[Text of a lecture of William Dalrymple, author of 'From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East,' New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1997. The lecture was presented at St. John the Baptist Church, Maadi, Cairo, Egypt, transcription of audio cassette by Susan Richards-Benson, edited by Cornelis Hulsman]
If in the spring of the year 587 AD, had you been sitting on a bluff of rock overlooking Bethlehem, you might have been able to see two figures setting off, staff in hand, from the gates of the great desert monastery of St Theodosius. The two figures - an old grey-bearded monk accompanied by a tall, upright perhaps slightly stern younger companion - would have headed off South East through the wastes of Judea, toward the then fabulously rich port metropolis of Gaza.
It was the start of an extraordinary forty year journey that would take John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist in an arc across the entire Eastern Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt's deserts. Byzantine caravanserais were rough places and the provincial Greek aristocracy did not enjoy entertaining. As the Byzantine writer Cecaumenus put it, "House parties are a mistake, for guests merely criticize your housekeeping and attempt to seduce your wife." So everywhere they went, the two travelers stayed in some of the thousands of monasteries, caves and remote hermitages which then littered the Middle East. There they dined with the monks and ascetics. In each abbey, Moschos jotted down onto papyrus accounts that he heard of the sayings of the stylites and desert fathers, the sages and mystics of the Byzantine East, before this world, clearly on the verge of collapse, finally disappeared for ever.
Later, exiled in Constantinople, Moschos wrote an account of his travels; entitled, 'Leimonarion' or 'The Spiritual Meadow,' and his book received an enthusiastic reception in monasteries across the Byzantine Empire. Within a generation or two it had been translated into Latin, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, and a variety of Slavonic languages. It was, if you like, the greatest travel bestseller in Byzantine history.
The monastic world described by John Moschos was a place where St Cyril could applaud his Coptic monks for lynching and murdering the pagan lady philosopher Hypatia as she passed in her litter though Alexandria; where oracle like stylites settled the domestic disputes of Eastern Christendom from atop their pillars, where dendrites took Christ's instruction literally to behave like the birds of the air. They therefore lived in trees and built little nests for themselves in the branches- other hermits walled themselves up in hermitages, suspended themselves in cages, and one gentleman named Baradatus even sowed himself up in animal skins so that he would be baked alive in sweltering Syrian midsummer heat - a sort of Byzantine boil - in the bag monk.
Yet for all this, there is a great deal in the period and in the ideals of Moschos's monks that is still deeply attractive, one being the great Orthodox monastic tradition which aims at the purification of the soul through the taming of the flesh, where the material world is pulled aside like a great heavy curtain to allow man's gaze to go straight to God. Moreover the monasteries where this spiritual warfare took place were fortresses that preserved everything that had been salvaged from the wreck of classical civilization, so preserving the learning of antiquity from the encroaching barbarism.
Moschos's 'The Spiritual Meadow' has an attractive carefree scholar gypsy feel to it and has an endearing lightness of touch and sense of humor evident in its stories. One typical tale concerns a novice from Antinoe in Upper Egypt who, according to Moschos, "was very careless with his own soul." When the novice died, his teacher worried that he might have been sent to hell for his sins, so he prays that what happened to his pupil's soul might be revealed. Eventually the teacher goes into a trance, and sees a river of fire with the novice submerged in it up to his neck. The teacher is horrified, but the novice turns to him saying, "I thank God, oh my teacher, that there is relief for my head. Thanks to your prayers I am standing on the head of a bishop."
Yet reading between the lines these were clearly dangerous times: the Empire was under assault, from the West, from Slavs, Goths and Lombards, while on the East the fabric of society was cracking under raids by desert nomads and the legions of Sassanian Persia. In 614 Moschos's home monastery of St Theodosius was burned to the ground by the Persian army and all their brethren - hundreds of unarmed monks - were put to the sword. Nevertheless, when John Moschos died in 619, the empire still ruled, however shakily, from Venice, to Southern Egypt. Moschos's companion, Sophronius, however, lived to see this entire Eastern Byzantine world finally shatter and fragment.
In his old age, Sophronius was appointed Patriarch of Jerusalem. It was left to him to defend the Holy City against the first great army of Islam as it swept up from Arabia, conquering all before it. Arabs were not great at siege craft, when they stood outside Damascus they had to borrow ladders from a monastery to get over the walls. With the Imperial legions already ambushed on the banks of the Yarmuck, it was a hopeless struggle without the prospect of relief.
On a February day in the year AD 638, following a siege that lasted twelve months, the Caliph Omar entered Jerusalem riding a white camel. Sophronius handed him the keys to the city, and through his tears he was heard to murmur, "Behold the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the Prophet." He died, heartbroken, a few months later, and was buried in the monastery of St Theodosius besides the body of his friend John Moschos in the next niche in the crypt.
