Very revealing!
Lonely at home
By Jumana Al Tamimi, Associate Editor
Published: December 18, 2008, 23:45
A few weeks ago, reports from Iraq carried dreadful details about the murder of two sisters in what many described as part of a campaign aimed at driving Christians out of the northern city of Mosul.
The incident cast a shadow on the fate of Iraq’s minority Christian community and shed light on their status in the Middle East and their relations with the majority Muslims.
Religious leaders from both sides blame “outsiders” for the tension between the followers of the two religions, saying they have coexisted for centuries.
While there was consensus among religious leaders, researchers and experts from the Middle East and abroad that Christians are closer to Muslims in the Middle East than their brethren in other parts of the world because they have many facets in common, including language and cultural background.
The Iraqi sisters were shot by a group of young men in the house of the Syrian Catholic family.
Their mother was wounded with a knife. The girls’ father and brother managed to escape.
Some sources were quoted as saying the attackers were “youth gangs from poor families” but were backed by “a criminal organisation doing everything to drive Christians out of the city”.
The attack came after about 10,000 Christians in Mosul, according to Iraqi official estimates, fled their homes following attacks and incidents of intimidation in October.
The attacks, believed to have been carried out by extremists, left 16 people dead. In March, the body of Paulos Rahho, the Chaledean Catholic archbishop of Mosul, was found after he was abducted by gunmen.
Safety over roots
While many Iraqi Christians have said recently that “nobody is threatening them” anymore, they still believe it is a “dangerous [situation] and all of them want to leave” the country where they have lived for generations and Christianity has been in existence for about 2,000 years — longer than in Europe.
“The Church,” Reverend Charbal Isso of the Syrian Catholic Church, said, “is trying its best to convince its followers to stay in [Iraq].”
“But the church can’t control them and keep them in Iraq” by force, Isso added in an interview with Weekend Review from the village of Qaraqosh, a few kilometres east of Mosul, which has a population of 50,000.
Priests and residents said there were around 100,000 Christians in Iraq at the beginning of the millennium.
Today the number could hardly be 20,000. Members of the community started leaving shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussain in 2003, said Luis Murqous, a member of the Municipal Council of Helwan town in Mosul.
Murqous, who calls himself a secular Iraqi, added: “Since then attacks on Christians began in Basra and started spreading northwards. … Whole [Christian] neighbourhoods became deserted.”
The fragile security and the spread of sectarian feelings — even among Islamic sects — in Iraq are to blame for the exodus of Christians.
"During Saddam’s rule, they said, Christian religious practices were protected and no religious aggression against them ever occurred. But the collapse of the regime unleashed many problems “for everybody”.
After the 2003 war, fundamentalists began linking Christians with the “Crusaders”, a term they used to describe the American and coalition troops, alluding to the Europeans who warred against the Muslim Middle East from the 9th century to the 11th centuries.
Instability and armed conflicts in the past years are just some of the reasons that have led to the declining number of Christians, who constitute minorities in the Middle East, researchers said.
In the days of hardshipThe decline is not limited to a particular area and includes the Palestinian city of Bethlehem and Lebanon, the only Arab country where Christians were considered a majority in the past.During times of conflict, minorities tend to become a target in a way different from times of peace or stability.
They “lack the ability to stand up for themselves”, said Brian Grim, a senior research fellow in religion and world affairs at the PEW Forum on Religion & Public Life.
“During times of instability, religious persecution can become a factor that drives one group out.”Grim, who is based in Washington DC, said the decline in the number of Christians in the Middle East goes back to the beginning of the 1900s.
In those days, Turkey recorded the highest fall in the number of Christians. About one fifth of Turkey’s population was Christian, primarily Armenians.
However, during the First World War and particularly between 1915 and 1923, almost all the Armenians were either killed or forced to flee the country.
Armenians describe the killing of their 1.5 million brethren by the Turks during those years as genocide. Turkey denies it and pegs the figure at below one million.
Several Middle Eastern Muslims deny that Christians are discriminated against.
At the same time any of them say some Western organisations operating in the Middle East give preference to Christians and provide favourable treatment to them, creating tension between Muslims and Christians.
There is also a belief that churches are providing the Christians with the chance of receiving good education overseas.
Those who have the opportunity to build a better tomorrow — whether they are Christians or Muslims — choose to stay in the place where their dreams begin to be fulfilled, they believe.
But opponents say it is widely believed that any minority in any society — not just Christians — tries to excel in fields such as finance, education, science and arts. Christians should not, therefore, be blamed for seeking to achieve such a goal.
