Peace. A five-letter word that embraces our deepest longings as we move into Advent. Where better to pray for such a gift for ourselves and the Iraqi people than in their desert, far from the tumultuous crowds of malls and blaring music that threaten to deafen us to the message of the Spirit?

However, before sitting down on a pile of rubble, courtesy of U.S.A’s bombing raids, let us listen to a history lesson by Anthony Shadid, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, as he contrasts the magnificence of Iraq’s past with its complete deprivation of any signs of its former glory.

He reminds us that: “Rome can still see its past, the magnificence of its Ancient Empire gracing the modern cityscape. Paris and London, storied cities reinventing themselves as they age across centuries, live in their histories, which surround them. Baghdad, its ancient grandeur utterly destroyed, cannot see its past, its glory. It can only remember. Baghdad’s is a culture of memory. The city draws strength and pride from the myths to which it continually returns. But the curse of recalling is the reminder of what has been lost.” (Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War)

Shadid tells us that the story of the founding of Baghdad revolves around the conqueror Abu Jaafar Mansur, second caliph of the Abbasid Empire, and the Christian monks who served him at their monastery, not far from the future city of Baghdad, who told him that a great city would be founded there by someone with the name of Miqlas.

One historian quoted Mansur as shouting, “By God, I am that man!” The caliph insisted that as a boy he had been given that name.

In a dream, he saw the Tigris River watering lush fields, with canals stitching the rich countryside. The nearby Euphrates and Tigris would provide revenues for Mansur’s empire.

The caliph laid the first bricks for his capital, a project that would take four more years to complete, with craftsmen, architects and laborers drafted from across the empire; 100,000 were always in demand.

Towns in Iraq were stripped of materials. From famous ruins in Babylon and the Persian city of Ctesiphon, came quotas of bricks. To the south, Wasit contributed five wrought-iron gates that, according to tradition, were built by demons under the sway of King Solomon. Kufa gave another gate, along with Damascus, for the Round City, a perfectly circular capital, which served as Mansur’s residence and the nexus of his Islamic empire. Thick walls protected it. They were insulated by a deep moat, and fortified by an inner wall ninety feet high. Roads radiated from the four gates; the Khorasan Gate opened to the frontier of China, others to Mecca and the pilgrims, west to Damascus, and south to Basra.

From the Golden Gate Palace rose the fabled green dome, with the figure of a warrior atop it. Mansur called his capital The City of Peace, and lived for 17 years there, passing away in 775, on the road to Mecca.

Shadid tells us that Baghdad grew to ten times the size of Constantinople, with a claimed population of 300,000, and an array of hospitals, places of worship, museums, libraries, law schools, racetracks, zoos, public baths, or asylums for the insane. One historian is quoted as saying:

I have seen the great cities...but I have never seen a city of greater height, more perfect circularity, more endowed with superior merits or possessions, more precious gates...It is as though it is poured into a mold and cast.

Mansur’s great-grandson built a library that was a marketplace of ideas, a pristine place of scholarship whose translators of Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, and Ptolemy created an intellectual heritage that was not Islamic but universal. One modern historian put it this way: “Baghdad became the intellectual battlefield upon which Roman law, Greek medicine and philosophy, Indian mysticism, Persian subtlety and Semitic genius for religion could meet on common ground.”

It was over such sacred territory that the Bush Administration arrogantly promised a night of “shock and awe,” a night that would put into motion years of nights that have filled us Americans with shock and shame, to say nothing of the suffering foisted upon the recipients of the “shock and awe.”

If we could find a couple of Iraqis to sit with us on a pile of rubble, they might tell us of what a magnificent city was Baghdad, and of its wonderful scholars even today, with their command of languages, and knowledge of the arts and sciences.

We might tell them the American people are also surrounded by rubble of our own making. Our sins abroad have boomeranged upon us and our children, creating broken dreams, shattered dignity and pride. We are a shamed people. We cannot hide, nor can we go forward as long as we refuse to turn from violence to peace. We are boxed into a corner; we can only pray.

Perhaps from the life of Blessed Charles de Foucauld, we can find a means of escape. (1858-1870)

It was while leading a patrol in search of the infamous Bou Amama, from the Ksour mountains in the southern Oran province near the Moroccan border, that Lieutenant de Foucauld’s men were jumped by a band of Uled Sidi Sheikh snipers hidden in the scrub growth of the hillside. Eventually, Foucauld called for fresh ammunition supplies.

When there was no response, the leader went to inspect and found his men prostrating themselves in prayer, for the sun had just set behind the hills and it was time for the faithful to turn their faces toward Mecca, to proclaim that there is no other god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. No shots came from the enemy side, either. Good Moslems, all, peace reigned. The stillness was like a cathedral, and Foucauld, who had been practicing no faith, was prompted to return to that of his youth, and he became a practicing Catholic Christian. (More on his life next week)

On to today: Eventually, the war in Iraq must be concluded with a negotiated peace. Why not now? Can we, as in Foucauld’s time, stop to pray, to find some sense in what we are doing? Can we convince the Moslems of our sincerity?

Can we not sit together and listen to Bernard Shaw’s words spoken by Joan of Arc, concerning why the Dauphin could not hear her voices?

They do come to you, but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them. When the Angelus rings you cross yourself and have done with it; but if you prayed from the heart, and listened to the trilling of the bells in the air after they stop ringing, you would hear the voices.

Let us pray for a time, not far hence, when we can sit with our Moslem brothers and sisters among the ruins we have created, weep for their suffering, and ours, listen to the bells when they have stopped ringing, and wait for the unspoken words of grace, granted when hearts are at peace with themselves and their world.

For this, O Lord, we pray. Amen. Amen.

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