Did pope really apologize?

ROME — Many Muslims insisted Monday that Pope Benedict XVI did not go far enough in his apology on Sunday for the offense caused by a speech he gave last week that discussed Islam and holy war.

In the southern Iraqi city of Basra, protesters burned an effigy of the pope, and an Iraqi group linked to al-Qaida posted a warning on a Web site threatening war against "worshippers of the cross."

The supreme leader in Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called the pope's remarks "the latest link" in the "chain of conspiracy to set off a crusade."

And, as a Vatican official said its ambassadors would seek to better explain the pope's statement, a Turkish man with a fake gun tried to storm a Protestant church in Turkey's capital, Ankara. He was arrested after worshippers trapped him in the church entryway.

Apart from the continuing anger at the pope's speech, in which he cited a medieval passage that called Islam "evil and inhuman," the debate on Monday seemed to turn on whether the pope had actually apologized.

Many Muslims — and some Catholics — noted that he had only said he was sorry for the reaction that fanned out across the Muslim world. He did not say that he had been wrong to have used the quotations.

"You either have to say 'I'm sorry' in a proper way or don't say it at all," said Mehmet Aydin, a state minister in Turkey, which Benedict is scheduled to visit in November in his first trip to a Muslim country.

But other Muslims either accepted the pope's statement or called it the best they would get.

"The pope has apologized, and that's enough, so let's calm down," said Hasyim Muzadi, head of Indonesia's largest Islamic organization, Nahdlatul Ulama. "If we remain furious, then the pope will be proved correct."

Turkey's most senior Muslim cleric, Ali Bardakoglu, who had been among the most strident in his criticism of the pope, said, "His expression of sadness is a sign that he would work for world peace."

The Muslim Council in Britain called the pope's words "exactly the reassurance many Muslims were looking for."

Benedict ignited a firestorm of protest last week in a speech he made at Regensburg University in Germany. The speech was largely a scholarly address criticizing the West for submitting itself too much to reason and shutting belief in God out of science and philosophy.

But he began by recounting a discussion of Christianity and Islam between a 14th-century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, and a Persian scholar.