiant or reductive they sometimes sound, have finally to do with the idea of Theos--God--as he understands it. Those judgments have not changed much, in character, since he left Germany for the Vat-ican, twenty-six years ago.

In 1997, when the Pope was still Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger and beginning his seventeenth year as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, otherwise known as the Holy Office, or the Inquisition, he told the German journalist Peter Seewald, "Islam has a total organization of life that is completely different from ours; it embraces simply everything. . . . One has to have a clear understanding that it is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of pluralistic society." In 2004, the year before his election to the papacy, he elaborated on that dismissive thought for the German secular philosopher Jurgen Habermas, during a long recorded conversation in Munich. Talking about the "normative elements" in human rights--rights that in the West, by consensus, are not subjected to "the vagaries of majorities"--Ratzinger brought up Islam. He said that "Islam has defined its own catalogue of human rights, which differs from the Western catalogue" and from the West's understanding of the "self-subsistent values that flow from the essence of what it is to be a man"--values that may not be readily apparent beyond "the Christian realm" or "the Western rational tradition." What he does seem to admire about Islam is its insistent presence at the center of most Muslims' lives.

Islam has been in Europe for thirteen hundred years. Arab armies were at the gates of Poitiers, in central France, in 732--only a hundred years after the Prophet died and more than three hundred and fifty years before the start of the First Crusade--and southern Spain was still under Islamic rule in the fifteenth century, some two hundred years after the knights of the Ninth Crusade straggled home. But Benedict is the first Pope to have developed what could be called an active theological policy toward Islam, as opposed to, say, a military or political one--"the first really functioning Pope in the post-September 11th world," Daniel Madigan calls him. Madigan, who is one of the Vatican's most prominent, and liberal, advisers on Christian-Muslim relations, runs the Institute for the Study of Religions and Cultures at the Jesuits' Pontifical Gregorian University, arguably the most intellectually independent of Rome's Catholic institutions. It is probably safe to say that many of the faculty had been hoping for a more doctrinally liberated Pope. They acknowledge Benedict, though, as an intellectual, and, from a critical distance, recognize his purpose in what Madigan calls "laying down challenges to Islam, telling Muslims, 'We need to do some hard talking.' "

Still, not even a Jesuit could explain what the Pope intended when he addressed a group of theologians at the University of Regensburg in September, beginning a speech that could best be described as a scholarly refutation of the so-called Kantian fallacy--Kant's distinction between rational understanding and apprehension of the sublime--with a question posed by a fourteenthcentury Byzantine emperor to a Persian guest at his winter barracks near Ankara. "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new," the emperor asked the Persian, "and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

The problem for people who actually read the speech (by most reports, very few did) was that the Pope chose not to dispute the emperor's statement. He allowed that the emperor had spoken with a "startling brusqueness," but he did not say whether he disagreed, nor, for that matter, did he acknowledge that Christianity had contributed its share of inhumanity to history. He quoted from the emperor's argument against violent conversion--"God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature"--and contrasted that with a modern scholarly reading of the Islamist argument for it: "In Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories--even that of rationality." After that, he did not mention Islam again. Marco Politi, the Vatican correspondent for La Repubblica, who heard the speech, says it was "like a typical Protestant Sunday sermon, with the quote as the proposition, the passage to be examined--only it wasn't examined."

People at the Vatican quickly covered for Benedict. Some said that he must have been talking a Regensburg shorthand; he had taught at Regensburg for most of the nineteen-seventies, and it could be argued that, in such a familiar academic context, his disclaimer was implicit. A few joked that, being an academic, he had simply given in to a professionally irresistible temptation to show off with an obscure citation. But many of the Vatican correspondents who, like Politi, travelled to Regensburg with Benedict doubt that there was anything accidental or inadvertent in the citation. They had received copies of his speech at six in the morning of the day he gave it, and, at ten, they assembled in the university's makeshift pressroom and informed the Vatican spokesman, a Jesuit priest and Vatican Radio director named Federico Lombardi, that the passage was going to be incendiary. "The point is that at 10 A.M. somebody got the message that the text was explosive," Politi told me, adding that when the Pope had gone to ...