(Photo: Bethany baptismal pool with ruins of ancient basilicas in rear, a staircase to the water and, at right, two of the four massive pillars that used to hold a church above the baptism site, 6 May 2009/Tom Heneghan)

In John’s Gospel, verse 1:28, it says that John the Baptist used to baptise people in “Bethany beyond the Jordan” and Jesus went there for his own baptism. Seen from the perspective of Jerusalem, “beyond the Jordan” means on the river’s east bank, in present-day Jordan. Those words were added to distinguish that Bethany from the village near Jerusalem where Jesus was said to have raised Lazarus from the dead. Despite that, pilgrims have long visited a spot on the river’s west bank, now in an Israeli military zone in the Palestinian territories, and considered it the true site where Jesus was baptised.

For about a decade or so, Jordan has been contesting that claim with excavations at a site on the river’s east bank that it argues must be the real place. Following John’s Gospel (the others only speak of the river itself) and descriptions from pilgrims dating back to the fourth to twelfth centuries, Jordanian archeologists have uncovered ruins of five ancient churches and a wide array of other remains and artifacts pointing to the area’s use as a pilgrimage site.

(Photo: Israeli flag on west bank across Jordan River and Greek Orthodox church on the east bank Bethany site, 6 May 2009//Jamal Saidi)

Pope John Paul’s visit to Bethany in 2000 was a coup for Jordan, which is keen to establish its site as a major centre for Christian pilgrims. But he also slipped in a quick visit to Qasr al Yahud, the west bank site across the river, to avoid any impression of partiality. Pope Benedict doesn’t seem to have the same concern — he’s coming to Bethany only and not planning any stop at the rival site. See our news story on this here.

If you ever visit the site and have a stroke of luck, as a group of English pilgrims did when I toured the area on Wednesday, you’ll come across a bundle of energy named Rustom Mkhjian who explains the site’s claim to authenticity with nothing short of missionary zeal. Mkhjian, a Jordanian engineer and Armenian Orthodox Christian, is assistant director of the Baptism Site Commission. For the past 12 years, he has been working at the site unearthing the foundations of ancient churches and matching passages from the Bible to facts on the ground. He was showing me around when the English group came up to the baptismal pool and their Jordanian guide introduced him as the real expert to tell the story.

With that, Mkhjian, a wiry man of 49 who studied civil engineering in Britain and monument restoration in Rome, launched into a short presentation quoting the gospels of John and Luke and the main testimonies from pilgrims down the ages. This historical background is well explained on the informative Baptism Site website. The site also shows plans for the new churches being built a short walk from the baptismal site and a gallery of photos of VIP visitors to date.

For the issue of the rivalry with Qasr al Yahud, the pages under “authentication” are the most interesting. Over the past few years, several Christian denominations have written letters backing Bethany’s claim (and thanking Jordan for permission to build churches there). The latest was star U.S. evangelical pastor Rick Warren, who praised “the opening of this authentic site where Jesus (Peace be upon him) was baptized.” Editorial comment: that PBUH — a regular addition in Muslim countries for the Prophet Mohammad — seems like a translation from the Arabic. Warren must have written something positive, but I didn’t use this quote in my news story because it didn’t sound right.

(Photo: Tourists visit Bethany baptism site, 6 May 2009/Jamal Saidi)

Qasr al Yahud, which is still in an Israeli military zone and open only occasionally to Christian pilgrims, enjoys none of this promotion and apparently little or no similar evidence amassed to support its claim. In the original draft of my story, I wrote that Israel seemed to have lost interest in promoting it. But our Jerusalem bureau intervened to say that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had just announced some economic aid programs for the Palestinian territories that included Qasr al Yahud. We inserted that into the story but still don’t have many details of what he plans.

The English pilgrimage group that borrowed Mkhjian from me for 10 minutes included some who had been here three years ago, when the pool was but a small puddle because the water table was lower at that part of the year. Wondering why it was now much bigger, one joked that it might have been filled up for the pope’s visit on Sunday. “You can’t bring a pope all this way just to see a puddle,” he quipped. As soon as I identified myself as a reporter and asked if I could quote him, the man seemed to think he’d said something sacrilegious and nervoslsy asked not to be named!

My photo on the  right shows the not-very-impressive Jordan River near the baptism site. Todays’s Jordan River is only about 10 metres (yards) wide and lies low in a riverbed lined by tamarinds and reeds. The baptism site is off to the right, on a flood plain about seven metres (yards) higher than the river. The Jordan used to be wider, but dams upstream have diverted much of its former flow for agricultural or industrial use.

