VATICAN: Pope Benedict will meet Muslim ambassadors to the Vatican and Italian Islamic leaders on Monday to try to calm anger over his use of a medieval text which says their religion was spread by violence.
"The purpose of this meeting is to relaunch dialogue with the Islamic world," said a senior Vatican official yesterday after invitations were sent for the meeting on Monday at the Pope's summer palace in Castelgandolfo, outside Rome.
As thousands of Muslims demonstrated after Friday prayers at mosques around the world, Islamic diplomats accredited to the Holy See hoped the meeting would help restore trust between the Roman Catholic Church and Muslims offended by the Pope's speech.
"We welcome it and are definitely going to participate," said Iran's deputy ambassador to the Holy See, Ahmad Faihma.
"This is a positive signal from the Vatican. I know that this will improve relations with the Islamic world," he said.
In Cairo, a banner strung between two mosque pillars read: "Wake Up Muslims! It's a conspiracy between the Pope and Bush!"
"It looks as if the Vatican is providing the religious justification for the wars waged in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Kamal Habib, a scholar who helped organise the Cairo protest.
About 300 Muslims waved anti-Pope banners at a peaceful rally in Malaysia and supporters of the opposition Islamic party PAS demanded the Pope's resignation.
The leader representing more than one billion Catholics has expressed regret three times in the past week for the reaction to a speech in which he quoted 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who spoke of the Prophet Muhammad's "command to spread by the sword the faith he preached".
But he has stopped short of the unequivocal apology wanted by Muslims for the speech, delivered at a university in his native Germany.
"This meeting will be very important, especially in these days, to try to stop every action that is not good," said Fathi Abuabed at the Arab League's Vatican mission.
Turkey's religious affairs director, Ali Bardakoglu, urged the Pope not to use the meeting just to repeat that he was misunderstood.
Speaking to CNN Turkey, Mr Bardakoglu said he would consider meeting the Pope if his trip to Turkey in November goes ahead.
Mehmet Ali Agca, who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1981, warned Benedict his life would be at risk if he travelled to Turkey. In Afghanistan, where 10 people died in February in protests against cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in European papers, scholars called the Pope's speech "psychological warfare".
"He ignorantly hurt the hearts of one and a half billion Muslims," Enayatullah Baleegh, senior cleric at Kabul's main Blue Mosque, said at Friday prayers. Some members of the congregation chanted: "Death to the Pope!" The Pope said at his audience on Wednesday his intention had been to "explain that religion and violence do not go together, but religion and reason do".
Western politicians, including US president George Bush, and Christian church leaders have tried to calm the crisis by reassuring Muslims that the Pope was sincere when he expressed regret at the offence caused.
But many Islamic organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt want the Pope to apologise and explain in detail what his views on Islam are.
"I hope we'll be able to put an end to the misunderstanding between the Vatican and Islamic and Arab nations," Iraq's Vatican envoy Albert Edward Ishmail Yelda, said.
Sympathetic observers say the Pope was clumsy to use such an inflammatory quote and behaved more like the theology professor he used to be than a church leader whose every word in public is reported by the world's media.
One of the few signs that the crisis may have peaked came from Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who told US television this week that since the Pope had expressed his regrets "there is no problem". - (Additional reporting by bureaux in Cairo, Kabul, Kuala Lumpur and Ankara).