A monastery in the midst of Islam

The story of a Roman Jesuit and of a ruined monastery that is reflowering on Arab soil. Becoming the meeting-point for friendly encounters between Christians and Muslims. With a realistic and untrammelled look also at the worldly power-struggles shaking the Middle East

by Gianni Valente

The monastery of Mar Musa seen from the desert below

The pink-slabbed path that winds up the rocky gorge looks like the scar on an immense wound. A kind of thin suture healing over as it weaves its way by overhangs and treacherous screes on the calloused body of one of the mountains in the Jabal al-Qalamoun, between Damascus and Aleppo. Down below the desert from which rises the tepid wind of spring stretches toward an Iraq maddened by bombs and terror. Up above, instead, the slanting light of evening makes the jagged skyline of the monastery of Mar Musa al-Habashi, Saint Moses the Abyssinian, look even more unreachable. The thousands-year-old bastions overlooking the drop, there where an old Roman watchtower once surveyed the hostile Persian frontier, still give the impression of the citadel impregnable by brigands, of the fortress perched over the chasm by people who wanted to live in the lee of the storms of history. But half an hour’s climb to the top is enough to see that the reality is quite different. The gate of the monastery is still low, so that one has to stoop to enter, but at least now it is always open.
Here, in the time of Muhammad, came Moses the Abyssinian, son of the King of Ethiopia, fleeing his dynastic destiny out of the desire to become a monk. He settled in one of the caves that pock the mountain, to give thanks to God with a life of prayer. Then, while the centuries of Islamic civilization stretched all around, on the mountain of Mar Musa the Christian life continued to bloom in a monastery of Syriac rite, embedded in a beehive of caves inhabited by monks like the cells of a hermits’ laura. Decline began only in the 18th century. The last monk had already left in 1830 when the monastery came into the ownership of the Syro-Catholic Church. From then on it seemed destined to disaster. The wind and snow, vandals and the rain were crumbling the monastic fortress, washing down into the valley fragments of millennial frescoes and baptismal fonts together with the dolomite deposits. Each year, on 27 August, the eve of the feast of Saint Moses the Ethiopian, only the Christians of nearby Nebek remembered to climb to the ruined citadel, to recite forlorn prayers among the desolate remains of the monastery. Up to when Paolo Dall’Oglio, a Roman Jesuit, madcap son of Saint Ignatius – and also, at least a little, of Saint Francis – happened to pass this way.

One of the frescoed walls of the church of the monastery of Mar Musa, with a depiction of The Last Judgment (11th century)

