Ras Al Khaimah: Upside-Down View

English writer Gilbert Keith Chesterton has written an atypical portrait of St. Francis of Assisi based on a particular idea. His thesis is that Pietro da Bernardone’s son accomplished his deeds because, as God’s acrobat, he was able to look at the world upside down. From bottom to top. From this particular viewpoint, the world with its riches, as well as the Church, remained sort of suspended, almost miraculously, revealing great fragility. In this way, all people and creation itself gained a different perspective and earned an understanding hitherto unknown. The Franciscan revolution will begin with this inverted view from below.

Now the image of Chesterton came back to my mind in the days when the Eurasian Economic Forum in Verona moved to Ras Al Khaimah in the United Arab Emirates for its seventeenth edition. The forum was held in the Palazzo Gran Guardia in Verona for 15 years, but with the war in Ukraine it found new locations: in 2022 in Baku, Azerbaijan, last year in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. The choice of Emirates made this year is very interesting. The federation of the United Arab Emirates, which celebrated its national unity on December 2, is a relatively young reality but remains very interesting. Paolo Martinelli, the Apostolic Vicar of South Arabia, wrote a few days ago in a welcome message: “This is a nation that promotes tolerance, hospitality, and prosperity.” The world seen from here, even from Ras Al Khaimah, seems a plural and more alive world than the one we know in the westernized North. If we put ourselves upside down, it not only makes Westernized opulence relative, but opens up the prospect of hope for a better world, of looking to the future, of talking to everyone.

To me, as a “papist,” it seems that right here, in Abu Dhabi, Pope Francis arrived in February 2019 to sign the Joint Declaration with Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, the 44th Grand Imam of Al Azhar. The counter call “We are all brothers” was a call for peace, coexistence, tolerance, cooperation that resonates around the world, and not coincidentally, from the United Arab Emirates. The work of the Verona Eurasian Economic Forum confirms the key role of this place in a world marked by disagreements, wars, clashes, and once again offering strong tensions between East and West, which some call a new Cold War.

Economics, economic diplomacy can restart the dialog. Because wars and strife are a profitable business only for a few and only in the short to medium term. History shows that civilizations communicate and infect each other and therefore develop not when they are locked in their strongholds and their ideologies, but when they meet, talk to each other, and ask each other questions. Moreover, genetic science teaches us this: a simple DNA study today would demonstrate that half of today’s widely held political beliefs about race, civilizations, and differences between peoples actually have no basis. They are ideological constructs. Genetic heritage does tell us that we are all brothers. And not just spiritually.

I’ll end with a story. Sigmund Freud loved Rome. And on the eve of the First World War, he really fell in love: every day for almost a month he spent a few hours in the church of San Pietro in Vincoli. A piece of artwork caught his attention: Michelangelo’s “Moses.” The founder of psychoanalysis later wrote: “Every day for three lonely weeks in September 1913, I was in the church in front of the statue, studying it, measuring it, drawing it.” This thrilling experience resulted in the only essay that Freud dedicated to a work of fine art. An essay originally published under a pseudonym, but which can still be found. So, what struck the psychological scientist so much that it turned his life upside down? Among the many “dark and ambiguous” messages that Michelangelo’s statue conveys is undoubtedly that of authority and law to his people. Moses is a leader. And a leader angry at his people who were following idols. Freud further writes: “How many times have I climbed the swift staircase that leads from the wretched Via Cavour to the secluded square where the abandoned church stands! And I always endeavored to withstand the hero’s frowning and contemptuous gaze, and sometimes I happened to slip away from the dim light of that interior, as if I also belonged to the rabble his finger pointed to, a rabble that does not want to hold on to any conviction, that does not want to wait or believe, and rejoices when it regains power over its illusory idols.”

“Illusory idols” of those who don’t want to wait or believe in a better world.