Though he did not know it, Sophronius had witnessed the first act in a historical process whose denouement is only now taking place.
Even a century ago, over a quarter of the population of the Levant was still Christian. In a town like Istanbul that proportion rose to nearly 60%. Through wars and nationalism the twentieth century ended centuries of co existence. Now the last of the Christians of the East are leaving.
Today they are a small minority. 14 million struggle to keep afloat amid 180 million non Christians, while their numbers are annually reduced through emigration. In the last 20 years, two million Eastern Christians have left the Middle East to make new lives for themselves in Australia, Europe and America. Now there are more Jerusalem born Christians living in Sydney than in Jerusalem itself, those that remain could be flown out in just nine jumbo jets.
It matters that Christianity is not a Western religion. It was not founded in London (however much the Victorians liked to believe that God was an Englishman), nor in Rome. It was born in Jerusalem, and received its intellectual superstructure in Antioch, Damascus, Constantinople, and Alexandria. The Eastern Christians, who are now leaving the Middle East, preserve many of the most ancient liturgies, superstitions and traditions which hold the key to understanding early Christianity and without which we can never really understand the roots of our own Christian based culture. Without the local Christian population, the most important and the most ancient shrines in the Christian world will be left as museum pieces, preserved only for the curiosity of tourists. Christianity will no longer exist in the Holy Land as living faith; a vast vacuum will lie in the very heart of Christendom.
Yet despite this gloomy picture, a surprising number of the monasteries visited by Moschos and Sophronius still survive, but only just. Like timeless islands of Byzantium, with their bells and black robes and candle lit processions they are still occupied with elderly monks whose heavily whiskered faces mirror those of the frescoed saints on the monastery walls. The monk's vestments remain unchanged since Byzantine times; the same icons are painted in the same way. Even the superstitions remain unchanged. Relics of the True Cross and the Virgin's Tears are still venerated; demons and devils still lie in wait outside every monastery wall.
Not long ago Our Lady was clearly seen floating over the domes of the Coptic Cathedral. Today, sitting under a candle lit iconostasis, listening to plainchant still sung in the language of the sixth century Byzantium, it is still possible to forget the intervening millennia and feel that the lifeline of tones and syllables, fears and hopes, that link us to the time of John Moschos are still intact
The oldest manuscript of 'The Spiritual Meadow' to survive can today be found in the library of the monastery of Iviron on Mount Athos. In June 1994, I set off to spend six months circling the Levant from Athos to the monasteries of Southern Egypt, roughly following in John Moschos's footsteps, to discover what was left, intent on seeing the last twilight of Byzantium before its sun finally set
To see the earliest manuscript of John Moschos's book The Spiritual Meadow, I started the journey by visiting Athos, the last Byzantine Republic to survive into the twentieth century.
The first monastery on the mountain was founded in the ninth century A.D by St Euthymius of Salonica, who, at the age of eighteen, took to moving around on all fours and eating grass. So renowned was the holiness of this saint that twenty other monasteries soon sprung up around his original foundation.
Istanbul:
What was once the greatest bastion of Christendom against Islam; Istanbul [Constantinople] withstood repeated sieges by Arabs, Persians and Turks for one thousand years. It is now 99% Muslim, which is a very new development. As late as the early 1955's there were still 100,000 Greeks in Istanbul. But following a bloody anti Greek pogrom in 1955 - the biggest race riot in Europe since the Second World War - and a continuing series of shootings and bombings on Greek churches, few Greeks now wish to remain. The younger generation has already emigrated, now only 500 Greeks remain, and they will most likely be gone by end of the next decade. It is difficult to say how long the Christian population in Istanbul has got, but probably no more than 20 years. Already this summer [2006] I remember very sadly walking down a street above the Fener [name of the once Greek quarter of the city], which, when I had been there in 1994 was still rich in Christian-Greek merchant houses, that now were all given over to Kurdish refugees. The Greeks have gone to Greece, the Kurds have come in from the east and you have an assortment of 10 or 12 families living in these beautiful merchant houses which used to be very elegant residences belonging to Greek intellectuals and merchants. In Istanbul, the problem is really nationalism. It was a problem of the Greeks against Turks. The big decline in the Greek population occurred during the Cyprus dispute and Greeks being in the wrong nation state.
Under Turkish law it is forbidden for Christians to build new churches, or to open schools or seminaries. As it is impossible to train or ordain new priests, monks are getting older and older, and the remaining monasteries on the Prince's Islands just off the coast of Istanbul are being abandoned, one by one. The Greek Patriarch, the primus inter pares of Eastern Christendom, can barely fill the first three rows of the pews in his cathedral.
