Muslim Leaders Demand Apology for Pope's 'medieval' Remarks

Pope Benedict XVI was last night facing angry demands from Muslims that he apologise for a speech in which he appeared to condemn the concept of jihad as "unreasonable" and quoted a medieval ruler who said Muhammad's innovations were "evil and inhuman".

Protests swept across the Islamic world and the furore threatened a scheduled visit by the Pope to Turkey.

The Vatican spokesman, Federico Lombardi, told Vatican Radio: "It was certainly not the intention of the Holy Father to undertake a comprehensive study of the jihad and of Muslim ideas on the subject, still less to offend the sensibilities of Muslim faithful."

Father Miguel Ayuso Guixot, the head of the Vatican's Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies, told the Guardian he feared the Pope's words had been "misinterpreted". He added: "The Pope has worked tirelessly for inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue and for tolerance."

In Turkey, however, where the Pope is due to visit in November, the deputy leader of the ruling party said Benedict had "a dark mentality that comes from the darkness of the middle ages". Salih Kapusuz added: "He is going down in history in the same category as leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini."

Representatives of the two million Turks in Germany, where the comments were made, also expressed deep annoyance. The head of the Turkish community, Kenan Kolat, said they were "very dangerous" and liable to misunderstanding.

In Beirut, Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, one of the world's top Shia Muslim clerics, said: "We demand that [the Pope] apologises personally, and not through [Vatican] sources, to all Muslims for such a wrong interpretation." An influential Iranian cleric branded his remarks "absurd". Ahmad Khatami told worshippers at Tehran University: "The Pope has insulted Islam." The lower house of Pakistan's parliament unanimously passed a resolution condemning the comments. It said the pontiff should "retract his remarks in the interest of harmony among different religions".

By last night the protests appeared to have been confined to words, and had not spilled over into the kind of street violence seen in February during the outcry over the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad. But Diaa Rashwan, a Cairo-based analyst of Islamic militancy, warned that the pontiff's comments were "more dangerous than the cartoons because they come from the most important Christian authority in the world. The cartoons just came from an artist."

The row broke out over a lecture given by the Pope on Tuesday at his old university at Regensburg. His central theme was one on which he has touched repeatedly - the need to reconcile faith and reason. He quoted from a little-known medieval text recording debates between a Byzantine emperor and an educated Persian. The Pope recalled that the emperor had told his adversary: "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."