AMMAN, Jordan, Sept. 23 (UPI) -- Millions of Muslims around the world marked the last Friday before the start of the holy month of Ramadan with peaceful protests against Pope Benedict XVI's comments deemed insulting to their religion and its founder, Prophet Mohammad. And they continue to demand a formal apology from the head of the Catholic Church.
In a lecture at Regensburg University in Germany on Sept. 12, the Pope quoted a 14th Century emperor, Manuel II Paleologos, as describing some of Prophet Mohammad's teachings as "evil and inhuman." He referred to a quote by the Byzantine emperor in a conversation with an "educated" Persian, in which he said: "Show me just what Mohammad 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."
The Pope has since made three reconciliatory statements towards Muslims and has invited Muslim leaders Monday to his Castel Gandolfo summer home outside Rome to explain that his comments were misunderstood and to try to soothe relations with 1.5 billion followers of Islam.
However, analysts say, Muslims will continue to see the Pontiff's remarks as part of a 21st Century Western Christian "crusade" against them unless the leader of the Vatican makes a clear and formal apology.
Extremist Islamic groups and moderate Muslim scholars and institutions alike did not see an innocent mistake in Benedict's comments since he failed to distance himself from the Byzantine emperor's quote on Prophet Mohammad.
Moderate Muslim scholars say if the Pope had sought to criticize religious-motivated violence, he would not have referred to Islam alone. There were many events in history in which faith was spread by force and violence, including by his own church, they argue.
The timing of such comments from the leader of more than one billion Catholics was another indication that resorting to a quote made more than 600 years ago on Islam's prophet was loaded with a political agenda.
Arab commentators have linked the timing of Benedict's statements, just one day after the world marked five years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, to the American-led war on terror, which has largely targeted Arab and Muslim countries and organizations in the past five years.
They say the Pope must have expected such angry reactions from the Muslim world, which sees the war on terror as a war against Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Arab anti-Israeli Islamic resistance groups that the West has thrown in the terrorism basket and the escalating crisis with the Islamic Republic of Iran over its nuclear program.
Many Muslim leaders are convinced that the Pope's remarks, which came ten months after widespread anger over published Danish cartoons insulting Prophet Mohammad, can only be part of a wider campaign led by the U.S. administration against a region where there is strong resistance against "imposing neo-colonialist American hegemony" on the region.
They see that campaign or the war on terror as having started with President George Bush's "Freudian slip" on launching a "crusade" against (Islamic) terrorism and ending up with a fight against "Islamic fascism" to defend "Christian Western civilization."
The Catholic leader's remarks, Arab analysts say, appeared to be an attempt to endorse the Bush administration's Christian neo-conservatives' political agenda in the Middle East.
Many Christian minority leaders in the Arab world, some of them Catholic but mostly Roman Orthodox, have also condemned the Pope's comments and warned against what they see as the "Judaization" of Western Christianity, which they said would further the divide between the Muslim world and the West on the one hand, and the Christians in the region and the West on the other.
Hanna Atalla, a leading Christian Orthodox cleric in the West Bank -- where some churches were torched in the aftermath of the Pontiff's remarks but whom some church leaders doubted were carried out by Muslims -- saw the Pope's comments as an insult to the Arab Muslims and Christians alike.
Jordanian Senator Michel Hamarneh, a Christian, wrote in the independent al-Ghad daily that Arab Christians did not want to see the Pontiff using his influence to become part of the "political Western and Israeli battles...and part of the hostile, racist and hateful programs against Arabs and Muslims."
He commented the Vatican should understand the Christians in the Arab world felt just as disappointed, angry and frustrated as their "Muslim brothers" and called on the Pope to offer an apology and admit he made a mistake that harms inter-religious dialogue and co-existence that his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, had worked to consolidate.
Independent analysts say the repercussions of Pope Benedict's remarks will continue to resonate in the region and protests may escalate during Ramadan, Islam's holiest month during which the Koran was revealed to Prophet Mohammad more than 1,400 years ago, and when Muslims fast from dawn until dusk for four weeks.
Only a formal apology for implicitly linking Islam to violence and terrorism will the Pope be regarded by Muslims as a respected religious leader independent of the Bush administration's war on terror.
