Europe's identity

In one of them, he has asked the Muslims to calm down and adopt a more reasoned approach to the Pope's unfortunate use of an offensive quotation: "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" -- from an obscure medieval text.

Prof Ramadan thinks that verbal excesses, and physical violence against civilians in predominantly Muslim countries, usually end up being counter productive and lend credibility to the accusations themselves. Instead, he feels, the Muslims should pay more attention to the Pope's attempts to define Europe's identity as exclusively Christian, because it is an issue with far-reaching consequences, particularly for the European Muslims and for Turkey's entry to the EU.

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Europe, at present, has a Muslim population of approximately ten million people and, according to reliable sources, it is likely to grow at a steady rate in future. In view of this phenomenon, i.e. the growing Muslim population in Europe, it is imperative to address this issue urgently and in as dispassionate a manner as possible.

Pope Benedict seems to think that there is a fundamental difference between Christianity and Islam. According to him, God and reason (Logos) go together in Christianity, while in Islam, God is totally transcendent -- God's will is not bound by rationality.

In other words, Christianity represents rationality and is, therefore, non-violent, while Islam is not rational and, therefore, tends to be violent. The Pope also thinks that Europe's identity is defined by Christian faith and Greek rationalism. Therefore, the inevitable conclusion that one is forced to draw from this line of argument is that the Muslims can never fully reconcile themselves with the European identity.

Leaving aside the thorny issue of trying to measure how much violence was exercised by the followers of which religion to spread their faith, the crucial questions in the context of the Pope's definition of the European identity are: Have faith and reason always walked hand in hand in Christianity? Is Islamic thought completely foreign to European culture and identity? Has Islamic thought not contributed anything to the European rationalism?

According to historical records, St Thomas Aquinas (1227-1274) was the first Christian theologian who studied Arabian-Aristotelian philosophy at the University of Paris, and starting from Aristotelian premises tried to reconcile faith with scientific rationalism. Yet, in spite of St Thomas's respect for reason, he felt that real truth was still obtainable through faith.

In the context of this letter it is relevant to mention here that this trend of thought was against the basic tenets of Latin Averroists like John of Jandun, Taddeo of Parma and Angelo of Arezzo (Christian disciples of Averroes or Ibn Rushd, the Muslim European rationalist philosopher, who was born in 1126 and died in 1198), who had developed the theory that "reason and philosophy are superior to faith, and knowledge founded on faith."

It is a pity that, in his religious zeal to define an exclusively Greco-Christian character of Europe's identity, a scholar of the stature of Pope Benedict should try to ignore not only the contribution made by the Muslims in transmitting Greek rationalism to Europe but also original contributions made to European rationalistic thought by the great European Muslim philosophers of the 10th to the 14th centuries, al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, al-Ghazali, Ash Shatabi, and Ibn Khaldun, whose works are available in all European university libraries.

The writer is a columnist of The Daily Star.