Fr. Stephanus, O.S.B. has translated an editorial that appeared in Corriere della Sera, written by a leading Italian Muslim:

To deny the historical reality is simply foolish, and it can generate nothing but foolishness. I recall that one of the most notable contemporary Islamologists, the Egyptian Mohammad Said El Eshmawi, said to me in the mid-nineties that he simply did not sympathize with the military conquest carried out by the Arab tribes in the Christian lands of the Mediterranean, and that he would have preferred to have had Islam spread peacefully as came about in Southeast Asia. And now the Pope is being punished and threatened for having said what every honest and rational Muslim should accept: the historical reality.

The lesson to draw is that the West and Christianity ought to stop considering themselves to be the cause of everything that followed, whether good or bad, within Islam and in the rest of the world. The ideology of hatred is an ancestral reality that exists in the heart of Islam from its very beginnings, because of the refusal to recognize and respect the plurality of the physiological religious communities, and given the subjectivity of the relationship between the believer and God, and the absence of a single spiritual reference point that incarnates the absoluteness of the dogmas of faith. And it is a reality that, beginning with the defeat of the Arab armies in the war of 5 June 1967, it [the ideology of hatred] has undergone an unstoppable upsurge parallel to the growth of the power of the Islamic extremists from Iran to Indonesia. It has ended up flowing into the current of globalized Islamic terrorism, that has transformed the West itself into a “kamikaze factory”.

This is the tragic reality of the ideology of hatred that is succeeding in solidifying the consensus among all those Muslims whose minds are clouded by being anti-American, anti-West, and by prejudiced hostility to the right of Israel to exist. The pretexts that can set off their fury change, from the Israeli occupation to the American war, from the Mohammed cartoons to the declarations of the Pope. But the problem is entirely internal to an Islam transformed by the extremists from a faith in God into an ideology bent on imposing a theocratic and totalitarian power upon all those who are not in their image and likeness. And it frightens me to note that even the so-called moderate Muslims have renounced the prudence of reason, and have aligned themselves with the “holy war” of which they will be the principal victims.