by Paul L Maier
Other aspects of Jon’s preparation involved direct research, such as wandering into a local mosque and checking out its tract rack. Here there was plenty of free literature, including short biographies of Muhammad, guides to understanding Islam, excerpts from the Qur’an, as well as CDs and DVDs on Islam. Jon stocked up on this material and even left appropriate cash in a contribution box nearby.
What intrigued him the most, however, was a broad display sign across the whole width of the tract area with the words: ISLAM IS THE
WORLD’S FASTEST GROWING RELIGION FIND OUT WHY!
He had heard this claim so often in the secular press and even among Christians that he was intrigued enough to test it out. It took a bit of doing-more than simply checking Wikipedia.
The careful research of David Barrett, who had been tracking religious numbers for years, proved very helpful. Statistics in the World Christian Encyclopedia easily demonstrated that the banner over the tract rack in the mosque was quite mistaken and that the world’s fastest growing religion was, in fact, Christianity. With the southern hemisphere-Africa in particular-exploding for the faith, the conversion rate to Christianity was double that of conversion to Islam, and in some places, triple.
Even more compelling was evidence from Islam itself. Nearly by accident, Jon stumbled across comments by Ahmad al-Qataani, who was interviewed by Al Jazeera on December 12, 2006. Al-Qataani, leader of an organization advancing the science of Islamic law in Libya, stated, according to the translated Web transcript from Al Jazeera, “In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity. Every day, 16,000 Muslims convert, and every year, 6 million Muslims convert to Christianity. These numbers are very large indeed.”
Jon doubted, though, that there would be any value in using statistical claims in the debate, since numbers alone did not prove all that much. When the Christian church was founded on the Day of Pentecost, it numbered only some three thousand members.
Osman al-Ghazali proved very helpful in marshalling the most important arguments that Muslims use in defending their faith, and Jon found books by other Muslim converts to Christianity, such as by the Caner brothers, to be very helpful as well. The literature on Islam and Christianity was becoming a major genre in the publishing industry.
So, once again, it would be the Crescent versus the Cross, and the Cross versus the Crescent, Jon reflected. Would their forthcoming debate bring anything fresh to the table or become nothing more than a footnote in a fourteen-century face-off?
Two weeks before “the great debate,” Jon, Shannon, Richard Ferris, and Osman al-Ghazali were on a Turk Hava Yollari jet-Turkish Airlines flight 25 from JFK to Istanbul, a ten-hour odyssey. With a nod to American presidential election debates, they had already had a practice session at Harvard, in which al-Ghazali had presented Islam with such passion that Jon nearly thought he had returned to the teachings of the Prophet.
Jon had planned to use frequent flier miles to upgrade them all to business class, but Richard Ferris told him it was unnecessary. Although the ICO had made no fund appeal in any medium, financial gifts had poured into their Cambridge headquarters anyway. The American public was clearly sensitive to the world importance of this particular Muslim-Christian engagement.
Two members of Jon’s party did not have their expenses underwritten by the ICO. Instead, American taxpayers footed their bill, and no one was even supposed to know they had anything to do with Jon’s group. They were, of course, two agents from the CIA, one sitting by himself at the rearmost seat in business class on the left side of the plane, the other taking the same position on the right. Jon grinned as he noted their navy blue serge suits and ties. If they were supposed to look like tourists, wouldn’t khaki Dockers and sport shirts have been more appropriate?
The plane landed with an emphatic bump at Ataturk Havalimani, the international airport west of Istanbul. The Turkish morning was bright and hot as Jon’s party descended the lofty aluminum port-a-stairway from the front of the plane, a strong semisirocco blowing up from Africa to the south and sending swirls of dust into the air.
