Through Force or Faith? — Page vii
FOREWORD to the Present Edition Religious misunderstanding bears the unfortunate responsibility of causing much of man’s misery and malign throughout history. This underscores the great burden that weighs upon religious leadership to uphold the virtues of integrity and scholarship when making public statements about other faiths. Failure to do so inevitably leads to ignorance and mischief, not to mention the immense embarrassment once the attempted slander backfires and exposes the perpetrator’s incompetence, irresponsibility, and/ or bigotry. On September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany. During that lecture, he made an innuendo that Islam was spread by the sword, referencing a medieval polemic authored by the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos (1350–1425 CE). The Pope also insinuated that the verse in the Quran forbidding compulsion in matters of faith (2:257) applied when the Holy Prophet s as was in a state of weakness, but this standard was changed once he attained