This Paolo Dall'Oglio of the subtitle above, an Italian by birth, became a Jesuit, a scholar of Islam and a fluent speaker of Arabic. Beginning in the 1980s for 30 years, Paolo sought a dialogue among Muslims and Christians in Syria. This dialogue was mostly informal but it had its scholarly side also. Paolo began, often alone, by embracing the labor of reviving, stone by stone, a monastic building that had been abandoned 100 years earlier. High on a mountain that looks east to the Syrian desert, this monastery may have been first built in Roman times as a military watchtower to keep an eye on possible invaders.
When we began living in Syria in 2005, we would often be asked if we had visited Deir Mar Musa al Habashi: the monastery of Saint Moses the Abyssinian, this "Moses" being the legendary founder of several monasteries on his travels from eastern Africa to Roman Syria. By the time we left Syria in 2012, we had often traveled by bus an hour north from Damascus to visit this religious community.
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