The bloodstained annals of the East contain no record of massacres more unprovoked, more widespread or more terrible than those perpetrated by the Turkish Government upon the Christians of Anatolia and Armenia in 1915.
—James Bryce, the 1st Viscount Bryce
In 1933, Muslim forces in the new nation of Iraq launched a deadly assault on the few surviving communities of the Nestorian or Assyrian peoples, in what had once been the Christian heartland of northern Mesopotamia. Government-sponsored militias cleansed much of the far north of Iraq of its Assyrian population, killing thousands, and eliminating dozens of villages. As the catholicos protested:
Men, women and children were massacred wholesale most barbarously by rifle, revolver and machine gun fire…. Priests were killed and their bodies mutilated. Assyrian women were violated and killed. Priests and Assyrian young men were killed instantly after refusing forced conversion to Muhammadanism…. Pregnant women had their wombs cut and their babies destroyed.1
Although the crimes were anything but new in their nature, the coming of modern media meant that, unlike on previous occasions, the events now reached the attention of a wider world, raising demands for Western intervention.2
So shocking were the anti-Christian purges that they demanded a new legal vocabulary. Some months afterward, Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin used the cases of the Assyrians, and the Christian Armenians before them, to argue for a new legal category to be called crimes of barbarity, primarily “acts of extermination directed against the ethnic, religious or social collectivities whatever the motive (political, religious, etc.).” Lemkin developed this theme over the following years, and in 1943 he coined a new word for this atrocious behavior—namely, genocide. The modern concept of genocide as a uniquely horrible act demanding international sanctions has its roots in the thoroughly successful movements to eradicate Middle Eastern Christians. Lemkin recognized acutely that such acts might provide an awful precedent for later regimes: as Hitler asked in 1939, “Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?”3
The very recent character of these events, of this genocide, must be stressed. We tend to assume that the world we grow up with has always been in existence, so that it can be difficult to realize just how remarkable present-day conditions might look to someone from the past. This is especially true of the region we call the Middle East, which many Westerners see as an overwhelmingly Muslim land that is sharply demarcated from the historically Christian West by the Bosporus. The city of Istanbul thus stands at the far western limits of the Islamic world. Within that world, which stretches east as far as India, no rival religions of any significance are believed to exist, with the obvious exception of the Jewish state of Israel.
Such a vision would have puzzled an observer just a century ago, for whom the Middle East was characterized by bewildering religious diversity—an area in which Christians remained a familiar part of the social and cultural landscape. And that picture had remained true in essentials for half a millennium. Particularly startling for our time traveler from 1900 would have been the almost inconceivable vision of modern-day Turkey as an almost wholly Muslim land. A hypothetical time traveler from just a century ago would be just as amazed that Greek no longer served as a convenient lingua franca around much of the Mediterranean. Only very recently, in historical terms, Christians were quite as familiar a part of the Middle Eastern scene as Jews are in the modern United States, or indeed Muslims in contemporary western Europe. Middle Eastern Christians in 1900 actually represented a much larger part of the overall population (some 11 percent) than do American Jews today (2 percent) or European Muslims (4.5 percent). The removal or destruction of that community represented a historic transformation for the region, no less than for the Christian world.
The decline of Christianity in the Near East occurred in two distinct phases, two distinct “falls.” In the first, in what Europeans call the Middle Ages, Christians lost their majority status within what became Muslim-majority nations. Different groups suffered to varying degrees—the Syriac sects worst of all, the Copts least. But once reduced to minorities, these groups proved very durable, with no obvious reasons why they should not last indefinitely: witness the Coptic experience in Egypt. In the second phase, however, which is barely a century old, Christians have ceased to exist altogether—are ceasing to exist—as organized communities. We can argue about the causes of that change, whether they can legitimately be described as religious rather than political, but the result was to create a Muslim world that was just as Christian-free as large sections of Europe would be Jew-free after the Second World War. And in both instances, the major mechanism of change was the same. For all the reasons we can suggest for long-term decline, for all the temptations to assimilate, the largest single factor for Christian decline was organized violence, whether in the form of massacre, expulsion, or forced migration.
Conquered Christians
When we look at the Christian communities surviving in the Middle East so many centuries after the Muslim conquest, we might be tempted to see this as evidence of Muslim willingness to tolerate other religions, and in some cases, that interpretation would be fair. Yet we also need to remember that the millennium-long saga of Muslim conquest was constantly bringing in new infusions of Christian subjects, which compensated for older Christian communities that had ceased to exist.
The most important force in that story of conquest was the Ottoman Empire, which began as a small power in Asia Minor. After the Mongol invasions destroyed the great Seljuk state, the Ottoman Turks used the ensuing wars to create a power base in Asia Minor, and they gradually spread over what had been the Byzantine Christian world. Already by the time they took Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire included most of the Balkans, and by 1500 they controlled the whole Black Sea region. By 1520 they ruled most of the Muslim world west of Persia, as far as Algiers, and thus became the main antagonist for Christians, in Europe or beyond. Their European conquests advanced rapidly through the sixteenth century, under such aggressive leaders as Selim I (1512–20) and Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66). In 1526, the Turks conquered Hungary, destroying what was then one of the major European powers. Turkish advances were not reversed until the Christian victory at Vienna in 1683.4
Although some rulers were more explicitly motivated by religion than others, the Ottomans were often more aggressively anti-Christian than were the original Arab conquerors of the Middle East. Selim I in particular took the title of caliph, and took his role as head of Islam very seriously. He ordered the confiscation of all churches, many of which were razed, and Ottoman authorities forced many thousands to accept Islam. A century later, the sultan Ibrahim contemplated the extermination of Christians. From the fifteenth century onward, the pressure to convert to Islam was substantial, especially when the regime made such massive use of converts throughout its administrative and military system: Europeans termed this an “empire of renegades.” Throughout the Christian territories, too, the Turks levied the “tribute of children” (devshirmeh), by which Christian families were required to give a proportionate number of their sons to be raised by the state as slaves, but also as elite soldiers, and this system continued through the mid–seventeenth century. Usually, these janissaries (“new warriors”) would convert to Islam. Although the system provided a kind of social advancement for subject peoples, it clearly represented a high degree of religious compulsion, and Bulgarians recall the system as the Blood Tax.5
Reinforcing such demands, Ottoman warfare was extremely destructive, not because it was “Islamic,” but because it drew so heavily on methods that stemmed from the Turkish heritage in central Asia. Ottoman forces carried out notorious massacres against Christian populations, and particularly targeted Christian clergy and leaders. In 1480, the Turks destroyed the Italian city of Otranto, killing twelve thousand and executing leading clergymen by sawing them. The destruction of Nicosia in Cyprus in 1570 may have inflicted still more casualties. Accounts of Ottoman warfare and punishment include such gruesome techniques as impaling, crucifixion, and flaying. The Christian leader who most effectively deployed such tactics against the Turks themselves was Vlad of Wallachia, “the Impaler,” who is remembered in Western folklore through tales of Dracula.6
From the fifteenth century through the nineteenth, the Turks ruled over a substantial Christian population on European soil, and enforced the kinds of forms of religious discrimination that had been commonplace throughout the Middle East. Turks termed Balkan Christians rayah, “the herd,” as animals to be sheared and exploited as necessary. As a Bosnian Muslim song declared:
The rayah is like the grass
Mow it as much as you will till it springs up anew.
