By Robin Shulman and Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, April 20, 2008

NEW YORK -- Pope Benedict XVI has said he would like to reach out to the Muslim community through dialogue, and Muslims were included in the pontiff's meeting with interfaith leaders in Washington on Thursday night. But many Muslims in America remain wary, saying the pope has created the impression that he is insensitive to their faith.

On Sunday, the pope will visit Ground Zero, perhaps the most poignant symbol of the divide between the West and the more extremist elements of Islam. But interviews in New York and elsewhere indicate that even those Muslims who do not hold such radical views are critical of the pope.

Many still recall the pope's September 2006 lecture at the University of Regensburg in Germany, in which Benedict quoted a Byzantine Christian emperor saying that the prophet Muhammad brought "things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

That lecture sparked days of protests in Muslim countries, some of them violent, and an Italian nun in Somalia was killed in retaliation. The Pope repeated several times that he regretted the offense his speech caused, and that he has deep respect for Islam. But the remarks have caused lingering damage, according to Muslims and some Catholic scholars interviewed.

"I don't think he did enough to apologize," said Omar T. Mohammedi, a member of the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

"For a person of his stature to come out and say this about Islam, it amazes me, it's sad," said Wael Mousfar, president of the Arab Muslim American Federation, a community group in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, a largely Muslim neighborhood. "Islam is the target of everyone nowadays; he just jumped on the bandwagon and joined the crowd."

There have been other perceived slights. For example, the pope confounded Muslims when he baptized a prominent Egyptian-born Italian Muslim convert on international television Easter Sunday.

"This person chose to be Catholic, it's not a problem," said Imam Shamsi Ali of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. The problem was the pope's celebration of the conversion on a global stage, he said.

Conversion and religious freedom remain major, thorny issues in the relationship between the Vatican and Muslim countries. Some Muslim countries prohibit Muslims from converting, and punishments can include the death penalty -- a position that Catholics find an anathema.

"The whole idea of having civil laws against people converting -- and threatening them with death -- is totally abhorrent to our view of religious liberty," said the Rev. Thomas Reese, a theologian with Georgetown University.

Another point of tension between the Vatican and the Muslim world is the issue of proselytizing, which is part of the Catholic mission but condemned by many Muslims.

Some Muslim leaders invited to meet the pope in Washington declined, citing the controversies over the Regensburg lecture and conversion. "I didn't attend," said Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who was invited to the interfaith meeting. "The invitation was to be involved in the ceremonies and the pageantry, but not in authentic, in-depth discussions on issues affecting Catholic-Muslim relations today."

There was no exchange in the meeting, according to participants, with Benedict delivering an address to the 200 leaders representing five faiths.

"It was not very interactive. It was not a two-way street," said Nihad Awad, a co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who attended.

Many Muslims fondly remember John Paul II, who made interfaith dialogue a central tenet of his papacy and was the first pope to step inside a mosque, while in Damascus, Syria, in May 2001. On that trip, he asked for a joint act of contrition "for all the times that Muslims and Christians have offended one another."

"The previous pope was very embracing, very wise, and I think he was genuine and sincere in fostering a commitment to build dialogue and communication with other religious groups," said Ali, of the Islamic Cultural Center. "The current pope is a little different."

Various scholars and theologians say that in the first days of his papacy, Benedict did appear to downgrade interfaith dialogue, removing Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, an Arabic speaker and noted Muslim scholar, from his role as president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue and sending him to Egypt as nuncio, or the Vatican ambassador.

"There's a doubt that he's serious about dialogue, said the Rev. Dan Madigan, a professor of theology in Rome who serves as a consultant to the commission for relations with Muslims, part of the Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue. Madigan said the council he sits on "is not called on very much."

He and others suggested that Fitzgerald, had he been retained in his position, would have properly vetted Benedict's Regensburg speech and excised the offending lines before the lecture caused outrage among Muslims.

"That speech at Regensburg never would have happened if it had been vetted," said the Rev. Patrick Ryan, an Islamic studies specialist and vice president for mission and ministry at Fordham University.

"He's very much in favor of interreligious dialogue," Reese said. But, he added, the pope's "great fear is relativism. . . . I think his biggest fear is that Catholics will misinterpret interreligious dialogue as meaning all religions are the same."

There is an opportunity for better relations, many said. Muslims recall that the pope was an early opponent of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and he has spoken out against the killing of Muslims in the Darfur region of Sudan. Also, Catholic scholars said, the pope admires Muslims' religious devotion.

In November, the Pope received King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in the first papal audience with a Saudi monarch. And last month, Vatican officials and Muslim leaders agreed to launch a Catholic-Muslim Forum for dialogue.

But improving dialogue will not be easy. "I think it's going to be a long-term effort," Madigan said. "It's going to require a lot of hard work."