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  • The end of Christianity in the Middle East could mean the demise of

    The end of Christianity in the Middle East could mean the demise of
    Arab secularism

    In a Middle East rebuilt on intolerant ideologies, there is likely to
    be little place for beleaguered minorities


    William Dalrymple
    The Guardian, Wednesday 23 July 2014 16.47 BST
    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/23/arab-christians-secular-arabs-isis-middle-east-minorities

    An Iraqi security officer guards the Church of the Virgin Mary in the
    northern town of Bartala, near Mosul, in 2012. Photograph: Karim
    Sahib/AFP/Getty Images

    The past decade has been catastrophic for the Arab world'sbeleaguered
    12 million strong Christian minority. In Egypt revolution and
    counter-revolution have been accompanied by a series of anti-Copt
    riots, killings and church burnings. In Gaza and the West Bank
    Palestinian Christians are emigrating en masse as they find themselves
    uncomfortably caught between Netanyahu's pro-settler government and
    their increasingly radicalised Sunni neighbours.

    In Syria most of the violence is along the Sunni-Alawite fault line,
    but stories of rape and murder directed at the Christian minority, who
    used to make up around 10% of the population, have emerged. Many have
    already fled to camps in Lebanon, Turkey or Jordan; the ancient
    Armenian community of Aleppo is reported to be moving en masse to
    Yerevan.

    The worst affected areas of Syria are of course those controlled by
    Isis. Last weekend it issued a decree offering the dwindling Christian
    population of eastern Syria and northern Iraq a choice: convert to
    Islam or pay a special religious levy - the jizya. If they did not
    comply, "there is nothing to give them but the sword". The passing of
    the deadline led to possibly the largest exodus of Middle Eastern
    Christians since theArmenian massacres during the first world war,
    with the entire Christian community of Mosul heading off towards
    Kirkuk and the relative religious tolerance of the Kurdish zone.

    Even before this latest exodus, at least two-thirds of Iraqi
    Christians had fled since the fall of Saddam. Christians were
    concentrated in Mosul, Basra and, especially, Baghdad - which before
    the US invasion had the largest Christian population in the Middle
    East. Although Iraq's 750,000 Christians made up only 7% of the
    pre-war population, they were a prosperous minority under the
    Ba'athists, as symbolised by the high profile of Tariq Aziz, Saddam's
    foreign minister, who used to disarm visiting foreign dignitaries by
    breaking into Onward, Christian Soldiers in Aramaic, the language of
    Jesus.

    According to tradition it was St Thomas and his cousin Addai who
    brought Christianity to Iraq in the first century. At the Council of
    Nicea, where the Christian creed was thrashed out in AD325, there were
    more bishops from Mesopotamia than western Europe. The region became a
    refuge for those persecuted by the Orthodox Byzantines, such as
    theMandeans - the last Gnostics, who follow what they believe to be
    the teachings of John the Baptist. Then there was the Church of the
    East, which brought the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato, as well as
    Greek science and medicine, to the Islamic world - and hence, via
    Cordoba, to the new universities of medieval Europe.

    Now almost everywhere Arab Christians are leaving. In the past decade
    maybe a quarter have made new lives in Europe, Australia and America.
    According to Professor Kamal Salibi, they are simply exhausted: "There
    is a feeling of fin de race among Christians all over the Middle East.
    Now they just want to go somewhere else, make some money and relax.
    Each time a Christian goes, no other Christian comes to fill his place
    and that is a very bad thing for the Arab world. It is Christian Arabs
    who keep the Arab world 'Arab' rather than 'Muslim'."

    Certainly since the 19th century Christian Arabs have played a vital
    role in defining a secular Arab cultural identity. It is no
    coincidence that most of the founders of secular Arab nationalism were
    men like Michel Aflaq - the Greek Orthodox Christian from Damascus
    who, with other Syrian students freshly returned from the Sorbonne,
    founded the Ba'ath party in the 1940s - or Faris al-Khoury, Syria's
    only Christian prime minister. Then there were intellectuals like the
    Palestinian George Antonius, who in 1938 wrote in The Arab Awakening
    of the crucial role Christians played in reviving Arab literature and
    the arts after their long slumber under Ottoman rule.

    If the Islamic state proclaimed by Isis turns into a permanent,
    Christian-free zone, it could signal the demise not just of an
    important part of the Arab Christian realm but also of the secular
    Arab nationalism Christians helped create. The 20th century after
    1918, which saw the creation of the different Arab national states,
    may well prove to be a blip in Middle Eastern history, as the old
    primary identifiers of Arab identity, religion and qabila - tribe -
    resurface.

    It is as if, after a century of flirting with imported ideas of the
    secular nation state, the region is reverting to the Ottoman Millet
    system (from the Arabic millah, literally "nation"), which represented
    a view of the world that made religion the ultimate marker of
    identity, and classified Ottoman subjects by their various sectarian
    religious "nations".

    Despite sizeable Christian populations holding on in Lebanon, Jordan
    and Egypt, there is likely to be little place for Christian Arabs in a
    Middle East rebuilt on intolerant ideologies like those of Isis. Their
    future is more likely to resemble that of the most influential
    Christian Arab intellectual of our day, Edward Said. Born in Jerusalem
    at the height of Arab nationalism in 1935, Said died far from the
    turmoil of the Middle East in New York in 2003. His last collection of
    essays was appropriately entitledReflections On Exile.

    * The headline of this article was amended on 24 July 2014.

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