Plaintiffs to the Pontiff

People shouldn’t confuse the Muslim’s reaction to the Pope’s speech with the violent reactions against the Danish Cartoons.

News websites are rife with dramatic-sounding headlines on how angry the Muslim world is with the speech (Pdf) the Pope made in Bavaria. Muslim clerics the world over have begun demanding apologies and the noise is growing.
But is the Muslim world’s reaction comparable to the irrational, large-scale protests that shook the world in the infamous Danish Cartoon incident? (Here’s my take on that event)

The short answer is: not yet.

You see, we have to divide the Muslim world’s reaction into two categories: The first category, your regular hot blooded Mohammed, gets insulted whenever you say anything that can be perceived as an insult to Islam or Muslims. The second category, the one which is vocal right now, is made up of respectable Islamic scholars who perceive an ignorance of papal dimensions on display, and want the situation fixed.

In their opinion, it is one thing to say that many Muslims are taking a course in their lives that is not based on reason (which I would have agreed with), but it is a completely different matter to suggest that Islam itself is at fault because it’s not based on reason, all the while implying that Christianity is better because it is.
As Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a respectable Lebanese Shiite cleric puts it: “We call on the pope to carry out a scientific and fastidious reading of Islam. We do not want him to succumb to the propaganda of the enemy”

The first category is not yet involved in the crisis. A quick skim of today’s Arab dailies reveals that the topic is largely absent from the headlines (not so in pan-Arab TV stations like Al-jazeera and Al-arabiya though). But unless the pope personally clarifies his position, today’s Fridays prayer sermons might change the situation.

If you ask me, a secular Muslim, I’d be surprised why the Pope, a representative of very unreasonable policies on contraception and divorce, used the angle of reason as his touchstone argument. But I guess even Popes make mistakes.