The End of Arab Christianity
Discovery Magazine
November 2011
About a year ago a
spurious article was published concerning a great christian revival taking place within Muslim
nations. Here is a more truthful article
concerning the systematic persecution and destruction of all things Godly,
righteous, loving, merciful, and faithful aka all things Christian in all nations Islam.
In these evil and perverse nations that walk in gross darkness, a darkness
which is now in the
UK
and other EU nations the church that is made with hands is under full attack,
with none that will lift up a hand to defend them. The Church not made with
hands is hidden from the eye of the servants of the fourth beast great and
terrible that showeth no mercy that breaketh in pieces, and grindeth to powder.
Blue words that are underscored are not our comments
Anthony Shadid
has a poignant piece up, … But There’s a Slim Hope in History
, on the specter of extinction facing Arab Christianity in the wake of
the Arab Spring. This is an issue which I think most of my Left-liberal friends
simply seem unable to confront forthrightly: ethnic and religious
cleansing are often the consequences of populist national self-determination.
This isn’t a speculative proposition, the history of
Europe is a testament to this, as well as what occurred in newly independent
European colonies (e.g., the fate of Indians in Burma
and Chinese in Vietnam).
This reality is often emphasized by a sort which is
very rare in the United
States: cosmopolitan imperialists. To these
partisans of the old regimes the Austro-Hungarian Empire is often held up as an
ideal. This ‘prison
house of nations’ was notoriously fractious and muddled, held together only
by the history of the House of Habsburg. To illustrate this in a manner
accessible to modern Westerners, Jews were often arch-imperialists because they
saw themselves as likely receiving a better deal in a situation of imperial ethno-linguistic
pluralism than in the possible nation-states where they would be a prominent
minority overshadowed by the majority (I think the subsequent history of Jews
in the inter-war states does confirm this fear as being grounded in reality).
Additionally, in the mid-19th century it was reported that some military units
resorted to English as their lingua franca! (the language being popularized by migrants who had returned
from the United States).
This section of the Shadid piece emphasizes the broader concerns in the Arab
world today:
Rare
is the Arab politician today who would specifically endorse secularism; the
word itself in Arabic is virtually a synonym for atheism. In an otherwise
triumphant tour of North Africa, Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey
unleashed invective from all stripes of Islamists when he endorsed a rather
tame take on secularism, namely that the state would treat all
religions equally.
Across the region, the climate
seems to have grown more inhospitable, more dangerous. In places like Egypt and Syria, authorities have cynically
fanned fears and biases to fortify their power. In the military’s bloody
response to a Christian protest in Cairo
in October, Egyptian television referred to Copts as though they were foreign
agitators bent on subversion, calling on “honorable citizens” to defend the
army. Religious stalwarts often speak rightly
of Islam’s long tolerance of minorities. But these days, the talk feels
condescending; minorities are asking for equality, not benevolent protection.
There are two
points which I always think are worth emphasizing: moderate
Islamists in the Arab world probably occupy a position which is analogous to
Christian Reconstructionists and Dominionists
in the West. Any analogy between ‘Christian fundamentalists’
in the USA
and ‘Muslim fundamentalists’ collapses because of the radical difference in
intent and plausibility of execution of that intent. In much of the
Muslim world the dominant religion has already attained the undisputed position
of power and legitimacy which Christian Reconstructionists
can only dream of. It is understood that non-Muslim religions and peoples exist
and persist only at the suffrance of Islamic law and
values. The genuine ‘moderation,’ or more accurately reconciliation with a
minimum level of norms acceptable to Western liberal democracy, of Turkish
Islamism has less to do with the nature of Turkish Islam than it does with the range of opinions of the general Turkish population. That
range of opinion is at least analogous to a very religious Western nation, like
the United States
(e.g., only a marginally greater number of Turks accept Creationism than
Americans). There is simply no analogy to the distribution of beliefs and
orientations found in Western nations within most Arab societies. The Libyan
government installed by Western military power explicitly asserts that its laws
and actions will be grounded in Islam. Consider how chilling most Western
liberals find a similar assertion by conservative Christian Western
politicians? The anti-Jewish attitudes common across the Arab world also
hearken back to an older time in the West. Whatever hostility Arabs as a whole
may have toward the state of Israel, they often seem unable to separate
individual Jews from that hostility, and rather manifest a very old and nasty
sentiment which is reflected in parodies like Borat (in part
because of the forced expulsion of Jews after World War II from many Arab
nations means that very few Arabs encounter individual Jews in the flesh).
