ANKARA // Pope Francis on Friday called for dialogue between faiths to end the Islamist extremism plaguing the Middle East as he paid his first visit to Turkey, an overwhelmingly Muslim but officially secular state.
The Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who welcomed the pope as the first foreign dignitary to his new presidential palace outside Ankara, for his part issued a strong warning about rising Islamophobia in the world.
The visit of the pope is seen as a crucial test of Francis’s ability to build bridges between faiths amid the rampage by ISIL extremists in Iraq and Syria and concerns over the persecution of Christian minorities in the Middle East.
“Sadly, to date, we are still witnessing grave conflicts. In Syria and Iraq, particularly, terrorist violence shows no signs of abating,” the pope said after talks with Mr Erdogan.
“Inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogue can make an important contribution ... so that there will be an end to all forms of fundamentalism and terrorism,” the leader of the world’s Roman Catholics added.
The pope also said all faiths should share the same rights.
“It is essential that all citizens – Muslim, Jewish and Christian – both in the provision and practice of the law, enjoy the same rights and respect the same duties.”
Turkey’s Christian community is only 80,000 in a country of 75 million Muslims but consists of Armenians, Greek Orthodox, Franco-Levantines, Syriac Orthodox and Chaldeans.
Mr Erdogan has long been accused of seeking to erode Turkey’s secular foundations with creeping Islamisation.
But he also presents himself as a friend of the country’s extremely small but varied non-Muslim minorities.
He chose the occasion to make a characteristically strong-worded warning against growing Islamophobia in the world, which he warned risked further dividing Muslims and Christians.
“Islamophobia is rising seriously and rapidly. We must work together against the threats weighing on our planet – intolerance, racism and discrimination,” Mr Erdogan said.
Pope Francis also met Mehmet Gormez, Turkey’s top cleric, and other religious officials gathered at the government-run Religious Affairs Directorate and called on Muslim leaders to condemn the “barbaric violence” being committed in Islam’s name against religious minorities in Iraq and Syria.
“As religious leaders, we are obliged to denounce all violations against human dignity and human rights,” Francis told Mr Gormez. “As such, any violence which seeks religious justification warrants the strongest condemnation”, he said.
Stressing Turkey’s opposition to extremists, Mr Gormez told the pope: “Those who veer away from the message of Islam – which is a call for peace – and spread violence and savagery are in a state of rebellion against Allah no matter what they call themselves.”
The pope will move to Istanbul on Saturday and Sunday, visiting key sites of the city’s Byzantine and Ottoman heritage as well as meeting the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I.
A subject of keen attention will be the pope’s visit in Istanbul on Saturday to the Hagia Sophia, the great Byzantine church that was turned into a mosque after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and now serves as a museum.
His every gesture will be scrutinised later in the day when he visits the Sultan Ahmet mosque, known as the Blue Mosque, one of the greatest masterpieces of Ottoman architecture.
When Benedict XVI visited the mosque in 2006, he assumed the Muslim attitude of prayer and turned towards Mecca in what many saw as a stunning gesture of reconciliation.
The pope addressed the problems of the 1.6 million refugees from the Syria conflict being hosted by Turkey, although a previously rumoured visit to a refugee camp no longer appears to be on the cards.
“The international community has the moral obligation to assist Turkey in taking care of these refugees,” Francis said alongside Erdogan.
In his talks with Bartholomew I – the “first among equals” of the world’s estimated 300 million Orthodox believers – the pope will seek to narrow the schism between the two Churches that dates back to 1054.
Papal visits to Turkey are still a rarity – Francis will be just the fourth pope to visit the country after Benedict in 2006, John Paul II in 1979 and Paul VI in 1967.
* Agence France-Presse and Associated Press
