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 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
"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,
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. There's more, at the link, but I thought this was enough.