Tur Abdin:
Because of the forcible eviction of the Greeks from Anatolia in 1922, after Greece had tried to annex Western Anatolia, and the massacre of the Armenians in 1916, if you want to see living monasteries in Anatolia today you now have to travel to the Tur Abdin, the Hill of Slaves, in the far South East of Turkey, in an area 19th century travelers knew as Kurdistan
The Suriani Christians in Eastern Turkey are the last Christian community of any size to survive within modern Turkey. They speak Aramaic, the language of Christ, and they worship early Christian monasteries that in many cases date from less than four centuries after the death of Christ. They were founded and built under the direct patronage of Byzantine emperors.
These Suriani faced a completely different problem. In 1994 they were caught in the middle of two Muslim powers battling in the civil war. The PKK[Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan (Kurdistan Workers Party) See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdistan_Workers_Party], the Kurds, and the Turkish government. The Christians were caught in the middle and neither side was particularly aiming at the Christians, but they were caught in the middle of an extremely vicious government campaign and were emigrating. The Christians were finding it easier to emigrate due to their Church schools, their language skills and their 'Christianess.'
Sixty people were being killed a day. Some 1,000 villages were cleared, including most of the Christian ones. In 1994, 50 odd Kurdish journalists were mysteriously killed during the course of the war. While I was in Diyarbakir, a local Kurdish newspaper editor mysteriously tumbled from the roof of his office. The situation was so tense that newspapers could only be bought from police stations. The PKK arrived in Christian villages demanding food and information. The government retaliated. It was quite a scary situation, not least because the PKK responded to the government by placing mines on the dirt tracks and resorting to kidnapping.
Mar Gabriel:
It was not the first time that the Surianis had suffered. The reason that the Surianis still remained where they had been before the First World War while the Armenians were either being killed or dispersed is simple; the Surianis were prepared. During the First World War, over one million Armenians were massacred by the Turks, without using any of the sophisticated machinery that the Nazis used. Instead, the Armenians were shot, starved, burned, or stabbed to death, the women often raped before being murdered. Unable or unwilling to make a distinction between different Christian communities, Ottoman authorities set about massacring the Surianis.
Aynwardo:
In 1994, I met an old monk who was able to tell me how the Surianis escaped from the fortress during the siege. He was 12 at the time, and remembered everything.
The preparations involved ten villages being evacuated overnight, and the residents taking shelter, with twenty families to every house. During the siege 12,000 Ottomans and 13,000 Kurdish besieged their Christian neighbors inside villages and monasteries. The monk was with 160 families, eating rats, but surrendering to the besiegers would have been worse. On one night a counter attack broke out, and Muslims were chased back to Midyat. Elsewhere some 90,000 Surianis were murdered in Eastern Turkey during the First World War.
In Eastern Turkey, things are much better than when I was there in 1994. A stability exists which was not at all there when I was there, but most people seem to believe that the existence of a Christian community is beyond the point of no return, it's too late there to revise the trend. Only 500 Suriani Christians are left in the entire area. Their main settlement is the monastery of Mar Gabriel with five remaining monks, along with forty children and refugees.
Antakya:
From Tur Abdin I went to Antioch, today known as Antakya. Once the rival of Rome as the principal Christian center of the ancient World, it is now almost completely 'cleansed' of any Christian presence. In this region, there survives the best evidence of what is certainly one of Byzantine monasticism's weirdest incarnations; the Stylites, those hermits who live in the desert on top of antique pillars. These Stylites were once very fashionable in Antioch and visiting them was a popular afternoon's outing for the smart and pious ladies of Byzantine Antioch.
St Simeon Stylite the Younger, the greatest showman among the stylites was really the Christian version of an oracle. He was Church oriented, but not towards the altar and to God, but to his own grotesque figure at the back of the nave on his pillar. The Church, built during the stylites lifetime, was magnificent. It was built by the finest masons, architects and sculptors. It had a walnut wooden enclosure around the top of the pillar to prevent vertigo, and a pipe for the removal of St. Simeon's bodily wastes. It was a kind of deluxe stylitism: like holding a hunger strike at the Ritz hotel [an expensive five star hotel]. Moschos was a great admirer of St Simeon Stylite the Younger and tells several stories. An Antoichene once accused St Simeon Stylite the Younger of sorcery, and his hand immediately turned putrid and fell off. Only after begging at the base of the pillar did St Simeon Stylite the Younger agree to put it back on.
Syria:
The surprise of this pariah state, part of the Axis of Evil, is that is has by far the most benign attitude toward Christians of any state in the Middle East. But here too Christianity is declining. Christians in Syria might only survive if Bush leaves it alone. The Assad regime, however, for all its many faults and sinister activities, does at least provide one of the most stable bases for Christians in the Middle East.
