Crisis in the Middle East – 2 ANTHONY O’MAHONY
A vital presence C
hristians in the Middle East will be
experiencing the recent quietist intifada or popular demonstrations against governments across the region with the mixed emotions of great hope, concern and fear. They will be aware that the great political upheaval that took place in Iraq after the ending of Baathist power in 2003 eventually led to sectarian violence and the dis- placement of half of all Iraqi Christians, with several hundred thousand in exile abroad, never to return home, and living in poverty elsewhere as refugees. In Iran, Shia Islam created the Islamic
Revolution, and Christians in the region will no doubt be concerned that Sunni political Islamism will not move in this direction. In Egypt, the Christians will be hoping and working for a very dif- ferent outcome. They will recall the 1919 uprising when the twin communities, Christians and Muslims, stood together against British rule and for independ- ence for Egypt. Christians confront many of the same challenges as the Muslim population of the region: weak economy, social dis- tress, crises of urbanisation and infrastructure, lack of investment in agriculture, cultural disorientation and above all a crisis in political authority. Yet the recent church bombing in Alexandria only a month ago was a real expression of religious tensions that exist in Egyptian society. The Egyptian Jesuit, Fadel Sidarouss, a Coptic Catholic, has argued in recent months for an articulation of an “Enlightened Secularism” in Egypt, pointing to the real danger of a dichotomy between the spiritual and the temporal, the heavenly and the things of this world, between the sense of ecclesial and of civil belonging: in a word, the need for a certain kind of enlightened secularity know- ing how to distinguish human realities, recognising the particularity and autonomy of each of them. The twentieth century for the Christians in the East began with genocide and ended with the rapid losses due to the migrations by Christians from the East to the West. In some areas, those who are left have experi- enced a slow decline and extinction and have known the consequences of political weakness, leaving the Christian tradition there marked
6 | THE TABLET | 5 February 2011
by suffering and leaving a permanent wound on its life, witness, theology and spirituality. The number of Christians, unfortunately, is very difficult to discern, although it is esti-
The people of Egypt and other Muslim-majority countries are demanding freedom and democracy. The fate of the Christian minorities will be a barometer of progress, an expert on the region argues in the first of a series on the Abrahamic faiths of the Middle East
10 per cent (800,000). During the Lebanese Civil War, some 670,000 Christians were dis- placed as opposed to 160,000 Muslims. Lebanon always had a Christian majority, but no longer has, and this has allowed the Shia to emerge as the majority commu- nity and its political organisations, such as Hezbollah, to try and capture the state and challenge traditional Maronite Christian dominance; Christians still represent some 35 per cent of the pop- ulation.
Other areas have seen similar dis- placement: ●Some 1 million Christians have left their northern Iraqi mountain home- lands in the last 50 years, some moving to Baghdad. ●Several hundred thousand Greek, Armenian and Syrian Christians left Egypt in the 1950s. Around 500,000 Copts have recently left, while 7-10 mil- lion remain. ● Since 1948 some 230,000
Christians have left the Holy Land. The Christian popu lation of Jerusalem was 30,000 in 1948, dropping to 5,000 today. ●Fewer than 150,000 Christians are
mated that the Middle Eastern church families represent about 35 million Christians of whom approximately 15 million reside in the Middle East. For some decades, there have no longer been confessional censuses in the countries of the Middle East, where governments are
With migration, the Christian communities in the Middle East have lost many of their most educated and younger members
concerned to veil the multi-confessional nature of their societies. One thing is certain: the proportion of Christians in the East is decreas- ing, as is, sometimes, their absolute number. Christians in Syria are down from 20 per cent before the Second World War to fewer than
left in Iran, many having departed after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Yet the vigour that believers bring to the region far outstrips their numerical importance. The largest groupings of Christians in the
Middle East are those belonging to the Oriental Orthodox Churches – Armenian, Coptic and Syrian – representing up to 70 per cent of the total Middle Eastern Christian population and who all have an Eastern Catholic sister Church, who form with the Maronites, Chaldeans and the Latins the sec- ond largest group in the region. The doctrinal position of these Churches is based on the teachings of the first three ecumenical coun- cils: Nicaea (AD 325), Constantinople (AD 381) and Ephesus (AD 431), while they have traditionally rejected the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451). For the Orthodox and Catholic (and derived Reformed) traditions, the Council of Chalcedon had settled the matter over how best to describe the relationship between the divinity and the humanity in the incarnate Christ. The Arab invasions and the rise of Islam
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