Since the Caux Round Table begin its study of the covenants given by the Prophet Muhammad to respect and protect Christians and Jews, I have, from time to time, reported to our community insights and historical facts which have emerged in our study of those covenants and discussions of their contents and what their terms imply for our times today.
Recently, the interim president of Syria, a country long burdened with brutal repression and civil war among its citizens, met with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch John X. The patriarch showed the president a recension of a covenant given as a work of grace by the Prophet Muhammad to Christians. The document dates to Ottoman times.
Here is a picture of the two with the recension:
Our colleague, Ahmed El-Wakil, now at Oxford, who has contributed so much to the finding of recensions of the Prophet’s covenants and to our understanding of their terms and of the circumstances in which they were given and received, has sent me the following email about the meeting, which I wish to share with you:
On Sunday, 26 October 2025, Syria’s transitional president, Aḥmad al-Sharaa, visited Greek Orthodox Patriarch John X Yazigi at the patriarchal residence in Damascus – a gesture that carried more than diplomatic weight. It was his first official visit to a church since taking office and it unfolded as both reassurance and reminder that Syria’s plural identity, frayed by war, still had roots deep enough to hold.
During the meeting, Patriarch Yazigi presented al-Sharaa with a copy of a manuscript of the covenant of the Prophet Muhammad housed at the Monastery of St. George al-Humayra, which promises protection and freedom of worship to Christians. This particular document was studied by Ibrahim Zein and Ahmed El-Wakil in chapter 3 of their book, The Covenants of the Prophet Muhammad: From Shared Historical Memory to Peaceful Co-existence, who identified it as a copy of the covenant the Prophet gave to the Christians of Najran, whose text was faithfully transmitted until the Ottoman period, to which the manuscript belongs. By invoking it, Yazigi appealed to a moral memory within Islam itself – one that links faith to justice and protection, not coercion.
Al-Sharaa responded in kind, writing in the patriarchal guest book a verse from the Qur’an describing Christians as “nearest in affection to the believers” and adding in his own words that Damascus is “the cradle of the first coexistence known to humanity.” His inscription framed coexistence not as political rhetoric, but as a duty inherited from the city’s own past. The moment thus echoed older gestures of mutual recognition, such as the one embodied in the Najran covenant preserved at the Monastery of St. George al-Humayra before the war.
Seen together, the patriarch’s presentation and the president’s response wove history into hope. They recalled that the idea of a just order in Syria has never rested solely on conquest or power, but on an older moral claim: that peace endures only when protection is shared.
Kind regards,
Ahmed