The End of Christian Arabia?

Massimo Franco writes:

The killing of dozens of Coptic Christian protesters during the recent turmoil in Cairo is one of the by-products of the Arab spring – and, unfortunately, a predictable one. Secular dictatorships such as those of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, and even of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Gadaffi in Libya were a bloody nightmare for political dissidents. But Christian minorities felt protected from Islamic persecution and were allowed to practise their religious faith. In exchange, respecting a tacit compromise, they stood at a distance from politics. This is known in the Vatican as "the panda syndrome", after the name of those inoffensive, vegetarian bears protected by Chinese authorities, to prevent their extinction. "But when a species has to be protected, it means it's already disappearing," points out the Egyptian Jesuit Samir Khalil Samir.

Samir is an expert. Pope Benedict XVI asked him to organise the synod of Middle Eastern bishops in October 2010 in Rome. And he knows that Christian "pandas" in his land and in all the Arab world are fighting a desperate battle for survival. That's why many local Catholic bishops greeted the revolts in the Maghreb and elsewhere around the Mediterranean with open scepticism and concern. They foresaw that political progress could be matched with religious regress, and a worsening of their condition as non-Islamic citizens.

This is what seems to have happened. The new ruling classes differ from one country to the other but they tend to have in common a stronger Islamic identity. Their more extremist factions push to punish Christian minorities for what is perceived as a double original sin: being allies of former hated regimes, and being "agents of western values", although they have been living there for 2,000 years or so. The result is that the prospect of their extinction as a community is growing.

It has happened already in Iraq, due to the "Anglo-American war" started in 2003. At that time, the number of Chaldeans, the Christian Iraqis, was between 800,000 and 1.4 million. In 2009-2010, it was estimated are between 400,000 and 500,000, and rapidly decreasing. Cairo's violent repression shows a similar process is under way in Egypt as well, where they still represent roughly 10% of the population.

This represents a georeligious tragedy for the Vatican, which always tried to maintain a frustrating dialogue with Islamic authorities, and which right up to the end persisted in invoking a pacific coexistence in the area.

But it is also a geopolitical failure for the west, and paradoxically for Islam as well. Christian communities have been historically a bridge between western and Arab culture; and a factor of moderation and mutual understanding between the two worlds. Their dramatic decline signals the collapse of this symbolic bridge, and the growing strength of an "Arab street" fed with consumerism but also with prejudices and a widespread hostile mood against Christians.

For the Holy See, the attempt to obtain reciprocity on the thorny issue of religious faith has always been difficult, and in some cases brutally refused. When some years ago Pope John Paul II asked Saudi Arabia's then top ruler if a Catholic church could be built there, the answer was a blunt "no": his country was Muhammad's holy land. The Polish pontiff tried to reply that in Rome a mosque had been erected, but the subtle and unanswerable retort was: "In Rome – not inside the Vatican City."

Even in America, most Evangelicals do not use the Scofield Reference Bible or take it at all seriously. Anywhere else, such as in Britain, it is hard to obtain. The Left Behind series has no British distributor, since it has no conceivable British audience. But their attitude to Levantine Christianity is much like their attitude to the Sub-Apostolic Fathers: they either do not know, or do not want to know, about entirely matter-of-fact descriptions of all things "Romish" existing during the lifetimes of the Apostles and providing the context that the New Testament text presupposes. Nor do they wish to be confronted with the entirely matter-of-fact existence of communities of that kind which have been present continuously for two thousand years, right there in the Bible Lands.

Christian communities that go all the way back to the Day of Pentecost are problematic enough in themselves for them, without those communities' having become, at best, Anglican or Lutheran rather than, say, Baptist, and far more commonly Latin Catholic or Maronite Catholic, Melkite Catholic or Greek Orthodox, Syrian Catholic or Syrian Jacobite, Armenian Catholic or Armenian Apostolic, Chaldean Catholic or Assyrian. As part of Evangelicalism's general upward trend in educational terms, Evangelical theology is increasingly looking beyond the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its earlier and more cerebral roots, and thus to a place within the older, broader and deeper Tradition. Approaches to the Middle East are starting to reflect this shift.

But most churchgoers, and indeed most clergy, are not academic theologians. So, for the most part, the attitude continues to be essentially the same as that which has since the nineteenth century maintained the completely made-up Garden Tomb because those who invented it did not like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and did not want people to know about it. We see the consequences in relation to the Holy Land, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria.