From the Beeb: Pope’s speech stirs Muslim anger.

In his speech at Regensburg University, the German-born pontiff explored the historical and philosophical differences between Islam and Christianity and the relationship between violence and faith.

Stressing that they were not his own words, he quoted Emperor Manual II Paleologos of Byzantine, the Orthodox Christian empire which had its capital in what is now the Turkish city of Istanbul.

The emperors words were, he said: “Show me just what Muhammad 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.”

Benedict said “I quote” twice to stress the words were not his and added that violence was “incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul”.

The Pope is due to visit Turkey in November and the Turkish response was swift and strong, the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford reports from Istanbul.

Religious leader Ali Badda Kolu said the Pope’s comments represented what he called an “abhorrent, hostile and prejudiced point of view”.

The riot watch begins.

Turkey’s top religious official asked for an apology for the “hostile” words.

In Indian-administered Kashmir, police seized copies of newspapers which reported the Pope’s comments to prevent any tension.

This is similar to how the police seized newspapers in Tel Aviv in July when the Pope drew an equivalence between the terrorist violence of Hezbollah and Israel’s acts of self-defense. Oh … they didn’t seize newspapers in Tel Aviv? Well, in any case, it’s nice to see the German Pope beginning to address, for his flock, the roots of a radical theology that seeks to justify mass murder in the twenty-first century.

…

Addendum 1:25 pm: Via Hot Air (where Allahpundit describes Benedict as now “marked for death”), there are links to additional pieces on the story. From the AFP:

But in reiterating his concerns about a modern world “deaf” to God, he warned that other religious cultures saw the West’s exclusion of God “as an attack on their most profound convictions”.

“A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures,” he said.

From Time:

His discourse Tuesday sought to delineate what he sees as a fundamental difference between Christianity’s view that God is intrinsically linked to reason (the Greek concept of logos) and Islam´s view that “God is absolutely transcendent.” Benedict said that Islam teaches that God’s “will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” The risk he sees implicit in this concept of the divine is that the irrationality of violence can potentially be justified if someone believes it is God’s will. “As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?”

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