Today Syria is a one party police state that tends to leave its citizens alone as long as they keep out of politics. Political freedoms are severely and often brutally restricted, as is often the case in most of the US allies in the region. But Asad's regime also allows the Syrian people widespread cultural and religious freedoms. Today these give Syria's minorities a security and stability far greater than their counterparts anywhere else in the region. This is particularly true of Syria's ancient Christian communities.
The reason for this is that the Asads are Alawite, a Shia Muslim minority regarded by orthodox Sunni Muslims as heretical, and disparagingly referred to as Nusayris, or Little Christians. Indeed their liturgy seems to be partly Christian in origin. The Asads have kept themselves in power by forming what was, in effect, a coalition of Syria's religious minorities through which they were able to counter balance the weight of the Sunni majority. In Syria, the major Christian feasts are national holidays; Christians are exempt from turning up to work on Sunday mornings. Churches and monasteries, like mosques, are provided with free electricity and are sometimes given state land for new buildings. This is something completely unknown anywhere else in the Middle East.
Seydnaya:
One of the most famous shrines to the Virgin is an image painted by prolific artist, St. Luke. Seydnaya remains a great center of pilgrimage, not only for Christians, but also for Muslims. You can see well chadored Muslim ladies climbing the steps. Barren women come to spend the night in front of the altar, and are supposed to miraculously conceive, but not I hasten to add because of monkly intervention, as Seydnaya is a nunnery.
Seydnaya is also much sought after by people who are about to embark on a long journey. Here I found a photo of cosmonauts, who brought along a sheep and slaughtered it before embarking on their space journey.
Iraq:
Talk to the refugees in Damascus and you will soon discover that one group overwhelmingly predominates, namely the Iraqi Christians. Although Iraq's 750,000 Christians made up only about 7% of the total population of pre war Iraq, they were a prosperous minority under Saddam, something symbolized by the high profile of Tariq Aziz, Saddam's Christian Foreign Minister. The Christian minority was highly educated and overwhelmingly middle class. Christians were heavily concentrated in Mosul, Basra and especially Baghdad, which before the war had the largest Christian population of any city in the Middle East.
At least half of these Christians, around 350,000 people, have fled Bush's new Iraq, unable to remain in the face of violence, mass abductions and economic meltdown. Wherever I went in Syria, I kept running into them bank managers and engineers, pharmacists and scientists, garage owners and businessman all living with their extended families in one room flats on what remained of their savings, and assisted by the charity of the different churches.
"Before the war there was no separation between Christian and Muslims," I was told by Shamun Daawd, a former liquor store owner who fled after receiving Islamist death threats. "Under Saddam no one asked you your religion, and we used to attend each other's religious services and weddings. After the invasion we hoped democracy would come, but instead all that came was bombs, kidnapping and killing. Now at least 75% of my Christian friends have fled. There is no future for us in Iraq."
His friend, Sabah Mansur Nesco, told a similar tale when I met him at the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate, where he had come to collect the rent money the Patriachate provides for its more impoverished laity. He lived in a wealthy mixed area of Baghdad, al Doura, until two of his nephews were kidnapped. In order for the first to be released, they had had to arrange a $30,000 ransom; for the second $10,000. The boys were returned to him, but not before they had been tortured and beaten up. Some Christian neighbors who were accused of assisting the American occupation were killed by jihadis. Five Baghdad churches were bombed and stories began to circulate that Christian girls were being raped at the University. Before long the whole family had decided enough was enough, and drove straight to Damascus.
As Sabah Mansur Nesco put it, ""Bush brought nothing but killing, violence and mass emigration not just to Iraq, but also to Afghanistan and Palestine. This is the democracy of George Bush. Now we just pray he leaves Syria alone. For us it is the last place of refuge."
As Moschos passed through Lebanon fairly quickly, I will provide a brief overview. Lebanon experienced a huge war this summer [with Israeli bombardments on the country] which has led the Maronites to head into exile. They are no longer the majority there, and have not been the majority for quite some time, and no longer control power. The Maronites also lost a civil war which, many would argue, they helped bring about through their own intransigence.
Israel and Palestine:
In 1922, soon after the British took over Palestine following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, nearly a tenth of the population was Christian Arabs. They were wealthier and better educated than their Muslim counterparts, owned almost all the newspapers, and filled a disproportionate number of senior jobs in the Mandate Civil Service. Now only 170,000 Christians remain in Israel and the occupied territories. They are leaving fast; fleeing outright violence and a hundred other of the more subtle forms of oppression suffered by all Palestinians under Israeli rule, including forcible expropriation of vast tracts of church and private land, diversion of water from ancient Christian villages to Jewish settlements, imprisonment, torture and deportation. In Bethlehem more or less every one of the younger generation that I met had their papers in some Embassy. They were waiting for their visas to come through for Canada or Australia but there was no sense at all that Christians were suffering more than Muslim cousins or brothers. They found it easier, by virtue of also being Christian, in the current climate to get visas to emigrate. So you find the Christian emigration rate far higher than the Muslim emigration rate in Palestine.