Of course, Christianity survived, partly because the rapid Muslim conquest of the Balkans largely left Christian communities in place and did not destroy ecclesiastical structures: the Orthodox churches would recover, in Greece, Bulgaria, and elsewhere. But we should note just how successful the Ottomans were in establishing Islam in the Balkans, by weakening Christianity and encouraging apostasy; by encouraging conversions to Islam, and by importing immigrant Muslim populations.7 Even today, after many thousands of Muslims have been removed from southeastern Europe in various population transfers, Islam still commands the loyalty of perhaps a quarter of the region’s people.
TABLE 5.1.
MUSLIMS IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE
Country | Total Population (millions) | Muslims (millions) | Percentage |
||||
|
|
|
| ||||
Albania | 3.6 | 2.5 | 70 |
||||
Serbia and Montenegro | 10.8 | 2.2 | 19 |
||||
Bosnia and Herzegovina | 4.1 | 1.6 | 40 |
||||
Bulgaria | 7.5 | 0.9 | 12.2 |
||||
Macedonia | 2.1 | 0.6 | 17 |
||||
Croatia | 4.5 | 0.2 | 4.4 |
||||
Cyprus | 0.9 | 0.16 | 18 |
||||
TOTALS | 33.5 | 8.16 | 24.4 |
Source: Adapted from Philip Jenkins, God’s Continent (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Although the Ottomans did not destroy Balkan Christianity, they achieved inroads into Christian loyalty at least as deep as those obtained by the earlier Arab regimes in a comparable time span. If Christianity did not die in this region, it was only because Turkish power did not last quite long enough.8
European Expansion
Most of the Orthodox churches now followed their old Nestorian and Jacobite rivals in passing under Muslim rule. But Muslims were not the only threat to their survival. In addition to the constant pressures from expanding Islam, all the surviving Eastern churches also faced real dangers from a newly assertive Western Christianity, which tried to bring these struggling bodies under its own power. The result was an ever-spreading pattern of schisms and internal controversies, which further paralyzed already weakened communities.
As the Near East fell into the control of militant Islamic states, so western European nations had an ever-greater incentive to find alternative trade routes, commonly by exploiting the oceans. Well into the fifteenth century, some explorers still dreamed of linking up with Prester John, and renewing the alliance against Islam. In the mid–fifteenth century, the Portuguese were exploring the Atlantic and the shores of Africa, and by the seventeenth century, the European powers were well on their way to global domination. Rising economic power led to urbanization, and the share of the world’s population living in Europe and in white European overseas possessions grew dramatically. Demographic expansion vastly increased the relative power of European Christianity, much as African forms of Christianity are growing in relative importance in the modern world.
Expanding commercial horizons also brought Europe’s churches into direct contact with what were by now the tattered shreds of the ancient Eastern Christian groups. Tensions between European and non-European churches were of ancient origin. As early as 1300, Catholic missions in China had met sharp opposition from Nestorians, who naturally saw the newcomers making inroads on their ancient territories. Now, however, the Latin powers were far stronger than before, and better able to enforce their will. During the great period of Spanish and Portuguese empire building in the century after 1550, the leading edge of Christian expansion was the Roman Catholic Church, now fortified by the militancy of the Counter-Reformation. As Catholic clergy and missionaries roamed the world, they found the remnants of many ancient churches, which they determined to bring under papal and Roman authority.9
So long-standing was the separation of Western and Eastern churches that the two sides never stood much chance of a friendly alliance. As Christianity had fallen into such dire straits outside Europe, Europeans and particularly Catholics tended to dismiss foreign traditions as marginal or even unchristian. After the fall of Constantinople, Pope Pius II wrote to the victorious sultan, effectively denying that the non-Catholic churches were Christian in any worthwhile sense: they were “all tainted with error, despite their worship of Christ.”10 He more or less explicitly asserted the identity of Christianity with the Catholic tradition and, even more radically, with Europe itself.
As Western Christians traveled the world, many demonstrated a like skepticism about the Christian credentials of the other churches they encountered. In 1723, a French Jesuit reported “that the Copts in Egypt are a strange people far removed from the kingdom of God…although they say they are Christians they are such only in name and appearance. Indeed many of them are so odd that outside of their physical form scarcely anything human can be detected in them.” Although Christ had ordained that salvation must be extended to all, Copts seemed a particularly hard case: “in any event we should not omit to teach the ignorant Copts in the faith as incapable as they always are of learning its mysteries without incontestable effort.”11 A Jesuit observer was appalled at the arrogance of the long-isolated Ethiopian church, although his criticisms could equally well be applied to some of his exclusive-minded colleagues:
They are possessed with a strange notion that they are the only true Christians in the world; as for us, they shunned us as heretics, and were under the greatest surprise at hearing us mention the Virgin Mary with the respect which is due to her, and told us that we could not be entirely barbarians since we were acquainted with the mother of God.
So bizarre were the customs of these Easterners, so puritanical, that Ethiopians even looked askance at the Portuguese habit of spitting during church services.12
Latins were troubled by the pretensions of these threadbare Christians, who nevertheless claimed such grand titles. In 1550, a Portuguese traveler reported that the forty thousand Christians of the Indian coast owed their allegiance to a head in “Babylon,” the catholicos. Bafflingly, they had not so much as heard of a pope at Rome. Some years later, envoys dispatched by the Vatican were appalled to discover that India’s Nestorians called “the Patriarch of Babylon the universal pastor and head of the Catholic Church,” a title that in their view belonged exclusively to the Roman pontiff. How dare a non-European church make such extravagant claims?13
For the first time, many Asian and African churches now found themselves under a European-based regime, and were forced to readjust their patterns of organization and worship accordingly. Distinctively local African and Asian forms now found themselves under heavy pressure. Catholicization incited sharp controversies within the churches, driving schisms and defections, and reducing any chance of local revival.
