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Pope Francis will become the first pontiff in history to stop in Bahrain, in a week that is expected to strengthen ties with Islam but is also marked by allegations of human rights abuses in the Gulf state.
The Thursday-Sunday stop at the 39th foreign stop of Francis’ papacy comes three years after his historic trip to the United Arab Emirates in 2019, where he signed a Muslim-Christian manifesto for peace.
But some human rights teams now hope Francis will press Bahrain’s Sunni leader, King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa, to end the crackdown on Shiite Muslims in the country, even as neighboring Qatar’s rights record has drawn more attention in recent months ahead of the World Cup.
The 85-year-old Argentine pontiff has made raising awareness among Muslim communities a precedent of his pontificate, visiting Middle Eastern countries, adding Egypt in 2017 and Iraq last year, while promising interfaith discussions with senior Muslim clerics.
On Friday, Francis plans to meet with the authority of Sunni Islam, Sheikh Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of the prestigious Al-Azhar Mosque and Islamic Learning Center in Cairo, at the Sakhir Palace in central China.
The two devout leaders signed a joint document in Abu Dhabi in February 2019 pledging to interfaith coexistence between Christians and Muslims. The stopover marked the first stop by a pope in the Gulf region, where Islam was born.
Francis will also meet with the Abu Dhabi-based Council of Muslim Elders for an “East and West” forum, with Muslim communities in the West, humanitarian crises, climate issues and Muslim-Christians on the agenda.
– Religious tolerance? –
Also on Friday, the leader of the world’s 1. 3 billion Catholics, who is expected to be confined to a wheelchair during his vacation due to persistent knee pain, will lead an ecumenical prayer at the cavernous Cathedral of Our Lady of Arabia in Awali, which opened in December.
The cathedral, which seats more than 2,000 people, was built to serve Bahrain’s 80,000 or so Catholics, mostly staff from South Asia, plus India and the Philippines.
Bahrain, like the UAE, is perceived as a more tolerant Arab nation, compared to Saudi Arabia’s ultraconservative Sunni force, continually cited by human rights teams for its abuses, whose absolute monarchy does not recognize freedom of faith and which bans all non-Muslim places of worship.
However, NGOs continue to cite discrimination, repression and harassment in Bahrain through the Sunni elite opposing Shiites, repression of opposition figures and activists, and abuses.
The nonprofit Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain wrote this month that the country’s devout freedom legislation “was nothing more than an act of subterfuge, published on paper as a way for Bahrain’s ruling circle of family members to access the benefits of friendship with a more hardcore group. Leaders and difficult to understand the anguish of their human rights violations.
The organization suggested the pope, who has made the protection of other marginalized people a hallmark of his speech, draw attention to the “endemic discrimination” against Bahrain’s Shiites.
On Monday, Human Rights Watch released a document documenting the “targeted marginalization of opposition figures” in Bahrain in the decade since pro-democracy protests erupted in 2011.
Bahrain’s annual Formula 1 race has also raised complaints about the country’s human rights record. In 2011, the Grand Prix was cancelled amid harsh repression following protests.
Francis’ scale looms ahead of the World Cup later this month in neighboring Qatar, which has highlighted its human rights record — that is, the remedy of its low-income migrant workers, women and the LBGTQ community.
– Flotted to the ground –
On Saturday, the pope will celebrate Mass at a stadium in Bahrain’s Riffa city in front of the 28,000 faithful expected, according to Father Charbel Fayad.
“We are pleased to see many Christians from the region,” he told AFP, saying he expected worshippers from other Gulf countries.
The pope, who concludes his vacation in Manama on Sunday by leading a prayer assembly with Catholic clergy, has visited several Muslim-majority countries during his pontificate, adding Jordan, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Egypt, Bangladesh, Morocco, Iraq and, at most, recently in September.
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