Last year, Michel Sabah, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, issued a warning that by the turn of the century Christianity may well have died out in the land of its birth. Along with the rise of Lieberman, who is now talking about whether Israeli-Arabs have a future in centers such as Haifa, Galilee, Acco, their future is now far more uncertain than it was. Israel and the West Bank is another completely different situation. Arabs in a Jewish state are not persecuted as Christians, but as Arabs in the way of Zionism.
Decline, demoralization and impotence of the Christian population are obviously affecting the monasteries. Pharan was, founded by St Chariton in the early fourth century and was first monastery in Palestine. John Moschos lived here for ten years when he first became a monk. It was finally deserted in 1976. I had the privilege of meeting the last monk in Athos who had been the last hermit on the site. He fled after his friend and neighbor, Fr. Philloumenos, was stabbed and then incinerated. Pharan is now wired into a new settlement.
But most monasteries have a different problem. Greeks won't ordain Arabs as it would allow Arabs to become bishops. This policy results in empty monasteries. St Theodosius once had four hundred monks, including a smaller wing which was a lunatic asylum, known as "a monastery within a monastery for those disturbed by excessive asceticism." Only two Rumanian nuns still remain. John Moschos and Sophronius are still buried in the crypt.
St. George, Wadi Kelt, the Lavra of Douka and St.Gerasuinus have each one monk left.
The exception to this is Mar Saba, which has 15 monks and is still going strong. They are a slightly eccentric bunch, who include my friend Fr. Theophanes, who will ask you if you are an Orthodox or heretic, and then tell you that unless you convert you will be among the damned.
Allow me to read you a little extract:
"See that river down there at the bottom of the cliff?" said Fr. Theophanes. "Nowadays it's just the sewage from Jerusalem. But on Judgement Day that's where the River of Blood is going to flow. Ifs going to be full of freemasons, whores and heretics: Protestants, Schismatics, Jews, Catholics. More Ouzo?"
"Please."
The monk paused to pour another thimbleful of spirit into a small glass. When I had gulped it down, he continued with his apocalypse:
"At the head of the Damned will be a troop composed of all the Popes of Rome, followed by their deputies, the Vice Presidents of the Freemasons..."
"You're saying the Pope is a Freemason?"
"A Freemason? He is the president of the Freemasons. Everyone knows this. Each morning he worships the devil in the form of a naked woman with head of a goat."
Egypt:
Egypt is better than it was in many ways now that there is no longer the insurgency with the Gama'at al-Islamiya, but there is still a certain unease about the rise of the Muslim Brothers and their call for an Islamic state. There is also increased polarization, mutual suspicion. Some things are getting better but it is still far from a stable situation. Nonetheless, I think the Christian population in Egypt has probably the longest long-term future of any of these.
It was in Upper Egypt that the al-Jamācah al-Islāmīyah would actually give a straightforward case of fundamentalist Islamists actively attacking Christians with guns, and even there that was no longer the case. So if there is any lesson from it is that one should never regard the Middle East with simplistic strictures of right or wrong, good guys and bad guys, Axis of Evil, and otherwise. It is a very complex place, with very complex rights and wrongs, and simplistic approaches for the region tend to create more trouble for the region than they solve.
In 1994, I also went to St. Antony's, which as you all know is the oldest monastery. For those of you who don't know, the story as I understand it is that the fashionable Greco-Roman intellectuals from Alexandria used to go and try talk to St. Antony at his home, driving him deeper and deeper into the desert, trying to escape his fan-club, who kept touching him and pulling bits of his clothing, taking hairs off and things. Eventually he went to the site of the current monastery which he though is about as far away as you can get from anywhere in Egypt, and when he was found he organized his fan-club into the first monastery around the spring. For those of you who haven't been there it's a highly recommended trip, extraordinary fresco's, extraordinary monks, many very remarkable men living there. It also has some of the most wonderfully sort of unembarrassed miracle conversations one can have in the modern age. I remember one of them, Father Dioscorus saying, "See up there?" pointing to the tower between the two towers of the church. "In June 1987, in the middle of the night, our father St. Antony appeared there, shining, hovering in a cloud of light." I asked, "You saw this?" He said, "No, I'm short-sighted, I can't even see the Abbot when he's sitting next to me at supper." That's quite a way of dealing with a question like that.
