It has been a long time coming. Christians have been an integral part of the Middle Eastern social fabric for millennia. They have lived among Muslims in the Levant and in Mesopotamia, contemporary Iraq, for centuries. By and large their Muslim overlords treated the Christians benevolently. Nevertheless, periodic pogroms, mostly instigated by non-Arabs such as the Ottoman Turks, also decimated the Christian population of the Middle East, which sometimes sought refuge in inhospitable, rugged mountainous terrain, such as Mount Lebanon and the peaks and pinnacles of northern Iraq. If they hear the words “Middle East” today, many people may instinctively think of Muslims. Those familiar with the Middle East, however, find such misconceptions absurd. Christians in the Middle East have been socially integrated into predominantly Muslim communities for centuries. Many left remote mountains for bustling cities such as the Syrian capital of Damascus and the country's largest city and economic hub Aleppo. They also flocked to the Iraqi capital Baghdad and the country's second-largest city Mosul. Yet today, a new ball game has been in the making. The rise of Islamist terrorist groups such as the Islamic State (IS) has left the Christians of the Middle East vulnerable. In the past they were sometimes seen as traitors and used as pawns by the powers that be. But today it may be that in some areas their very survival is at stake. It should be made clear from the outset that the Christians of the Middle East are not a homogeneous lot, and this article focuses on the Christian communities of the Levant and Mesopotamia. Moreover, Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Christian community is the largest in the Arab world. With an estimated 100 million people, Egypt is by far the most populous nation in North Africa and the Middle East. Egyptian Christians constitute between 10 and 15 per cent of the population, and hence they number about 12 million at least. The Coptic Orthodox Church estimates the number of Egyptian Christians as much higher than the official statistics, especially if the Coptic community in North America, Australia and Europe, who in many cases have dual citizenship, are included. There are some two million Egyptian Christians overseas. “The Christians of Egypt are a special category. They have suffered from terrorism, the last being the attack on the Al-Boutroseya Basilica adjacent to the Coptic Orthodox Saint Mark's Cathedral, and yet the fate of Christians in Egypt is secure, unlike in the more volatile conditions in the Levant and Iraq,” Mona Makram Ebeid, an Egyptian politician, told Al-Ahram Weekly. “The future of Christians in the Middle East depends on the goodwill of the Muslim majority,” Abi-Nader, the former head of the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia, concurred. Christian Levantines once played a pivotal role in the economic and social development of Egypt and other states in the Middle East, West Africa and Latin America. “Take Samaan Sednaoui, the founder of the department store of the same name in Cairo, for instance. He was descended from a family of Melkite Greek Catholics of Syrian descent. The family has its roots in the city of Sednaya, which is where their surname originates. The Sednaoui family migrated to Egypt at the end of the 19th century,” Ebeid commented. Yet, despite this history this is a perilous moment for the Christians of the Middle East even as they continue to pursue the cause of secularism and freedom of expression in the region. In the past, Arab nationalism and the anti-colonial struggle were overwhelmingly secular in nature, and there was plenty of room for Christians to participate in the anti-colonial struggle and in both Iraq and Syria in the ruling Baath Party, meaning “renaissance” or “resurrection”. The party's motto was the secularist “Unity, Liberty, Socialism”, and there was no room for religious zealotry. The principal brain behind the Baath's ideology was a Syrian Greek Orthodox Christian thinker, Michel Aflaq, who was born in Damascus and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris. His main associates in the early years when the Party was founded in April 1947 were a Sunni Muslim named Salaheddin Al-Bitar and Zaki Al-Arsuzi, an atheist. Aflaq and the Baath believed in the strict separation of state and religion, and hence they attracted Christians and Alawi and Shia Muslims. The Baathists were against both capitalism and communism. The Baath saw itself as Arab nationalist, anti-imperialist and socialist. A staunch believer in secularism, Aflaq nonetheless believed that Islam was proof of the “Arab genius”. Nursing grievances and lacking reliable allies both at home and abroad, Christians in the Middle East today understand that they cannot impose themselves on