At passport control, a welcoming committee from the Turkish Ministry of Culture greeted them amiably, led by the dapper and amply mustachioed director himself, Adnan Yilmaz. He would be their liaison with the Turkish government throughout their visit. Once their baggage was in hand, he whisked them through the various gateways set up to screen out troublemakers. Curbside, he reminded them of the final planning meeting for the debate, to be held in three days at the U.S. consulate in Istanbul, then ushered them inside two black Mercedes limousines emblazoned with insignia from the Turkish government.
So far, so good, thought Shannon, who was torn between the thrill of finally visiting one of the most exotic cities on earth and the fear that somewhere in that vast metropolis of thirteen million, there had to be at least a dozen or so fanatics who felt that they would please Allah by assassinating her husband-or both of them.
Her dread, however, was soon drenched by the improbable vista unfolding before them. To the south were the sparkling sapphire waters of the Sea of Marmara, alive with ships of every variety sailing eastward or westward. Ahead and to the left, the central skyline of Istanbul grew ever larger, not with skyscrapers, as in other cities, but with huge, domed mosques, each surrounded by several stately minarets that looked for all the world like two- or three-stage guided missiles in stone, as if to guard the sanctity of the mosque.
Further eastward, and occupying the most commanding view of the waterfront, were the vast grounds of the Topkapi Palace-for centuries, the home of the great sultans of the Ottoman Empire that had at one time controlled the Mediterranean world and all of Balkan Europe as well. This was not one palace, but a virtual palatial city of its own, full of structures housing the sultans’ treasures in art and women too. From 1453 to the late nineteenth century, much of the world was ruled from here.
Jon was exuberant as he directed Shannon to the sights left and right. Their limos turned northward and were mounting the hill overlooking the Bosporus when he suddenly asked the driver to slow down.
“There, Shannon!” Jon exuded. “See those two great structures? The one to the left, with the six minarets, is the Blue Mosque. And the one to the right, with only four-” he suddenly shifted to a tone of near reverence-“is probably the greatest Christian monument in the entire world: Hagia Sophia.” He said the last in a choked whisper.
Shannon, too, was deeply moved. Hagia Sophia-Greek for “Holy Wisdom”-had been constructed 1,500 years ago by the great Byzantine emperor Justinian, who, on dedication day in AD 537, declared proudly, “Solomon, I have outdone thee!” He had indeed, with this first and largest domed structure in the world, the Christian exemplar from which every domed Muslim mosque since that time was patterned. And Hagia Sophia would be the place where the Muslim-Christian debate would take place that could change all of their lives.
“It’s such a shame that the Muslim conquerors added those minarets,” Shannon said. When Constantinople was taken over in 1453, the cathedral had been converted into a mosque. A mosque? Wait a minute…
“Jon, you can’t be planning to debate a Muslim opponent inside a mosque?”
He looked surprised. “Why not? I’m a generous sort and don’t mind giving him some home-field advantage.”
As he chuckled, the rest of her history knowledge fell into place. “Wait, I recall now. Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, converted Hagia Sophia from a mosque into a secular public museum.”
“Precisely.” Jon grinned. “But you were worried there for a minute, weren’t you?”
She swatted him playfully and sat back to enjoy the sights. Through crowded streets scented with dozens of different spices and jammed with humanity buying or selling at hundreds of open-air markets, the limos threaded their way down to the waterfront of the fabled Golden Horn. This was the inlet from the Bosporus-gilded each sunrise and sunset-that split the city and set off the triangular peninsula tip that was the heart
of Istanbul. They crossed the Galata Bridge and drove up another hill in the eastern sector of the city, atop which stood the Istanbul Hilton, their headquarters while in Turkey.
Jon and Shannon’s suite was on the top floor of the Hilton, and they walked out onto their balcony to take in the commanding view to the south and west. Below them sprawled the great Turkish metropolis, with millions of citizens packed into its boulevards, parkways, streets, and alleys. To the south flowed the majestic Bosporus, that great waterway channeling water from the Black Sea into the Sea of Marmara and eventually into the Aegean and Mediterranean. The ominous drone of ships’ horns filled the air as ferries scuttled between Europe and Asia-a distance no more than the width of the waterway at that point. On a north-south axis, the ferries had to interweave themselves between the huge cargo ships sailing an easterly-westerly vector, their staccato horn blasts advertising a near miss from time to time.
