FORBES: Why The Pope Went To Azerbaijan, A Mostly Muslim Nation
By Wade Shepard
Pope Francis visited Azerbaijan, a predominantly Shiite Muslim country, on Sunday as part of a broader South Caucasus tour which also included stops in Georgia and Armenia.
During his ten hours in Azerbaijan he led a mass, met with religious leaders, had a private talk with President Ilham Aliyev, and visited a mosque, where he declared that God should never be used to justify extremism to a mixed crowd of Muslims, Jews, and Christians.
He also congratulated Azerbaijan for creating a religiously tolerant atmosphere and for cultivating a society that has largely avoided extremism.
Officially, Azerbaijan has just 200 native Catholics, but supporting the diaspora was not really the Pope’s intent here. The purpose of his visit was to promote peace in a Caucasus region, which still has an array of long-standing conflicts — namely the two breakaway regions in Georgia and the standoff between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh area.
During his visit to Armenia in June, the pope bluntly stated that Azerbaijan and Armenia are “not making peace on account of a small patch of land — because that is all it is — is something grim” as he tried to “act as a symbolic bridge” between the nations. These messages were delivered along with the pope’s broader initiative to improve relations between Catholics and Orthodox Christians, as well as Christians and Muslims in a region where two of the oldest Christian countries sit on the edge of the Islamic world.
For Azerbaijan, this visit by the pope was part of a broader vision to become a great crossroads of nations and cultures, which has resulted in a strategy of promoting multiculturalism and internationalism in many forms.
Azerbaijan has been very active in hosting an array of international events, which have included the 2015 European Games, the 2016 European Grand Prix Formula One race, the World Chess Olympics, and Eurovision — Baku even preemptively built an entire Olympic village and other facilities in hopes of eventually hosting the world’s biggest sporting event.
However, Eurasianet.org posited that the pope’s visit to Azerbaijan was “not so much about religion as it was about PR payback.” Over the past few years, Azerbaijan’s Heydar Aliyev Foundation has been pumping money into the Vatican for restoration work on some of its holy sites and artifacts, including the Sistine Chapel, two catacombs, and various works in the Apostolic Library. According to the Vatican, these were the first incidents of this type of contribution from a predominately Muslim country.
Sitting to the north of Iran, to the east of Georgia and Armenia, and to the south of Russia, Azerbaijan has always been a crossroads of nations, cultures, and religions. The country was a major stop on the ancient Silk Road, and even the capital city Baku is traditionally divided between Muslim and European quarters.
This position is little different today, where Azerbaijan is enacting a “multi-vector” policy of establishing friendly relations with countries from all sides of the geopolitical tracks, so to speak, concurrently dealing with Israel and Iran, the U.S. and China, Ukraine and Russia as it attempts to position itself as an economic hub of Eurasia.
Wade Shepard is the author of “Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities Without People in the World's Most Populated Country”, a book which explores and explains the peculiar nuances of China's urbanization movement.
He is currently traveling the various land and sea routes of China's “One Belt, One Road” initiative, more romantically known as the New Silk Road, collecting information, insights, and stories for a book on the topic.
