Rebecca Coulson

The Vicar of Baghdad – ‘Israel is the most intelligent country in the world’

‘We weren’t even at opposite ends of the table. Because he was in the eyes, and I was fighting over my own bit of space to keep the patient alive.’ If you’re surprised to learn that Canon Andrew White used to work alongside Bashar al-Assad in the same London operating theatre, then you clearly haven’t met White – perhaps better known as the Vicar of Baghdad. Once you have, nothing about him will surprise you. A tall, bearish, immediately likeable man, his enthusiasm is contagious, whether it’s for vanilla ice cream, or intercession in war zones.

When he talks to me via Skype from Jordan – a couple of days after we’ve met in Jerusalem – he’s half thinking about flying back, just to get a shofar, so that he can celebrate Rosh Hashanah properly. ‘I’m quite used to doing crazy things!’ he explains. And some of the things he’s done certainly do strike you as crazy. Crazy, extreme, wonderful things. Often involving dangerous places and people. He describes many of these people – although few in his position would – as ‘friends’, and he brings them together, when otherwise they refuse. That’s the real gift of this anaesthetist-turned-priest-turned-religious-diplomat – the way in which he so easily elicits trust. He uses it for one goal: peace.

White has continued to assemble the representatives of warring religions since his original success, the 2002 Alexandria Declaration, about which he remains proud, ‘The first time that all the different religious leaders – Muslim, Jewish, Christian – had all come together, and signed a declaration, a commitment.’ This was a commitment to cooperation in the face of conflict in the Holy Land; as a “first step”, it called for a ‘religiously sanctioned cease-fire’.

Last year, in Cyprus, White managed to convene a group of leading Iraqi clerics – both Sunni and Shia – and Israeli rabbis.

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