A knock on the door of their suite interrupted Shannon’s reverie. They walked back from the veranda, and Jon opened the door. It was their two “guardian angels” from the CIA who wanted to sweep the room for any listening devices. Their code names were merely Click and Clack-perhaps in honor of the Tappet brothers on National Public Radio?-and they brushed off all requests for further identification, genially but firmly. Despite their best efforts, no bugs were found.
“Still,” Clack advised, “I wouldn’t mention anything supersensitive inside here.”
“Do we go out onto the balcony, then?” Jon asked.
“Never! Anyone down below could home in on you with telescopic audio.”
Shannon sighed. It seemed that from now on, the panoramic view would have to be enjoyed from within the safe confines of their suite.
Early the next afternoon, Jon and Shannon had an audience with the personage who had innocently lured them almost halfway across the world, the man with the official title, His All Holiness, Bartholomew II, Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch, who was the 271st successor to the Apostle Andrew. Jon had already met and enjoyed instant rapport with the eastern pope at the Vatican III Council in Rome, the ecumenical conclave where a potential disaster to Christianity had been avoided.
The Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate was located on the eastern edge of the old city just north of the Sultan Selim mosque and overlooking the Golden Horn. The patriarchate was heavily walled-as was so much in that area of the world-but here with more reason. It had been subject to repeated bomb attacks by Muslim terrorists in recent years-a fact deplored by the secularist government of Turkey and the reason there was an official guard station near the entrance.
Inside the gate, Jon and Shannon received a warm welcome from an aide to the patriarch and were given a brief tour of the premises, including St. George’s Chapel with its great chandeliers of shimmering crystal. In the reception hall stood a lofty dais on two levels. On the upper dais was a throne to seat not a human being but a beautifully illuminated Bible, attesting to the supremacy of Scripture. Immediately in front of it but on the lower dais stood the patriarch’s throne of gold with red silk cushions that Bartholomew would have occupied were this a state reception.
Jon and Shannon were received instead at the patriarch’s residence across the courtyard, where the great man himself greeted them with surprising warmth and excellent English. “I bid you welcome in the name of our sovereign Lord, Professor Weber, and also to you, madam.”
“This is my wife, Shannon, Your All Holiness,” Jon explained. “Thank you for this gracious audience.”
He bowed slightly. “No, it is our Christian community in Turkey and I who must extend gratitude to you for coming to defend our faith here in the heart of Islam.”
Bartholomew closely matched Jon in height, though with a stockier frame. He was a figure of authority in his late sixties, attired in a robe of basic black and clutching what was either a bishop’s staff or something of a tall cane-perhaps both. His face, animated with a pair of blazing blue eyes and a broad smile, was edged by a great beard of almost gleaming white that began at his temples and plunged downward halfway to his cincture. A large golden medallion with the heraldry of his office dangled from a chain, apparently having escaped the frosty forest that covered half his chest. By any standards, this was one striking man.
The patriarch ordered refreshments and led them to his office, which had an expansive view of the Golden Horn. Predictably, they first discussed the forthcoming debate and their respective roles in that exchange. When Shannon joined the conversation, her queries were usually about security matters, particularly when Bartholomew told of the series of bombings at the patriarchate. Inevitably, this begged her question, “How safe are Christians in Turkey, Your All Holiness?”
“As you must know, Madame Weber,” he replied, “even though Istanbul is at the dividing line between the Christian West and the Muslim East, Christians number less than one percent of the Turkish population, and we do have a militant Muslim minority that does not mean us well. However, the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, decreed that this nation would be a secular -not a religious-state, and the army has always enforced that mandate, even to the point of overthrowing several Turkish governments in the past that tried to favor Islam. At present, even though the religious parties seem to be growing in power, I truly believe the Turkish government will remain secular and provide us the protection that we need.”