A group of academic and civil rights organisations has written to the Obama administration asking it to end U.S. visa refusals to foreign scholars apparently because of their political leanings. Probably the best known of these cases is that of Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss-born Islamic scholar who was just about to take up a chair at the University of Notre Dame in 2004 when a visa already issued to him was suddenly revoked. Ramadan is a leading Muslim intellectual in Europe with a strong following among young Muslims who like his message that they can be good European and good Muslims at the same time.

(Photo: Ramadan at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome during a Muslim-Catholic Forum, 6 Nov 2008/Alessandro Bianchi)

Currently teaching Islamic theology at Oxford University, he is viewed with deep suspicion in France but well received in Britain (see, for example, the cover of Prospect magazine pictured below). Pope Benedict received him at the Vatican last November as part of a delegation of Muslim scholars to a Muslim-Catholic dialogue. No matter what one thinks of his views, he is an active figure in the debate about Islam and the West and deserves to be heard in serious discussions on the topic.

The American Civil Liberties Union will plead his case for lifting the ban before the U.S. Court of Appeals in New York on March 24. Given the way President Barack Obama has rolled back several policies of the preceding Bush administration, there could now be a chance that Washington will simply lift the ban and let Ramadan take up the many invitations to speak that he would probably get from U.S. universities and think tanks. That would be a victory for academic freedom, but it still leaves one question unanswered.

When a U.S. federal judge upheld the ban in 2007, Ramadan was told he had been barred because he gave 1,670 Swiss Francs ($1,487) to the Association de Secours Palestinien (Palestinian Aid Association — ASP) from 1998 to 2002. Washington banned ASP in 2003, saying it supports terrorism and had contributed funds to Hamas, and the government has argued Ramadan should have known he was giving to a group that supported terrorism. He has replied that he could not have known that before the U.S. government did.

This official explanation has never sounded convincing and it always seemed Ramadan was being punished for his political views, which are left-wing, pro-Palestinian and critical of the Bush administration. I suspect there was something else going on behind the scenes, either a political decision made by administration officials or a direct intervention by someone or some body outside the administration who was opposed to letting him speak freely in the U.S. Ramadan himself has blamed Daniel Pipes, a controversial U.S. commentator on Islam who welcomed the ban. Other suggestions are French government officials or intellectuals who dislike the way he promotes a kind of Muslim pride and ensures religion remains a public issue.

If the Obama administration does lift the ban, let’s hope it goes all the way and publishes any Bush administration paperwork explaining it, so we can see a more convincing explanation for keeping him out of the United States.

Right-wing Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who is being prosecuted at home for anti-Islam remarks, has been barred from entering Britain.

He had been invited to show the House of Lords his film "Fitna," which argues that the Koran incites violence, but was told his opinions could "threaten community harmony and therefore public safety" and sent back home again when he arrived at Heathrow.

Defending the decision to bar him, Foreign Secretary David Miliband said: "A hate-filled film designed to stir up religious and racial hatred in this country is contrary to our laws."

But Wilders called Gordon Brown the biggest coward in Europe and added: "I think a discussion is always better than barring people or turning people away."

Do you think he should have been allowed in to show his film?

Rabbi Marc Schneier, a New York Jewish leader who has helped to build bridges with American Muslims, is planning to bring his campaign to Europe to help ease the anger fed by bloodshed in Gaza. “In the light of the recent conflict in Gaza, Jewish-Muslim tensions have been exacerbated,” Schneier, vice-president of the World Jewish Congress, told Reuters during a recent visit to London. “We have seen a rise, I would say an exponential growth in anti-Semitic attacks, rhetoric coming from the Muslim world. We cannot allow for Islamic fundamentalism to grow.”

(Photo: Rabbi Marc Schneier/FFEU)

Schneier helped to bring together thousands of Jews and Muslims across America last November in an initiative in which 50 mosques were twinned with 50 synagogues over a weekend. Jews and Muslims worked together in community projects, formed study groups and got a better understanding of each other’s faith. They publicised this in the short video below and a full-page ad in the New York Times available here in PDF.

An eloquent and persuasive speaker, Schneier has advocated closer links between Jewish and Afro-American communities through the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, where he has worked with hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons.