Then there’s the issue of Islam’s
history of religious tolerance. This is correct, but the term tolerance here
has an older meaning. It refers to the right to exist, not the right to liberty
and equality. Non-Muslims in the Muslim world were subordinated explicitly, and lesser subjects in the Muslim order. They
were protected by Muslim states in return for a tax and specific sets of
debilities. That protection did not always hold, and expulsions and pogroms did
occur on occasion. Several times I have heard Arab dissidents point to this
past history of coexistence and tolerance. I suspect that like many ignorant
Westerners they take this at face value, without understanding the deep
inequalities which were lifted only during the era of European colonialism. But
this is not a past to be proud of, and only notable
because of the exclusive intolerance of European Christendom during the same
period. Like the famous rights of women granted in Islam, this is only positive
when graded on a strong historical curve!
Finally, there’s
the issue of the future of Arab Christianity. Does it matter? Let’s hit the
practical and the principle. The practical is that there aren’t many Arab
Christians left in the Levant and Iraq. There are more people of Arab
Christian heritage in the New World than in
this region. Millions of Americans and Brazilians have Arab ancestry. The vast
majority of people of Palestinian Christian heritage reside outside of Palestine. The Iraq War
of the early 2000s has decimated the Christians of Iraq, many of whom have fled
to Syria
(the irony, the most powerful nation of Christians is responsible for the
evisceration of one of the most precarious and ancient Christian communities!).
Likely when the Assad regime falls they will flee again, perhaps to Lebanon, or the
West. These transplanted communities persist after a fashion, but their
distinctive identity as grounded in the locales of their origination and
evolution do seem to decay, as they lose their peculiarities. These ancient
Christian traditions are unlike American Evangelical Protestantism, in that
specific place and history have deep meaning. The idea of Assyrian Christians
worshiping in a strip-mall seems ridiculous on the face of it. The reality is that Arab Americans, and
particularly Arab Christians, have a very weak sense of ethnic solidity and
coherency in the West. They melt away as individuals, and the community loses
its sense of integrity. The functional rationale for integrity necessary in a
hostile Muslim environment is far less in the United
States, France,
or Brazil.
It seems entirely plausible that
as the Fertile Crescent is cleansed of its
Christians that they will resettle in the West, and evaporate into the ether of
the broader cultural milieu. Their numbers are modest, probably ~5 million or
so. The more pressing issue is Egypt.
There are likely ~10 million or so Coptic Christians, and I do not see a
feasible migration out of Egypt
for most of this population. The Christians of the Levant
invariably have family abroad, and so the options for migration are numerous,
and the feasibility of transplantation rather high. In contrast the Copts are
more solidly grounded within Egypt,
and their numbers are such that it seems impractical that any one nation could
embrace them in large numbers. I suspect that the next few decades will be
difficult ones for the Copts, as they are brutalized by an Egyptian democracy
which goes through a process of ‘maturation.’ A substantial number of Copts
will embrace Islam to secure liberty in a society which grants full equality
only to Muslims. This an old story, not a new one.
Finally, there’s the principle. Who
cares? I don’t believe in any religion, let alone the Christian
religion, so what does it matter that a particular ethno-religious group loses
its coherency in the face persecution if they persist as individuals? I think
this is a fair logical point, and I don’t have a fair logical defense. I’m in
fact broadly skeptical of the proposition that groups have
collective “rights” as opposed to individuals. Rather, let me simply observe as
a descriptive matter that just as we live in the age when the Western
Black Rhino goes extinct, so we live in the generation that will likely see
the passing of the ~2,000 year old living Christian communities of Iraq and
Palestine. Of course the scions of these communities will continue to make
pilgrimages to their ancient holy sites, but without a living community to care
for them they will become as the ruins of Nineveh,
a testament to memories and ages forgotten. The partisans of the ‘true Islam’
are now ushering in a profoundly different world, as societies are
progressively cleansed of their diversity and difference. In this way they are
to a great extent the heirs of the French Revolution, and not the first decades
of Islam.
Addendum: I am aware that many “Arab Christians”
deny that they are Arab. I will refer to them as Arab in this space because
most readers will be confused by the details of the argument, and this semantic
gloss does not alter the substance of my argument here.