For Arab Christians and secular Arab nationalists, Isis may be the death knell
In a Middle East rebuilt on intolerant ideologies, there is likely to
be little place for beleaguered minorities
William Dalrymple
The Guardian, Wednesday 23 July 2014 16.47 BST
An Iraqi security officer guards the Church of the Virgin Mary in the
northern town of Bartala, near Mosul, in 2012. Photograph: Karim
Sahib/AFP/Getty Images
The past decade has been catastrophic for the Arab world’sbeleaguered
12 million strong Christian minority. In Egypt revolution and
counter-revolution have been accompanied by a series of anti-Copt
riots, killings and church burnings. In Gaza and the West Bank
Palestinian Christians are emigrating en masse as they find themselves
uncomfortably caught between Netanyahu’s pro-settler government and
their increasingly radicalised Sunni neighbours.
In Syria most of the violence is along the Sunni-Alawite fault line,
but stories of rape and murder directed at the Christian minority, who
used to make up around 10% of the population, have emerged. Many have
already fled to camps in Lebanon, Turkey or Jordan; the ancient
Armenian community of Aleppo is reported to be moving en masse to
Yerevan.
The worst affected areas of Syria are of course those controlled by
Isis. Last weekend it issued a decree offering the dwindling Christian
population of eastern Syria and northern Iraq a choice: convert to
Islam or pay a special religious levy – the jizya. If they did not
comply, “there is nothing to give them but the sword”. The passing of
the deadline led to possibly the largest exodus of Middle Eastern
Christians since theArmenian massacres during the first world war,
with the entire Christian community of Mosul heading off towards
Kirkuk and the relative religious tolerance of the Kurdish zone.
Even before this latest exodus, at least two-thirds of Iraqi
Christians had fled since the fall of Saddam. Christians were
concentrated in Mosul, Basra and, especially, Baghdad – which before
the US invasion had the largest Christian population in the Middle
East. Although Iraq’s 750,000 Christians made up only 7% of the
pre-war population, they were a prosperous minority under the
Ba’athists, as symbolised by the high profile of Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s
foreign minister, who used to disarm visiting foreign dignitaries by
breaking into Onward, Christian Soldiers in Aramaic, the language of
Jesus.
According to tradition it was St Thomas and his cousin Addai who
brought Christianity to Iraq in the first century. At the Council of
Nicea, where the Christian creed was thrashed out in AD325, there were
more bishops from Mesopotamia than western Europe. The region became a
refuge for those persecuted by the Orthodox Byzantines, such as
theMandeans – the last Gnostics, who follow what they believe to be
the teachings of John the Baptist. Then there was the Church of the
East, which brought the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato, as well as
Greek science and medicine, to the Islamic world – and hence, via
Cordoba, to the new universities of medieval Europe.
Now almost everywhere Arab Christians are leaving. In the past decade
maybe a quarter have made new lives in Europe, Australia and America.
According to Professor Kamal Salibi, they are simply exhausted: “There
is a feeling of fin de race among Christians all over the Middle East.
Now they just want to go somewhere else, make some money and relax.
Each time a Christian goes, no other Christian comes to fill his place
and that is a very bad thing for the Arab world. It is Christian Arabs
who keep the Arab world ‘Arab’ rather than ‘Muslim’.”
Certainly since the 19th century Christian Arabs have played a vital
role in defining a secular Arab cultural identity. It is no
coincidence that most of the founders of secular Arab nationalism were
men like Michel Aflaq – the Greek Orthodox Christian from Damascus
who, with other Syrian students freshly returned from the Sorbonne,
founded the Ba’ath party in the 1940s – or Faris al-Khoury, Syria’s
only Christian prime minister. Then there were intellectuals like the
Palestinian George Antonius, who in 1938 wrote in The Arab Awakening
of the crucial role Christians played in reviving Arab literature and
the arts after their long slumber under Ottoman rule.
If the Islamic state proclaimed by Isis turns into a permanent,
Christian-free zone, it could signal the demise not just of an
important part of the Arab Christian realm but also of the secular
Arab nationalism Christians helped create. The 20th century after
1918, which saw the creation of the different Arab national states,
may well prove to be a blip in Middle Eastern history, as the old
primary identifiers of Arab identity, religion and qabila – tribe –
resurface.
It is as if, after a century of flirting with imported ideas of the
secular nation state, the region is reverting to the Ottoman Millet
system (from the Arabic millah, literally “nation”), which represented
a view of the world that made religion the ultimate marker of
identity, and classified Ottoman subjects by their various sectarian
religious “nations”.
Despite sizeable Christian populations holding on in Lebanon, Jordan
and Egypt, there is likely to be little place for Christian Arabs in a
Middle East rebuilt on intolerant ideologies like those of Isis. Their
future is more likely to resemble that of the most influential
Christian Arab intellectual of our day, Edward Said. Born in Jerusalem
at the height of Arab nationalism in 1935, Said died far from the
turmoil of the Middle East in New York in 2003. His last collection of
essays was appropriately entitledReflections On Exile.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/23/arab-christians-secular-arabs-isis-middle-east-minorities