Through Force or Faith? — Page 77
Chapter 1 Analysis of the Papal Lecture by Mohammad Ilyas Majoka On September 12, 2006, the spiritual leader of the Catholic Christians, Pope Benedict XVI, gave a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany. Its subject was the relationship between faith and reason. In the course of the lecture, the Pope read out some excerpts from a long dialogue in which baseless allegations have been made on Islamic teachings. The aforementioned dia- logue took place between the Byzantine Emperor, Manuel II Palaeologus, and a Persian scholar, perhaps in A. D. 1391. While reading some of the sections of the excerpts, the Pope made com- ments in his own words on some occasions, from which an erro- neous impression emerges about Islamic teachings. The passages of the speech in which Islamic teachings are tar- geted for objections are reproduced here. I …Here I would like to discuss only one point—itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole—which, in the context of the issue of ‘faith and reason’, I found