Jenny Taylor's blog

[This blog was published by Times Online http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2009/07/praying-for-patients-debate-taking-place-now.html on 1 July 2009.]

Anyone interested in Pope Benedict XVI and his attitude to Islam was expecting a field day during his recent Middle East visit.   

Would he apologize for his earlier ‘gaffes’, as the Muslim Brotherhood of Jordan demanded?  Would he make more statements that would incite volatile Muslim communities?   

I realized quite suddenly that I was in love with India.  It had been building up, from admittedly inauspicious beginnings.  The suffocating yellow dust of Delhi, the huddled poor in filthy rags sitting by miserable little fires on every patch of waste ground; the scabby dogs and dying puppies; the way nothing ever seems to be finished off, or final; the traffic that careens crazily along pitted highways; the way no one, literally no one, can drive in a straight line, or give way.