CHRISTIAN PEOPLE IN THE ARAB WORLD ARE FACING EXTINCTION:
(2) The Cases of Iraq and Syria. .
by Paul Merkley.
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Christians have always been seen by their neighbours in the Middle East as People of the Book. Their commitment to reading is founded in devotion to the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures that make up our Bible. While piety certainly drove the ambition of the earliest Christians for access to Scripture, a parallel benefit of literacy and the wonderful effects of Bible-reading upon imagination, were soon discovered. Literacy begat enthusiasm for secular wisdom – including Science and History.
In the years following the conquest of Middle Eastern Christians by the Muslims, the latter noticed that the children of Christians were participating in much great numbers in emigration from the Arab and Muslim world. As more and more Christians took advantage of their greater qualifications as literate people to emigrate, the Christian proportion of the population remaining in the Middle East began declining steadily.
This began well before the dawn of the Twentieth Century. In 1900, Christians made up 25 percent of the population of the Middle East; by 2000 they were less than 5 percent. Wherever they may still be found in the Middle East, they live in the midst of chaos. Few reliable governmental services exist; and this state of affairs exists in spades today in Iraq and Syria, where the ISIS state declared Christians to be enemies of the people, and forced them to hide or to flee. The effects of this today upon the matter of determining population can only be guessed at. One percent or less of the total population of Iraq and Syria may be approximately correct. But however numerous, they are all bent on finding a way out.
Almost all of the Christians living today in Iraq and Syria belong to churches whose origins go back several centuries before the origins of the major churches of the West. By the same reckoning, they go back at least three centuries before the Muslim horde came over the hills and put an end to the independent existence of the Arab kingdoms of the time.
As conquered peopled have done everywhere, many of the conquered Christians of the Middle East armored themselves against humiliation by inventing grander histories for themselves than they were entitled to. An excellent example of this can be seen in the determination of the Christian population of what we call today Iraq and Syria to be referred to as “Assyrians.” The psychology is obvious – but not to their credit. The Christian people who in the Eighth Century AD were humiliated by becoming subject to conquering “Arabs”— illiterates, and from the point of view of the newly subject Christians, uncivilized – have insisted ever since upon being called “Assyrians” – as though they were the descendants of the warrior race who appear in Jewish scripture as perhaps the greatest conquering people race of the ancient times. The message is: Abject, conquered people we may appear, but in our hearts we are the conquerors, while you ……
Sadly, a principal factor explaining the surrender of the Christians and the triumph of the Muslims some sixteen centuries ago was the fact that the Christians had wasted so much of their energies over the previous centuries fighting over theological matters and matters of ecclesiology. The result was that they were reduced into several sects, whose very names are known today only to hyper experts. (See my essay, “How Christian Communities Die in the Middle East: Lessons from the Sorry History of the Assyrians,” http://www.thebayviewreview, July 29, 2013.)
Particularly sad has been the story of the Christians of Iraq. Like all of the Christian communities of the Middle East they gained a degree of independence from their Muslim masters when the British and French established their “Protectorates” in the Nineteenth Century on top of the local jurisdictions that operated under the aegis of the Ottoman Empire. And then, the Ottomans made the grand error of throwing in their lot with the Empires of Germany and Austria during the First World War. Germany (in case you haven’t heard) was defeated, and her colonial possessions handed as prizes to the British and the French – who carved out Protectorates over Syria and Iraq.
During the 1920s and 1930s the Christian people of Iraq and Syria, although a minority, seemed reasonably well-situated to stave off the challenge represented by the aggressive Islam of their neighbours. Or so they might have been had they been able to resist the temptation to leave the Middle East and go to Europe and to the Americas. In 1947, 4.7 million Christians represented about 12% of the population of Iraq.; by 2013, the number had dropped to perhaps 450,000. During the months of the ISIS campaign of liquidation, neighbours marked their doors (usually under cover of darkness)with the Arabic equivalent of our letter N (for “Nassara = Nazarene or Christians – an open invitation to looting. Their numbers are now estimated to be as low as 200,000.
Then came the American-led invasion (2003) and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In Saddam’s Iraq as in Assad’s regime next door, the Assyrians had looked to the dictator as their protector against popular Muslim hostility. The moment that Saddam Hussein fell, Muslim mobs, acting on the advice of their religious teachers, began attacking the churches. Even before the Islamic State got into the game a few years ago, hundreds of Christians had been kidnapped and murdered by other Iraqis because of their Assyrian ethnicity and their Christian faith.
Thus, the single most important feature in the history of Christian people in the Arab world has been their flight from it.
A few years ago, the organization which speaks for the Assyrian community issued an appeal to the Five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council to establish an internationally-administered safe haven, a sovereign entity, for Assyrians of Iraq and the larger region. At one point, France, one of the Permanent Five, came up with the suggestion that the nations of Europe ought to get together and establish a safe haven in Europe for the Assyrians. But the association which speaks for most Assyrians came up with this unanticipated response:
France has announced its intention to grant asylum to the Christians forced out of Mosul [and to address] the immediate and disastrous situation facing Christian Assyrians in Iraq … All the Christians of the Middle East thank you, France, for offering a safe haven in, say, Marseille. But we know that it is not a tenable solution. The Assyrians need a permanent safe haven in the Middle East itself: the birthplace of Christianity and where our legacy of seven thousand years rests.
To further bolster the Assyrian credentials, these spokesmen note that “they also speak the language of Jesus.” (AINA editorial board: August 13, 2014: “Europe Must Arm the Assyrians, Provide Immediate Humanitarian Aid.”)
The eminent Roman Catholic author George Weigel insists that it is now time to reckon what is happening to the Assyrians as “genocide.”
Today, western politicians seem to fear that naming the genocide of Christians for what it is, or treating Christian refugees as refugees, will be taken as a gesture of disrespect for Islam. This is shameful. (George Weigel, “ISIS, Genocide, and Us, http;//www.firstthings.com, February 20, 2016.
Weigel has put his finger upon the major deficiency in the Assyrian cause — that these are Christians. The liberal-internationalists who make our foreign policy are so obsessed by determination not to appear unfriendly to Islam that they turn a deaf ear to the rightful claims of Christians.
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The Bayview Review 