their Muslim compatriots by diktat. Bruised by the experience with political Islam and Islamist terrorism the Christian gaze is fixed firmly inward, even though some Christians may contemplate exile from the region. Citizenship rights and participation in their respective nations' democratic institutions and political culture would be a panacea. Political Islam has proved polarising, but the Middle Eastern Christians' relations with their Muslim compatriots have not fundamentally foundered. “I am an optimist by nature. I believe that there is a future for Christianity in the Middle East. Much depends on the attitudes of the Muslim majority towards the Christian minority. Christians have lived side by side with Muslims for millennia and have survived many pogroms, and yet the Christians of the Middle East survived down the centuries and participated in the struggles against European colonialism along with their Muslim compatriots,” Abi-Nader told the Weekly. SYKES-PICOT: The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France compounded the problems faced by Christians in the Middle East. They had been living in the region since the inception of Christianity in 1st century CE, but Sykes-Picot rendered them citizens of diverse nations carved out by the colonial powers of Britain and France, unsettling the Christians' co-existence with their Muslim compatriots. The Christians of the Middle East whose political consciousness dawned in the years when the region was embroiled in turmoil have had to survive the tawdriness of the Baath Party in both Iraq and Syria as well as decades of denominational political deadlock and mud-slinging. Many have flirted with exile. Yet, as this year's Christmas celebrations in Iraq and Syria have demonstrated, many are now convinced that after a spell of chaos the powers that be can now unite fractured nations. The Christians of the Middle East have had to come to terms with living as citizens of the new nations created by Sykes-Picot, even if they have not always enjoyed full citizenship rights. They have sometimes been viewed suspiciously as the pawns of the European powers. But the majority of Christians in the Middle East have had little appetite for their communities to break away from the region, even if hardliners might be tempted to exploit the atrocities committed by the Islamic State (IS) group and other Islamist terrorist groups to stir religious sentiment. The schisms that brought about the many sects resulting from doctrinal disagreements among Arab Christians in the Middle East were exacerbated by Sykes-Picot. The Christians at that time were still dismissed as dhimmis, non-Muslim subjects of Muslim states, in certain quarters. The word literally means “protected people,” and it was once obligatory for Christians and Jews to pay the jizya (poll) tax in return for the protection of their Muslim overlords. The jizya was different from the compulsory zakat or alms paid by Muslim subjects. It was a system enforced under the Ottoman Turks who once ruled the Levant and Mesopotamia. The system was discarded after the Sykes-Picot Agreement as most of the new nations adopted western legal systems. Yet, in matters of family and personal law, the Ottoman millet (community) system persisted. The divisions among the Christians of the Middle East provide a thornier challenge in a region where their record of solidarity is patchy. The Eastern Orthodox Church is a communion of autocephalous churches, for example, and the Christians of the Middle East do not constitute one monolithic church such as the Roman Catholic Church, for instance. Rather, they consist of independent autonomous Churches, as in Lebanon. LEBANON: “We are the only nation in the Middle East and Arab world that constitutionally must have a Christian head of state,” Gisele Khoury, a Lebanese media figure, explained to the Weekly. But the Lebanese system is an anomaly in the region. Recently there was a proposition in Lebanon so that overseas Lebanese, mostly Christian, could have dual citizenship with the right to vote. The inclusion of the Lebanese Diaspora into the country's complex and contentious political scene would have changed the face of Lebanese politics. The Lebanese overseas are spread throughout the world, and they are mostly Christians. The largest geographical concentration is in Latin America, and Brazil has the world's biggest Lebanese population, some 5,800,000 or an upper estimate of seven million, followed by Argentina with an estimated 1,500,000 Lebanese. West African nations, Francophone and Anglophone, account for a sizable portion of the Lebanese Diaspora. Australia with 450,000 Lebanese is also significant, as is the United States, and Canada as well as Europe, where there is a concentration mainly in France. Hitherto, the Lebanese Diaspora