A sitting pope repeated the Orientalist equation of Islam with irrational violence

Evidence

In a 2006 speech titled “Faith, Reason, and the University,” Pope Benedict XVI equated Catholicism with reason and Islam with violence and a lack of reason. Paraphrasing a fourteenth-century Byzantine emperor, he argued that when a religion (like Islam) is spread through violence, it goes against reason and also against nature, for “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” In making this argument, the Pope joined a long line of Orientalists who have argued that reason, rationality, and science are alien to the world of Islam. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 332

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to Said’s Orientalism and the broader thesis of this book about how empire deploys the reason/barbarism binary.
• SEED: Essay angle: how the ‘Islam lacks reason’ trope has a continuous lineage from medieval polemic to a 21st-century pope’s speech.

Related

• A pope resurrected the Orientalist equation of Islam with irrationality as recently as 2006 (similarity 0.87)
• The Pope endorsed a myth of Islam’s inherent violence. (similarity 0.82)
• Pope Benedict’s attack on Islamic irrationality ignored Christianity’s own persecution of reason (similarity 0.79)
• Lewis argued Islam inherently tends toward fundamentalist violence. (similarity 0.79)