A new beginning
Speaking of Father Paolo one risks slipping into the cliché of the stubborn idealist with a cumbersome ego. Son of one of the early Christian Democrat leaders («when they were coming back by train from the big rallies De Gasperi was wont to fall asleep on the shoulder of my father Cesare, who was in charge of the youth groups in the late ’forties»), fourth of eight children, middle-class house in the Salario district. And then leftwing militancy as a Christian “for Socialism”, the voluntary work typical of the affluent boy in the Roman suburbs, scouting, national service in the Alpini («we decided to occupy the barracks, we were expecting a coup d’état by the Americans from one moment to the next…»). Up to the surprising decision to join the Society of Jesus that emerged in 1974 as overflowing response to a vocation felt amidst a thousand desires to live on the grand scale. An adventure that also for chance reasons – a trip from Turkey to Jordan, a meeting with the Jesuit islamologist Arij Roest Crollius – appears immediately marked by a fascination with the Muslim world, for that multitude «that in each country kneels in the same posture, and prays whispering in the same language its words of submission to the sole God». Already by February 1975 the Roman novice was boldly confiding to Pedro Arrupe his desire to «offer his life for the salvation of the Muslims». The Jesuit General, measuring him up with a somewhat mocking look, replied that «it’s a difficult mission, but if it’s the will of the Lord, it will come about». Eight months later Paolo was in Beirut studying Arabic like a madman. The Dutchman Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, at that time head of the Jesuit Middle East province, lodged him in the Society’s residence a few yards from the green line that marked the front in the civil war dividing the tormented Lebanese capital. And then Islamic studies in Damascus and at the Orientale in Naples, and the happy intuitive decision to shift to a local Church of the East, «one of those that had survived the Koranic prophecy and had co-existed with it for centuries». He chose the rite of the Syriac Church, «apostolic, Semite, low-class, a poor Church of Christians on the edges of the desert, that has never been imperial» and whose liturgy, «without passing through the Greek language, adopted Arabic, the sacred tongue of Islam, preserving hymns and prayers in the Syriac (or Aramaic) speech of Jesus himself». In the summer of 1982, searching for an isolated place where to retreat for his spiritual exercises, the directions in an old guide to Syria published in 1938 led him to the ruins of the monastery of Mar Musa, abandoned for two centuries. He climbed into the church through the broken roof, his electric torch lighting up miraculously preserved 11th century frescoes: faces of male and female saints painted along the aisles and even up in the vaults, and, on the far wall, a general judgment with its Heaven full of prophets, evangelists, saints and monks, and its Hell also packed with clerics and bishops. At first he only thought that it would be worthwhile restoring the place, maybe involving some monk friends in Rome – the Benedictines, or even the Trappists. But then, just in those days, a group of Muslim hunters passed through there. They were amazed to find anybody in the place. They dined with him, they read the Koran together, and before going their way they left all the food they had brought with them, as if giving alms to a monk. And on 27 August the same surprise was in store for the Christians of Syriac rite who every year climb up from Nebek on that date. They prayed inside the church under the open sky together with abuna Paolo, who at that point had already decided in his heart: this was the good place where to spend one’s life.
As a good Jesuit he embarked on his unplanned enterprise shamelessly looking for help in all the possible places: the Vatican, the Syrian government, the Italian Foreign Office, the European Community, international voluntary agencies, schools of archaeological restoration. He went in his headlong fashion at obstacles of every kind, such as the easily understood and cautious distrust of locals, both Christian and Muslims. Also his bond with the Society of Jesus went through some years of “suspension” before things were clarified. From 1991 onwards Mar Musa again became the home of a small monastic community, with male and female sections, brought together around three «priorities»: prayer (with the daily liturgy in Arabic according to the Syriac rite), manual work (olives, goats, meat and cheese, frescoes to be restored, kitchen and library work) and hospitality, «which in the Semite, Arab world of nomadic origin», Paolo stresses, «is the highest virtue». When well looked at, nothing original. Ora et labora. If it weren’t in the heart of Islam. And that the guests to whom Paolo opens the doors of the monastery are above all the sons and daughters of the Islamic Umma. Those who at least five times every day repeat, to great and merciful Allah, that trust in the divine mercy without which nobody pleases God.