was not permitted to vote in Lebanon. Over 1,800,000 Lebanese emigrated from the country from 1975 to 2011. The Lebanese Diaspora today is estimated to be around 14 million people, far more than the internal population of Lebanon of around six million. Lebanon also has the most religiously diverse society in the Middle East. The country comprises no fewer than18 recognised religious sects. However, even though Christians constituted the majority of the population when Lebanon gained independence from France in 1945 and was specifically created as a Christian enclave in the Levant, today Christians are in a minority as the country's population is divided equally between a third Christian, a third Sunni Muslim and another third Shia Muslim. This is a rough estimation, as no census has been conducted since 1932, and it does not take into consideration minorities such as the Druze. Personal status laws are a particularly contentious issue in Lebanon, where religious courts determine the laws of inheritance even though wills often fall under national jurisdiction. Christians are not subject to Islamic personal status laws inspired by the Sharia (Islamic) law. Christian religious courts are competent to deal with marriage, divorce, and child custody. The Maronites are the largest Christian community in Lebanon, followed by the Greek Orthodox community. The country's National Pact of 1943 required that Lebanon's president be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister be a Sunni Muslim, the speaker of the parliament be a Shia Muslim and the deputy speaker of the parliament and the deputy prime minister be a Greek Orthodox, or Roum Orthodox in Arabic. Lebanese presidential and parliamentary elections matter in the region precisely because of the sometimes reckless Lebanese political system based on religious affiliation.
ISRAEL AND THE PALESTINIANS: The Palestinians in Israel, the so-called Arabs of 1948, belong to myriad political parties. The politics of the Palestinians, both Christians and Muslim, in Israel draw upon the belief that the complexity of Israeli politics is smoke and mirrors designed to bamboozle the indigenous population, the Palestinians. The vast majority of Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, are anti-Israeli, and yet the Israeli daily newspaper Maariv has described Christian Arabs in Israel as “the most successful in the education system.” Christian Arabs have fared the best in terms of education in Israel in comparison with other religious groups, including Jews. The number of young Christians enlisted in the Israel Defence Forces is expected to set a new record in 2017. According to Maariv, the number of recruits will rise. Christians constitute two per cent of the population of Israel, and Christian officers at the rank of major in the teleprocessing branch, the navy, and other units are expected to increase, according to Maariv. This, however, does not refute the fact that a majority of the Arab Christians in Israel are champions of the Palestinian cause. Israeli Arab Christians are a community ill at ease with itself, and they can see what their coreligionists in Iraq and Syria have suffered over the past decade. They have witnessed how their numbers have been decimated. Some 200,000 Israeli citizens are Christian, mostly Arab Christians, but there are some smaller groups of Christians in Israel, mostly adherents of the Greek-Catholic (Melkite) Church, representing about 60 per cent of Israeli Christians. Other Christian denominations include 7,000 Maronites and smaller numbers of Armenian, Anglicans and Roman Catholics. Aramean, or Syraic, Christians in Israel espouse an Aramean ethnic identity and speak the Aramean language of Jesus Christ as well as Arabic. The antagonism between Christian representatives in the Israeli parliament or Knesset reached a tipping point when in April 2007 the Arab Christian MP Azmy Bishara resigned from it via the Israeli embassy in Cairo. In 2011, Bishara's pension as a former Knesset member was cancelled through a new law specifically promulgated against him. Christian Arab Members of the Knesset, past and present, have also been under police investigation, and most are vociferously anti-Zionist. Socio-economically, the Arab Christians of Israel are more similar to the Jewish population than to the Muslim Arabs. But the cultural and linguistic heritage and ethnic identity of the Arab Christians of Israel is decidedly Arab in nature Arab Christians only represent 2.1 per cent of the total Israeli population, but they account for 17 per cent of the country's university students, a higher rate than Jews. Christian Arabs comprise about nine per cent of the Arab population in Israel. Approximately 70 per cent reside in the northern part of the country. Nazareth, the biblical Galilean