The final place of refuge for Christians in the Middle East is under threat

As Iraq and Lebanon are torn apart by sectarian mayhem and war, only
Syria’s religious tolerance offers refugees shelter

William Dalrymple in Damascus
Saturday September 2, 2006
_The Guardian_ ()

Wander through the streets of Damascus this week, and you will see
signs everywhere of the conflict in Lebanon. The bearded,
black-turbaned Hassan Nasrallah stares out from every shop window,
even in the Christian quarter.Here electric-blue neon crosses wink
from the domes of the churches, and processions of crucifix-carrying
boy scouts squeeze past gaggles of Christian girls heading out on the
town, all low-cut jeans and tight-fitting T-shirts. Thevideo shops are
full of DVDs showing "highlights" from the war – exploding Israeli
tanks and jubilant Hizbullah fighters – which sell even better than
the ubiquitous pirated versions of the latest Hollywood releases, The
Devil Wears Prada and The Da Vinci Code: evidence that in the
contemporary Middle East you don’t have to hate western culture, or
even be a Muslim, to relish the bloody nose given to ill-judged
Israeli and American attempts at imposing their hegemony in the region
by force of invasion and cluster bombs.

Evidence of the conflict in Iraq, Syria’s neighbour to the north-east,
is at first harder to spot than the ubiquitous images from Lebanon,
but on closer examination it is no less pervasive. Lounging in every
park and teahouse are unshaven, tired-looking Iraqi refugees, driven
from their homes by sectarian mayhem. This summer, as Baghdad
spiralled out of control, with more violent deaths in one fortnight
than in Israel and Lebanon together in nearly a month of warfare,
Syria responded by providing asylum (though not work permits) to all
Iraqis who were forced to flee, as well as free education for their
children.

Talk to the refugees in Damascus, however, and you soon find that one
group predominates: the Iraqi Christians. Although they made up only
about 3% of the population of prewar Iraq – 700,000 people – under
Saddam they were a prosperous minority, symbolised by the high profile
of Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s Christian foreign minister. Highly educated
and overwhelmingly middle class, the Christians were heavily
concentrated in Mosul, Basra and especially Baghdad, which before the
war had the largest Christian population of any Middle Eastern town or
city.

Now at least half of these Christians – around 350,000 people – have
fled Bush’s new Iraq and its 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 businessmen –
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 Muslim,"
I was told by Shamun Daawd, a former liquor-store owner who fled after
he received 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 it provides for its more impoverished laity. He had lived
in a wealthy mixed area of Baghdad, al-Doura, he said, until two of
his nephews were kidnapped: for the first they had to arrange a
$30,000 ransom; for the second $10,000. The boys were returned, having
been tortured and beaten. Then some Christian neighbours were killed
by jihadis. Five Baghdad churches were bombed, and stories began to
circulate that Christian girls were getting raped at the
university. The family decided enough was enough, and drove to
Damascus.

The Christian community in Iraq is one of the oldest in the world, and
has existed since the first century; according to tradition it was St
Thomas and his cousin Addai who first brought Christianity to the
Parthian capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon soon after the resurrection. At
the Council of Nicaea, where the words of the Christian creed were
thrashed out in 325 AD, there were more bishops from Mesopotamia and
India than there were from western Europe.

Later, the region became a refuge for groups considered heretical by
the Orthodox Byzantine emperors – such as the Mandeans, the world’s
last surviving Gnostic sect, who follow what they believe to be the
teachings of John the Baptist; and the Church of the East, or
Nestorians, who played a key part in bringing Greek philosophy,
science and medicine to the Islamic world. It was from the Nestorian
school of Nisibis, via Córdoba, that many of Aristotle’s and Plato’s
works reached the universities of medieval Europe. Yet in three years
most members of this ancient church, and almost all the Mandeans, have
been forced to flee the anarchy their western coreligionists have
helped unleash.

This is part of a much wider problem across the Middle East. Almost
everywhere the Christians are leaving, as ill-judged Anglo-American
adventures, intended to suppress terrorism, actually have the reverse
effect and steadily radicalise the entire region. Today in the Middle
East the Arab Christians are a small minority of 12 million; in the
last decade at least two million have left to make new lives for
themselves in Europe, Australia and America. Only in Syria has this
pattern been resisted.

Now there are worries that Syria, one of the last countries in the
region without an Islamist movement, is also in Washington’s cross
hairs: Donald Rumsfeld, among others, has accused Syria of sponsoring
the Islamic resistance in Iraq and in Lebanon.

Few would deny that Syria has much to reform. It is a one-party
Ba’athist state, where political activists are suppressed and an
extensive network of secret police fills the prisons with political
prisoners. Violent opposition to the regime is met with overwhelming
force, most dramatically in the case of the armed rising of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Hama in 1982. The city was sealed off and at least
10,000 people were killed – a similar operation to that undertaken by
the US in Falluja, except that Syria did not use banned chemical
weapons.

Yet if Syria is a one-party police state, it is one that tends to
leave its citizens alone as long as they keep out of politics. And if
political freedoms have always been severely, and often brutally,
restricted – as is also the case in most of the US’s ally states in
the region – Assad’s regime does allow wide-ranging cultural and
religious freedoms, which give Syria’s minorities a security and
stability far greater than their counterparts anywhere elsein the
region. This is particularly true of Syria’s ancient Christian
communities.

The Assads are Alawite, a Shia Muslim minority seen 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 Assads have stayed in power by forming in effect a
coalition of religious minorities, through which they were able to
counterbalance 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; and churches and monasteries,
like mosques, are given free electricity. This is unknown anywhere
else in the Middle East.

It would be tragic if the British now assisted the US in destabilising
not just Iraq and Lebanon, but also Syria. As Sabah Mansur Nesco put
it: "Bush brought nothing but killing, violence and mass emigration –
not just to Iraq but to Afghanistan and Palestine also. Now we just
pray he leaves Syria alone.

For us it is the last place of refuge."

· William Dalrymple is the author of From the Holy Mountain: A Journey
in the Shadow of Byzantium. His new book, The Last Mughal, will be
published by Bloomsbury next month

_Williamdalrymple.com_ ()