A noisy wing of the Italian left excoriated Fallaci for her final works. But millions of others listened to her and revered her. In 2005, shortly after becoming the new Pope, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger invited Fallaci to come and speak with him at his summer residence on the understanding that what they discussed would never be made public. The following year Fallaci died of the cancer she had been battling for decades. Until the end the legal cases against her were still coming, and the debate around Italy’s Cassandra quietened for a few years until events brought her books back to life again.

In the year Fallaci died the new Pope himself came into conflict with the force she had excoriated. Pope Benedict did not issue a Fallaci-like screed. Instead, in the course of a speech on ‘faith and reason’ at the University of Regensburg he merely quoted a single sentence from the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos: ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.’ Before reading this quote Pope Benedict did say that the phrase had ‘a brusqueness that we find unacceptable’.31 In doing so he reiterated that he was quoting. Nevertheless, the word went around the world that the Pope had insulted Islam. There were riots across the Muslim world and a 65-year-old Italian nun was murdered in Somalia. Protests and riots over the cartoons of Mohammed published in Denmark a few months before were already a common occurrence. Now they were joined by other riots and protests about the Pope. The fact that everybody, from Europe’s most devout atheists to the head of the Catholic Church, was simultaneously falling foul of the same forces still seemed not to be enough of a warning.

9. Early-warning sirens

9

Early-warning sirens