Around the world, we see similar attempts at harmonization. From the 1550s, factions in the Nestorian church sought Roman support, and much of the church accepted Roman rule under a new patriarch of the Chaldeans. Like other Eastern churches, the Catholic Chaldeans retained many of their customs and their own liturgy, but this compromise was not enough to draw in other Nestorians who maintained their existence as a separate church. The Jacobites split on similar lines, with an independent church remaining aloof from the Catholic “Syrians.” Other mergers and acquisitions followed. In 1596, the Union of Brest-Litovsk brought many European Orthodox believers into communion with Rome, but following their own rite and customs, and many Near Eastern Orthodox followed shortly afterward. They thus became members of the so-called Uniate churches. In 1624, Roman missionaries even brought Ethiopia into the papal fold, though the union lasted only for a few years before national traditions reasserted themselves. Thereafter, any Catholic clergy found in Ethiopia stood an excellent chance of being martyred, albeit by fellow Christians.14
The most controversial moment in this process occurred in 1599, when Catholic authorities in southern India sought to absorb the ancient Syriac-founded churches of the region, the Thomas Christians. The main activist was Aleixo de Menezes, archbishop of the Portuguese colony of Goa, who maneuvered the Indian church into a union with Rome at the synod of Diamper. In Indian Christian memory, de Menezes remains a villainous symbol of European imperialism, who began the speedy Romanization of the church, enforced by Goa’s notoriously active inquisition. The synod ordered the burning of books teaching Nestorian errors or “false legends,” as well as texts teaching practices that the Europeans deemed superstitious or magical. A substantial body of Syriac and Nestorian tradition now perished. Many local Christians reacted against the new policy by forming separate churches, and in later years the Thomas Christians would be deeply fragmented.15
Under New Masters
Yet despite all these disasters, this double pressure from Muslims and Catholics, Eastern Christian communities survived. At its height, the Ottoman Empire encompassed the Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa, and especially in Europe included millions of subject Christians. Even in 1900, Muslims made up just half the empire’s overall population: Christians comprised 46 percent; Jews, 3 percent. Christian numbers were obviously smaller in the Asian territories, the lands east of Constantinople, but they were still thriving.16
This survival may seem amazing when we think of the accumulated military catastrophes and defeats between 1300 and 1600, and the tyranny of sultans like Selim I. Yet for all these horrors, the Ottomans also found it in their interest to maintain a stable imperial order, and a semblance of legality. After Sultan Mehmet II took Constantinople, he formally invested the new patriarch with his cross and staff, just as the Christian emperors had done previously: Mehmet was, after all, both sultan and Caesar. Christian numbers now stabilized as the Ottomans granted them the status of millet communities, under a system dating back to the ancient Persians. As a millet, a nation, each denomination or theological tradition was recognized as a community under its own laws and courts, and governed by its own particular clerical structures. Orthodox Christians became the Rum Millet—the Roman nation—under a patriarch who was both religious and civil head, the ethnarch, and this system endured into the 1920s.17
Christians enjoyed nothing like what modern Americans construe as religious liberty, and there were stringent limits on any kind of Christian expansion, yet at least this legal position granted them some degree of protection and stability. The patriarchate became a fixture of the Ottoman system of government, so that sultans resisted efforts by more rigid Islamic forces to revoke minority rights. The empire proved flexible about enforcing restrictions. Notionally, for instance, Christians were not allowed to build or rebuild churches, but permission was granted as a special reward for loyalty, or to encourage settlement in new areas. Around 1620, one Armenian traveler claimed that at least in western Asia Minor the Turks discriminated against no one, Christian or Jew, though matters were more perilous farther east, and away from the coasts. The fact that the sultan was also the caliph, head of Islam, placed such flexibility beyond criticism.18
Within limits, then, Christians often flourished, to the puzzlement of western Europeans, who could not understand the distinctive Ottoman mix of tolerance and persecution. Particularly baffling was the extensive use that the empire made of non-Muslims, who were in so many other ways denied the most basic rights. Sultans regularly used Christians and former Christians as administrators, partly because such outsiders would be wholly dependent on the ruler’s pleasure: eight of the nine grand viziers of Suleiman the Magnificent were of Christian origin. Greek political influence in the imperial administration reached its apex during the eighteenth century, the era of the Phanariotes, the residents of Phanar, the Greek quarter of Constantinople. At lower levels, too, certain communities dominated their niches in the Ottoman world: Greeks were the sailors; Armenians, the merchants and traders.19 Although the Orthodox church cherishes its list of neo-martyrs from this period, most cases involved exceptional violations of Ottoman law. Most commonly, these were either Muslims who attempted to convert to Christianity, or converts to Islam who changed their minds and tried to revert to their old faith.20
Making their life under the new order more acceptable, Christians actively proved their loyalty. Above all, Orthodox believers were not likely to work with foreign Catholic powers to subvert Turkish rule. The Orthodox found the Muslims no more obnoxious than the Catholic nations, whose activities in recent centuries had left horrendous memories. Apart from the Latin sack of Constantinople in 1204, later Catholic invaders like the Venetians had been almost as tyrannical to their Orthodox subjects as were the Turks. Even in the last days of the empire, a Byzantine official famously declared, “Better the Sultan’s turban than the [Catholic] Cardinal’s hat!” Matters deteriorated further when the Orthodox saw how Catholics treated members of their church and Uniate believers, in eastern Europe and elsewhere. When a Syrian cleric visited the Ukraine in the seventeenth century, he was appalled, writing, “God perpetuate the empire of the Turks! For they take their impost [tax] and enter into no account of religion, be their subjects Christians or Nazarenes, Jews or Samaritans.” The oppressive Poles, in contrast, were “more vile and wicked than even the worshippers of idols, by their cruelty to Christians.”21 Few Orthodox Christians had any dreams of being liberated by these hated Catholic foreigners. The sultans encouraged these divisions by favoring those Orthodox leaders most opposed to Catholic influences.
