In the heart of Heliopolis, five elderly women, one of them a nun, and a middle-aged man gather in prayer at the Catholic Keldanian Church of Notre Dame de Saint Fatima. They are among the few scores of remaining Keldanian Catholics in Egypt, a sad reminder of what a few decades ago used to be a relatively full church. “There are a hundred or so Keldanian Catholic families left in Cairo and a few more like them in Alexandria,” said Father Philippe, the head of the church. “But they are mostly elderly people who did not join the waves of emigration during the middle of the last century. Now they are all that is left of Egypt's Keldanian Catholics.” Keldanians migrated to Egypt from Syria during the 18th century. Today, of all the six Catholic churches in Egypt, their numbers have declined the most. Their church is also losing followers in its historical stronghold in the Levant. Many of the Iraqi Christians who, along with the Yazidis, were forced to flee Iraq when Islamic State (IS) forces took over the north of the country were followers of the Keldanian Catholic Church. “They went to Europe and North America, as they have been doing for many years, especially since the 2003 [US-led] war on Iraq,” said Father Philippe. He added that in previous decades the Keldanian Catholics of Iraq, “like the followers of other churches and Muslims, were mostly leaving for economic reasons, looking for a more prosperous and stable life outside the Middle East. Recently, however, they have been fleeing for their lives.” Father Philippe is himself of Iraqi origin. He travelled to Iraq last summer after the IS takeover of large parts of northern Iraq, where all non-Muslims and some Muslims who did not follow the IS version of Islam were forced to leave. Thousands are now homeless and face a harsh winter in UN-supported refugee camps. “We had hoped to be able to get some of them, the elderly ones especially, to come to Egypt, at least temporarily. But, unfortunately, the regulations and concerns related to the war that Egypt is leading on terror meant that this was not possible,” Father Philippe said. “If any of them gets the chance to go to any Western country, whether Europe, North America or Australia, they would not hesitate for a second. I fear it is only a matter of a few more decades before Christians from most churches, with the exception perhaps of the Coptic Church in Egypt, will have left the Middle East for good,” he added. Christians, already a minority, have lost a considerable proportion of their numbers in the region over the last century. Some estimates suggest that the number has fallen sharply from around 20 per cent to less than five per cent of the population. “The chaos in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the rise of Islamic extremism have prompted the emigration of the Christians of the Middle East,” wrote the authors of “Christians in the Land of Islam,” a research article published by the French newspaper Le Monde some years ago. The article gave a detailed account of the other side of the picture offered by another publication, “Emigration of the Shawam [the People of Levant],” issued around the same time. In the first, there was a narrative of Christians from all churches, including the otherwise well-established Orthodox Church of Egypt, being faced with many forms of discrimination, adding to the hardships they shared with other nationals of their respective countries and making emigration an attractive solution. The second offered a more prosperous image of the lives of families who had left Syria in the main and found their way to Egypt and the rest of the Mashriq, where they started new communities and built churches. In the first it was an image of a people whose rights to live and worship freely were being undermined, while in the second it was an image of a people who had managed to move around with their faith, customs and lifestyle intact. “It is a very sad image of a sharply declining Christianity,” said Father Philippe. “But Christians are not the only minority whose presence in this part of the world is declining. The Yazidis, for example, are also dwindling, something I saw during the trip to Iraq in the summer. “Increasingly, the minorities, and not just the religious minorities, are fleeing their countries and their homes as the level of tolerance is declining.”