Jon could hardly wait to bend the conversation in a new direction. Truth to tell, his ultimate goal was less to pit Christianity against Islam-he had not sought the debate, after all-and more to search the archives of the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate for precious manuscripts. He used history as his segue.
“Your All Holiness,” he began deliberately after a slight lull in their dialogue, “here in Constantinople-and I prefer to use its time-honored name-we have probably the most extraordinary city in the world. I find it remarkable that after Rome fell, New Rome-Constantinople-survived for another thousand years. It was this city, this cork in the bottle of Muslim expansionism, that virtually saved Christianity in eastern Europe. In the West, Islam rolled across North Africa, crossed at Gibraltar, conquered Spain, and then invaded France until the Muslim forces were finally stopped just south of Paris. But for Constantinople, the same could have happened in the East.”
“Well, for a while, it seemed as though it might,” Shannon joined in. “When this great city fell in 1453, Islamic hordes poured into the Balkans, conquering everything up to Vienna, where they were turned back by a Christian Europe that could now finally defend itself. What if there had been no Constantinople?”
Bartholomew had been nodding his concurrence. “Eastern Islamic forces would have joined with their Western forces and European Christianity would probably have been vanquished-as it has been wherever Muslims have conquered.”
Shannon added, “I have little patience with some of our bleeding hearts who point to the church’s great ‘sin’ in the case of the Crusades. That’s a myopia that sees only halfway into the past. If we ever ask ‘Who took more from whom-Islam or Christianity?’ there’s no contest. Christianity has taken not one square foot of territory from Islam that it did not originally possess, whereas Islam has taken Asia Minor, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, all of North Africa, and part of the Balkans from Christianity.”
“How very, very true, Madame Weber. I wish all Christians were as well informed. So often they can see back only to the Crusades.”
Jon saw his opening and plunged in. “And the losses to Christianity have been staggering, particularly here in Constantinople. Think of the precious church documents that were destroyed here-some probably from the time of Constantine or even earlier. By the way, wasn’t Constantine buried here?”
“Oh yes, indeed,” Bartholomew replied. “He was buried in the Hagioi Apostoloi, the Church of the Holy Apostles. He built the church and wanted to gather relics of all twelve apostles for the sanctuary, but he got only St. Andrew. Well, also the bon
es of St. Luke and St. Timothy. So yes, Constantine and his sons were buried here, and so were Justinian and Theodora and their family, as well as many of the Byzantine emperors and my patriarch predecessors-St. John Chrysostom, too. That wonderful basilica was second in importance only to Hagia Sophia itself.”
“Is it still standing?” Shannon asked.
Bartholomew shook his head sadly. “The Holy Apostles was rebuilt by Justinian in the year 550, just after Hagia Sophia, and it stood nine hundred more years until the Ottomans conquered Constantinople. That’s when the conqueror, Sultan Mehmed II, turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque and moved our patriarchate into the Holy Apostles. But when that church got surrounded by Turkish settlers who were hostile to Christians, Mehmed demolished the church and built the Fatih Camii on the site, the Mosque of the Conqueror. In fact, he’s buried there. And that mosque still stands, almost in the center of the Old City.”
“Where did the patriarchate relocate?” Jon inquired.
“To the Church of St. Mary Pammakaristos in the Christian district-and eventually, of course, to this place.”
“What happened to the treasures of the Church of the Holy Apostles-its icons, sculptures, sacred books, manuscripts, and-”
“The Venetians,” the patriarch muttered darkly, then, more distinctly. “What history calls the Fourth Crusade-although it was conceived and born in hell-invaded Constantinople instead of the Holy Land in 1204 and plundered the city. The Venetians even looted the Church of the Twelve Apostles, opening the tombs of the emperors-even the sepulchre of Justinian-and carting off their silver, gold, and jewels!”