Within this delicate system, some churches coped better than others. The largest Christian group in Asia was the Orthodox, who had of course been the dominant religious and cultural force under the Byzantine Empire, but who found themselves reduced to a minority under Ottoman rule. This was also the status of the Copts in Egypt, and of several churches in Syria (a term that for several centuries included what we would today call Lebanon and Israel). In the 1670s, an English diplomat saw in the sturdy faith of these oppressed churches powerful evidence in favor of Christian belief:
The stable perseverance in these our days of the Greek church…notwithstanding the oppression and contempt poured upon it by the Turk, and the allurements and pleasures of this world, is a confirmation no less convincing than the miracles and power which attended its first beginnings. For indeed, it is admirable to see and consider with what constancy, resolution and simplicity ignorant and poor men keep their faith.22
By far the worst sufferers from the carnage of the fourteenth century were the old Eastern Syriac churches, precisely because they had once been so powerful and had posed a real danger to Muslim supremacy. Neither Jacobites nor Nestorians ever recovered from the time of Timur. If we combine all the different branches of these churches, we find barely half a million faithful in all by the early twentieth century, scattered from Cyprus and Syria to Persia. (India had a further six hundred thousand “Syrians.”) The implosion in numbers led to a steep decline in morale and ambition. Instead of trying to convert the whole of Asia, the Syrian churches survived as inward-looking quasi-tribal bodies within the Near East. Succession to the Nestorian patriarchate became hereditary, passing from uncle to nephew. Intellectual activity declined to nothing, at least in comparison with the glorious past. Many clergy were illiterate, and the church texts that do survive are often deeply imbued with superstition and folk magic. In the early twentieth century, the Catholic Encyclopedia pronounced, harshly, “From the fourteenth century, Syriac literature produced no works of value.” Suggesting just how isolated and exotic the Nestorians seemed, nineteenth-century Anglo-American travel accounts bracketed the church’s followers with the Yezidi “Devil-Worshipers” who lived nearby.23
Within the Ottoman realm, we have good estimates for Christian numbers around 1900. As by this stage they would have been under such intense pressure for several centuries, it is reasonable to assume that the figures would have been much higher in earlier years. (As recently as the mid-1890s, Christians had suffered widespread massacres.) Even so, by 1900, Christians still constituted 15 or 20 percent of the population of Asia Minor. In Constantinople itself, Christians in 1911 made up half the population—at least four hundred thousand strong—compared with 44 percent Muslim and 5 percent Jews. The city’s population was 17 percent Greek Christian, 17 percent Armenian. As for other places in Asia Minor, a 1911 encyclopedia commented simply, “Modern Smyrna is in all but government a predominantly Christian town,” which was known to the Turks as the city of the giaour, the infidels. About the same time, Trebizond “has 50,000 inhabitants, among whom are 12,000 Greeks, 10,000 Armenians, some Jews, and a few hundred Catholics.” Christians made up 31 percent of the people of greater Syria.24
In 1907, the Catholic Encyclopedia reported in loving denominational detail on the enormous diversity that still prevailed in much of the Middle East. The city of Amida, modern Diyarbakir, was still 40 percent Christian, with a polyglot gaggle of bishops and higher clergy:
It has about 35,000 inhabitants, of whom 20,000 are Mussulmans (Arabians, Turks, Kurds, etc.), 2,300 Catholics (Chaldeans, Armenians, Syrians, Melchites, Latins), 8,500 Gregorian Armenians, 900 Protestant Armenians, 950 Jacobite Syrians, 900 Orthodox Greeks, and 300 Jews. Diyarbakir possesses an Armenian Catholic bishop, a Syrian Catholic bishop, a Syrian Jacobite bishop, a Chaldean Catholic archbishop, and a Greek Orthodox metropolitan under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Antioch.25
Shrinking Numbers
If we take the Middle East to include all the land from Egypt to Iran, and including Anatolia and the Arabian Peninsula, Christians represented 11 percent of the total population. That degree of survival is impressive, but the absolute numbers of these communities were still quite small. Even including the Copts, the Armenians, and the Greeks living in Asia Minor, we are thinking only of some 5 million believers. (See table 5.2; this table understates the number of Armenians, which was probably closer to 2 million.)
TABLE 5.2.
CHRISTIANS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AROUND 1910
(including Egypt and Persia but excluding Ethiopia)
Denomination | Numbers (in thousands) |
|
Greek Orthodox | 1,662 |
|
Armenian Orthodox | 1,073 |
|
Copts | 600 |
|
Maronites | 309 |
|
Nestorian | 143 |
|
Melchites | 142 |
|
Protestant | 100 |
|
Armenian Catholic | 94 |
|
Jacobite | 78 |
|
Chaldean | 67 |
|
Syrian | 40 |
|
Latin | 47 |
|
TOTAL | 4,355 |
Source: Catholic Encyclopedia, S.V. “Asia,” http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01777b.htm.
This small scale reflected the political and economic decline of this once-crucial ancient region, which sank into near insignificance compared with the newly ascendant worlds of Europe and North America. In 1800, the population of the whole Middle East region was perhaps 33 million, a number that had grown only to 44 million by 1900. That 1900 figure was about the same as the national population of France, and considerably below the population of Germany. Ironically, this historic center of urbanization had utterly failed to compete with the growth of cities in the West. Still in 1900, only Constantinople could compete with the booming cities of Europe, while cities like Damascus, Alexandria, and Baghdad had a mere two or three hundred thousand residents apiece.
Christians in the Middle and Near East found themselves ever more marginalized, not only in their home societies, but in the Christian world at large, as the proportion of the world living in Christian or Christian-ruled states grew vastly. The combined populations of Europe (including Russia) and North America represented 22 percent of world population in 1800, and 32 percent by 1900.
TABLE 5.3.
THE CHRISTIAN WORLD AROUND 1900
Continent | Number of Christians | Percent of overall total |
||
Africa | 10 | 2 |
||
Asia | 22 | 4 |
||
Europe | 381 | 68 |
||
Latin America | 62 | 11 |
||
Northern America | 79 | 14 |
||
Oceania | 5 | 1 |
||
TOTAL | 559 | 100 |
Source: David B. Barrett, George T. Kurian, and Todd M. Johnson, World Christian Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).
By 1900, 68 percent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe alone, besides a further 25 percent in the Americas. Although Christians made up a respectable share of the Middle Eastern population, their overall numbers were tiny compared with the churches of England or France, to say nothing of emerging nations like the United States and Canada. By this stage, the whole Middle East accounted for just 0.9 percent of the world’s Christians.26
The tiny size of the population would itself be a crucial factor in the area’s religious development, as such small groups could so easily be identified, and then expelled or killed. And that represents much of the story of the Middle East’s Christians over the past century, as this small population would soon lose even this marginal presence. Reading an account of the Christian Middle East in the early twentieth century—of Smyrna or Trebizond or Diyarbakir—is to excavate a lost world. From the First World War onward, Christian communities were systematically eliminated across the Muslim world, and the Armenian horrors of 1915 are only the most glaring of a series of such atrocities that reached their peak between 1915 and 1925. Although these instances of massacre and persecution have no historical resonance for most Westerners today, they count among the worst examples of their kind.
The Ottoman Crisis
Mass violence was by no means a new factor in Muslim-Christian relations, but matters deteriorated from the early nineteenth century, as Muslim societies felt themselves under increasing threat from the Christian West. As so often in history, the persecutors saw their actions as fundamentally defensive in nature, and the sense that a majority community was facing grave threats to its very existence drove them to acts of persecution and intolerance against convenient minorities. And although this certainly does not excuse the later violence, Turkish fears of predatory Christian rivals were by no means an illusion.
