Arab Spring Turns to Christian Winter
By William Dalrymple
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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 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 Benjamin 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 about 10 per cent of the total population, is now
frankly terrified.
For much of the past 100 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 80s 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 Syrians 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.
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.
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. 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 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-Qa'ida-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-US 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 US support is being channelled
towards opposition groups that may eventually do the same to the minorities of
Syria.
As in 80s 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.
Arab Spring Turns to Christian Winter
By William Dalrymple
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