Good new, for once.

David Warren Online says something I find particularly heartening:

    The signatories renounced and condemned violence against Christians in the name of Islam. They accepted without qualification the Pope’s post-Regensburg clarifications, and both accepted and applauded his call for dialogue. They unambiguously denounced and rejected all terrorist interpretations of the word “jihad”; they insisted on the priority of Surah 2:256 of the Koran (“There is no compulsion in religion”), stating explicitly that it is not obviated by later Koranic passages or Hadiths. They went so far as to aver that the declaration of Jesus in Mark 12:29-31 expresses the essence of all Abrahamic religion — Muslim, Christian, Jewish.

(For those of you who don’t have your Bibles handy, Mark 12:29 is where it is said that the whole of the law consists first of loving God with all one’s heart and soul and mind, and second of loving one’s neighbor as oneself. )

IslamicaMagazine reports:

The letter, which is the outcome of a joint effort, was signed by top religious authorities such as Shaykh Ali Jumu‘ah (the Grand Mufti of Egypt), Shakyh Abdullah bin Bayyah (former Vice President of Mauritania, and leading religious scholar), and Shaykh Sa‘id Ramadan Al-Buti (from Syria), in addition to the Grand Muftis of Russia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Slovenia, Istanbul, Uzbekistan, and Oman, as well as leading figures from the Shi‘a community such as Ayatollah Muhammad Ali Taskhiri of Iran. The letter was also signed by HRH Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad bin Talal of Jordan and by Muslim scholars in the West such as Shaykh Hamza Yusuf from California, Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Professor Tim Winter of the University of Cambridge.

All the eight schools of thought and jurisprudence in Islam are represented by the signatories, including a woman scholar. In this respect the letter is unique in the history of interfaith relations.

The Open Letter itself strikes me, upon reading a little way into it, as possesing that same reasoned tone as the Pope’s original address. Note, for example this passge:

There are two extremes which the Islamic intellectual tradition has generally managed to avoid: one is to make the analytical mind the ultimate arbiter of truth, and the other is to deny the power of human understanding to address ultimate questions. More importantly, in their most mature and mainstream forms the intellectual explorations of Muslims through the ages have maintained a consonance between the truths of the Quranic revelation and the demands of human intelligence, without sacrificing one for the other.

To me this sounds like the same balance that men of good will always strike when discussing matters of religion. Reason is not the ultimate arbiter of truth (for, if it were, what can be used to verify the truth of reason itself? Modern nihilism has its roots in the attempt to cut reason from its roots, for its roots are in matters of wisdom and common sense not open to analysis)  but to deny reason has the power to address ultimate questions is to retreat into, at best, a zenlike silence on any topics of faith and morals.

And here again:

If a religion regulates war and describes circumstances where it is necessary and just, that does not make that religion war-like, anymorethan regulating sexuality makes a religion prurient.

Good point, I have heard non-Quaker denominations of Christianity called warlike because they have Just War theory; we have all heard Christianity condemned as prurient for its rules to bring sexual activity within the bounds of reason.

If some have disregarded a long and well-established traditionin favor of utopian dreams where the end justifies the means, they have done so of their own accord and without thesanction of God,His Prophet, or the learned tradition.God says in theHoly Qur’an: Let not hatred of any people seduce you into being unjust. Be just, that is nearer to piety (al-Ma’idah 5:8). In this context we must state that the murder on September 11th of an innocent Catholic nun in Somalia—and any other similar acts of wanton individual violence—‘in reaction to’ your lecture at the University of Regensburg, is completely un-Islamic, and we totallycondemn such acts.

Whatever one’s take on the specific questions raised, the condemnation of violence and the tone of reason lend honor to Islam. These men, and one woman scholar, have done their religion a service.