The Jesuit Father Paolo Dall’Oglio during a liturgical celebration at Mar Musa

Becoming everything to all
A great many climb up, above all on Friday, their day of rest. Alone, in groups, in families with children. They take their shoes off before entering the church, they sit on Bedouin carpets on the ground, sometimes turned toward the white wall set in the direction of Mecca. But they also make devout gestures before the faces of the Virgin Mary, of Jesus and of John the Baptist. Then they eat under the big tent that functions as refectory, or among the slabs of stone on the side of the mountain scattered with caves for apprentice hermits. Their relaxed visits are also the most ordinary reflection of the fabric of meetings and relationships with the Islamic world that the monks of Deir Mar Musa have woven in more than fifteen years. If the great Jesuit Matteo Ricci adopted the rites of the Confucian tradition in his mission of witness to Christ in the Celestial Empire, then for Father Paolo also it is no scandal to assimilate practices and customs shared by the Muslim surroundings. When his Muslim friends fast for Ramadan, he also joins in their penitential practice. «It is not out of imitation», he says, «but out of fellow-feeling in Christ». The young Christians of the place have told him often of having fasted together with their Muslim friends during military service or when working away from home. To those who accuse him of creating scandal and confusion he answers that he has invented nothing. That in these parts «the Christian Arabs have safeguarded for centuries their perception of being a community with a destiny shared with the Muslim majority. And of being witnesses to Christ for the Muslims, much more than in the face of the Muslims, more with their lives than with words». A closeness that has left its mark not only in daily living but also on the most usual gestures of the life of faith. Thus, even in the oldest sanctuaries of Syrian Christendom, such as the Marian one of Saydnaya or that of Saint Tekla, in Maalula, one enters barefoot and prays kneeling on carpets, as in any mosque. And precisely at Deir Mar Musa, the restoration that has saved the 11th century frescoes has brought to the light numerous Arab-Christian inscriptions full of expressions and words willingly borrowed from the Muslim devotional lexicon, beginning with the Koranic incipit «In the name of God the clement and merciful». An inevitable blending, given that the Churches here have adopted as liturgical language the same one as the Koran, the one that the whole of Islam uses as sacred language. «And which, for that matter», stresses Dall’Oglio, «is also the last quoted among the languages in which the announcement of the apostles was heard by miracle on the day of Pentecost».
Gossip about the flow of pro-Islamic sympathy at Deir Mar Musa reached the Vatican. When the monastery asked for approval of its rule, the texts and information about the monastic community were subject to attentive sifting by the Roman Congregations from 2002 to 2006. After scrupulous examination and some retouching of the texts the nihil obstat was granted that opened the way to canonical approval by the Syro-Catholic diocese of Homs, which has jurisdiction over the monastery. Abuna Paolo and his friends know well that they certainly would not have got through if the verdict had been given by the platoon of opinion makers who have for years been spreading alarm of Islamist aggression against Christian civilization through the western media. And go so far as depicting Muslims as a billion of latent cutthroats. Perhaps for them, even the handful of monks at Deir Mar Musa ought to be set down ex officio on the list of deserters, guilty of treating with the enemy.
The fact is that, looking at it from these heights over the Syrian desert, the whole incandescent question of relations between the Islamic world and the Christian world appears in a different light, and suggests assessments that have at least the virtue of originality. Listening to abuna Paolo, the Islamic world at times is a paradoxical and providential ally – even at geopolitical level – of the Christian venture in the world. The billion Muslims who every day, according to the words of the Council, «worship God, above all with prayer, charity and fasting», are for the hyperbolic Jesuit «the containing mass of any would-be hegemonic “crusade” in its different forms, including the “lay” forms of secularized and globalizing modernity». While the Muslim terror that is bloodying the world and killing a great many poor wretches who bear the name of Jesus «would not have exploded without the immense slough of western complicity that prepared the soil for the poisonous plants». The same identity crisis that has infected so many Christian leaders, «this need to be continually demonstrating the “superiority” of one’s own religion, at bottom masks the deep anguish of the Christian world, the suspicion that He, Christ, is not really living, and so one has to grit ones teeth to “convince oneself” of the truth of Christianity and its moral superiority through cultural and socio-economic victory over other religions».

The altar of the church of Mar Musa; in the background, the apsidal fresco – in very poor condition – with the Virgin Mary surrounded by Saint Fathers of the Church

The patience of God
In Damascus, one of the three minarets of the immense mosque of the Umayyads is known as the minaret of Jesus. According to a tradition handed on by the Muslims of Damascus, it will be precisely on this tower that Jesus will appear on the day of His second coming to vanquish the Antichrist, to announce the end of days and separate the good from the wicked. Vatican Council II declared that the Church honors and looks on Muslims with respect for «striving to submit with all their heart to the decrees of God», and «awaiting the day of the judgment, when God will reward all of risen mankind».
The “mimetic”, or rather intercultural, stance of abuna Paolo and of his friends toward the tide of praying Muslims that surrounds them is not just an updated version of the old “camouflage” of which the Jesuits were accused, nor even a political survival strategy for beleaguered minorities. He points out that «Islam is not a temporary or ephemeral phenomenon». The Koranic negation of the divinity of Christ «is analogous to the Jewish refusal to accept the Gospel message». And if Saint Paul embraced the refusal of the Israelites in the perspective of the end of time, when «all Israel will be saved» (Rm 11, 26), by analogy abuna Paolo projecting to the end of days his hopes «of uniting ourselves through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, in the presence of Christ merciful judge and king of peace, to the choir of the angels and of the saints together with the saved of the Umma of Muhammad». In the meantime, which is the time of the Church, the cordial “being” in the midst of Islam of the children of the Nazarene, something already experienced by Saint Francis, by Charles de Foucauld and for centuries by the thousand-year-old minority Churches of the East, still seems to him the only effective and disarming way «to show the love of Jesus for the sons of Ismael». And set his own lone hope in His work that even today can touch the hearts and moisten the eyes of whoever He wants. «I myself would have long converted to Islam», says abuna Paolo of himself «if I had not tasted in my life the tenderness of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of the Most High».