An act of catholicity

For the first time in recorded history, the head of the Roman Catholic Church stepped into a Muslim religious site in a demonstration of reconciliation. Kesava Menon on the Pope's recent visit to Syria.

BENT WITH age though he may be, Pope John Paul II last week ventured to take on a task that younger and far more powerful people are reluctant to at present. In his effort to quieten the passions of the region, the Pope stressed, as the theme of his visit, the message of love, peace and harmony that all religions are supposed to teach. At the end of the day, the pontiff found that the divergence in historical memories was running far stronger than the commonalities in scriptural doctrine.

In a sense, the Umayyad mosque in Damascus appeared to symbolise the different strands of historical experience that run riot in the region and the papal visit to the shrine was a genuine effort to re-examine these experiences to discover the commonalities. For the first time in recorded history, the head of the Roman Catholic Church stepped into a Muslim religious site in a demonstration of reconciliation between two scriptural traditions that have fought each other bitterly over the centuries especially in this part of the world. Together with his approaches to the heads of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the pontiff did seem very keen to at least erase the bitter feelings between the different strands that flow from the monotheistic principle of West Asia. But in the celebration of the meeting point between two of the scriptural traditions that flow from the monotheistic principle, there was also aroused the rage that Arab Christians and Muslims feel towards the adherents of the third scriptural tradition, Judaism.

Although the unwanted controversy of the papal visit did not erupt at the Umayyad mosque itself, a reading of the history of this shrine is of great value in trying to untangle the torrid tale of the relations among the adherents of the three monotheistic religions of West Asia. The spot where the mosque now stands is believed to have first acquired an aura of sanctity as the shrine for a Semitic god. Perhaps, like other sacred sites throughout the Fertile Crescent that have been fought over by empires, this spot also successively housed the holy images of Greeks or Persians. But it re-emerged as a temple to the supreme Roman god Jupiter till after the advent of Christianity. Since Damascus was one of the major cities of the Eastern Roman Empire, it seems probable that the temple to Jupiter became a church at or about the time the Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity.

It continued as a Christian shrine till the Umayyads, the first dynastic and political Muslim Caliphate (the first four Caliphs, considered the ``rightly guided ones'', had more a spiritual aura while Muawiya ibn Abu Sufiyan the first Umayyad Caliph inherited an empire) converted it into a mosque. The forces of Christianity and Islam fought each other bitterly from the declining years of the Eastern Roman Empire, through the Crusades and in a sense right up to the First World War when British forces seized Damascus and ended Ottoman control over the Arabian lands. But while the forces of Arabic and Turkish Islam fought Western Christendom, the Muslims and Christians of the Arab world had a far less turbulent relationship between themselves. Here again, the Umayyad mosque stands as a symbol of this relative harmony since it houses the tomb of John the Baptist who is also revered by Muslims as the prophet Yahya. Conspicuous in the narrative of this religious site is the absence of any reference to Judaism. It is perhaps an ironic reflection of the alienation between the Arab Muslims and Christians of the modern world on the one hand and the Jews on the other that Damascus should also be associated with the Apostle St. Paul (or Saul of Tarshish as he was perhaps called before his beatifications). Saul the ordained Jewish priest was on a campaign of crushing those Semites who were straying from Judaism to Christianity when he had his Damascus Experience and changed from being Christianity's fiercest opponent to its most able proponent.

When Pope John Paul II traced the footsteps of St. Paul he inadvertently walked into the thicket of the Semitic disputes that have been raging for centuries.

In his speech welcoming the pontiff to his country, Syria's President Dr. Bashar al Assad (who as an Alawite is barely considered a Muslim by the more orthodox), said that modern day Israel's treatment of Palestinians and other Arabs was comparable to the manner in which the Jewish Pharisees had hounded the followers of Jesus in the early years of the Christian era. This statement was read together with another speech that Dr. Bashar had made a few months ago when he compared Israel's behaviour with that of the Nazis. Predictably enough, there came statements from Israel and the West accusing the Syrian President of anti- Semitism. Dr. Bashar's reply to this was that he could not be anti-Semitic since the Arabs too were Semites.

The loose application of the labels of racism paradoxically obscures and reveals the true nature of the Arab-Israel dispute. If Arabs and Israelis are both Semites then the dispute is a religious one that dates back to the time when the followers of Judaism, oldest of the West Asian monotheistic traditions, denounced and prosecuted those they believed were committing heresy by following the teachings of Christ and Muhammed. But if the Israelis of today are a western people who are out to colonise a portion of West Asia, as the Arabs believe them to be, then it is a racial dispute between a Europeanised people and the indigenous Semites. The truth is that the Arab-Israeli dispute is a mix of both these divergences and much else besides.

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