Can Benedict XVI bring Peace and Concord?

Following the recent expression of Muslim anger and hatred against Benedict XVI, it is high time for Muslims to check whether by doing so and by speaking and acting so inconsiderately and so irresponsibly they alienated a possible ally.

What was the real error in the Muslim reactions?

Speaking so vehemently, Muslims allover the world showed that they do not understand nuance and intellectual subtlety; the Roman Pope had referred to a negative evaluation of Islam by an Eastern Roman Emperor, enemy of the Pontiff’s predecessors as the warden par excellence of the Orthodox Christianity before 600 years.

What a reasonable Muslim reaction should be?

Yet, Muslims allover the world missed an excellent opportunity to oppose the statement and the citation, by explaining the real meaning of the Jihad, especially the Grand Jihad, that consists in the struggle for self improvement and self discipline, self purification, and self refinement in every aspect (educational, intellectual, mental, psychological, spiritual, physical).

There is a total ignorance and a profound misunderstanding in the West, as regards the main essence of the Jihad concept, and the Muslims would prove their identity by just explaining that Grand Jihad was carried out by pro-eminent Christian spiritual leaders, erudite intellectuals, and holy men such as St Francis of Assis and Ignacio de Loyola.

In brief, Jihad is divided into two levels,
a) the Grand Jihad that is to be carried out by every Muslim separately, as it concerns his/her self improvement (and this endeavour is very close to the famous emblem by Marcus Aurelius ‘Endon skapte’ – ‘dig within’), and
b) the Minor Jihad that is the Fight for Faith’s purpose – but has to be carried out by people who underwent through the terrible procedure of Great Jihad, and raised themselves into the level of righteous spiritual beings.

Instead of this approach that would let many understand in the West that neither Ossama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahri nor Qaradawi and Nasrallah represent a real, authentic and pertinent (but a rather degenerated and disintegrated) Islam, Muslims started screaming in a paranoiac way that contributed to further tarnishing of Islam among the West and among all the reasonable people of all cultural backgrounds.

Can there be common ground between Catholic Christianity and Islam?

Muslims have fallen victims of the colonial schemes; by highly politicizing issues like Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kashmir, and Iran, ignorant Muslim sheikhs play perfectly well into the pre-planned and pre-machinated role Western Colonial empires have invented for them.

Muslims are managed and maneuvered without their choosing, when strengths are pulled by those in the West who have a world vision totally different than theirs (let alone the original and authentic Islamic Weltanschauung)!

Yet, when one considers issues relevant to human life values, justice, right, honesty, humility, piety, morality, ethics, and behavioural social systems, when one assesses comparatively the Christian and the Islamic theological approaches to our modern technological world and the consumer societies (well renowned for the prevailing materialist way of living), when one takes into account Catholic Church attitudes and Islamic hierarchy positions towards undeserved societal and ideological developments the embattled humanity had to face over the past 60 years, one realizes that there is a vast common ground for the two systems.

Whose should be the initiative?

The Catholic Church must understand that the initiative should come from their part; the reason is simple: Catholic Christianity exists as continuity of a theological system that was able through the ages to adapt to various situations, to face challenges, and to irrevocably remain open to changes. The modern Islamic world has long sunk into ideological, theological, philosophical, intellectual and academic inertia and apathy.

The Christian civilization has been terminated with the emergence of the modern Western World, but Christian intellectual life – as a composite phenomenon comprising various subsystems and at times opposite considerations (the Franciscans and the Dominicans differed as much as Thomas Aquinas and Heidegger diverged to say the least) – remained alive. Contrarily, the Islamic civilization eroded, and at the same time Islamic intellectual life ceased to exist.

Originating from a Hanbali perception (that had been very obscurantist and backward), Ibn Taimiya’s poor theological system (that was plagued with Islamic reductionism and severe isolationism laced with irrational traditionalism and politico-social demagoguery) prevailed through the centuries, driving all the other Islamic philosophical systems out. It faced opposition but gradually prevailed among the lowest social levels, and then got momentum among the top of the Ottoman ulemas and imams. Ibn Taimiya’s pathetic followers targeted Knowledge, Research, Science (Astronomy in particular) and by doing so they killed the "Interest for the Other" which the Epitome of Lights, Progress, and Tolerance.

Around 1600, all the important intellectuals of the Ottoman Empire rejected this already large group that was able to dictate approaches and ideas to the Sultan himself. Soon after, Research was abandoned and the Ottoman Empire started losing pace with the European countries. If one adds the advanced Barbarism of Abdel Wahhab that expanded on Ibn Taimiya’s basis, one gets the picture of a lethargic society plunged into oblivion that Napoleon’s soldiers noticed around them in 1798 Egypt.

Not a single Muslim philosopher and intellectual was able to comprehensively understand this reality, let alone depart from it. Islam today is not Islam; it is Islam as perceived by Hanbal, interpreted by Ibn Taimiya, re-assessed by Abdel Wahhab. It is just an erroneous theological system (already extremely reductionist by its nature and geared against any possible interaction with the outside world – Ibn Taimiya lived at the last period of the Crusades) that imposes mental and intellectual sterility among the people in order to remain predominant. Not a single erudite scholar, major philosopher and renowned intellectual of the ages of the Islamic Civilization would accept the modern sheikhs and imams as possibly Muslims. Islam has therefore disappeared and we cannot expect intellectual fecundity from the part of its supposed spiritual and/or intellectual representatives.

How to bring the common ground to the surface of the consciousness?

Focusing on moral issues would let these ignorant sheikhs understand that not all the people in the West are homosexuals and alcoholics.

Fair judgment of politically unhappy events would be essential, because these sheikhs’ mindset is extremely de-spiritualized and totally politicized. It does not have to be a position against Israel; it could be a proper condemnation of the disreputable deeds of the Colonial powers, namely France and England.

More anti-colonial positions the Catholic Church takes, more details about the Colonial powers wrongdoings the Catholic Church brings to surface, more impressive a partner for these ignorant sheikhs it will become.

It would be essential for Catholic Historians to expand in their moral evaluations of the Academic and Intellectual Colonialism; a critical stand against the Orientalism, as machinated and diffused by mainly Freemasonic scholars would truly offer the Catholic intellectual elite a credibility that would later have positive results in averting the Cultural Clash of Civilizations.

In our age of Brokerage and Securities criteria, it would be an unexpected light fro the eyes of (extremist as misled) Muslims to the Roman Pontiff reaffirming what was said before 2000 years by someone Muslims venerate only too profoundly: "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's".

When Benedict XVI travels to Turkey, it will be essential for all Muslims to hear that their pre-Islamic and Islamic past consists in pages of Glory and Civilization, that Copernicus and Galileo were indebted to Ulugh Beg, the famous Samarqand astronomer whose texts were translated for the later use of the top European researchers, and that Catholic Christianity offers a hand for cultural, national, and academic emancipation from the aberrational diktats of Freemasonic Orientalism that led peoples from Morocco to Indonesia and from Dagestan to Somalia to undeservedly believe that their past was useless, meaningless and inferior.

An unbiased Orientalism, as common search for the Historical and the Spiritual truth, would create a vast field of cooperation among peoples of the East and the West, who would happily reject the despair and the death culture to enjoy common respect and knowledge. Far from the Freemasonic machinations of division between East and West, people can still survive in unity, peace and concord.

Professor Cardinal Ratzinger, by choosing the papal name of Benedictus, seems to know this truth only too well.