Muslim-Christian Dialogue and the Fate of Iraqi Minorities
By
Ibrahim Al-Marashi
9 March
2021
On March 5,
Pope Francis, leader of the Catholic Church, embarked on a historic four-day
trip to Iraq, where he met with officials, religious leaders and ordinary
Iraqis of all faiths.
Remarkably,
he went to Najaf where he visited Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, the spiritual
leader of Iraq’s Shia community. The meeting was a significant milestone in
Iraqi history and the global history of interfaith dialogue. He also visited
the ancient city of Ur, Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region, and
Mosul, where he prayed at the ruins of four churches destroyed by ISIL (ISIS).
Iraq's most revered Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani met with
Pope Francis and his delegation at his home in the holy city of Najaf, on March
6, 2021. [Ayatollah al-Sistani's Media Office via AFP]
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The pope’s
visit to Iraq offers moral support to Iraq’s beleaguered and dwindling
Christian community and will hopefully encourage the Iraqi leadership to put
more effort into protecting the many minorities the country is home to. While
much can be done to ensure the safety of minority communities, it has to be
recognised that their plight has much to do with instability linked to Iraq’s
century-long state formation process and persistent foreign interference.
Pope
Francis’s Muslim-Christian Dialogue
When he was
elected pope in 2013, Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina decided to
be named Pope Francis. His choice was deliberate and was made in reference to
St Francis of Assisi, whose legacy the newly elected pope was inspired by.
St Francis
was a Catholic preacher and mystic who during the fifth crusade set out to
Egypt to try to promote peace and spread Christianity. During the siege on
Damietta in 1219, he crossed enemy lines and succeeded in meeting Sultan
al-Malik al-Kamil, nephew of Salaheddin. He asked the Sultan to embrace
Christianity, which the ruler declined to do. Impressed by his audacity,
however, he allowed Francis to preach for several days in Egypt.
Upon his
return to Italy, the Catholic preacher revised the rule of the Franciscan
order, which he had established, to encourage his devotees to live among
Muslims peacefully and avoid conflict. This move was truly revolutionary given
the fact that the Catholic church fully encouraged and supported the crusades.
Some 800
years later, Pope Francis set out to promote Muslim-Christian dialogue, making
several historic visits to the Middle East and meeting with Muslim leaders. In
2014, he travelled to Jordan and Palestine. Three years later, he went to Egypt
where he met with Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar, the
preeminent seat of Islamic learning in Egypt. In 2019, he visited the UAE and
Morocco.
His trip to
Iraq was perhaps the most important and symbolic. It was the first country he
decided to visit after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic and he
proceeded with his plan, despite the spate of rocket attacks and a deadly
bombing in Baghdad in the preceding weeks.
On March 6,
Pope Francis visited Ur, a Sumerian city that dates back 6,000 years, which,
according to the Judaic, Christian and Islamic traditions, is the birthplace of
the patriarch Ibrahim or Abraham.
The
significance of invoking Abraham’s legacy during the pontiff’s speech at Ur
lies in the current polemics that imagine a Judeo-Christian civilisation in
conflict with an Islamic one. By using Abraham’s birthplace as a setting for
his speech, the pope stressed the concept of the Abrahamic faiths as a single tradition.
Even more
important was his meeting with Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, who has called on
Iraqis to protect minorities since 2003. Even his 2014 fatwa, often seen as
giving rise to the Shia militias that fought ISIL, in fact, was a nationalist
appeal to all Iraqi citizens and it ended up motivating the formation of
Christian and Yazidi armed groups to defend the nation.
After the
meeting, al-Sistani’s office put out a statement that the grand ayatollah
“affirmed his interest in Christian citizens living like all Iraqis in peace
and security while preserving all their constitutional rights.”
Violence
and Insecurity
While Pope
Francis’s visit to Iraq is undeniably a historic event that could help improve
the situation of Christians and other minorities in the country, it has to be
recognised that the violence these communities have faced cannot be resolved
just through interfaith dialogue.
Throughout
Iraq’s recent history, foreign intervention and colonialism have severely
exacerbated ethnic and religious tensions in the country. During the British
mandate in Iraq, for example, the British colonialists actively recruited
soldiers from the Assyrian community to set up a security force, protecting key
colonial properties and military installations. The Assyrian Levies, as they
came to be known, also participated in the quashing of Kurdish rebellions.
The role
they played in the colonial occupation of Iraq caused resentment among the
Muslim population which saw them as traitors to the cause of Iraqi independence.
This was a typical example of the colonial divide-and-rule tactic, which sowed
division within the Iraqi public.
When the
Iraqi army sought to disarm these forces in 1933, a year after Iraqi
independence was declared, a relatively minor skirmish led to the massacre of
hundreds of Assyrian civilians in the town of Summayyil, while dozens of
Assyrian villages were looted and burned by local Kurdish and Arab tribes.
Similarly,
the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 escalated tensions between the various
religious and ethnic groups in the country, resulting in a civil war. The
security vacuum left behind by the Baathist regime resulted in inter-communal
violence, which the Christians and other minorities bore the brunt of.
It also
facilitated the ISIL invasion of Iraq in the summer of 2014, which pushed the
Iraqi state to near collapse. The armed group sought to forge a homogenous
state through religious cleansing of the population and public spaces,
including antiquity sites related to the pre-Islamic past and religious sites
used by minority and heterodox communities.
The
expulsion of Iraqi Christians from Mosul and the Nineveh Plains, the
extermination and enslavement of Yazidi communities, and the destruction of
both communities’ temples were justified by ISIL’s twisted doctrinal beliefs
but were also carried out for material gain. Plundered property and assets
helped fuel the ISIL economy, while videos of executions and destruction of
religious sites fed the fervour of its core supporters.
By the time
ISIL was defeated in Iraq, the Christian community, who had once totalled 1.5
million – about 3 percent of the Iraqi population – was reduced to a few
hundred thousand. Other communities, like the Yazidis, have also been
decimated.
Helping
these minorities recover and rebuild their lives in Iraq has to go beyond
interfaith dialogue. It means providing physical and economic security for
their communities which cannot happen while the Iraqi state continues to
experience instability and its cohesion is constantly undermined by foreign
forces.
Indeed,
religious leaders have to do their part. And in this sense, Pope Francis’s
visit to Iraq is a significant undertaking that could help improve conditions
for Iraqi minorities. But ultimately, their fate will be determined by the
ability of the Iraqi political elite to resist foreign pressure, build a stable
and functional state, distribute the country’s wealth to its people and ensure
their safety and security.
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The
views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
Ibrahim
al-Marashi is an associate professor at the Department of History, California
State University, San Marcos.
Original
Headline: Pope Francis’s visit to Iraq:
Beyond the symbolism
Source: The Al-Jazeera
URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/muslim-christian-dialogue-fate-iraqi/d/124500
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