city where Jesus Christ was raised, has the largest Christian Arab population. Not only are Israel's Arab Christians the most educated segment of Israel's population, but they also have the lowest unemployment rates. About 30 per cent of Israeli Arabs belong to the Greek Orthodox Church. Some 25,000 Israeli Christians hail from the former Soviet Union, and most are Russian Orthodox. The dramatic escalation of anti-Christian incidents in Nazareth over the past three years augurs ill for Christians in Israel. In one incident in 2014, the black flag of IS was installed in front of a church in Nazareth, the Israeli city with the largest concentration of Arab Christians. Father Gabriel Nadaf of the same city has also faced persecution because he is widely regarded as a “pro-Israel traitor of the Arab cause” because he encourages Arab Christians to join the Israeli Defence Forces. Rejecting Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people lies at the heart of the ideology of Israeli Arab Christians. SYRIA: The largest Christian denomination in Syria is the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch, and Aleppo has the largest number of Christians in Syria. The Syriac Orthodox Church, or Jacobite Church, is the most influential in the social and economic spheres. Syrian Christians are more urbanised than those of Iraq, and Christians comprise roughly 10 per cent of Syria's population.
IRAQ: Iraqi Christians are considered to be one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world. Christians numbered about 1,500,000 in Iraq in 2003, representing just over six per cent of the population. In Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, until recently under the control of IS, Christian homes have been painted with the Arabic letter “noon” referring to nassarah, the Arabic word that means “Christian”.
JORDAN: The vast majority of Jordanian Christians are of Palestinian origin. Like in Syria and Iraq, their numbers are dwindling as a percentage of the population due to lower birth rates and immigration.
CHRISTIAN CHURCHES IN THE MIDDLE EAST: Most of the Christians of Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria are represented in the Middle East Council of Churches. The term “Eastern Church” can be misleading, and here the challenges that face motley Christian communities such as Maronites, Melkites, Catholic Syrians, Armenians, Assyrians and Chaldaeans are examined. The Maronites historically carved out a niche for themselves in the bastion of Mount Lebanon in Lebanon, and the French colonial authorities conferred upon them a special status, one which endowed them with a relative security denied to the other Middle Eastern Christians. To this day, as enshrined in the Lebanese constitution, the president of Lebanon must by law be a Maronite Christian. Every other Middle Eastern nation constitutionally bars Christians from being presidents or heads of state. And even though most contemporary Muslim governments reject the old Ottoman dhimmi system as inappropriate for the modern era of nation-states and democracies, areas held under the control of Islamist terrorist groups such as the Al-Nusra Front and IS have imposed the dhimmi system on Christians and other non-Muslims. Contemporary Middle Eastern Christians are subjected to variations of persecution and suffering, not necessarily because of a gradation based on their particular creed. Most often, the differences are a question of geography. The Assyrians and Chaldaeans, in particular, have been badly affected, partially because they are geographically concentrated in areas that have fallen under the control of IS. Exile may be the only solution if they are to survive as a people, and it is clear that it has become increasing difficult for them to continue living in the lands of their ancestors. ASSYRIANS: The ethnic Assyrians, one of two main Christian groups in Iraq, have been subjected to terrible atrocities in recent years. Two explosions rocked an Assyrian neighbourhood in Al-Qamishli in January 2016. On 29 June, a suicide bomber disguised as a priest attempted to enter an Assyrian genocide commemoration event in the Al-Wusta district of Al-Qamishli but was stopped by Assyrian forces. The bomber detonated his bomb outside the hall, killing himself and three members of the Assyrian security forces and wounding five. It is believed that the bomber was targeting Patriarch Ignatius Aphrem II Karim of the Syriac Orthodox Church who was leading the commemoration. Incidents such as these have led many Christians in Iraq to flee the country. The explosion occurred at the intersection of the Al-Quwatli and Al-Kindi Park Road in a neighbourhood heavily populated by Assyrians in the north-eastern Syrian city of Al-Qamishli near the Syrian-Turkish border. The pre-conflict population