A warning for academics everywhere
The fracas over Benedict’s speech is an illustrative warning for academics everywhere. What the pope quoted was offensive to Muslims, true–but is context anything anymore? The citation provided merely a starting point for his reflections (as he said), it could have been taken out of his lecture without impacting his argument, the overall thrust of the lecture is conciliatory, and he distanced himself from the citation in the speech of the text itself.
On today’s Diane Rehm show, Seyyed Hossein Nasr argued that (not a direct quote) that the fact that the head of an organized, hierarchical religion would reject the revelation of another religion, essentially dismissing it as a religion, is troubling. I’m sure Prof. Nasr is aware that this selfsame rejection of the Jewish and Christian revelation is part and parcel of the Islamic revelation. If one religion cannot claim to have a unique grasp of the truth, in contrast to another, then where does that leave religious discussion? These claims are the stuff which religions are made of!
I’m all for a practical religious pluralism, but that requires people to not respond to words with violence. I’m not an exclusivist myself, but I will defend the right of Christians to say “Jesus is the only way” or Muslims to say “There is no god but Allah and Muhammed is his prophet.” That must go both directions, however!
And why is this a warning for academics? What you say will be skewed, chopped into soundbites, and interpreted against whatever background your interlocuters wish to import. The idea of charity in interpretation is foreign, it seems. A commentor on one blog remarked that this episode smacks of the political correctness which caused on economist lose his job over the word “niggardly” (which is not, in any context I can think of, a racial slur).
Shooting a nun over the quotation of an ancient medieval text is not a legitimate response. Period.
As a sidenote, too, I find the responses of Martin E. Marty and Karen Armstrong horrendously misguided. I still respect their scholarship, but I wonder what to make of the fact that such bright religious academics are missing the mark. So, two lessons: high profile religious academics ought to be aware of the ways in which their words can be misconstrued; secondly, even the brightest religious academics can have gaping blind spots when critiquing world events.