From the mid–eighteenth century, the vast Ottoman Empire began to crumble at the edges. From the 1760s, the Russians pushed into the Crimea and the Caucasus, establishing a strong foothold on the Black Sea. The ease with which Napoleon’s armies routed Muslim forces in Egypt in 1798 suggested the West’s immense technological and military superiority, and through the nineteenth century, Britain and other colonial powers progressively grabbed more and more outlying corners of the Ottoman world. By midcentury, only the rivalry from British and French interests prevented the Russians from taking over the heart of that empire and establishing themselves in Constantinople. The Russian czars presented themselves as the protectors of the Orthodox Christians within the Ottoman Empire. In 1850, an experienced British traveler was just reflecting the common wisdom when he predicted the imminent Russian takeover of the Middle East:
From Mount Ararat to Baghdad, the different sects of Christians still retain the faith of the Redeemer whom they have worshipped according to their various forms, some of them for more than fifteen hundred years; the plague, the famine and the sword have passed over them and left them still unscathed, and there is little doubt but that they will maintain the position which they have held till the now not far distant period arrives when the conquered empire of the Greeks will again be brought under the dominion of a Christian emperor.27
Partly in response to such hopes, Christian minorities became ever more assertive, and the more Christian subjects struggled against the Ottoman Empire, the more brutally their aspirations were suppressed. The savagery of Muslim regimes must be understood as a manifestation of the shock and outrage they felt at the resistance of peoples they had come to view as natural inferiors. Moreover, the Turks associated the menace from domestic dissidents with the external danger from rival empires, so that Christian rebels were portrayed as agents of foreign aggression. Anti-Christian policies began a vicious circle. The more brutally the Turks treated their minorities, the greater the Western clamor for intervention to protect the victims. The closer the harmony of interests between domestic and foreign enemies, the greater the Turkish hostility to Christian minorities.
Violence escalated during the Greek revolt that began in 1821, when mass killings claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Muslims on Greek soil. These acts left a lasting memory, suggesting the likely fate of Turkish minorities should Ottoman rule ever weaken. Across the Greek-speaking world, the Ottomans responded by a series of massacres, and many clergy died in the ensuing repression. The patriarch of Constantinople was hanged outside his cathedral—on Easter morning!—and other archbishops and patriarchs were hanged or beheaded, at Adrianople and Thessaloniki, and across Cyprus. Turkish massacres culminated in the slaughter on the island of Chios, where perhaps twenty thousand Christians were killed. Unlike the earlier atrocities, which had occurred far from the Western gaze, this incident generated horror across Christian Europe, and Lord Byron and Victor Hugo both helped mobilize public anger. Eugène Delacroix painted a famous work with the emotive title Scenes from the Massacres at Chios: Greek Families Awaiting Death or Slavery. Anti-Turkish feeling provoked armed intervention by Britain, France, and Russia, who combined to crush the Turkish navy in 1827.
As the rulers of an ever-weaker Ottoman Empire realized how desperate their situation was, they tried to modernize and often to grant more rights to minorities. Most dramatically, in 1856 the empire was just emerging from a war in which Britain and France had fended off yet another Russian advance. Partly in response to Western demands, the sultan issued a historic law granting religious liberty, including the right to change religions. The thought that anyone would want to leave Islam for Christianity had not really registered with the Ottoman rulers. Christian missionaries now became active in the Ottoman realm, and the converts they made sometimes invoked the support of the Christian powers.28
These concessions infuriated conservatives, who blamed precisely those minorities for the plight of Muslims within the empire and beyond. The more reforms threatened to undermine the privileged positions of Muslims, the angrier those old elites became. Also angered were secular-minded modernizers, who had hoped for a strong new nation but who now saw a future of collective humiliation and subjection. Looking at the unintended consequences of these liberalizing pressures, modern observers might draw analogies with Western states forcing Middle Eastern nations to grant democracy and freedom of speech, only to find that the greatest beneficiaries of this openness are radically anti-Western Islamist parties.
Purging the Christians
Looking at acts of pogrom and massacre, it is not easy to identify specifically religious motives, to tell which acts of violence were targeted against Christians as Christians rather than as rebels against the regime. Whatever the initial reasons, Turkish forces and mercenaries commonly did choose Christian leaders and properties for special attention during Balkan counterinsurgency campaigns, burning churches and killing clergy. Religious themes became still more explicit in the Middle East proper as Christian communities increasingly fell prey to sectarian attacks by Muslims, violence that made Christian survival ever more difficult. In 1860, Druze and Muslim forces massacred ten thousand Maronite Christians in the land that would later become Lebanon, raising fears of the wholesale extermination of one of the largest surviving Christian groups in the region. A pogrom in Damascus killed thousands more, besides those driven from their homes or starved. The “Massacres of ’60” (Madhabih al-Sittin) still live in the Maronite consciousness.29 Other sects suffered comparably. Muslim forces attacked Assyrian and Nestorian Christians between 1843 and 1847 and again in the 1890s, killing and enslaving thousands. Many more Christians perished during the Bulgarian wars of the 1870s.
