One of my original Middle East guys responds to Velshi:

You know I’m a philoislamist, right? But your correspondent, Mr. Velshi, with whom I generally agree, is mistaken if he thinks that Benedict was in any sense endorsing Manuel Palaeologus’s comment (indeed, he comments on its brusqueness and has earlier commented on the fact that the polemic is probably recorded by Manuel’s own hand and therefore quite biased). You really should read the whole speech, as it’s actually a really good piece on how, if the West is to rouse itself and survive, it needs not only more Jerusalem but a lot more Athens. Anyway, the quote is here, roughly in context: Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels,” he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. “God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably (“syn logo”) is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats…. To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death….” The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: Not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry. As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God’s nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? Read the whole thing: http://zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=94748 And, in so far as the narrow point of the radical contingency of the world in many Muslim philosophers’ works, he’s generally right. I haven’t dealt with the point in some years, but if I’m recalling right, the will of God is always and absolutely behind everything. To be simplistic, God’s not just aware of every sparrow that falls, he’s knocking it off the branch. In a degraded, demotic form, this is what’s behind “Islamic fatalism,” the idea that anything that happens is the “will of Allah” and therefore predestined, incapable of avoiding, and therefore vaguely pointless and slightly blasphemous to resist. (And I happen to disagree with those who think that this particular cultural incident, which does sometimes occur, is the occult key to the problems of political and economic stagnation in the Middle East.) Anyway, please reassure Mr. Velshi and anyone else concerned that Benedict was not endorsing that statement, but quoting one of the participants in a polemic (who was likely faced by an opponent making similar “you must admit the logical truth of Islam and therefore reject your deformed, polytheistic, idolatrous Christianity” statements), in order to illustrate a point relative to the place of violence and reason in religious conversion. With which, I suspect, no non-reactionary Muslim would want to disagree. لا اکراه فی الدین, there’s no compulsion in religion, right?