of the Christians in Al-Qamishli was about 40,000, half of whom are known to have fled the city after consecutive massacres. The Assyrians also remember earlier pogroms. Al-Qamishli dates back to the 1920s, when thousands of Assyrians escaping the Assyrian Genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks in southern Turkey settled in the vicinity on the Syrian side of the Taurus Mountains. They also claimed Al-Qamishli to be their community's capital. Assyrians constituted two-thirds of the city's population until the influx of Kurds fleeing persecution from Iraq and Turkey. Unfortunately, the Kurds competed with the Assyrians for controlling the resources of the region. Tensions between the two communities were intensified and successive Syrian governments deliberately stoked the fires in a deliberate divide and rule policy. Contemporary Assyrians live predominantly in north-eastern Syria and northern Iraq, even though they are also found in the large cities of the Middle East such as Beirut, Damascus, and Aleppo, once the economic hub of northern Syria. They are also found in the north-western fringes of Iran. Many Assyrians have now fled their ancestral homelands to North America, Australia and Europe. Historically, the Assyrian Church, an Eastern Orthodox Church, spread the Christian faith to countries as far afield as China and Mongolia, in order to proselytise away from the Muslim-ruled lands in the Middle East. The Syriac Orthodox Church has a large number of ethnically Assyrian adherents. The Assyrians from northern Mesopotamia and the Arameans and Phoenicians from the Levant are collectively dubbed Syriacs. The Assyrians suffered a number of religiously and ethnically motivated massacres throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and the Ottomans also conducted systematic genocide against the Assyrians, even though this has not been widely publicised in the West. The Assyrians were virtually decimated in south-eastern Anatolia, and a 1922 Assyrian assessment set the genocide of Assyrians at 275,000 dead. In 1982 under the leadership of Yonadam Kanna, a thorn in the flesh of the former ruling Baath Party regime in Iraq, the Assyrians took up arms against former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and paid dearly for their alleged treachery. One latest outrage occurred last month when at least five people were killed and 20 wounded, at least four of them seriously, in a series of suicide bombings in the mostly ethnic Assyrian town of Qaa in north-eastern Lebanon near the border with Syria. IS claimed responsibility. SYRIAC ORTHODOX CHURCH: Of all the Orthodox churches, the Syriac Church is probably the oldest after that of Jerusalem. It has Jewish roots and practices a form of Christianity unknown in the West. The pre-eminence of the Syrian Orthodox Church's Apostolic See is well documented. Like the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt, the Syrian Orthodox Church is monophysite in nature. Sermons are traditionally given in Syriac and on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The liturgy is one of the most ancient in the world with strong Jewish overtones and is in Syriac or Aramaic. Most IraqiSyriacs now reside in the Americas and Europe. Members of the Syriac Church are also found in the Indian state of Kerala, where St Thomas is believed to have introduced Christianity to South Asia. The Syriac Christians were the first to welcome the Arabs in the Levant, and they have one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world, the Syriac Orthodox Mor Gabriel Monastery in south-eastern Turkey. But the order lives in conflict with the surrounding Kurdish villages today, and lawsuits have been brought accusing the Monastery of having illegally appropriated the land surrounding it. More than 300,000 Christians have left Turkey in recent decades to escape persecution and for being caught in the crossfire between the Turkish authorities and Kurdish insurgents. The Syriac Orthodox Church has some five million adherents across the globe, mostly in India, but it is based in Damascus. The Council of Chalcedon was a Church council held in 451 CE in Chalcedon in Asia Minor, now in Turkey, which decided the doctrine of the dual nature, human and divine, of Christ. The Coptic Orthodox, the Ethiopian Tewahedo Orthodox, the Syriac and Armenian Apostolic Churches do not acknowledge the Council of Chalcedon, and hence the term monophysitism, or single nature, is used to define their creeds. CHALDEANS: According to Jewish tradition, the birthplace of Abraham in northern Mesopotamia was Ur of the Chaldees, and the name stuck to adherents of the Chaldean Christian faith. MELKITES: The term Melkite derives from the Arabic malaki meaning “royal” and by extension, “imperial”. The term malko and its