Kashmir Observer

The Pope in Iraq

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The lead-up to the first-ever papal visit to Iraq has been somewhat overshadow­ed by concerns over its timing. The pope’s determinat­ion to go ahead testifies to the significan­ce he attaches to a visit that sums up two key themes of his papacy: the need to develop genuine inter-faith dialogue with Islam, and a non-sectarian vision of the church as a “field hospital”, where the spiritual wounds of the suffering are healed.

On Saturday, in the city of Najaf, a holy city for Shia Muslims, Francis will meet the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s leading Shia cleric and one of the world’s most influentia­l Muslim leaders. He will also visit Christian communitie­s in Baghdad and in Iraq’s north, where thousands of believers were killed by occupying Islamic State forces between 2014 and 2017. Many more fled Iraq altogether. Since the disastrous Anglo-American invasion in 2003 unleashed a cycle of violence and sectariani­sm, the estimated Christian population of the country has plummeted from around 1.5 million to between 200,000 and 300,000. A message of inter-faith tolerance and solidarity will be symbolised by a joint prayer service at the ancient archeologi­cal site of Ur, believed to be the birthplace of Abraham. The ceremony will be attended by Yazidis and other Iraqi religious minorities, as well as Muslims and Christians.

Following the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq war, the notion of a clash of civilisati­ons between Christiani­ty and Islam fuelled the growth of violent religious extremism, with tragic and bloody consequenc­es. Christian minorities in the Middle East and elsewhere have suffered persecutio­n. In parts of Europe and in the United States, the promotion of “cultural Christiani­ty” has become a proxy for thinly-veiled Islamophob­ia and hostility towards migrants. The pope’s visit to Iraq, which takes as its motto the words of Matthew’s gospel, “You are all brothers”, is intended to challenge such divisions and distortion­s of religious faith. Two years ago, Pope Francis joined with the grand imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, one of the world’s leading Sunni clerics, in a groundbrea­king call for a cross-faith commitment to human fraternity. In an era of cultural and religious polarisati­on, alliances such as these are desperatel­y needed to create a counter-narrative. Pope Francis’s trip, and his meeting with the grand ayatollah, will hopefully prove to be landmark moments in that crucial task.

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