Schneier feels there is a need for action at the grass-roots level to help heal the rift between Jewish and Muslim communities in Europe.  He is planning to repeat his ”Weekend of Twinning” this November and wants to extend it to Britain from North America.  “Jewish-Muslim relations are a great concern here in Europe, so we wanted to bring this programme across the Atlantic,” he said.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews told me they were very interested in the project and wanted to develop it here, building on their own linking programme. However, the climate is not easy.  Israel’s invasion of Gaza in which more than 1,300 Palestinians were killed has sparked fresh tensions between the two groups in Europe.

An umbrella group of French Jewish groups last week asked French President Nicolas Sarkozy to ensure that authorities do more to stem a rise in anti-Jewish crime. Britain has also seen protests over Israel’s campaign.

(Photo: Pro-Palestinian protesters in Paris, 24 Jan 2009/Gonzalo Fuentes)

Schneier dismissed concerns that members of close-knit Muslim communities in European countries such as Britain and France would be harder to reach than their counterparts in the United States, who tend to be better integrated into U.S. life.

“The challenge here is more of a language barrier than a social or cultural barrier. What we did in North America wasn’t an easy task either. There was much hesitation on both sides,” he said. “I see around the world there are pockets of moderation emerging within Islam. We cannot spurn the hands of the moderates in the Muslim world.”

Schneier’s initiative seems to be working in the United States, but can it be transplanted to Europe? We’d like to hear your comments here.

The uproar over traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson and his denial of the Holocaust highlights an open secret here in Rome: Vatican departments don’t talk to each much, or at least as much as they should. The pope appears to have decided to lift the 1988 excommunication of four schismatic bishops of the SSPX (including Williamson) without the wide consultation that it may have merited. The Christian Unity department, which also oversees relations with Jews, was apparently kept out of the loop. The head of the office, Cardinal Walter Kasper, told The New York Times it was the pope’s decision. Kasper’s office and the Vatican press office, headed by Father Federico Lombardi, were clearly not prepared for the media onslaught that followed the discovery of Williamson’s views denying the Holocaust.

(Photo: Bishop Richard Williamson, 28 Feb 2007/Jens Falk)

Pope Benedict’s lifting of the ban and Williamson’s comments about the Holocaust are unrelated as far as Church law is concerned. The excommunications lifted last Saturday were imposed because the four were ordained without Vatican permission. As Father Thomas Resse, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, told me: “The Holocaust is a matter of history, not faith. Being a Holocaust denier is stupid but not against the faith. Being anti-Semitic, however, is a sin.” This is an important distinction, but not one the Vatican seems to be able to get across.

It was all very reminiscent of the pope’s Regensburg speech in 2006. Few in the Vatican knew it was coming. The Vatican was overwhelmed by the Muslim reaction and the media interest. This time, it is also not clear how many people in the Vatican even knew about Williamson’s history. Surely, those negotiating with the traditionalists for the lifting of the excommunications should  have known. If they didn’t, why didn’t they? If they did, why did they not tell Kasper’s department? The Holocaust is such a sensitive issue for Jews that this response could have been seen from miles away.

(Photo: Pope Benedict speaks at Regensburg University, 21 Sept 2006/KNA)

Even if the Vatican felt the rapprochement with the traditionalists was necessary, a clear and severe distancing from Williamson’s views issued simultaneously to the announcement of the lifting of the excommunications certainly would not have hurt.

It is still too early to gauge the public relations fallout within the Jewish community and in the Church itself. In all the years I have been covering Catholic-Jewish relations, this is the biggest blow-up I can recall — bigger than the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, the Good Friday prayer,  the controversy over Pius XII or the late Pope John Paul receiving Arafat.  It will take a long time for this one to heal. Those involved in Catholic-Jewish dialogue say it will go on. It will.

In 2003, several Reuters correspondents — including myself — published a book entitled “Pope John Paul, Reaching Out Across Borders.” One contributor, Alan Elsner, is Jewish and lost relatives in the Belzec death camp in Poland in 1942. He concluded his chapter on Catholic relations with Jews with this paragraph:

“For the Jews, the central question to be put to Christians remains, in the words of Rabbi Michael Signer ‘Can we trust you, can we trust you now?’ For Pope John Paul, the answer was a resounding ‘yes’. It will be for his successor to provide an answer for the future.”

The members of Italy’s atheist association probably would not fill one of the side chapels of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. But that’s not stopping the group from launching an unprecedented ad campaign on buses in Italian cities, much like the one recently started in Britain.

(Photo: Planned Italian bus ads/UAAR)

The Italian Union of Atheists and Rationalist Agnostics (UAAR) will run the ads on four buses in the northern city of Genoa next month. The ads, which will cover the entire bus painted a soothing sky blue, read: “The bad news is that God doesn’t exist. The good news is that you don’t need him.”

