CHRISTIANITY IS SLOWLY DYING IN ITS HOMELANDS
by William Dalrymple
The Times (London)
August 7, 2012 Tuesday
Edition 1; National Edition
Forced out of Iraq and Gaza, Christians are now fleeing Syria. Their
future looks bleak in the Middle East
Wherever you go in the Middle East today, you see the Arab Spring
rapidly turning into the Christian winter. The past few years have
been catastrophic for the region’s beleaguered 14-million strong
Christian minority.
In Egypt, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood has been accompanied by
a series of anti-Coptic riots and intermittent bouts of church-burning.
On the West Bank and in Gaza, the Christians are emigrating fast
as they find themselves caught between Netanyahu’s pro-settler
Government and their increasingly radicalised and pro-Hamas Sunni
Muslim neighbours. Most catastrophically, in Iraq two thirds of the
Christians have fled the country since the fall of Saddam.
It was Syria that took in many of the 250,000 Christians driven out of
Iraq. Anyone who visited Damascus in recent years could see lounging in
every park and sitting in every teahouse the unshaven Iraqi Christian
refugees driven from their homes by the sectarian mayhem that followed
the end of the Baathist state. They were bank managers and engineers,
pharmacists and businessmen – all living with their extended families
in one-room flats on what remained of their savings and assisted by
the charity of the different churches.
“Before the war there was no separation between Christian and Muslim,”
I was told on a recent visit by Shamun Daawd, a liquor-store owner
who fled Baghdad after he received Islamist death threats. I met him
at the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate in Damascus, where he had come
to collect the rent money the Patriarchate provided for the refugees.
“Under Saddam no one asked you your religion and we used to attend
each other’s religious services,” he said. “Now at least 75 per cent
of my Christian friends have fled.”
Those Iraqi refugees now face a second displacement while their
Syrian hosts are themselves living in daily fear of having to flee
for their lives. The first Syrian refugee camps are being erected in
the Bekaa valley of Lebanon; others are queuing to find shelter in
camps in Jordan, north of Amman. Most of the bloodiest killings and
counter-killings that have been reported in Syria have so far been
along Sunni-Alawite faultlines, but there have been some reports
of thefts, rape and murder directed at the Christian minority, and
in one place – Qusayr – wholesale ethnic cleansing of the Christians
accused by local jihadis of acting as pro-regime spies. The community,
which makes up around 10 per cent of the total population, is now
frankly terrified.
For much of the past hundred years, and long before the Assads came
to power, Syria was a reliable refuge for the Christians of the
Middle East: decades before the Iraqis arrived the people of Syria
welcomed the Armenians escaping the Young Turk genocide of 1915. In
1948 they took in the Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim, driven
out of their ancestral homes at the creation of Israel; and during
the 1970s and 1980s their country became a place of shelter for
Orthodox Christians and Maronites seeking a refuge during Lebanon’s
interminable sectarian troubles.
For while the regime of the Assad dynasty was a repressive one-party
police state in which political freedoms were always severely and
often brutally restricted, it did allow the Syrian people widespread
cultural and religious freedoms. These gave Syria’s minorities a
security and stability far greater than their counterparts anywhere
else in the region. This was particularly true of Syria’s ancient
Christian communities.
The reason for this was that the Assads were Alawite, a syncretic
Shia Muslim minority regarded by Sunni Muslims as heretical, and
disparagingly referred to as Nusayris, or Little Christians: indeed
their liturgy seems to be partly Christian in origin. Alawites made up
only 12 per cent of Syria’s population and the Assads kept themselves
in power by forming what was in effect a coalition of Syria’s religious
minorities, through which they were able to counterbalance the weight
of the Sunni majority.
In the Assads’ Syria, the major Christian feasts were national
holidays; Christians were exempt from turning up to work on Sunday
mornings; and churches and monasteries, like mosques, were provided
with free electricity and were sometimes given state land for new
buildings. In the Christian Quarter of Old Damascus around Bab Touma,
electric-blue neon crosses would wink from the domes of the churches
and processions of crucifix-carrying boy scouts could be seen squeezing
past gaggles of Christian girls heading out on the town, all low-cut
jeans and tight-fitting T-shirts. This was something unknown almost
anywhere else in the Middle East.
There was also widespread sharing of sacred space. On my travels, in
a single day I have seen Christians coming to sacrifice sheep at the
Muslim Sufi shrine of Nebi Uri, while at the nearby convent of Seidnaya
(recently shelled by government forces) I found that the congregation
in the church consisted not principally of Christians but instead of
heavily bearded Muslim men and their shrouded wives. As the priest
circled the altar with his thurible, filling the sanctuary with great
clouds of incense, the men made prostrations on their prayer mats as
if in the middle of Friday prayers in a great mosque. Their women,
some dressed in full black chador, mouthed prayers from the shadows
of the narthex. A few, closely watching the Christian women, went
up to the icons, kissed them, then lit a candle and placed it in
the candelabra. They had come, I was told, to Our Lady of Seidnaya,
and to ask her for children.
Now that precious multi-ethnic and multi-religious patchwork is in
danger of being destroyed for ever. As in Egypt, where the late Coptic
Pope Shenouda supported Hosni Mubarak right up until his fall, the
established churches of Syria marked the beginning of the revolution by
lining up behind the regime. My friend Mar Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim,
the urbane and multilingual Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan of Aleppo,
was quoted as saying: “We do not support those who are calling for
the fall of the regime simply because we are for reform and change.”
Initially many of the flock were unsure of the wisdom of that position,
and many young Christians were among those calling for the end of
the Assad regime, hoping for a new dawn of freedom, human rights and
democracy. But a year on, pro-revolution Christians are much harder
to find. There are more and more reports of violent al-Qaeda-inspired
salafists fighting alongside the Free Syrian Army, while Turkish
backing for the opposition Syrian National Council has terrified the
Syrian Armenians. As criminality, robbery, lawlessness and car-jacking
become endemic, even in places where outright fighting is absent, and
as the survival of the regime looks daily less and less likely, the
Christians fear they will soon suffer the fate of their Iraqi brethren.
As ever, the Christians here remain mystified by the actions of
Christian America. When George W. Bush went into Iraq, he naively
believed he would be replacing Saddam with a peaceful, pro-American
Arab democracy that would naturally look to the Christian West for
support. In reality, nine years on, it appears that he has instead
created a highly radicalised and unstable pro-Iranian sectarian
battleground. Now American support is being channelled towards
opposition groups that may eventually do the same to the minorities
of Syria.
As in 1980s Afghanistan, a joint operation between the CIA and Saudi
intelligence could end up bringing to power a hardline salafist
replacement to a brutally flawed but nonetheless secular regime. If
that happens in Syria, the final death of Christianity in its Middle
Eastern homelands seems increasingly possible within our lifetime.
William Dalrymple is the author of From the Holy Mountain: A Journey
in the Shadow of Byzantium. His new book Return of a King: The Battle
for Afghanistan 1839-42 will be published by Bloomsbury in February
>From the domes in Old Damascus electric-blue neon crosses wink