cognates are the Semitic words for “king” or formerly for the Byzantine emperors. The Melkite Christians call themselves Al-Rum Al-Orthodox, or “Roman Greek”. They are mostly found in Lebanon and Syria. Somewhat confusingly, the patriarchs of the Melkite Church were divided between the Greek Orthodox by the authority of the Patriarch of Constantinople until the late 19th century, with the Greek Catholics in sharp contrast recognising the authority of the Roman Catholic pope in Rome. The Saint Paul Basilica in Lebanon, a Melkite Greek Catholic church, is an architectural wonder and a symbol of the Byzantine architectural tradition in the Middle East. Contemporary Melkites are mostly located in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine. Greek Catholics are almost exclusively Arabic speakers, even though they are spread throughout the Middle East and Turkey, with a geographical concentration in the south-western Turkish province of Hatay bordering Syria. ARMENIANS: Roman Catholic Pope Francis last year paid tribute to the 1.5 million Armenians massacred in 1915 at the Tzitzernakaberd, the Genocide Memorial and Museum in Erevan in Armenia, where he met with Armenian president Serzh Sarksyan and leaders of the Armenian Apostolic Church. “May God grant the beloved Armenian people and the entire world peace and consolation. May God protect the memory of the Armenian people. Memory should not be diluted or forgotten. Memory is a source of peace and the future,” Francis said. The Armenian Christians number around half a million in the Middle East, with their largest community in Iran including 200,000 adherents of a variety of Armenian churches. MARONITES: The Maronite Christians' stronghold is Mount Lebanon in the country of the same name. The Maronite Church was founded by the Syriac Christian Saint Maron, the first Maronite Patriarch (ruled 685-707 CE). Ethnically, the Maronites are descended from the indigenous Arameans and Phoenicians. Some Maronites claim that they are the descendants of the Maradites, a word derived from the Arabic mareed which translates as “sick”, “insane” or simply “moron”. Many Christians in the Middle East today are convinced that their future lies in integration with their Muslim compatriots and particularly with secular Muslims. This is the case among the Maronites of Lebanon, even if they managed to maintain their own distinctive Aramaic language until as late as the 19th century. As mentioned earlier, Lebanese presidents are required by law to be Maronite Christians. Indeed, the French colonial authorities created the country of Lebanon as a haven for the Maronites. The Mount Lebanon enclave had long been their bastion, and the former ruling Ottomans barred Christians from residing in the coastal cities of Lebanon. The Ottoman blockades and land confiscations during World War I that killed an estimated third to half of the Maronite population in Lebanon is testimony to the pains, trials and tribulations of the past. The Maronites witnessed a further decline in their population in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), and today it is estimated that the Maronites constitute up to 25 per cent of the Lebanese population. Reaffirming their economic and social importance will be complicated in neighbouring Syria and Iraq, but not in Lebanon. The Maronite Church under its own Patriarch of Antioch is in communion with the Roman Catholic Church, and the Maronites were widely viewed as traitors because they welcomed the First Crusade in the Middle Ages, with some still accused of this particular charge. Overall, the craft of crisis management is at the core of the Christian faith in the Middle East, and the Maronites of Lebanon embody this spirit of perseverance. Low fertility rates and immigration have led to the loss of Maronite Christian hegemony in Lebanon, but more fundamentally the history of the Maronites exemplifies the instinct of survival and endurance peculiar to the Christians of the Middle East. These, like the Maronites, have had to insist on their civil rights without damaging relations with their Muslim compatriots. “We the Christians of the Middle East, the Levant and Iraq, are the yeast that ferments the Christian faith in this region.God has ordained that we live in this land,in this part of the world that is the cradle of civilisation. The Islamic State is not the end of us. We have historically witnessed worse repression and persecutions than that of the Islamic State. We survived the oppression of the Mamlukes and the Ottoman Turks.I am optimistic. And, my optimism is not blind faith.It is no coincidence that Aleppo, the city with the largest Christian population in Syria, was liberated just before Christmas Day. We shall survive,” Bishop Samir Mazloum of the Maronite Church told Al-Ahram Weekly.
