NEW YORK — Unease with Pope Benedict XVI’s approach to Islam has led a U.S. Muslim group to decline to join an interfaith event with him Thursday.
Several other U.S. Muslim leaders expressed similar concerns about the pope but pledged to participate in the Washington gathering, saying the two faiths should do everything possible to improve relations.
“Our going there is more out of respect for the Catholic Church itself,” said Muzammil H. Siddiqi, chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America, which interprets Islamic law. “Popes come and go, but the church is there.”
But Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, an advocacy group based in Los Angeles, said the event seemed “more ceremonial than substantive” and his organization would not participate.
Muslims in many nations reacted angrily when the pope quoted a 14th-century Byzantine emperor connecting Islam with violence in a 2006 speech at Germany’s Regensburg University.
And many Muslims said the pontiff insulted them on Easter Sunday in St. Peter’s Basilica, when he baptized Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-born commentator who has criticized what he called the “inherent” violence in Islam.
Islamic leaders said the prominence of the ceremony, not the conversion itself, was troubling.
