LAST RITES IN THE HOLY LAND?
Rod Nordland
Newsweek
The world’s most ancient Christian communities are fleeing their
birthplace.
He refused to leave Baghdad, even after the day last year when
masked Sunni gunmen forced him and eight co-workers to line up
against a wall and said, "Say your prayers." An Assyrian Christian,
Rayid Albert closed his eyes and prayed to Jesus as the killers
opened fire. He alone survived, shot seven times. But a month ago a
note was left at his front door, warning, "You have three choices:
change your religion, leave or pay the jeziya"–a tax on Christians
levied by ancient Islamic rulers. It was signed "The Islamic Emirate
of Iraq," a Qaeda pseudonym. That was the day Albert decided to get
out immediately. He and the other 10 members of his household are
now living as refugees in Kurdistan.
Across the lands of the Bible, Christians like Albert and his
family are abandoning their homes. According to the World Council
of Churches, the region’s Christian population has plunged from 12
million to 2 million in the past 10 years. Lebanon, until recently a
majority Christian country–the only one in the Mideast–has become
two-thirds Muslim. The Greek Orthodox archbishop in Jerusalem, where
only 12,000 Christians remain, is pleading with his followers not to
leave. "We have to persevere," says Theodosios Atallah Hanna. "How can
the land of Jesus Christ stay without Christians?" The proportion of
Christians in Bethlehem, once 85 percent, is now 20 percent. Egypt’s
Coptic Christians, who trace the roots of their faith back to Saint
Mark’s preaching in the first century, used to account for 10 percent
of their country’s population. Now they’ve dwindled to an estimated
6 percent. "The flight of Christians out of these areas is similar
to the hunt for Jews," says Magdi Allam, an Egyptian-Italian author
and expert on Islam, himself a Muslim. "There is no better example
of what will happen if this human tragedy in the Arab-Muslim world
is allowed to continue."
Nowhere is the exodus more extreme than in Iraq. Before the war,
members of the Assyrian and Chaldean rites, along with smaller
numbers of Armenians and others, constituted roughly 1.2 million of
the country’s 25 million people. Most sources agree that well over
half of those Christians have fled the country now, and many or most
of the rest have been internally displaced, but some estimates are
far more drastic. According to the Roman Catholic relief organization
Caritas, the number of Christians in Iraq had plummeted to 25,000
by last year. Of the 1.7 million Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria,
half are Christians, says Father Raymond Moussalli, a Chaldean vicar
who now says mass every night in a basement in Amman. "The government
of Saddam used to protect us," he says. "Mr. Bush doesn’t protect
us. The Shia don’t protect us. No Christian was persecuted under
Saddam for being Christian."
Over the centuries, the region’s Christians have frequently made
common cause with their Muslim neighbors. Leaders of some Christian
factions even backed Hizbullah during last summer’s Lebanon war,
and Arabic-speaking Christians in the Palestinian territories
have regularly sided with the Muslim majority against the Israeli
occupation. Five years ago Palestinian militants found sanctuary from
Israel’s tanks inside Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. Nevertheless,
old relationships are crumbling now. When Pope Benedict XVI quoted a
medieval scholar’s critical comments on the Prophet Muhammad, last
September, furious Palestinians reacted by torching at least half
a dozen churches on the West Bank. About 3,000 Christians remain in
Gaza–many of them seeking new homes somewhere else. "We’re living
in a state of anxiety," says Hanady Missak, deputy principal of the
Rosary Sisters School in Gaza City. Militants ransacked the school’s
chapel during the battle between Hamas and Fatah last month. Crosses
were broken and prayer books burned.
At least a few moderate imams are speaking out against attacks on
Christians. "I ask the culprits to return to the Holy Qur’an and reread
it," said Sheik Muhammed Faieq in a recent sermon at the Mussab Mosque
in the Baghdad suburb of Dora, where jihadists have waged a cleansing
campaign against Christians. "Forcing people to leave their religion or
properties is contradicting Islam’s traditions and instructions." For
many in the Middle East, the admonition comes too late. "There is no
future for Christians in Iraq for the next thousand years," says Rayid
Paulus Tuma, a Chaldean Christian who fled his home in Mosul after
two of his brothers were gunned down gangland style. His pessimism
is shared by Srood Mattei, an Assyrian Christian now in Kurdistan:
"We can see the end of the tunnel–and it is dark."
With Kevin Peraino in Jerusalem, Salih Mehdi in Baghdad, Barbie Nadeau
in Rome and Mandi Fahmy in Alexandria