‘Exaggerated injustice’
Grim believes political and security-related instability, Muslim-Christian tension and lack of sufficient support from local societies are among the factors that make Christians feel they are not welcome. However, many religious leaders and researchers in the region, mainly in Egypt — where the largest number of Christians in the Middle East live and from where several disputes and incidents between Muslims and Christians have been reported in the past few years — describe the talk about discrimination as “exaggerated injustice”.“It is not as flagrant as some try to portray,” Amnah Nusair, a professor of Islamic philosophy at Al Azhar University in Cairo, one of the most prestigious institutions for Islamic learning, told Weekend Review.“The feeling of prejudice among minorities anywhere on the planet is always more deep because of their smaller numbers,” Nusair said.“We don’t complain of a [general] discrimination against Christians in Egypt,” bishop Basant of the Egyptian Coptic Church said. Actually, the number of Christians in Egypt “is on the rise”, he added. But there are some problems, “such as the lengthy procedure to get a church built compared with that for building mosques and discrimination against Christians in filling vacancies for jobs”.While Nusair believes the number of churches in Egypt seems “more than what they [the Christians] need”, she urged the authorities to “study objectively the complaint of the lengthy process of building churches”. Meanwhile, she said, “extremism is playing a role in dividing Muslims and Christians. “It’s a tragedy. ... They [the extremists] have forgotten the essence of Islam.”She accused “some Egyptian Christians abroad” of receiving “external” strength in accusing Egypt of oppression.
Basant rejected foreign interference, saying any problem Christians face in Egypt “should be dealt with internally”. Some believe immigrant Christians find it easier to adapt to societies in the West, where Christianity is the majority religion. But researchers such as Grim said this was only partly true. He offered the Coptic Christians in Egypt as an example. “They are more similar to Muslims in Egypt than they are to Americans.” When Arab Christians migrate to the West, many build their own churches and use their own language. “I am not sure that they always feel comfortable,” Grim said.Yet many of them in the West feel they have more freedom to practise their religion there. “This is not necessarily because they are going to a Christian country,” Grim said. “It is because there is a less restrictive environment for religion itself.”Although there have been incidents of discrimination against Muslims living in Western countries after 9/11 and despite the fact that some of them do feel a sense of “discomfort”, they do not think of leaving America.“They still feel life [in the US] is better than the one they would have in the country from where they come,” Grim said. “So many of the Muslims in the US and Europe have come for better opportunities just as Christians have left the Middle East for themselves and their families.”
Lebanon: A non-Muslim country with a Christian minorityThroughout its modern history, many have looked at Lebanon as the only non-Muslim Arab country, while many others consider it either a Christian country, or a melting pot for a variety of religious sects.Experts and researchers, however, describe the small country overlooking the Mediterranean as the only country that sought to solve the issue of minorities’ participation in decision-making by allocating high positions to certain sections.But that “norm” has been a source of tension and has given rise to differences. “Lebanon is not a Christian country,” said Antoine Massarah, a law professor who is also in charge of the masters programme in Islamic-Christian relations at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. “It is a joint Christian-Islamic country.“It is the only Arab country that doesn’t state a specific religion for the state. All religions are the state’s religion,” he added.The country prides itself on having a distinctive characteristic: It has 17 religious sects.In the past, Christians under different churches used to constitute more than half of Lebanon’s population. They now constitute nearly 30 per cent of the 5 million population. According to a norm practised many years ago but not codified in the constitution, only a Maronite Christian can be the president of the country. The post of prime minister should go to a Sunni and the speaker of the parliament must be a Shiite.Muslim-Christian relations witnessed an ebb and flow of tension, especially during the years of the civil war (1975-1990), with the conflict pushing many from both sides outside their homeland.But experts warn of “dangerous” consequences of Christian immigration outside Lebanon and the rest of the region and of “losing the historical distinguished variation of the region”.“It will be a form of Zionising the region … and making it similar to the Jewish state which is facing a predicament,” Massarah said, referring to the debate in Israel on the need to keep Israel as a Jewish state.Massarah and researchers in other parts of the region blamed the discrimination against Christians (and their migration) on “outside forces” and believe they were aimed at creating divisions among the people.Any country that has “a problem with its minorities also has problems with its majority,” Massarah said. The decline in the number of Christians became obvious because they were a minority, he added. “Autocratic measures, spread of extremism and the backwardness of some of the Arab countries in their democratic processes are all behind the migration of Christians,” he told Weekend Review.To Massarah and many other elite, it is not the phenomenon of Christian migration only that should cause concern. It is the “brain-drain of both Muslims and Christians that should be looked at as a very dangerous (trend)”.
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