Regensburg lecture/Pope Benedict XVI's lecture

==Pope Benedict XVI's lecture==
The lecture on faith and reason, with references ranging from ancient Jewish and Greek thinking to Protestant theology and modern secularity, focused mainly on Christianity and what Pope Benedict called the tendency to "exclude the question of God" from reason. Islam features in a part of the lecture: the Pope quoted a strong criticism of Islam, which he described as being of a "startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded".
The author of this criticism was the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (or Paleologus) in a 1391 dialogue with an "educated Persian" (who remained unnamed in the Pope's lecture), as well as observations on this argument made by Theodore Khoury, the scholar whose edition of the dialog in question the pontiff was referencing. Pope Benedict used Manuel II's argument in order to draw a distinction between an allegedly Christian view, as expressed by Manuel II, that "not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature", and an allegedly Islamic view, as explained by Khoury, that God transcends concepts such as rationality, and his will, as Ibn Hazm stated, is not constrained by any principle, including rationality.
In part of his explication of this distinction, Pope Benedict referred to a specific aspect of Islam that Manuel II considered irrational, namely the practice of forced conversion. Specifically, the Pope (making clear that they were the Emperor's words, not his own) quoted Manuel II Palaiologos as saying: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only bad and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."
The pontiff was comparing apparently contradictory passages from the Qur'an, one being that "There is no compulsion in religion", the other being that it is acceptable to "spread the faith through violence". The pontiff argued the latter teaching to be unreasonable and advocated that religious conversion should take place through the use of reason. His larger point here was that, generally speaking, in Christianity, God is understood to act in accordance with reason, while in Islam, God's absolute transcendence means that "God is not bound even by his own word", and can act in ways contrary to reason, including self-contradiction. At the end of his lecture, the Pope said, "It is to the great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures."
===Key paragraphs===
Quoted below are the three paragraphs (of sixteen total) which discuss Islam in Pope Benedict's lecture:
===Translation differences===
The original German text of the Pope's lecture as published at the Vatican website differs slightly in several respects from the English translation, despite both versions being official (though "provisional") Vatican versions. It is unknown whether this had an impact on perceptions of the speech.
As for the emperor's quote employed by the Pope, the translation "evil and inhuman" is doubtful. What the Pope said in German, according to the audio recording of his address and the subsequent German text, was "nur Schlechtes und Inhumanes finden"."Lecture of the Holy Father - Faith, Reason and the University Memories and Reflections", Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 12 September 2006 The German adjective schlecht means "bad"; the English word evil would usually correspond to böse. The German adjective inhuman normally translates as inhumane which in English is subtly different from inhuman. As for meaning, therefore, "find only things which are bad and inhumane" seems to be a more accurate English translation of the Pope's utterance. (As a grammatical advisory, the use of initial capital letters indicates the two words are nouns. In this case they are adjectives being used as nouns, hence the introduction of the word "things" into the English translation.)
Another difference between the German original and the Vatican's English translation is the place where the word "jihad" has been omitted from the English: the original statement "The emperor touches on the theme of jihad, holy war" (kommt der Kaiser auf das Thema des Djihad, des heiligen Krieges zu sprechen) became in the English rendition "The emperor touches on the theme of the [sic] holy war." (In this context, the use of the word "the" before "holy war" is a grammatical mistake.)
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