Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12S y r i a a n d I r aq , persecutedMiddleEasternChristians, the true nature of Islam: in a controversial speech in October 2015 upon accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in Frankfurt, the Muslim writer Navid Kermani tackled a host of contested questions.Andheasked:WillWesternChristiansrespond,orstayindifferent? Navid Kermani is an Iranian German writer and journalist who lives in Cologne. This translation from the German, newly revised for Plough, is based on its first publication in “Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels 2015”, ed. Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (Frankfurt am Main, 2015). On the same day that I learned I had been awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Jacques Mourad was abducted in Syria. Two armed men entered the Mar Elian monastery on the outskirts of the small town of Qaryatain and called for Father Jacques. They found him, likely in the bare little office that also serves as his living room and bedroom and took him away. On May 21, 2015, Jacques Mourad became a hostage of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS). I first met Father Jacques in autumn 2012 when I was traveling as a journalist through an already war-torn Syria. He served Qaryatain’s Catholic parish while also belonging to the religious order of Mar Musa, which was founded in the early 1980s in a derelict early Christian monastery. This order is a special, even unique Christian community, since it is devoted to an encounter with Islam and to love for Muslims. The monks and nuns, while con- scientiously holding to the Catholic Church’s precepts and rites, engage just as seriously with Islam and take part in Muslim traditions, including Ramadan. This may sound mad, even ludicrous: Christians who, in their own words, have fallen in love with Islam. And yet this Christian–Muslim love was a reality in Syria until just recently, and remains so still in the hearts of many Syrians. Through the work of their hands, the goodness of their hearts, and the prayers of their souls, the nuns and monks of Mar Musa created a place that to me seemed a utopia, a place where the eschato­ logical reconciliation of all things was – well, perhaps not already fulfilled (they would not have claimed this), but still tangible in advance as a promise of the reconciliation to come. This was the Mar Musa I came to know: a seventh-century stone monastery amid the overpowering solitude of the mountains of the Syrian desert, a place visited not only by Christians from all over the world but also by ever-increasing numbers of Muslims, who knocked at the door to meet their Christian brothers and sisters; to speak, sing, and be silent with them; and also, in a corner of the church kept free of images, to pray according to their Islamic custom. When I visited Father Jacques in 2012, his friend Paolo Dall’Oglio, the Italian Jesuit who had founded the Mar Musa community, Opposite, Mar Musa ­monastery, 2008; the cable stretching across the valley to the building is to transport firewood. Images of ceramic tiles from Wikimedia Commons (public domain)