The Padua-based group is launching the campaign in Genoa because advertising is much more expensive in other large cities such as Milan and Rome. But Genoa is also home to Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, the president of  the Italian Bishops Conference. According to some Italian reports, one of the buses will pass near his residence.

The group claims to have some 3,000 members and says it has received many more contributions since news of the bus campaign.  UAAR, which has chapters in 40 Italian cities, says if more funds come in,  it will take the campaign to Pope Benedict’s backyard in Rome. It says it decided to run the ads because the Italian media pays no attention to atheists. It added that Italian politicians “don’t always have to say ‘yes’ to the Church.”

The UAAR says it got the ad idea from the British Humanist Association, but it didn’t follow the London example completely. The British ads say “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” One would have thought the British atheists would be more decisive than Italian ones in denying the deity.

(Photo: British atheist Richard Dawkins in a London bus, 6 Jan 2009/Andrew Winning)

Atheists in Barcelona, London and Washington have already run ads like this and more are bound to come elsewhere. Do you find these offensive? Humourous?  A waste of valuable ad space? Do you think atheists get ignored by the mainstream media?

Articles about Islamic finance are usually long on finance and short on Islam. Knowing that the various schools of Islam can interpret and apply sharia in different ways, I recently wondered how this looked in the financial sector, especially since Islamic banking has spread in recent years and non-Muslim institutions and investors were getting into the business. A conference on Islamic banking in France brought several sharia scholars to Paris, so I took the opportunity to interview them for the news story posted here.

While the financial side wants as much standardisation as possible, the scholars insist it would be un-Islamic to impose rules that apply fully around the world. So rulings from the sharia boards of financial institutions can differ, although the existence of voluntary standards — such as those worked out by the Accounting and Auditing Organisation for Islamic Financial Institutions (AAOIFI) in Bahrain — has helped to harmonise them. Also, the fact that individual scholars sit on several sharia boards at the same time brings a certain conformity.

But, as Mufti Barkatulla told me, there are not enough young scholars entering the field. A sharia board needs a minimum of three members and can have up to 10, depending on its workload, he said. The problem is that acquiring the needed knowledge can take years. Barkatulla himself was a sharia judge at London’s Central Mosque for 30 years, mostly ruling on family issues such as divorce, before getting involved in Islamic finance five years ago. Like him, Sheikh Nizam Yaquby of Bahrain, another scholar at the Paris conference, continues to decide such family cases in addition to his work in the world of finance.

In my story, Mufti Ahmed Said Louqman Ingar from Reunion, the French Indian Ocean island, explained how Islamic financing products there needed approval by local scholars before clients would trust them. Jérôme Pignolet de Fresnes, a French banker with experience in Islamic finance in Reunion, said his bank gets two sharia rulings for its new products, one from a local and one from a foreign sharia board. “We try to take the lowest common denominator so everyone can accept the product,” he said.

The non-story at the conference was the question of Islamic retail banking in France. The government is adjusting local regulations to allow French financial institutions to compete with London in the lucrative Islamic bond market. But although bankers outside France often point to its 5-million-strong Muslim minority — the largest such group in Europe — as a natural market for Islamic retail banking, a Finance Ministry official said there was no demand for it there and so no plans to accommodate it.

The Jewel of Medina, a novel about the Prophet Mohammad’s child bride Aisha already linked to an arson attack in London, was rushed into U.S. bookstores on Monday in a bid to head off any other violence. Author Sherry Jones says it’s a respectful account of Aisha’s life but Random House baulked at publishing it after being warned it could offend Muslims and provoke violence from a “small, radical segment”.

Publisher Eric Kampmann, president of the Beaufort Books company whose London office was firebombed, told Reuters that the surprise measure would help change the discussion about the book. “We felt that, given what was happening, it was better for everybody… to let the conversation switch from a conversation about terrorists and fearful publishers to a conversation about the merits of the book itself,” he said.

Comments from Muslims in Britain about The Jewel of Medina have been mixed, with some approving a vigorous protest and others saying their views have evolved since the Rushdie affair. Comments on blogs since the novel went out to U.S. bookshops range from those criticising it as a “flawed jewel”, those (like Ayaan Hirsi Ali) cheering the publisher for not caving in and those urging Muslims not to be provoked even by this “distorted picture of Aisha”. Some, citing a review saying it’s just a “second-rate bodice ripper-style romance”, wonder what the fuss is all about.

