ROME — The authoritarian nature of Pope Benedict’s papacy was being blamed yesterday for the speech that provoked uproar in the Islamic world.

Unlike his predecessor John Paul II, who worked closely with a select group of advisers when drafting key speeches, Benedict XVI insists on writing his own.

Although the final drafts are then circulated to his aides, senior Vatican advisers believe that no one is brave enough to tell the pope that he may have made a mistake. The pope was known as “God’s Rottweiler” when he held his previous position as the Vatican’s defender of the faith.

“The speech was seen by some people in the secretariat of state, and they were a bit shocked by the strength of it but decided that it was what the pope wanted to say,” the director for the study of Religions and Cultures at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, the Reverend Daniel Madigan, said.

He added that the pope was “clearly writing things himself” since his speech contained elementary errors about Islam.

“He is not really au fait with the material. He says the second Surah was handed to Mohammed when he did not have political power, but almost every Muslim scholar believes it was handed to him later, in Medina, when he did have political power.

“The second mistake is one he makes continually. He spells Ibn Hazm with an ‘n’ at the end. It is the kind of thing I see in students’ writing,” he said.

Since the exile of Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald to be the papal envoy to Egypt, few high-ranking Islamic experts are close to the pope. Yesterday, Archbishop Fitzgerald declined to comment on the row, saying that he was “on a retreat” in France.

Robert Mickens, the Vatican correspondent of the Tablet, a Catholic newspaper, said the biggest problem was a lack of checks and balances within the Roman Curia under Benedict. He said the pope was surrounded by a cabal of “yes-men” who “hold him in such high regard that they are unlikely to challenge him.”

John Paul II was regularly guided either by the former secretary of state who resigned this month, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, or by the Vatican’s press secretary, Joaquin Navarro Valls, who served 22 years before retiring earlier this year.

Both departures have helped the pope recast the Vatican’s top order in his image. A Jesuit who served with the pope at the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, has been made the new secretary of state despite having no diplomatic experience.

“It sends out the message that the Vatican does not care about diplomacy to the same extent,” a senior priest said.

Sandro Magister, who is a veteran Vatican observer for L’Espresso magazine agreed that the pope was less concerned with diplomacy than with getting out his central message.

“This is not a pope who submits himself to censorship or self-censorship, which he sees as being inopportune and dangerous when it concerns the pillars of his preaching,” he said.

The weakness of Cardinal Bertone, who has publicly stated that his job is simply to “carry out the pope’s will” was cited by another Vatican source as a cause of the pope’s troubles.