Peace in the Face of War

– regrettably, for security reasons, much of what we do cannot be disclosed.
All I can say is that mediating the negotiations that this entails constitutes
a major part of my work and it is often very complex and time-consuming.
It is essential in all this that people come to trust me and my colleagues. This
does not happen automatically. A crucial factor is that first and foremost I
am regarded as a religious leader. That is the only reason I can do this job. If
I were not a priest, I could not do it. I am frequently told by members of the
Iraqi government that my two most important qualifications for my work
are that I am myself a cleric and that I have been in Iraq for a long time,
now over a decade. It makes all the difference that I am ordained because
here there is very little distinction between religion and politics. In the West
we may talk about the separation of church and state and it may have big
advantages, but the reality in Iraq – as, indeed, in much of the non-Western
world – is very different. Recently, when one of my team asked some of Grand
Ayatollah al-Sistani’s people what they thought of Iraq’s new government,
they told him matter-of-factly, ‘We are the government.’ Here in Iraq, religion
and politics are inextricably entwined. I was in a discussion group with
Madeleine Albright at the launch of the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005 and
she admitted that her biggest mistake in office, as America’s Secretary of
State from 1997 to 2001, was not to take seriously the role of religion in
diplomatic affairs. As she points out in her brilliant book The Mighty and the
Almighty, it is futile to try to ‘keep religion out of politics’. It is bound up in
so much of the conflict in our world and we cannot be serious about peacemaking
unless we are serious about engaging with it.
The mutual incomprehension between the Islamic world and the West is
certainly one of the biggest problems facing humankind today. Many Muslims
do not understand the fundamentals of Western society. They see it in simple
terms, as recklessly secular, with no God-given ideals. Unfortunately, this
perception is confirmed by much of our television, whose witness they see
and believe. You only have to watch a little Arabic TV to see the difference.
(Curiously, the divorce between religion and politics in the West goes even
deeper in those countries where it is unofficial, such as Britain, than it does
in America, where it is established by the constitution.)
The West, in return, has many false perceptions of Islam, which it associates
increasingly with radicalism and terrorism. We forget that for hundreds of
years Christians, too, waged war in the name of God. Violence in God’s name
is always wrong, whoever it is committed by, but we need to grasp that only a
small percentage of the Muslim community is guilty of this evil. (Indeed, it is
not only Muslims who suffer from our prejudice in the Middle East – Christians
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