People who protest violently against a book usually haven’t read it and have no intention of doing so. This was the case with Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses — and has been with many other books that had nothing to do with Islam. So is Kampmann’s strategy a smart move or a naive attempt to get hotheads to read first and shout later?

“Suicide tourism” in Switzerland exerts a morbid fascination on the media. The assisted suicide group Dignitas, which opened in 1998, is rarely out of the news, especially in Britain (here are some of the latest stories on Google). In a rare interview last March, its founder Ludwig Minelli said it had helped 840 people to die to date, 60% of them Germans.

Another “right to die” group, Exit, gets less attention abroad because it only deals with Swiss citizens. But it seems to be just as active, if not more so. Founded in 1982, it says it gets 150-180 requests for assisted suicide annually.

There have been several polls showing general public support for these groups — the latest one says 61 percent of the Swiss approve of assisted suicide. But until recently, there has not been any serious study of the people who seek these groups out. Are there patterns in the types of people or their reasons for ending their lives this way?

A new study by the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) has examined 229 official written requests for assisted suicide in Zurich in a search for any significant patterns. Most findings of the study, presented at a European Association of Centres of Medical Ethics (EACME) conference that ended at the weekend in Prague, are not surprising. The candidates cited reasons such as wanting to end suffering or avoiding being a burden on their families. No single motivation stood out as the most frequent.

But there was one statistic that did. Women made up 61.9% of the candidates for assisted suicide considered in the study (64.4% over the total in Zurich from 2001 to 2004) and men only 38.1% of those studied (or 35.6% of the overall total).

“We could not find any pattern to explain why there were so many more women than men,” said Romy Mahrer Imhof, the ZHAW nursing lecturer who presented the study.

They need to study this more.

Are we headed for another “Rushdie affair” over the yet-to-be-published novel The Jewel of Medina? First an American publisher withdrew its plan to publish the novel about A’isha, the child bride of the Prophet Mohammad, out of fear of a backlash from Islamist radicals. Then a British publisher announced he had bought the rights and would print the “once feared historical novel“. Now comes the news that the publisher’s London office has been the target of an arson attack and police have arrested three men on suspicion of terrorism.

Some early signs are not encouraging. The Daily Telegraph quotes Anjem Choudhary, a radical cleric based in Ilford in east London, as saying: “It is clearly stipulated in Muslim law that any kind of attack on his honour carries the death penalty.” While his unbending interpretation of Muslim law is certainly debatable, his warning that publication of the novel could cause further protests is not.

On the other hand, Muslim Council of Britain spokesman Inayat Bunglawala wrote last week that the mood among British Muslims had changed since they clamoured for Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses to be banned. “Is this rethinking now widespread amongst British Muslims? Yes, my impression is that it certainly is with many now accepting that the Satanic Verses affair served to create (and for others reinforce) the unfortunate view that Muslims were backward, anti-intellectual, prone to violence and saw themselves as being somehow above the law,” he wrote.

“It is painful to admit it, but on the need to uphold the freedom to offend, Rushdie was right. The consequences of not doing so should be apparent by now to Muslims above all. Earlier this year, the leader of the far right Dutch Freedom Party, Geert Wilders, called for the Qur’an to be banned because he found some passages in the book offensive. And there’s the rub. Who is to decide what is offensive or not? What may be offensive to me may be just harmless fun to you and vice versa.”

There’s a lot of political manipulation behind these “spontaneous” outbursts of violence against anyone accused of blaspheming Mohammad (as we saw in the Danish cartoons controversy). There are also ways of trying to counter this. The failure of Wilders’ much-hyped film Fitna to incite anti-Muslim tension in the Netherlands is a case in point. None other than the top Dutch counterterrorism official noted that the debate preceding the film’s premiere helped bring Christian and Muslim groups together to discuss their views and maintain calm when the film was aired.

If The Jewel of Medina is published, protests in the Muslim world (such as the burning of a Rushdie effigy in Pakistan last year pictured above) might be par for the course. The question is whether they will be matched by copy-cat violence in Europe.

London’s highly competitive newspaper market loves blaring headlines and shock quotes. There are bound to be more coming in this story and they may be justified. As this story progresses, I’m curious to see how Muslim groups in Britain and elsewhere in Europe react and whether those defending the principle of free speech get as much coverage as those railing against it.

Do you think the mood has changed among Muslims in Europe? Or is a repeat of the Rushdie affair on the cards?