The Pope's tact and sensitivity in Turkey this week could help lessen the distrust many Muslims have of him, writes Patsy McGarryin Istanbul
It was March 2000 and we had just been to visit the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. For many Muslims this is the St Peter's of Islam. It is a stunningly beautiful building of great simplicity and complex calligraphy. As we put on our shoes in the courtyard outside, Said, a French journalist of Algerian descent, was troubled.
Our guide was ushering us out of the mosque to a nearby mausoleum. Said's new girlfriend, a young female journalist from Budapest, had gone ahead. They had met for the first time on the trip and their flowering romance had generated a bond of goodwill across our disparate group.
We were a party of 12 European journalists who had been invited by the Turkish government to visit mainly biblical sites in that still vastly undiscovered country from which no foreign traveller returns unenlightened. Said hadn't been inside a mosque for 15 years. Earlier in our trip he had been triumphant in his agnosticism. As such, he was not untypical of the group when it came to religion.
Italians, Hungarians, Spaniards, French, a Dane, a Swede, myself - our interest was more in the socio-archaeological than the theological. But by the time we visited the Blue Mosque, the roots of our western secularism were beginning to show.
As we turned a corner outside the mosque en route to our new destination, I teased Said about his unusual silence. With the others out of earshot, he said "Patrick", as he insisted on calling me, "I want to pray". Any temptation to laugh at this irony was dispelled by his obvious seriousness.
He was bothered about trying to explain his feelings to the others, and not least because he was Muslim.
"If that is what you want to do, then pray," I said.
We slipped back inside the mosque. Sitting on mats in the blue-tinged gloom, Said prayed while I waited, admiring that magnificent creation. Prayer is very important for the people of Islam. It is totally integrated into their lives because, unlike the experience in the West, they do not separate the temporal and the spiritual and God is an ever-present. They pray in public and in private, without embarrassment. In Istanbul and other Turkish cities, it is not unusual to see men unroll prayer mats at midday or in mid-afternoon in parks or any vacant space and just get down on their knees.
That is why Pope Benedict XVI's moment of prayer, while facing towards Mecca, in the Blue Mosque on Thursday was so significant for the people of Islam. No words of his could ever have illustrated his actual respect for that religion as powerfully. And that he should do so in the Blue Mosque, a place deeply venerated by Muslims worldwide, added further to the impact.
Pictures of him in prayer there with his eyes closed, standing alongside Istanbul's Mufti Mustafa Cagrici, were on the front pages of nearly all of yesterday's main newspapers in Turkey. In this notoriously image-sensitive country that can only do good.
Speaking about that improving image on Turkish television on Thursday night, the country's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said "the image of Turkey has now changed. Turkey is a country coming out of its old shell. Remember, we came to this point from days when we were associated with Midnight Express, economic crises and democratic weakness." Many of the same national papers on Thursday had pictures of the Pope waving an enormous Turkish flag at the house of the Virgin Mary, near Ephesus, where he had just said Mass. He had been greeting the congregation at Meryem Ana Evi when he passed someone holding the flag and, in a John Paul-like gesture, he lifted it high. Whether planned or spontaneous, it was an inspired act and hit just the right note.
Such gestures, beginning with his indication of support for Turkey's accession to the EU on arrival last Tuesday, saved this trip from being a disaster for all sides. They removed the tension, even if some suspicion remained about Pope Benedict's sincerity.They, along with prime minister Erdogan's last minute decision to welcome him at the airport on Tuesday and the extraordinary security arrangements, ensured the visit passed off not only peacefully but successfully. But were Pope Benedict the proverbial alien he might well have wondered whether there was anyone at all in Turkey apart from police, an army of media, some dignitaries, and various clergy.
In any event, there was great and genuine relief all around yesterday that the visit had passed off without incident and that the doomsayers who forecast another Sarejevo, an archduke-style catastrophe that could turn a clash of civilisations into wholescale world war, have been so wide of the mark yet again.
IF ANYTHING, THIS visit has only done good. Credit for that must go to the Turkish authorities, the grace of the Muslim clergy in meeting and greeting the Pope despite their hurt at his Regensburg address, and the Pope himself.
He was clearly nervous arriving here last Tuesday and visibly tense as he took the steps down from the aircraft in his long white coat.
His original intention in visiting Turkey was purely ecumenical. He was going to meet Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, to advance rapidly improving relations between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches and as an expression of solidarity with the small Christian community in Turkey, which is experiencing difficulties because of the rigidly secular nature of the state.
Shortly after his election as Pope, the Ecumenical Patriarch invited Benedict to Istanbul and he accepted. The visit was expected to take place last November. Concerned as to the reasons for the visit and how it might be perceived, the Turkish authorities decided to formally invite him to visit this year instead.
They were suspicious of this Pope, particularly because of that by now infamous interview he gave the French newspaper Le Figaro while still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in August 2004. There he opposed Turkey's entry to the EU, essentially because it was not Christian.
The Turks suspected prejudice against their religion and that suspicion was seriously reinforced on September 12th last when, in his Regensburg address, Pope Benedict quoted the views of the medieval and "erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus" on Muhammad.
In a 1391 dialogue the emperor had said "show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". The Pope, clearly, had not anticipated or, it must be said, intended the grave insult his quoting such words meant for Muslims.
As Turkey's president of religious affairs Dr Ali Bardakoglu put it, courteously if firmly, in an address to the Pope in Ankara on Tuesday night, Muslims condemned "all types of violence and terror".
Prejudice against Islam was "nourished mainly by historical fears and concerns". Religious leaders "should concentrate on solving the common problems of mankind, without trying to demonstrate the superiority of their own beliefs and without wasting time discussing the theologies of religion". Significantly, he expressed regret at growth in the view that Islam encouraged violence and was spread by the sword. That had no basis in fact, he said.
The Pope took it on the chin, having no alternative. He has long since realised that, regardless of his own intent in quoting Manuel II Palaeologus last September - which was to bolster an academic argument - it did wound the people of Islam and he clearly regrets that.
But good has come of it all. It is doubtful whether he would have shifted position on Turkey's entry to the EU without such reaction to his Regensburg address or that he would have gone to the Blue Mosque last Thursday and prayed facing towards Mecca. Neither were part of his original plans for the visit.
But from last September's disaster he has plucked success through tact, sensitivity, charm, and flexibility. Nineteen months ago, when he was elected Pope, few familiar with the 24-year career of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith would have believed Pope Benedict could be capable of such things.