“Only a spiritual journey can bring security, reconciliation, love and peace to our Arab countries, particularly Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon”. Gregory III, Melkite Patriarch of Antioch and All The East, of Alexandria and of Jerusalem, wrote this in a message to Muslims to mark the end of Ramadan. “This year Eid el-Fitr (the end of Ramadan) takes place amidst daily news of tragic and serious events”, the patriarch wrote. “It is in this deeply sad context that we send our best wishes to the Muslim people, our brothers and sisters in citizenship, history and destiny in this region in which we have been placed by God”; best wishes that “we accompany with a sincere prayer for security, reconciliation, love and peace in our Arab countries, particularly Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Lebanon”. According to Gregory III, today more than ever, “we, Christians and Muslims alike, all need a spirituality that takes us from exclusion to inclusion, from rejection to acceptance of the other, from prejudice to understanding, from competition to complementarity, from hatred to mercy, from mercy to the heart of God, because God is love”. “Only this spiritual journey – the Patriarch said – can lead us to rebuild our countries threatened by physical and spiritual destruction, so that together” we can build them again: “Rebuild souls and stones”. We have asked this in our latest letter ‘A message from an Arab Christian Patriarch to his Muslim brothers’ which we hope has reached all people of good will”. Hence the final appeal: “The task entrusted to us in our East is to challenge the West and the international community with an Eastern unity, a Christian-Muslim unity, based on the civilisation of love”.