The Bulgarian situation provoked an international crisis that decisively shifted the religious balance in the Ottoman world. In 1877–78, the Russians won an overwhelming victory over the Turks, who were saved from total destruction only by British intervention. The outcome placed an expansionist Russia perilously close to the Turkish heartland; and immediately over their border, the Russians could look to sympathetic Christian populations, especially the numerous and influential Armenians. For the Ottomans, the prospects for the near future looked dire. If the Russians could create an independent Bulgaria within their sphere of influence, why should an independent Armenia not be next, followed by a Christian Assyria? However loyal most Armenians remained within the empire, radical nationalists made no secret of their hopes for Russian aid. Making matters worse, the Russo-Turkish war was followed by a widespread ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Bulgaria. And the French were already carving out a Christian protectorate around Mount Lebanon. Christian communities within the Turkish Empire looked like a clear and present danger to the survival of Ottoman and Muslim power.30
Unrest among the Armenians led to an official clampdown, which led to the so-called Hamidian massacres of 1894–96. Reportedly, the sultan’s regime directly inspired extremism, as envoys gathered Muslims together in local mosques, telling them that Armenians were preparing to rise against Islam. The main killings were then undertaken by the Turkish military, supported by Kurdish irregular forces. Probably a hundred thousand Christians perished. Armenians were the primary targets, as “the murderous winter of 1895 saw the decimation of much of the Armenian population and the devastation of their property in some twenty districts of eastern Turkey.” A killing spree occurred in Urfa—ancient Edessa—where Armenians made up a third of the population. Eight thousand were killed, including three thousand who were burned alive in the cathedral where they had sought sanctuary. A thousand more were killed in Melitene. The Syriac Christians of northern Mesopotamia also suffered during the red year of 1895, especially in the ancient sanctuaries in and around Amida and Tur Abdin. The French ambassador reported at this time that “Asia Minor is literally in flames…. They are massacring all the Christians without distinction.”31
As in the Middle Ages, Christians and Jews both suffered from the new wave of harsher and more paranoid popular attitudes. In Damascus in 1840, the anti-Jewish blood libel surfaced in the Muslim world, with allegations that Jews kidnapped and murdered Gentiles in order to use their blood for ritual purposes. In this instance, the scandal arose with the disappearance of a Christian cleric, a Capuchin friar, and other Christians took the lead in denouncing the Jews. Soon, however, the charge entered Muslim thought and inspired Ottoman authorities to launch copycat persecutions in many other regions; and the story still circulates in the Arab world today. Many Jews died in the Damascus rioting in 1860.32
The Year of the Sword
Such conflicts provide the essential prehistory for the Armenian genocide of the First World War years, which represented an escalation in intensity, rather than a departure from previous tolerance. Although the regime in power at the time of the actual massacres was the nationalist Young Turks, the actual violence had many resemblances to the Hamidian killings of twenty years earlier. As before, Turkish forces attacked a community believed to be sympathetic to external enemies, at a time when European powers were threatening not just the defeat of the Turkish state, but its partition among rival imperial powers. After a century of combining to restrain Russian advances, in 1914 the British and French were actually allied with the czar, making it virtually certain that a peace settlement would see the Russian empire expand toward Constantinople. Britain and France also had their own designs on Ottoman territories, and they used the promise of lands in Asia Minor as a means of rewarding their Italian and Greek allies. For the Turks, losing the war would potentially cost them everything, including any shade of national independence.33
The violence that began in 1915 killed perhaps half the Armenian Christians in the region. Although the accumulated stories of massacre numb after a while, some of the atrocities cry out particularly. One of the worst storm centers was the wilayet, or province, of Diyarbakir, under its brutal governor, Reşid Bey. Here, “men had horse shoes nailed to their feet; women were gang-raped.” One source placed the number of murdered Christians in this province alone at 570,000. In the summer of 1915, the New York Times reported that “the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people.” During the 1915–16 era, at least 1 million Armenians were displaced, and plausible estimates for those actually killed range from eight hundred thousand to 1 million. If the word genocide has any meaning whatever, it certainly applies to these events.34
Other Christian communities reported horrendous losses from similar events. Lord Bryce alleged that the Turkish government was pursuing a “plan for exterminating Christianity, root and branch,” which equally targeted “the minor communities, such as the Nestorian and Assyro-Chaldean churches.” Claiming to have lost two-thirds of their own people during their own wartime genocide, the Assyrians recall 1915 as sayfo, “the Year of the Sword.” In the Christian-majority region of Lebanon, the Turkish military deliberately induced a famine that left a weakened population unable to withstand the ensuing epidemics: a hundred thousand Maronite Christians died. All told, including Armenians, Maronites, and Assyrians, perhaps 1.5 million Christians perished in the region.35
Far from anti-Christian purges ceasing with the official end of war in 1918, they actually intensified during the ensuing war between Greece and Turkey. In its origins, this war stemmed from aggressive Greek claims to territory in Asia Minor, which at their most extreme amounted to a return to something like the Byzantine Empire. As matters turned out, the Turks turned the conflict into their own war of independence, in which they evicted foreign invaders. In the process, the Turks purged the Greek Christians of Asia Minor, as ethnic cleansing continued through the early 1920s. The campaign reached its horrifying peak in the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, allegedly causing the deaths of a hundred thousand Greek and Armenian Christians in what had been the City of the Giaour. The area around Trebizond was the setting for what Greeks and Armenians today recall as the Pontic Genocide of Christians.36
As with most other incidents described here, historians differ widely in how they interpret these events, and we can attribute most of the deaths in Smyrna to the results of war and social breakdown rather than deliberate anti-Christian persecution. Elsewhere, religious motivation was more explicit: in Iraq by 1933, it was “the universal belief of the Arabs that the war was between the Crescent and the Cross…. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs volunteered to fight a handful of unbelievers and infidels.”37 Whatever the reasons, the long-term effects would be the same: across the Middle East, Christian communities vanished one after the other, like lights being switched off. Before 1914, Christian pockets were numerous and widespread, while by 1930, most had vanished or were in the process of disappearing.
Asia Minor now became, definitively, Turkey—a Muslim land, freed of virtually all Greeks and Armenians. Constantinople, which had over four hundred thousand Christians in 1920, today has perhaps four thousand. The city’s final Greek remnants largely vanished during a sweeping race riot in 1955. Multiethnic Smyrna became Muslim Izmir; Trebizond is now Trabzon; Melitene is Malatya. A recent writer comments, “On the eve of their forced mass exodus in 1924, the Syriac Orthodox population of Edessa was approximately 2,500. Today no Christian soul exists in Edessa.” Edessa is today Urfa, and is famous as a center of Islamic piety, one of the two main power bases of the nation’s ruling Islamist party. Although religious activism here is conservative and traditionalist rather than extremist, Urfa is definitely a capital of the Quran Belt, which resents modernization and Western influence. So is Mardin, deep in the outer provinces of rural Islamic Turkey: in recent years the area has been best known as the rural backdrop for a popular television soap opera depicting life in a Muslim backwater. Recently, the formerly Christian cities have witnessed violent outbreaks that are now exceptional in modern Turkey. In 2006, a young Islamist murdered a Catholic priest praying in a church in Trabzon, and the following year, assassins butchered three Protestants in Malatya. Generally, such attacks target foreign Christians, as very few local believers remain.38
Along with the Christians, there also vanished what had once been their abundant heritage of buildings, of art and architecture. In 1914, the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople recorded a total of 2,549 ecclesiastical buildings, including 210 monasteries. By 1974, the locations of only 913 were still known. Four hundred sixty-four had completely disappeared, 252 were in ruins, and 197 were in fairly sound condition. Even this dreadful situation had already deteriorated further by the 1990s. Although theoretically committed to archaeological and historic preservation, Turkish authorities systematically discriminate against preserving Christian remains.39
Visiting Diyarbakir in 1997, William Dalrymple reported finding literally the city’s last Armenian Christian, “a very old lady called Lucine,” who had not spoken since her husband was killed. In the words of one of the Kurdish Muslim brothers who cared for her, “Her mind is dead.” Asked about other Armenians, he continued, “There are none. There used to be thousands of them…. I remember them streaming out of here every Sunday, led by their priest. But not now. She is the last.” Elsewhere, too, we find individuals who are the last of their kind. Mesopotamia’s two hundred thousand Syriac Christians, the Suriani, had contracted by 1920 to seventy thousand, and to barely four thousand by 1990. A solitary priest was the only Christian inhabitant of one village that was once endowed with seventeen churches. The monasteries of Tur Abdin were home to just two brothers.40
The Last Stand
Since the 1920s, the much-reduced Christian populations have tried various strategies to maintain their existence, but none shows great hopes of success.41 One tactic was the creation of a protected Christian reservation, a state that would be able to defend Christian interests. This separatist goal explains the creation of the nation of Lebanon. After the First World War, with the horrible experience of the Armenians fresh in their minds, the French arbitrarily detached the most Christian sections of Syria as a separate enclave, which achieved independence in 1943 as the state of Lebanon. Though Maronites and other Christian sects initially formed a solid majority, the territory also included substantial Muslim minorities, which grew significantly over time in consequence of their higher birthrates. The lack of representation for poorer groups fostered disaffection and contributed to the bloody civil war of 1975–90. Violence and repression naturally encouraged Lebanese to flee to safer lands, and the fact that better-off Christians were more able to leave contributed still further to the shrinking of the Christian population. Christians today represent at most 40 percent of the nation’s people.
