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Daily Star journalist Nick Kimbrell reported on Stefan Wild’s lecture at the German Orient Institute in Beirut last Tuesday:

In September 2006, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a speech at Regensburg University which invoked a centuries-old dialogue between the beleaguered Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an unidentified Persian scholar. The pope quoted the emperor as saying, “Show me just what [the Prophet] Mohammad 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.”

Wild surveyed several key points of clarification in the letter penned by the 38 Muslim scholars. He called the letter “exceptionally encouraging … [an] appeal to dialogue much more than a rebuff.” The correspondence, he noted, began by supporting Benedict’s opposition to “the dominance of positivism and materialism in modern life.”

The several ramifications of Benedict’s decision to quote a Byzantine emperor in a lecture about the contemporary role of reason in Catholic faith was the subject of professor Stefan Wild’s Lecture at Beirut’s German Orient Institute on Tuesday night.

He read at length from the pontiff’s address, the letter, and a longer and more ambitious letter of October 2007 that 138 Muslim scholars addressed to the pope and other Christian leaders. He also alluded to an August conference at the Yale Divinity School, which called the interfaith conversation following the Regensburg lecture “a quantum leap in Muslim-Christian relations.”

Although the Byzantine quotation was unrepresentative of stated papal doctrines and tangential to the subject of the pontiff’s lecture, the September 2006 remarks sparked confusion, concern, and outright rage in much of the Muslim world.

A professor emeritus at Bonn University and a former director of the Orient Institute, Wild sketched the events since Benedict’s 2006 lecture with a measured optimism and offered some commentary of his own.

These underlined yet again the proximity between religious rhetoric (culture, if you like) and political action. Various threats, protests and actions followed – in one case, a 65-year-old Italian nun was gunned down in Somalia.

The most measured and official response came in an October 12, 2006, letter from 38 well-respected Muslim scholars who, while questioning the scholarship of some of Benedict’s claims and offering a gentle reproof, opened the possibility of a renewed interfaith dialogue.

Click here to read the whole story: German academic sees signs of dialogue between civilizations