An illuminating piece on Islam in Germany and World Youth Day in Cologne, from Sandro Magister in Chiesa (thanks to Paolo):
ROMA, August 18, 2005 – The penultimate event of Benedict XVI's visit to Cologne, before the vigil and Mass with the young people of World Youth Day XX, will be a Saturday, August 20 meeting with the "representatives of some of the Muslim communities."The meeting will take place at the residence of the city's archbishop. The Muslims asked the pope to visit a mosque, but Benedict XVI declined the invitation.
His prudence is understandable. Cologne and Munich – where Joseph Ratzinger was archbishop from 1977 to 1981 – are the cities in which the Muslim Brotherhood, which has for decades been the main ideological and organizational source of radical Islam in the world, has gained control of most of the mosques and of active Islam in Germany and in Europe.
Mahdy Akef, an Egyptian now residing in Cairo who is the present murshid, or supreme guide, of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide, is an explicit supporter of the suicide terrorists in Iraq. From 1984 until 1987, he directed the most dynamic Muslim center of Germany, in Munich, with its great mosque in the northern part of the city.
Munich was the birthplace of the Islamische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland, IGD, one of the largest Islamic organizations in Germany. The IGD is under the full control of the Muslim Brotherhood and has sixty mosques spread throughout the country.
For a few years, its organizational headquarters has been located in Cologne. The president of this body is Ibrahim Al Zayat, a 39-year-old Egyptian, the charismatic leader of a network of youth and student organizations that are linked to the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, WAMY, the largest Islamic youth organization in the world. WAMY is financed by Saudi Arabia, bears a strong, rigorist Wahhabi imprint, and produces vehemently anti-Jewish and anti-Christian publications.
Curiously, the commitment to young people on the part of the Roman papacy, which is celebrating one of its key moments in Cologne during these days, has in that same city a parallel in one of the leading centers in Europe for promoting radical activism among young Muslims.
Read it all.
The Islamic world needs an Enlightenment, similar to what happened in the Western world in the 18th Century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment
It has already had a Reformation (a return to the original tenets of the faith); it is known as Wahhabism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wahhabism
The Enlightenment only happened because of journalists, writers and scholars who created a mass movement based on powerful ideas. Although, many of the spokespersons of Enlightenment ideas were imprisoned or killed, the ideas made it to the ordinary people, created a mass movement and changed the world. This situation will never happen in Islam because Islamic families and societies are the ultimate fear societies. All attempts to question Islam are instantly squashed. This situation has been true throughout Islamic history. The one attempt to bring an enlightened point of view to Islam was under the Mutazalites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%27tazili
This theological strain was wiped out ... literally (i.e. very few surviving books from this period).
Nothing will change in Islamic societies as long as education and the dissemination of knowledge is controlled by the religious clerical elite.
The Enlightenment in Europe involved separating Church and State and that meant that the clergy no longer controlled education nor the arms of state control.
For a concrete example of this, ponder this fact: the last person to executed for blasphemy in Scotland was Thomas Aikenhead on January 8, 1697. As Arthur Herman describes the situation in Scotland at that time:
p. 9, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, by Arthur Herman
The point is the Scotland Herman describes was swept away by the Scottish Enlightenment. I do not think the same thing is possible in Islam for the factors that I mention above.
Heh! Came across a what appeared to be a semi-permanent display villifing Israel in front of the great Cologne Cathedral on my first visit last September. Complete with the requisite literature table and several obscene 8 x 10s, there were also three or four partisans holding posters with the usual banal slogans. Funny thing was, these guys looked like disinterested denizens of the local halfway-house -- unshaven, unkempt, and quite smelly. It was as though one of the organisers had dug them out of a rubbish bin, given them a few euros, and told them to stand very still for a few hours. With the Muslim Brotherhood based in Cologne, it suddenly makes perfect sense.
The meeting will take place at the residence of the city's archbishop. The Muslims asked the pope to visit a mosque, but Benedict XVI declined the invitation.
Visit a mosque like a good little dhimmi so the Muslims can get a prime photo-op? Glad Il Papa turned them down.
Does the World Youth Day Logo, in the link above have a crescent moon, or is it just my imagination running away with me.
Anyway, the Pope's current program of ignoring rather than embracing Islam is at least a good start.
Readers in the USA may not be aware of this but Brother Roger who founded the ecumenical Taizé community in France was murdered during a service in front of a congregation of 2500 people. He was repeatedly stabbed by a woman from Romania who was described as 'deranged'.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4162590.stm
Brother Roger, may he Rest in Peace, was an exceptional man. The music of Taizé lives on in Churches throughout the world.
DennisW,
But from this story from AP, the Pope does want to visit the Synagogue.
The subtlety of the diplomatic message regarding Islam in his quote is not lost.
Indeed. However closer they are to his heart, their knives are still closer.
Sheik Geoff
Mentat:
There is no question of having a kind of Reformation or Enlightenment that occurred in Europe. Islam founded on the koran is eternal, the word of allah. It is perfect - so how can there be any further improvement?
So where does this leave us?
Mentat,
Islam needs enlightenment? Who says so?
Perhaps wikipedia, certainly not Islam!
The Enlightenment was a unique historical phenomenon - a result of distinctive set of conditions arising within an exceptional civilization. It happened TO and IN the West very much like apples happen to and on an apple tree. It was the nature of the West to produce Thomas Aquinas, Copernicus, Reformation, Enlightenment, democracy, religious and civilizational tolerance and ideas of personal liberty and human dignity. And, of course, a number of less admirable things as well as the will to combat them.
But Enlightenment can not be provoked within any other civilization any more than one can provoke a cactus to bear watermelons.
To believe so betrays an uncritical acceptance of a dogma that civilizations follow similar graphs of growth and given enough time they will all eventually travel through stages similar to West’s reformations, enlightenments and so on.
One of the corollaries of such view is an often repeated assertion that Islam’s backwardness is due to its late, in relation to Christianity, appearance on the stage of history and that it simply needs another 600 years to “catch on” and arrive at the level of our development.
Despite the 1300 years of evidence it somehow never occurs to these people that the disparity between Islam and the West must be attributed to the irreconcible difference in their respective essence. It is precisely the soul, meaning and spirit of any civilization that forms their unique pattern of development, growth, triumph, stagnation and decay. That is why the West found Enlightenment while Islam found and kept female genital mutilation.
The fact is that different civilization and cultures differ in their essence infinitely more than any two humans may differ “biologically”. The offspring of Eskimo and Hottentots will on average be as healthy and robust as the offspring of two Greeks, or Scots, whereas an interaction of islam with practically every other culture is violent and results in either total eradication, or submission and gradual atrophy of the other. Islam was born a predator.
But I think it would be wrong to say that Islam has not changed since the time of Mohammed as we are now witnessing Islam’s entering a new stage of its development.
After having lost its martial potency Islam has now moved beyond the stage of a violent predator into the stage of peaceful parasite.
Its survival is finally assured due to the West’s endless generosity, both through lavish material support to Islamic countries and through receiving millions of Moslems in its heart territory, and especially through suicidal acceptance, tolerance and respect of Islam’s fundamentally hostile to the West ideology.
So back to your assertion; why do you think that in such an auspicious historical setting Islam should suddenly decide that it absolutely “needs Enlightenement”?
It could theoretically develop such a "need", but only if the West decides to let it swim, or sink instead of propping it up.
I think you would be more justified claiming that Islam’s entering the stage of peaceful parasitism on the West may be viewed as its own version of Enlightenment.