In the last quarter of the 20th century environmental concerns were such that the dangers of the loss of habitat would be couched in terms of “tigers will go extinct in our lifetimes if we don’t preserve the the lands in which they live.”
In some ways it seems that the lot of Oriental Christians, those ethno-religious groups which inhabit the territory from Egypt through the Fertile Crescent, are similar. The first quarter of the 21st century is seeing the extirpation of whole communities.
Just another of the many stories of this genre you see, Christians, in an Epochal Shift, Are Leaving the Middle East:
The exodus leaves the Middle East overwhelmingly dominated by Islam, whose rival sects often clash, raising the prospect that radicalism in the region will deepen. Conflicts between Sunni and Shiite Muslims have erupted across the Middle East, squeezing out Christians in places such as Iraq and Syria and forcing them to carve out new lives abroad, in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere.
“The disappearance of such minorities sets the stage for more radical groups to dominate in society,” said Mr. Johnson of the loss of Christians and Jews in the Middle East. “Religious minorities, at the very least, have a moderating effect.”
Though many are concerned about rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in the West to the point of aiding and abetting apologia for the religion, the media is rather sanguine and straightforward about the role of Islam in creating a hostile and dangerous environment for Christians in the Middle East. The truth of what’s going on is just too obvious to obfuscate. Here are some interesting facts:
* A small suburb of Stockholm has become a sort of Mecca for Oriental Christians.
* The collapse of the Iraqi Christian community followed the American invasion under an evangelical Protestant president and democratization.
* The correlation between toleration of Christians and pro-American alignment on the part of the government is weak to non-existent. Saudi Arabia has no churches because public Christianity is banned, and they are an American ally. In anti-American Iran Christians live difficult lives, but arguably with more safety than in Iraq and Egypt, and with more freedom than Saudi Arabia.
* The period of mass movements since the Arab Spring has not been positive for Christians and ethnic minorities in general.
* The indigenous Christian communities in the Fertile Crescent (those from Jordan, Syria, and Iraq) will almost certainly congregate in Lebanon, where their numbers and power is great enough that they are not at the mercy of the majority in terms of their status.
* There are too many Copts (millions) to imagine that Egypt will lose its Christians within this generation, but the outflow is enough that major Diaspora communities will arise.
One dynamic to note is that once these communities relocate to abroad they will change in fundamental ways. The author of Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East wanted to record the lives of minorities in their traditional environments because he understood once they were transplanted they would transform, and eventually assimilate into the majority if the record of Arab Christians in the West is any precedent.
Note: I like a lot of Philip Jenkins work, but The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died is a particular good book.
Now there’s an interesting point. As the Middle East Christians are largely forced out (or marginalized), will intra-Islamic sect squabbles escalate into far more vicious sectarian warfare?
depends on what you define as sect. in egypt almost all muslims are sunni. but obv there has been a lot of clash btwn fundamentalists and the rest.
Count on it.
I enjoyed this book:
“From the Holy Mountain: A Journey In The Shadow of Byzantium” by William Dalrymple (1998)
https://www.amazon.com/Holy-Mountain-Journey-Shadow-Byzantium/dp/0006547745/
In AD 587, two monks, John Moschos and Sophronius the Sophist, embarked on an extraordinary journey across the Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. Their aim: to collect the wisdom of the sages and mystics of the Byzantine East before their fragile world shattered under the eruption of Islam. Almost 1500 years later, using the writings of John Moschos as his guide, William Dalrymple set off to retrace their footsteps.
Taking in a civil war in Turkey, the ruins of Beirut, the tensions of the West Bank and a fundamentalist uprising in Egypt, William Dalrymple’s account is a stirring elegy to the dying civilisation of Eastern Christianity.
The minority Islamic sects are already under attack, and will be even more so in the future.
In Turkey, after what Orthodox Greek-speaking Christians were left abandoned the country as a consequence of the ’50s pogroms, the Alevis have been more and more marginalized and have been subject to increasingly violent attacks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sivas_massacre for example, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mara%C5%9F_massacre).
The same is already happening in Egypt, where during the run-up to the 2013 coup that deposed the Islamist president Morsi there were a number of attacks targeting Coptic Christians but also a less well known mob attack against the Shia community (http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/1/64/74821/Egypt/Politics-/Egypts-Islamists-under-fire-over-Shia-mob-killings.aspx).
Both countries are nominally Sunni but popular religious practices were very influenced by other traditions but the decade-long trend in favour of more rigid forms of Islam is changing things quickly. The same is happening in Libya, where after the 2011 revolution, and well before ISIS started it’s campaign against pre-Islamic or not sufficiently orthodox Islamic sites, some radical militias started destroying shrines and tombs.
That looks like a fine read. Ordering!
1. Is it plausible that there are significant cryptic, in the closet, minority religion populations that publicly purport to be the predominant local form of Muslim in Egypt or other places in SW and W Asia?
2. It appears that minority religious populations in SW and W Asia are strongly endogamous (hard data says so in the cases of the Druze and Zoroastrians, and there is strong circumstantial evidence that these aren’t the exceptions to the rule). Do/did those strongly endogamous minority religious populations also practice cousin marriage to the same extent as majority sect Muslims in SW and W Asia? If so, are they similarly clannish? If not, does this give them a disproportionate capacity to engage in large scale collective action since they are not as prone to clannish corruption?
3. Is the Oriental Christian diaspora big enough to have the critical mass necessary to really impact the places that are their destinations more than locally (e.g. to be politically relevant in national or regional/state politics)? My perception, right or wrong, is that, apart from the Egyptian Copts and perhaps a couple of the larger religious communities in Lebanon, that these are communities that could wholesale relocate to a few small towns in a part of a single U.S. state or a few municipalities within a single metropolitan area.
4. How much are these “ethnic cleansing” campaigns facilitated by oil wealth?
If you have oil wealth, you don’t need a diversified commercial/industrial economy to generate wealth and life is cheap. You also can tolerate religious practices that give rise to immense economic inefficiency in the form of women who don’t contribute much to GDP and young unemployed men with Islamic studies degrees, all served by maltreated immigrant servants who actually know how to get the necessities for a functional society accomplished.
A society can have very sex differentiated roles and still be very productive (e.g. 1950s U.S.A. or Victorian England), but you can’t have a society the basically burns a huge share of is GDP and available human capital investments on “luxury” religious expenditures that generate no consumable GDP creating religious professionals it has no use for, and, for example, hiring armies of drivers to drive women around as in the KSA.
If you need the GDP created by a diversified commercial/industrial economy, in contrast, because you don’t have enough natural resource revenues or sovereign wealth, you need widespread buy-in to a political economy that can create that wealth and usually ethnic/religious minorities will be critical to one or more critical cogs in the economic machine of that diversified economy and the no representation and no taxation model of oil economies no longer works because you need voluntary compliance with taxation of the diversified commercial/industrial economy to fund the state. Purge the people who have trade connections, or run factories, or cut diamonds, or what have you and you’ve killed the goose that lays the golden eggs.