When my wife, Hind, an Arab-born psychologist, came to Syria this year as a Fulbright Scholar to lecture at the University of Damascus and to do research on the world view of young Syrians, I accompanied her as a Roman Catholic, like her, eager to explore the cradle of Christianity. After wandering the safe streets of Syria at all hours of the day and night, we can testify that domestic peacefulness is a Syrian specialty.
The night the pope arrived, my wife and I had dinner in Damascus to watch his arrival on television with the same Syrian Arab Christian family with whom we had observed Good Friday. They belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, which is the largest of Syria’s many Christian sects. (Ninety percent of Syria’s Christians are either Greek Orthodox or, like my wife, Syrian Catholic.) The mother of this family, Rania, her husband, Souheil, a Damascus businessman, and their two sons, Omar, 15, and Fadi, 11, are not bound by the pope, as we are, but are bound, as all Christians are, by the commandments of Jesus to “love God with our whole hearts… and our neighbors as ourselves.”
“Why is it you Americans always think that Christians and Muslims don’t get along?” Rania asked me. “I’ve lived all my life here. We go to school together, eat in each other’s houses. We just pray differently–but to the same God. Jews, too. The Jewish prophet, Leviticus, said even before Jesus, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’–but the Zionists say, ‘Unless he’s an Arab’.”
By 6 a.m. the next day we were at the ceremonial mass at Abbasiyin Stadium. What the pope said in his sermon about the early Christians made teenage Omar proud to be a Syrian. “He said we wouldn’t have Roman Catholicism and the Western Church if it weren’t for the people of Syria,” Omar said proudly. On Sunday evening, we watched Muslims with video cameras tape the first time in history that a pope entered a mosque, as warmed by John Paul’s neighborly love as were many Jews the first time a pope entered a synagogue, on John Paul’s visit to a Roman one in 1986.
So what did the pope’s visit mean to Syria and to me? I heard it as a call older than Paul–“love thy neighbor.” Our Syrian friends heard it the same way–but felt that they have not failed in this regard. As an Irish-American, I know what it means to be misrepresented as a violent, unloving people whose ranks are filled with terrorists. A Syrian Muslim physician counseled me: “Rise above it. Fanatic extremists thrive when there is no peace, when there is poverty and injustice. Then every land is ripe for extremists.”
