“The Muslims have always guarded the Holy Places in Jerusalem with as much loving care and veneration as they have guarded the Holy Places in Mecca or in Medina. Why shouldn't they? The Koran has taught us to venerate Jesus Christ. We believe in His divine mission as much as we believe in the divine mission of Mohamed. We consider Him as much our prophet as the prophet of the Christians. Our creed is based on this belief and on the recognition of all the past prophets. So there is really no difference between us and the Christians as far as we are concerned. The only differences that exist are dogmatic differences such as those which might exist even between two churches of the same religion and in our eyes a Christian who follows the principles of Christ and who does not deny the prophethood of Mohamed is as much a Muslim as any one of us. “Of course we do not consider as Christians those who adore images. The Russian who expects an icon to perform a miracle is as much an idolater to our eyes as any one who adores the stone or the paint with which the statue or the picture of a saint is made. There is no difference between them and the pagans of yore. “We Muslims go even farther than some Christians in our belief in Christ. We are taught that the Virgin Mary, in her religious ardor, was praying the Almighty to give her a son who would bring back into the fold his erring sheep and that the people upon hearing this prayer criticized and shamed her: a virgin praying for a child! 'But how little they knew the ways of God,' says the Koran. 'In answer to the Virgin's prayer the Almighty sent her one of His Angels in the likeness of a human and she begot the Christ,' “For us, God is not material. He is the All-Inclusive Spirit which permeates all nature and the whole universe. He is the Supreme Conscious Force, endowed with all the attributes, who rules the universe. He is Eternal: He never begot and never was begotten. We believe in Him and He only do we adore. We believe in His Angels, His Holy Books, His Prophets, and in the future life. We believe that He ordains everything, our recompenses as well as our punishments, and that there is no God but He and we believe that Mohamed is His Messenger--who revived on this earth, as all prophets before Him, the true religion as taught by Abraham, and by Moses and by Christ.” The master was silent for a few minutes. His words which I had been translating sentence by sentence as he delivered them, had impressed us all so much that we kept quiet and awaited patiently for more. He looked out from the window into the blueness of the sky. Then, turning again to me he said with an infinite smile: “How simple it all is, and how foolish humanity is not to understand”! He passed his hand over his forehead in an effort to concentrate on more material subjects, he sighed and said: