Madam, - Vincent Browne (Opinion September 20th) alleges that "in essence" Pope Benedict said that "Europe is essentially Christian" and that "Islam excludes reason".
According to The Irish Times of the previous day, the Pope said something quite different: that the convergence of biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry "created Europe and. . .remains the foundation [ my italics] of what can rightly be called Europe"; but that this convergence had become "dehellenised" through the writings of philosophers such as Kant and von Harnack. Since those men wrote in the 18th and 19th centuries, Mr Browne's final salvo, grounded on much later events - "Where was reason during the first World War. . .Where was reason during the Holocaust?" - is pointless. He must know well that "dehellenised" in this context means that the impact of Greek reasoning had already waned.
As regards Islam, the Pope cited another opinion that "for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality." Mr Browne must also know quite well that "transcend" means to excel or surpass and that it does not mean "exclude", just as he knows that "foundation" is not "essence".
In his style of argument, Mr Browne quotes statements and then misinterprets them, perhaps in order to create a dragon which he can then slay in triumph. This would be good entertainment in the rant of teenage debate but it is not responsible journalism where fanatics are at large. - Is mise,
EOGHAN Ó SÚILLEABHÁIN, Ascal Achadh Feá, Áth Cliath 15.
Madam, - While Rev Joseph O'Leary (September 23rd) is doubtless correct in drawing our attention to the proper adherence, in the examples he quotes, to the laws of war by early Islamic armies, the fact is that not all armies of the Muslim world were so compassionate. Many engaged in atrocious acts fully comparable to those of medieval and early modern Christians. To name just some, we could point to the horrible death of Antonio Brigandino in Cyprus in 1575 at the hands of the Ottomans, the iconoclastic depredations of the armies of Mahmud of Ghazni in India in the 11th century, the destructive conquests of Tamerlane and, especially, the dreadful sacking of the renowned Buddhist University of Nalinda in Northern India in 1193 by the Turkic Muslim general Bahkhtiar Khilji, an act which greatly accelerated the demise of Buddhist learning in India.
The notion that the advance of Islam was essentially different from that of Christianity is not sustainable. The Advance of Islam over most, if by no means all, areas of western and southern Asia was enabled by military conquest in a way sadly similar to that of Christendom in America and Africa.
As to the notion the Islam is "a religion of peace", such a statement is unprovable in any real sense. Any religion - Christianity is the obvious example - is more than its holy scripture. It is an evolving, multi-faceted complex of doctrine, tradition, history, accommodation with the secular world and the beliefs of its adherents. Just as Catholicism is inextricably made up of - to take some aspects of its history - Jesus, St Francis of Assisi, the Inquisition and the Borgias - Islam cannot prove its pacific nature by appealing to the Koran alone. It is doubtful, perhaps impossible, for any secular observer to verify, using any universally applicable criteria, the claim that the "real Christianity" is the religion of, say, the Gospel of St Luke, Pope John Paul II and St Bernadette, as opposed to that of Torquemada, the conquistadors or the Salem Witch Trials.
Such judgments belong to the history of the far future, if even they become amenable to such judgement at all. The same surely applies to the Islamic religion as well. - Yours, etc,
GERARD DOCKERY, Westfield Park, Bray, Co Wicklow.