After leaving St. Antony, the final bit of my journey following John Moschus involved going up the Nile which, in 1994, was very unsafe with the al-Jamācah al-Islāmīyah shooting anyone who they liked to shoot at. From Minia onwards, one came across more and more police checkpoints. In Malāwī the police were everywhere, sandbank emplacements, and village guards given guns to protect themselves with. From Malāwī at one point we actually came across a police post that had been attacked that afternoon, and we made the rest of the journey surrounded by heavily armed para-military policemen in pick-up trucks. The destination we were going to, which was considered dangerous, was Sanabu, which was a village that had been attacked two years earlier by an extraordinary convoy of militants who swooped down early in the morning onto a small Coptic hamlet. Twelve Coptic farmers had been hunted down and murdered in the fields. A Coptic high-school headmaster had been shot dead in front of his pupils, a Coptic doctor riddled with bullets as he opened up his surgery. A short distance away from that was Dayr al-Muharraq where three monks and two laymen were shot dead in Lent of 1994.
Conclusion:
When I started this journey, I had imagined that it would be quite a simple story of fundamentalist Muslim persecution of Christians. Now one of the most interesting things I found on this journey was the fact that this was the case almost nowhere. The situation, as so often in the Middle East, is far more complex than it appears when viewed from the distance of London or Washington. The situations in almost all cases turned out to be far more complex than one would imagine, and the rights and wrongs to be very different than the ones they seem from the distance.
Anyway, I was still sitting in Dayr al-Muharraq, it was getting dark, and Bishop Biman insisted on taking me before I left to the inner courtyard to show me the keep that the Emperor Zeno had built for the monks in the sixth century AD. He said, "We Copts have always been attacked for our faith. You know compared to some of these attacks in the past the present trouble is nothing." So I said, "When were some of those?" He replied, "Oh not so long ago, during the persecution of the Roman Emperor Diocletian for example, now that was serious trouble for the Copts."
Thank you very much.
The lecture was followed by questions and answers:
Q - If you were ever going to do a column, would you write it on this volatile region again?
A - Yes, actually, one of the reasons I accepted this invitation was to update everyone. I have been back to Palestine, Syria, and now to Egypt, and next year I'm producing a book called 'Blind Men and the Elephant,' which is not a proper 'grown up' part two, but it is a selection of essays on Islam and Christianity, which should be out in about 18 months now.
Q - Thank you for your lecture and also your points on Egypt, I think that it summarized the current situation in Egypt very well. When you were traveling around Egypt in 1994, the film 'Between Fear and Faith' was released, presenting a very different story of persecution in Egypt. When you listen to Christian organizations in the West, whether it be U.S. Copts, Open-doors, or Christian Solidarity International, you hear a very different story. Does it appear to be more of a self-fulfilling prophecy by doing that, while also creating trouble back in Egypt which is then pushing Christians out?
A - Yes, I mean the most interesting example I have come across is a Christian organization in England, 'The Barnabus Trust,' which uses very lurid accounts of Christian persecution and blames this persecution on Islam. There is never any nuance in it. It is also very one-sided, for example they talk about the persecution of Christians by Muslims in Bethlehem, when if you talk to any Palestinian Christians there is certainly nervousness about the rise of Hamas, but 90% of this is because of the situation with Israel, which is never mentioned. We all know how very simplistic much of the reporting from this particular region is, how particularly loaded a great deal of the media is, and the more right-wing the media, the more loaded it becomes. I think everyone who is in this region has a duty not only to privately express to people back home what they see, but also to write into news organizations and newspapers. If you see something in the newspapers, the New York Times or whatever else, contrary to your experience, write them, because journalists get embarrassed. If it is very one-sided and very inaccurate pictures are presented, make your voice heard. I know as a person who has had my work corrected that it is acutely embarrassing when letters arrive to your foreign editor's desk and he calls you over and says, is this true? There are things that one can do about this however. You, I think, have another answer to this?
Q - No, this is true. You see that it works to criticize media, but it is not done enough. There is not enough critique on the Western media to correct mistaken presentations. It is primarily a lack of context, namely that incidents are reported but the context behind that incident is not provided.
A - Correct. Another thing that I should say is that I am quite often told by my Muslim friends "Oh the Western media cannot report the truth about Palestine, or you have over-arching segments." I have found it possible to easily, provided you do your research, to publish pro-Syrian articles in the New York Times. Virtually anyone, if you cover yourself, if you do your work, will publish the truth, whether it is about Muslims, or Palestine, or anything. If you get your facts right, you can do it. Certainly you often have to explain and cover yourself more than you would do if you were writing for the other side. I think though, that if you have things you have seen, if you disagree with the media reports, do not just sit around. Write letters, maybe even write an article. I think it is a very crucial moment, and unless people of good will who see mis-reporting act to correct it, mis-representation of Islam and a mis-representation of the complexity of the Middle East will continue.
Q - Is the rise of the phenomenon of Christian Zionism one of the more influential factors on Christian communities in the Middle East?