MINORITIES AND POWER: For Sinan Antoon, a New York-based professor of Christian Iraqi origin, the reason is oppression. This explains the plight of the IS-forced eviction of Christians and Yazidis in areas of northern Iraq this year, and is related to those in power rather than who belongs to which religion or ethnic group. Antoon argues that the plight of many Iraqis under the rule of former president Saddam Hussein, who subscribed to the theoretically Sunni minority in an otherwise predominantly Shia population, was not Shia- or Christian-oriented. Instead, it was oppression that targeted those who did not follow the rule of the then-ruling Baath Party that had brought together a diverse ethnic and religious population. Nadim Houri, a Beirut-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, the US-based NGO, also argues that the exercise of oppression is not necessarily something done by those who belong to the larger segment of the population against those in the smaller segment, although this does happen. Instead, it is essentially about power and control, discriminating against those who do not in one way or another subscribe to the ruling clique and thus are targeted by it. The ruling Alawites in Syria are not the majority in terms of numbers, but they have been able throughout the decades to exercise oppression against the Sunnis, who make up a larger portion of the population. Vulnerability, Houri says, is never exclusively a question of population numbers alone, although this can be at times behind discrimination. Sami Ofeish, chair of the political science and international affairs department at the University of Balamand, points out that minorities, whether ethnic or religious, have suffered a series of waves of emigration in recent years, as well as calls for separation. “In general, during times of turmoil they are particularly targeted and they feel particularly pressured,” he said. “We have seen this in Lebanon and we have seen it in Iraq.” Ofeish acknowledges that the influence of radical Islamic groups like IS as a factor in the emigration of minorities from Iraq. At the same time, he does not dismiss the influence of Baathists in prompting or at least inciting already existing Kurdish separatist sentiments. Nor is he willing to overlook the influence of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories in pushing Christians out of the land where Jesus was born, “or for that matter other Palestinians.” He continued, “In Syria, we have seen IS turning Sunnis, a majority in terms of the volume of population, who do not follow its version of Sunni Islam into a minority.” The same thing, argued Houri, is happening to Sufi Muslims in Libya, North Africa and northern Iraq, all of whom are being affected by the presence of radical Muslim groups. In his book Minorities in Arab History, Awni Farsakh writes that minorities have historically been groups that share a particular historical or cultural identity that brings them together in the midst of a larger population. This can be ethnic or religious or of some other sort. Given that the Arab countries, before, during and after the Ottoman Empire, were predominantly made up of Arab and Sunni Muslims, the definition of a minority applies to other groups, including Christians, even in the case of the Copts of Egypt and the Amazigh of North African countries, who were there prior to the conquest of the Arabs. It also applies to Jews who moved to Arab countries from within and without the Arab world and Armenians who fled the Ottoman massacres and others. According to the argument made by Farsakh in his 1994 book, the attitude of the ruling majority, the Sunni Muslims, towards minorities has had its ups and downs, including times of fairness as well as times of unmasked discrimination. This discrimination, Farsakh argues, eventually evolved into the norm and was used by the colonial powers to try to build local alliances, sometimes successfully but by no means always. “Siding with the minorities, whose rights were oppressed, and acting to turn them into the ruling elite was a clear choice for the colonial powers and it was the baseline of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, for example,” said researcher Mohamed Al-Agati, director of the Arab Centre for Alternatives. According to Farsakh, with the beginning of the establishment of the modern nation-state in the last century the objective, or rather the hope, was to find an all-encompassing identity whereby all ethnic, religious and other groups would simply be encompassed in one unified body. “We saw some key Amazigh faces as part of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) in Algeria, for example,” said Saleheddine Jourchi, a Tunisian commentator. However, this attempt, Farsakh suggests, was challenged from the very beginning. The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, which prompted the mass emigration of Jews from Arab countries, mostly to Europe but also to the newly established state, and the subsequent Israeli wars against Arab countries, especially the 1967 defeat, dealt serious blows to the supposedly all-encompassing nation-state. It also, the book further argues, opened the door for waves of migration by those who either felt victimised or economically and culturally challenged. By that point, ruling regimes had increased the volume of the pressure, including discrimination against those who went against the predominant tide and minorities of all kinds. “The 1950s and 1960s saw some of the largest waves of emigration of many Christians and others too,” said Father Philippe. Armenians and Europeans born in Arab countries, including the once-large Greek community of Egypt, left not just the national Arab state but also their own home countries. It was during this period, Farsakh says, that Arab countries experienced the increased oppression of other minorities by new dictators, including the Kurds, Nubians, Bedouins and Amazigh. And despite centuries of amalgamation, the ethnic element was again high and the collective cultural identity was clearly compromised.
