Vicar of Baghdad: 'I've looked through Quran trying to find forgiveness... there isn’t any' [Spectat

The Vicar of Baghdad: 'I've looked through the Quran trying to find forgiveness... there isn’t any.'

Isis bombs have exiled Canon Andrew White to Hampshire, but he's itching to get back to the Middle East

Mary Wakefield
21 November 2015

Canon Andrew White, the vicar of Baghdad, is not, in person, at all as I’d imagined him. His memoir, about life as first a medic, then a cleric, is chock-a-block with famous friends. Pope John Paul II was a pal, the Grand Ayatollah of Baghdad, General David Petraeus. ‘Oh, Andrew knows everyone,’ I was told when I asked anyone about him, and I’m afraid my heart hardened. I arrived in the rain at his house in Liphook, Hampshire, preparing myself for a vain man, full of his own derring-do.

More fool me. Canon White is instantly, unusually lovable. He greets me wearing a sweatshirt with the caption ‘Real men become vicars’. ‘Look!’ he says delightedly. ‘Look at my hoodie!’ We talk for close to two hours about Islam, Isis and evil, and his work as a mediator between the various hate-filled factions of the Middle East. By the time I leave it occurs to me that Canon Andrew White is something of a saint.

It’s not that he’s perfect, but that he’s guileless. He’s pure of heart in the way few people over five ever are. It makes sense that he’s spent two decades as a peace-maker, negotiating with tyrants and psychopaths, because he’s utterly disarming.

We sit in his study, which is arranged like a front room in the Middle East: seats around the walls. And on most of the seats, perched or lounging, is a young person, all employed by White’s foundation (for relief and reconciliation in the Middle East). Throughout our interview they fuss over White, organise him, join in the conversation, which is interrupted from time to time by phone calls from a man called Des who has been given the job of finding for the Canon the perfect red suit-lining.

I say: ‘I gather the Archbishop has recalled you. He’s said it’s not safe for you to stay in Baghdad?’ Canon Andrew nods glumly, but he admits that his friend Justin Welby has a point. They worked together mediating in Nigeria, so the archbishop is not risk-averse. But Isis are now too dangerous. ‘Isis are on the doorstep of Baghdad. Their bombs are going off all the time,’ says White. Not least last Friday, when, before the Paris atrocity, a suicide bomber blew up 18 Shia Muslims. Has he ever been personally threatened? ‘I invited an Isis man to dinner to talk once,’ says White, ‘But he replied -saying that if he came he would chop my head off.’

This sounds crude enough to be a bad joke. It wasn’t. And if White had his head removed he wouldn’t be the first member of his congregation to be assassinated by Isis.

St George’s, White’s church in Baghdad, once had a congregation of more than 6,000 and a school, a clinic and a food bank. This great community has been more than decimated by Isis. ‘They killed over 1,000 of my congregation,’ he says. ‘Can you believe that? And now the others have fled, too.’


Click here for the rest of the article:
http://new.spectator.co.uk/2015/11/...ut-hes-itching-to-go-back-to-the-middle-east/