Another difficulty with the reservation scheme was that it reinforced the popular association of Christianity with foreign imperialism, and thus with enmity to the nationalism that was rising in the early twentieth century. This problem became evident with the Assyrians, who had sympathized with the Western Allies against the Turks during the war, and who were exiled in large numbers. Most fled to northern Mesopotamia, where they supported the British mandate regime. The British cast the Assyrians as a warrior race, the supposed descendants of the ancient peoples they knew from the Old Testament; and they relied on their loyal (and Christian) Assyrian Levies to suppress Arab and Kurdish insurgencies. By 1932, the British were anxious to withdraw from the lands they had pulled together to form the new kingdom of Iraq. Fearing revenge from their Muslim neighbors, the Assyrians hoped for some form of autonomy, ideally a small nation-state, headed by their patriarch. The Levies would provide the core of a national army. It was this threat of separatism, of disloyalty to the Iraqi national cause, that provoked the massacres of 1933, and that incident ended Assyrian hopes within Iraq.42
Seeing little hope in separatism, many Christians took a different course, seeking not to remove themselves from mainstream political life but rather to lead it. They worked to create a progressive and nonsectarian Middle East in which Christians and other minorities would be able to survive in any nation, free of the dangers of Muslim hegemony. In the process, Christians would free themselves of the taint of being potential agents of outside forces, of the enemies of Islam. Far from being traitors to the Arab world, they would prove themselves as Arab superpatriots, and in so doing, they contributed mightily to progressive and radical politics in the region.
Across the political spectrum, Christians became the leaders and thinkers of movements that would move the region’s politics in secular directions. We regularly find such leaders bearing such typically Christian names as Michael, Anthony, and George. Some Christians were influential in Communist parties, while others founded influential Pan-Arab movements. A founding text of modern Arab nationalism was The Arab Consciousness, published in 1939 by Syrian Christian Constantin Zureiq, who created the idea of the “Arab mission.” In 1947, Michel Aflaq, of a Greek Orthodox family, cofounded the Baathist Party, which long ruled Iraq, and which still holds power in Syria. Syria, indeed, represents a real success story for Christian activism, since Christians still enjoy great power under the Baathist regime, and constitute 15 percent of the nation’s population, if we count thinly disguised crypto-Christians: Aleppo might be a quarter Christian. Egypt’s Copts worked closely with Muslims in the Wafd Party, which from the 1920s strove to eject British imperialism: patriotic banners bore the combined symbols of the cross and the crescent. Christian nationalist thinkers made every effort to accommodate the Muslim sentiments of the Arab majority, agreeing that the Islamic tradition was essential to understanding Arab history, and lauding Muhammad and the Quranic inheritance. Michel Aflaq urged Christians to understand that Islam was inseparable from Arabism.43
Christians were prominent in Palestinian nationalist causes—inevitably, since they represented much of the educated professional elite that stood to lose most from the growth of Zionist settlement. At least as much as for Muslims, the creation of the state of Israel was for Christians the Nakba, the catastrophe: the war of 1948 caused the exodus of 650,000 Muslim Palestinians, and a further 55,000 Christians. The plight of Palestinian Christians accounts for the long reluctance of the Vatican to establish diplomatic ties with Israel, a step not formally taken until 1993. Otherwise, Arab Christians complain that their existence has been largely forgotten in the West, especially by those evangelicals who pledge uncritical support for “Christian Zionism.”44
Christians enjoyed a wholly disproportionate role in the leadership of the Palestinian guerrilla movements through the 1980s. Much of the sensational Palestinian terrorism across the globe in the 1970s was planned and orchestrated by Christian commanders like George Habash, Wadih Haddad, and Nayef Hawatmeh, who often operated in alliance with the Baathist regimes. Although he did not invent the tactic, Wadih Haddad was the first Arab guerrilla leader to use airliner hijacking on a major scale. Some notorious Palestinian attacks were aimed at freeing Hilarion Capucci, a Melkite archbishop who was jailed by Israel for running guns and explosives to the Palestinian guerrillas. After his release, the archbishop became a personal envoy for Yasser Arafat, and a member of the Palestine National Council. Another prominent Palestinian nationalist of Christian faith is Hanan Ashrawi, a leader of al-Fatah. Elsewhere, Lebanese Christian novelist Elias Khoury has provided perhaps the greatest literary commemoration of the Palestinian experience.45
The Western response to these nationalist movements produced some powerful ironies. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the United States and its European allies viewed the world primarily through the lens of the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, and possible Soviet advances against Middle Eastern oil supplies. Accordingly, the West was alarmed at the progress of secular leftist movements across the Arab world, of Marxist, Baathist, and nationalist currents, many of which featured Christians so prominently in their leadership. Americans in particular found it easy to choose between leftist pro-Palestinian Christians and anti-Communist Muslims. Western governments and intelligence agencies cooperated with the Saudis and other conservative regimes to promote traditionalist Muslim religious organizations. The result was the spread of Wahhabi-and Muslim Brotherhood–oriented networks, in Europe and elsewhere.46
Middle Eastern Christians, in short, tried every possible tactic to survive and flourish, and their efforts have largely failed. Partly, this is a matter of sheer numbers. Christian populations, shattered by the events of 1915–25, have never recovered, and some communities have been eliminated. The survivors face the problem that wealthier and better-educated communities usually have low birthrates, particularly as they are more likely to follow the lead of secularized Europe. At the same time, the overwhelmingly Muslim majority population of the region has boomed. The 44 million people who populated the Middle East in 1900 grew to over 300 million by the end of the century, and the figure will probably rise to 450 million by 2025. The Christians who constituted 10 percent of the region’s population in 1900 made up at most 3 percent by the end of the century. Just to take one example, the Turkish city of Diyarbakir has over the last century grown from thirty-five thousand residents to at least 1.5 million; in the same period, its Christian population has fallen from fourteen thousand to a few hundred. Baghdad’s population grew during the century from one hundred forty-five thousand to 6 million.