MODERN SECTARIANISM: For Ofeish, this was a moment of sectarianism par excellence. It was, he argues, the moment that led to the civil war in Lebanon which ended “with a sectarian-based agreement” at Al-Taif, for example. Sectarianism ruled from east to west and from north to south in Arab countries. At the same time, the increased call for a heavy-handed version of “political Islam” was also on the rise, given the defeat of the secular national call, he added. Al-Agati says that the largest minorities in the Arab world, Kurds and Amazigh, were faced from within with calls for separation, but it was especially Sudan that was walking this path. “The division of Sudan was something that had been planned by the British some 80 years before it happened, but the ethnic and religious discrimination that compromised the basic rights of citizenship after independence was crucial in pushing things towards the separation,” he said, adding that this happened in January 2011 at the time of the Arab Spring. The latter, Al-Agati argues, was thought of, “even if ever so briefly,” as a moment when the people of Arab countries could overcome their already fast-expanding sectarianism and become modern democracies where equal citizenship would prevail and be the ultimate rule and judge. “Unfortunately, this call for a citizenship-based society was short-lived, and it was not long before the issue of minorities was again put into a negative perspective, related both to the elimination of rights and the calls for separation,” Al-Agati said. According to Houri, “It is now fashionable among some to say that the Arab Spring was bad for minorities, with the implicit meaning that the dictators were better for the minorities than the democratic regime. But this is simply untrue. “The Arab uprisings offered new challenges, and minorities are always vulnerable to socio-political hiccups. They fear them and they are sometimes negatively influenced by them.” Had the call for a citizenship-based society been achieved, he says, the issue of volatile groups would not have resurfaced. Instead, Ofeish adds, the accent was rather put on further dividing lines. “We moved from Muslims versus Christians to Shias versus Sunnis,” he said. “And this Sunni-Shia tug of war is currently a very destablising factor in Arab countries.” It is resulting, Al-Agati added, in something that goes beyond waves of emigration to “shocking waves of refugees.” In the final analysis, Houri says, the Arab Spring weakened some groups and made them vulnerable to violations — the Yazidis of Iraq, for example — while it also strengthened some minorities, among them the Kurds of Iraq. As Al-Agati stresses, it showed that some minorities would continue to be overlooked in the bigger picture. “This includes people without a nationality in the Arab Gulf countries (al-bedoun) and, of course, women,” he said. But the attention that has been drawn to the issue of minorities in the Arab world has prompted some acknowledgement of the rights of these specific groups, at least at the cultural level, says Jourchi. “Particularly in Morocco, there is a new recognition of the cultural rights of the Amazigh and their language is now being acknowledged,” he said. “Across North Africa in general I think there is a growing awareness of the influence of the Amazigh culture, and Amazigh music and art are gaining new ground across the North African countries.” These limited acknowledgements, however, will not end all separatist sentiments, according to Al-Agati. “There is much talk now about schemes to divide the Arab world and the use of minorities to serve this objective. To those who entertain this theory, there is a one-word answer to the problem: citizenship.” Real citizenship, Al-Agati argues, can only be offered in a newly restructured state where “things are not done from top down but rather the opposite.” This is no short path, Houri added. Equal citizenship is something that many regimes will want to avoid simply because it would require the parallel elimination of privileges for some groups and the promotion of rights for others. It is also something that will require political will.
SEARCH FOR RECOGNITION: In any case, minorities are not always recognised by Arab countries. Throughout its history, the Arab League has never had a department for minorities, something that Arab League officials have argued is a positive rather than negative as it indicates the equality of all Arab citizens. “It is an assumed, but not always applied, equality, and until equality is a reality the issue of minorities will continue to be a headache for the Arab regimes,” Ofeish said. The prospect of further emigration, clashes or calls for separation will also continue to be very real. “It is true that some countries are very hard to divide, like Syria, for example, but others could evolve into federations, as we are seeing in Iraq, or could eventually be divided. This is something that Arab governments need to take into consideration when they decide to approach the matter, which is still more or less a taboo,” he said. In the mid-1990s Egyptian sociologist Saadeddine Ibrahim launched a project at the Ibn Khaldoun Centre, a research institute, to examine the issue of ethnic diversity in the Arab world. This would not be just in Egypt, where the divide is between Muslims and Christians, but across the Arab countries. The matter that Ibrahim wanted to bring to the attention of civil society raised eyebrows across the Arab world, and the sociologist was implicitly or explicitly accused of promoting social dissent within Arab countries. “This was especially the case in the eyes of the Arab Gulf countries, where the Shias, either as a minority in Saudi Arabia or a majority in Bahrain, are marginalised almost completely,” said one Arab League source. It was equally a headache for Cairo, which is always careful to refer to Christians and Muslims as the “two elements of one nation”, and to drop any reference to ethnic rather than religious divides, like the Nubians and some Bedouin tribes. The issue was preemptively fudged, and the book that Ibrahim issued as a result of the research was only allowed a very limited circulation. Over the past 20 years, little has been said about the issue. It appears there is little interest in examining the full inclusiveness of diverse groups in one country, not just in Egypt and cases such as that of Iraq, but also in countries where some progress has been made, like Morocco.