A - I am not an expert on Christian Zionism, and I have not done a great deal of work on this. But it is an incredibly powerful force in America. It was also an incredibly powerful force in Britain at the time of the Balfour declaration. If one looks at some of the statements coming from of Lord George and so on in the early part of the 20th century, it is extraordinary how much of early Zionism was facilitated not so much by Jewish activity, but by Christian-Zionist activity. I understand that the Israeli's Lobby in the States is increasingly becoming more of a Christian Zionist matter than a Jewish phenomenon. In general, Christians in the Middle East and the Christians in Pakistan suffer very badly for being Christians, as it is the same religion as in America and in the West. The more the West is seen and perceived to be attacking Islam and waging a war on Islam, which is increasingly the perception in many Muslim countries, be it right or wrong, it correspondingly becoming increasingly difficult to be a Christian living there. [In the Middle East] Many sophisticated Muslims realize that there is absolutely no connection to Christians in the West politically, and the Christians in the East, but at a street level that distinction is often not made. One has direct knock-on effects, for example the week that saw the beginning of Taliban positions being bombed by the American Air Force, a bomb exploded in the church in Islamabad, killing 35 people. One can therefore see a direct link, in many cases, between attacks on Christians in the East, and Western foreign policy in the Middle East. But I am afraid Christian Zionism is not my specialty.
Q - In your book you address the rise of nationalism, especially in Turkey and Lebanon and Israel. Do you believe this nationalism was spurred by secular groups, such as the Israeli government, or more by religious groups?
A - Historically in the 20th century it was very often secular nationalist groups that affected it. The Turks were not a religious group, and did not attack the Armenians primarily on religious grounds. I understand that it was a nationalist Turkish group that attacked the Armenians entirely on national grounds. The Filange, again you are right, was very much a secular movement. So very often you are correct in saying that the Christians are being displaced by secular nationalism, as much as by religious antagonism. But then again, these things are quite difficult to pry apart.
Q - At a time when there is a supreme separation, how do you see the relation between religious groups and sects in countries such as India, and/or Britain?
A - Britain is very worried. On one hand the unraveling of Iraq led to a very wide-spread awareness that neo-con pundits got it very wrong, and people such as Melanie Phillips, Michael Gove and right-wingers who were urging attacks on Iraq have very much got egg on their faces. On the other hand there is a real fear of Muslims in Britain, based largely on ignorance and media stereotyping. We've seen extraordinary things in the past few months, a wave of anti-Islamic stories following Jack Straw's comments about the bail and so on. John Friedland, a writer for the Guardian, wrote that if Jews were being written about in the same way as Muslims were, he would be reaching for his passport. Islamophobia is as rife as ever. Muslims have not helped their own cause, the 7/7 bombings and the response of many Muslim groups in Britain turning up with placards saying "Death to Democracy," and "We'll Invade Rome" and the likes does not help anyone's cause. But things are not at all, and the tone of right wing papers is just awful. India is a very different situation. India's communal ratios are better than they've been for a very long time. As a young reporter in India, I was very rarely covering Hindu-Muslim riots, there are very few at the moment. The rise of the BJP [Bharatiya Janata Party], the Indian Nationalist Party, brought with it in small bizarre towns in North India a whole wave of rioting, which largely died down once the BJP came to power, and died down entirely now that the BJP have disappeared, with the hideous exception of the massacres in Gudhrat in 2002.
Q - Christian Churches have the capacity to grow and flourish even under persecution. Would you want to comment more on what you've seen in that respect?
A - The Copts in 1994, as I talked about earlier, were full with the blood of the martyrs, with the blood of the martyrs watering the flowers of the church, or whatever the metaphor is. But ultimately, however much it may strengthen the faith of a few of the monks, in a globalized 21st century persecution tends to lead to mass emigration. Though you may take your faith with you, if you are a young person with a degree and a passport, persecution does not usually end up with a 'stealing of the faith,' so much as a mass exodus in practical terms. It is not however, for me to judge the religious effects; I deal more with the secular effects.
Q - Just touching again on Christian rioting, what I have noticed in the West when I return to Australia, it seems to not just be a Christian bias towards Israel, and pro-Syria, pro-Isaac, anti-Ishmael. I just want to understand where you think that it comes from in a simple explanation, because I do feel that there is a bias in the Western media toward Israel and anti-Arab, not just anti-Islam but I feel it goes deeper to anti-Arab?