Christians live alongside a Muslim supermajority that has become more intensely and devoutly Muslim. Radical and fundamentalist Muslim movements have grown across the region, financed by the vast oil wealth of the conservative states of the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf. Even societies that once aspired to be secular and socialist adopted Islamic values with varying degrees of enthusiasm. In the last days of Saddam Hussein’s regime, even Baathist Iraq declared its support for Muslim values, while a moderate Islamist party has made advances in secular Turkey. More perilously, the rise of popular Muslim movements has made life all but impossible for surviving Christian communities. Since the late 1980s, with the rise of Hamas, the leading forces in the Palestinian cause have all been Islamist rather than Christian.
Growing religious tension, economic hardship, and the threat of violence have all conspired to drive Christians into exile, chiefly to the United States and Australia. While Arab Christians emerged as celebrated cultural figures, they often achieved these successes overseas: Khalil Gibran, author of The Prophet, was a Lebanese American, while prominent intellectual Edward Said was based in the United States. Removing so many exiles left societies in which barely enough Christians existed to act as a visible minority. In 1915, the Arabs of Palestine represented a 15 percent Christian minority, though that figure is now below 1 percent. Even Egypt’s Copts, who have withstood so many pressures over the years, are being weakened by emigration. The fact that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood makes conciliatory remarks about Christians may simply mean that the Copts are no longer considered potential rivals or a cause for concern.47
Iraq’s Martyrs
The most dramatic catastrophe in recent years has been that of Iraq’s Christians, who represented 5 or 6 percent of the population in 1970. That number is now around 1 percent, and it is shrinking fast. As in Syria, Christians did well under the militantly nonreligious Baathist regime, and produced some well-known faces. Saddam’s foreign minister and deputy, Tariq Aziz, was by origin a Chaldeanrite Catholic who bore the pure Christian name of Mikhail Yuhanna, “Michael John.” He adopted his Muslim-sounding name to avoid offending more rigid Arab counterparts. Christians in the 1980s reportedly made up 20 percent of Iraq’s teachers and many of its doctors and engineers.48
The nation’s economy was, however, devastated by two wars, against Iran in the 1980s and the U.S.-led coalition in 1990–91, followed by painful international sanctions. These events provoked the exodus of everyone who could leave easily, which usually meant those professional groups among whom Christians were well represented. The second invasion, that of 2003, proved the final straw in unleashing Muslim militancy, both Sunni and Shiite, while removing any central policing authority. In the ensuing anarchy, Christians became primary targets of mobs and militias. Christians were regularly kidnapped, and militias demanded protection money, under the euphemism of exacting the jizya, the poll tax on unbelievers. When Pope Benedict gave his controversial address in Regensburg in 2006, the “Lions of Islam” retaliated by beheading a Mosul priest, Paulos Iskander. Father Paulos belonged to the Syrian Orthodox church, the denomination anciently known as the Jacobites.
As so much of the story of Middle Eastern Christianity has its origins in northern Mesopotamia, it is appropriate that it should end there. One of the most active priests in Mosul was Father Ragheed Ganni, a Chaldean Catholic of the church that traced its origins to the Nestorians and, before them, to “those of the laying on of hands at Antioch.” By 2007, as the situation was becoming desperate, he tried to preserve a note of optimism:
The young people organized surveillance after the recent attacks against the parish, the kidnappings, the threats to religious; priests celebrate mass amidst the bombed out ruins; mothers worry as they see their children face danger to attend catechism with enthusiasm; the elderly come to entrust their fleeing families to God’s protection, they alone remain in their country where they have their roots and built their homes, refusing to flee. Exile for them is unimaginable.
But matters did not improve: soon he was writing, “Each day we wait for the decisive attack, but we will not stop celebrating mass; we will do it underground, where we are safer.” As it became increasingly difficult to celebrate services, he admitted, “We are on the verge of collapse.” On Trinity Sunday, 2007, Father Ragheed and three subdeacons were kidnapped and killed, their bodies mined with explosives to make their recovery more difficult.49
Shortly afterwards, Pope Benedict showed his concern for Middle Eastern Christians by granting cardinal’s rank to the Chaldean patriarch of Baghdad. Yet many believe that the church in Iraq is now entering its final martyrdom. In 2008, Islamists murdered Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, head of the Chaldean church in northern Iraq. Just between 2003 and 2007, two-thirds of Iraq’s remaining Christians left the country, and the population will certainly sink further in coming years. A traveler in the near future might well encounter someone like “a very old lady called Lucine,” who would be the last incarnation of Mesopotamian Christianity.
Christians thus survive in the Middle East, but their collapse in numbers and influence over the past century has been astonishing, and only a wild optimist would predict that the process of decline had finished. The most vulnerable groups are those in Syria, which has since the disasters in Iraq become yet again the refuge for thousands of exiled Christians. Yet any change of regime could easily produce a radical Islamization such as occurred in Iraq, with similarly dreadful effects on minorities. Cynical observers hope for democracy and majority rule to come to Syria, but preferably not in their lifetimes. Perhaps within a decade or two, Egypt itself might find itself under an Islamist regime, driving the remaining Copts to choose between mass migration and conversion.
The remaining 10 million Christians in the Middle East could easily be reduced to a handful, while the story of their churches would continue only outside the region—in Detroit and Los Angeles, in Sydney and Paris. Already, the Syrian Orthodox have created new European monasteries in the familiar tradition: the Netherlands has a Mor Ephrem, while a new Mor Augin rises in Switzerland. In the West, members of these ancient communities are annoyed to be asked just when they converted to Christianity. And they explain, patiently, that their Christian heritage goes back a good deal further than that of their new host countries.
Middle Eastern Christianity will not become extinct in the same way that animal or plant species vanish, with no representatives left to carry on the line and no hope of revival. Even in the worst-case scenario, a few families, a few old believers, will linger on for decades to come. Millions of people from the region will also continue the tradition elsewhere. For practical purposes, however, Middle Eastern Christianity has, within living memory, all but disappeared as a living force.