Christianity after the dictatorships TOM HENEGHAN
Hopes and hazards of the Arab Spring
The so-called Arab Spring has heightened both the expectations and fears of Christian minorities in the Middle East. Last week, prelates and academics gathered in Venice to debate the prospects for change. Our correspondent joined them
O
ne of the most striking aspects of the Arab Spring has been the fact that it has not focused on religion. The protesters who toppled gov-
ernments in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen and battled hardline rulers in Bahrain and Syria have demanded democracy, individual liberty and corruption-free government. The absence of calls for a sharia state and the memorable scenes of Muslim-Christian cooperation on Cairo’s Tahrir Square have prompted hopes that the region could be heading for a “new secularism” more favourable to its non- Muslim religious minorities. There is no guarantee it will turn out the
way Arab Christians might want. The concept of secularism – or more accurately laïcité, the French model of Church-State separation that has influenced the Middle East more than ideas from the English-speaking world – has long been disputed. Many Muslims sim- ply misunderstand it as atheism. Authoritarian governments have misused it as a tool to increase state control over religion. Finding the way towards a new and more positive secu larism means picking a path through a minefield of religious, political and legal controversies. The Oasis Foundation, launched in 2004 by Cardinal Angelo Scola of Venice to promote understanding among Christians and Muslims in the Middle East, debated the prospects for change last week at a conference in Venice. “The stress upon the need for a new secularism or on a positive secularism [to which Pope Benedict XVI has dedicated more than one address]”, he told dozens of invited prelates and professors, is “a need imposed by the facts”. The three days of discussion certainly high- lighted some uncomfortable facts. Christian minorities in the Middle East – whose num- bers range from one-third of the population in Lebanon to 10 per cent in Egypt and only a few percentage points elsewhere – are dwin- dling. The region’s embattled dictators, starting in the pre-Spring era with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, have been their main defenders, in the name of the “old”
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secularism of the Arab nationalist regimes. Now, however welcome the advent of democ- racy may be, they threaten to increase the pressure on Christians in a region marked in recent decades by an Islamic religious revival. A promising view came from the leading
French Islam specialist Olivier Roy, who called the Arab Spring “a break with the culture and ideologies that dominated the Arab world from the 1950s until recently”. The change, he said, began with steep falls in fertility rates starting in the late 1980s, bringing them down to just over two children per woman in North Africa. Most boys and girls are now educated, sometimes up to university level, and many have access to the internet. The effect, Roy explained, was a young population that is more educated, more individualistic and more demanding than its elders. In countries where the Arab Spring takes root, “this will translate into a change in the political paradigm,” said Roy, who heads the Mediterranean Programme at the European University Institute in Florence. “The pro- testers are asking for full rights as citizens, which is an individualist demand ... There are no more sacred causes. Islamism was not mentioned in the protests. Pan-Arabism was not mentioned.” In principle, all this bodes
well for a transition to democracy, he said. This more modern approach to public life, Roy added, will rub off on the religious sphere. Instead of thinking in collective terms, he said, the youth of the Arab Spring see indi- vidual religious freedom as a human right. The trend is apparent in the revival of Sufi fraternities, the popularity of new religious leaders such as the Egyptian “telemufti” Amr Khaled and the tiny but growing number of conversions to evangelical Christianity. For these youths, the Iranian-style Islamic revo- lution is passé. But the outlook is not all rosy. Roy expects a conservative backlash at elections planned in Tunisia and Egypt, led by military and busi- ness interests that think change has gone far enough. The emerging Islamist parties may no longer demand a full Islamic state, but they may opt for US-style “culture war” tactics to lay down Muslim guidelines for politics to follow. That context would not be favourable to a new secularism that makes a clearer break between mosque and state. The individualism in the Arab Spring also challenges the self-identity of Arab Christians as a closed community, Roy added. If religious freedom is now a human right, then Christians cannot expect to be defended as a protected religious minority. “We will not be able to think of religious belonging simply as identity, but in terms of faith and individual choice,” he said. The fact that some Muslims have converted to evangelical Protestantism, rather than joined the established but inward-looking Christian communities, highlights this trend, he said. Roy stressed that these changes would not be easy, and that Islamists, such as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, had not suddenly become democrats. But he thought that some countries, such as Tunisia and Egypt, were moving on the path of democratisation. After Roy’s longer-term analysis, several
Arab prelates gave the conference the less optimistic view from their perspective as minorities in the Muslim world. The Coptic Catholic Patriarch of Alexandria, Antonios Naguib, said the situation for Christians in Egypt had gone from bad before the Arab Spring to ideal for about three euphoric weeks.
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