The Unlikely Place Where Syria’s Muslims And Christians Become Friends
NABK, Syria — The climb to Mar Musa al-Habashi monastery is deliberate and demanding — 340 stone steps wind up a stark, treeless mountain ridge in the Qalamun region, north of Damascus, offering nothing to the weary except an expanding vista and the growing certainty that you are meant to be here, or you are not.
For Father Paolo Dall'Oglio, an Italian Jesuit who arrived in Syria in 1982, those steps represented something far more significant than a physical challenge. They were a pathway to a calling that would reshape how an entire generation understood the possibility of religious dialogue in the Muslim world.
Walking where a fifth-century saint once walked, Dall'Oglio discovered not just history, but a blueprint for a different way of being together.
Saint Moses the Abyssinian, or Moses the Black, as some traditions call him, lived a life that reads like scripture written in paradox. Born in Ethiopia to privilege, trained as a brigand and bandit leader, the saint's dramatic conversion mirrors the arc of redemption itself: From violence to contemplation, lawlessness to devotion and the world to a cave on a Syrian mountainside, where he spent decades in prayer until Bedouin raiders ended his life around the year 405 AD.
By the time Dall'Oglio arrived at the monastery bearing Saint Moses's name, the buildings had been abandoned for nearly 300 years. A Roman watchtower from the second century had been transformed into a monastic site in the sixth, then left to the shepherds and hunters when the monks departed in the early 1700s, driven away by instability, scarcity, and dwindling community.
Dall'Oglio saw differently. He saw restoration, not retrieval. He saw the possibility.
"In Syria generally, and in Syrian Christianity and in Syrian Islam," he said, “I discovered the embodiment of my spiritual dreams and desires.”
He learned Arabic. He sat in Islamic law classes at Damascus University. He studied the Qur'an and between 1984 and 1991, with volunteers from Syria, Lebanon, and Italy, he rebuilt the monastery, not as a museum to the past, but as a platform for something unprecedented in the region: a systematic, authentic interfaith encounter rooted not in argument, but in shared spiritual experience.
A vision of togetherness
The dialogue Dall’Oglio advocated for was radically different from what most people meant when they used that word.
Father Jihad, who now leads the monastery, describes it with precision: "We were not trying to convince others that Christianity is right and they are wrong. We were not debating the theological differences we already know exist. Instead, we work on building friendship and harmony through respect for religions and learning from one another's spiritual experience."
This distinction matters. Rather than a debate club with creeds as arguments, the monastery became something closer to a school for spiritual friendship.
The dialogue operated on four levels, Father Jihad explains.
First came hospitality itself, the way visitors were welcomed not despite their faith identity, but through it. A Muslim guest would be received as a Muslim, and the monks would speak to him using Qur'anic terminology to explain Christian theology. Respect for difference became the first utterance.
Second was daily collaboration. Muslim and Christian employees worked the gardens, managed beekeeping operations, and coordinated environmental initiatives with the nearby town of al-Nabk. In the dirt and the daily routines, sectarian abstractions became irrelevant.
Third was the spiritual dimension, prayers offered for the well-being of the Muslim world, a commitment that transcended polite ecumenism and moved into genuine intercessory practice.
Finally came structured dialogue: seminars where Muslims and Christians spoke from their own traditions to one another, seeking understanding rather than agreement, exchange rather than conquest.
For years, it worked. The monastery became a pilgrimage site, a gathering place where Syrian Sunnis, Shias, Christians, Druze, and Alawites encountered one another not as historical adversaries but as neighbors interested in spiritual common ground.
Jaber Bakr, a journalist and activist who first visited in 2007, said he recalled discovering "a concept of dialogue as a way of living together, rather than merely a way of speaking."
The wound and the witness
The Syrian uprising, when it took place in 2011, shattered much of what had been built.
The Bashar Al Assad regime, sensing ideological threat in an interfaith space that predated the revolution by decades, had already begun isolating the monastery by 2010, after a seminar on religious discourse renewal that Bakr describes as decisive in the regime's calculation. The natural preserve was dissolved. Activities ceased. The gates, though never quite locked, received fewer pilgrims.
Dall’Oglio, whose sympathies for the uprising were known, faced increasing pressure. He died in 2013, reported killed in custody, though his final fate remains officially undetermined. The monastery lost its founder, and Syria lost one of its most remarkable voices for coexistence.
But something survived. The monks remained. The doors stayed open. And when the military tide shifted and the immediate fighting receded, something unexpected happened: the monastery reopened not as a museum to a lost vision, but as an active site of witness to the wounds the war had created.
Healing through recognition
What emerged was not the same dialogue as before, but perhaps a deeper one. Father Jihad and others at the monastery, working with activists like Bakr and the physician Ayman Issa, began organizing visits to what they call "wounded places", communities that had suffered catastrophic loss, neighborhoods torn by sectarian violence, families fractured by disappearance and death.
These were not confidence-building missions in the traditional sense. They were pilgrimages to pain. "We search for wounded people," Jihad said. "We listen to their suffering. We share difficult stories. We grieve together. We cry together. We discover that others suffered as we suffered, and perhaps suffered because of us. We need to discover the other — the one we were afraid of, the one we forgot, the one we ignored."
The monastery organized a dialogue on prison experiences, where former detainees from across Syria's political spectrum spoke to one another. They placed the names of the disappeared on the monastery's trees as a memorial. An initiative called "Gardens of Figs" brought people together to process collective trauma through shared remembrance.
Mussab al-Baqai, a young activist from rural Damascus whose life was upended by displacement, attended these gatherings with deep skepticism.
"Honestly, I didn't believe in interfaith dialogue at all," he recalled. "I thought religions were simply different, and each condemned the other. I always hesitated to visit a Christian monastery or participate in anything, even secular community work."
But meeting Father Jihad changed something. Watching people from different sectarian backgrounds speak of their suffering and hear one another's pain shifted Baqai's understanding of what dialogue could actually do.
“I saw that everyone involved was open to everything, held a complete Syrian nationalist commitment, and had a moderate religious discourse. I saw how people relaxed when they told their stories,” he added.
These gatherings don't resolve the structural violence that tore Syria apart. They don't restore what was lost. But in a landscape of mutual suspicion so complete that many Syrians exist in isolation from one another, coastal communities estranged from Idlib, Damascus separated from rural neighbors, the monastery offers something scarce: A place where the other is not a threat or an abstraction, but a person whose grief somehow mirrors your own.
Today, the climb to Mar Musa al-Habashi remains as demanding as it was four decades ago. The barren ridges and sparse vegetation have not changed. But the small church with its frescoes weathered by time, the simple cells of the monks, the tables arranged in the courtyard, and the names carved on trees, these have become something more than a monastery.
They have become a record of what is possible when spiritual vision refuses to acknowledge the borders that violence insists upon.
"We want to tell Syrians that you are not alone," Ayman Issa said. "We are with you. We are trying to heal wounds. We hope that with time, our initiative will grow and reach the national level.”
This aritcle is published in collaboration with Egab.
Mawada Bahah is an independent Syrian journalist with bylines in local, regional and international outlets.