A - Well I think that the simple answer would be following the holocaust, we've all thanked god to have been taught enough to recognize the centuries of Christian anti-Semitism. I was certainly brought up with holocaust films, such as 'Maschoa,' and 'Schindler's List' and all those things. There has been no understanding of the centuries of Christian Islamophobia, which can be traced through the whole stream of Dante and other Christian literature, which has always had a deep suspicion of the Islamic world. Again in the same way Christian's imbibed anti-Semitism with the whole breadth of Western literature, so we have imbibed a suspicion of Islam, in the form of the terrible turp. It is not exclusive to the Arabs but it certainly encompasses the Arabs. To this day, it is possible to say things about Muslims in all Christian countries, whether Australia or Europe or America, which would never be allowed to appear in print if it was about Catholics or Jews or black people, but there is a blind spot. I think that the activities of al-Qācidah and similar graft of activities have opened up the floodgates for this sort of things, and it's a mutual spiral, it only gets worse and worse. The only solution is inviting people to come to a place such as this. One of the nicer things I heard about was that the number of British tourists coming to Egypt passed the one million point last year. Now if one million people a year are spending time in a Muslim country, even if it is just going to Hurghada and going snorkeling, that means that 1 in 55 people in Britain are coming to a Muslim country on holidays. It is always through coming in contact with the culture that these myths are dispelled. What is so frightening about modern day America is that so few people actually carry a passport, let alone come to Egypt.
Q - This is taking away a little from what you have been saying, but you have done a recent review on the book by Edward Luce 'In Spite of the Gods.' As an author who has lived in India for several years, I would like to ask you Edward mentioned that he thought that India could give a sense of direction to humanity in terms of where it was going in the future. What is your opinion on that?
A - Can India give a sense of moral direction? I am not one of those people who believes that India is a wonderful aura of positive mysticism. India seems to be like the rest of the world, good and bad people, religious people and not. The thing that India can point to, and the great triumph of India since it has developed is that it is pluralist. It has successfully maintained Hindu and Muslim population side by side, despite relations with Pakistan, despite all the horrors that have taken place; it still is a democracy and a plural world. So I think that India is an example to many other places with a poor population that aid can maintain democracy with relatively low literacy rates, with relatively low capita per head income. In these ways India is an example, but I do not believe that India is a 'Mohatma Ghandi' non-violence represented, as in many ways India is a very violent country.
Q - That question was not really asked in a spiritual or religious sense. It is just in terms of what humanity, in what direction humanity could possibly be going in the future. Will it have any relation to what Edward Luce had to say?
A - I mean it would be lovely if many countries remained as pluralistic as India has done, and I think in that sense perhaps India has shown us something.
Q - I would just like to say that there is appalling lack of leadership amongst some of the Western religious leaders, I am thinking in particular of the pope's recent appalling comments about the figure of Mohammed in quoting a Byzantine emperor. When you have that level of lack of understanding, and insensitivity, attacking the central figure of Islam in a way that Muslim's never attack Jesus, the central figure of Christianity, what hope is there to perpetrate a general understanding of Islam in the West with that kind of derelict of duty from our religious leaders?
A - I think that the pope is a very particular case as he does have a record of saying such things about Islam. He gave an interview to L'osservatore Romano [http://www.vatican.va/news_services/or/or_quo/] a couple of years ago, speaking very strongly against Turkey being let into the European community and talked about Islam flooding Europe. I am not a fan of the present pope, and I do believe it was an extremely anxious comment. I think that many people see the situation of Muslims in Europe as being akin to the situation of Jews in the 1930's. I mean there certainly is no question of the holocaust and such things yet, but the level of rhetoric is in many cases so virulent and fuelled by such extraordinary ignorance that I think there really is cause for concern. But I think that people in this room can do something about this, those people who have had the privilege to live in a Muslim country, and see have to do their bit, and work hard to write to newspapers, to write articles to make their opinions heard. We are in a position to correct these misconceptions, while most people are not. It is out of ignorance that a lot of this comes, and one can understand where it comes from. When bombs are going off in tubes and airlines are crashing into towers, if you don't understand the background to it, obviously these are extremists. People wearing veils and things are not things that you come across in everyday life, and if you don't have the education and the understanding about what these represent, it is very easy to see them as sinister. It is only by education and by writing that these things can be corrected and understood, but there is no shortcut. One of the most terrifying things is the way that nothing about Islam ever appears in any Western school curriculum. I happen to have a specialization in the crusades in my History A level, and that was in the most confrontationally possible context in coming across Islam. It gave me a measure of understanding that I might not have had if I had done any other subject. My generation grew up reading things out of the Communist Manifesto and learning about Bolshevism and Stalinism and could write very coherent essays on what communism was all about, the then-perceived threat. What's terrifying about comments about Islam is that no one in the West studies Islam, no one learns about the good and bad points, and the complexities and differentiations of the Islamic world. These people are not in a position to make any sort of informed comment about Islam, and so they are susceptible to rabble rousing nonsense on Fox TV, and people will believe this, in a way that in other subjects there are enough informed people out there who can distinguish fact from fiction. Anyway, you all go and write some letters to newspapers!
