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The Christian church that began on the day of Pentecost, some 2,000
years ago, was one undivided church. It began in Jerusalem where 17
nationalities gathered together to celebrate the feast. Arabs (or
Arabians) are the tail-end of the list of these nationalities (Acts
2:11). Two millennia later, Arab Christians, largely unnoticed and
in serious danger of extinction, still inhabit the land, keeping the
faith and the heritage as the descendants of the first church.
The roots of Arab Christian identity go deep into the soil of a
region where, despite all difficulties, an indigenous Christian
church has survived for 2000 years. Such historic survival is
nothing less than an awesome achievement. Arab Christianity has been
buried beneath a superimposed western veneer-- the legacy of nearly
100 years when the faith was closely aligned with European imperial
power.
The history is complex, mingling alienation and hope. Not only were
Arabs among the 3,000 converts of that first Pentecost, but their
numbers swelled when the apostle Thomas reached Arabia on his way to
India. In its five centuries, the church expanded broadly throughout
the Middle East and North Africa, the Christian message profoundly
influenced all the peoples of the region-- including the founder of
Islam, Mohammed himself. Arab literature records those individuals
and tribes who altered the values of Arab society with their embrace
of Christianity. (Also important was the social influence of those
Arabs who converted to Judaism).
This historically rooted indigenous character of Arab Christianity,
however, has been concealed-- not only from western believers but
all too often from Arab Christians themselves.
Two highly significant events took place in the sixth century which
had a deep and adverse effect on Christian life in Arabia, in the
remainder of the Middle East, and in North Africa. In fact the
effect of these events had been immediate and dynamic to such an
extent that people started to change their faith.
The first event was theological. In an era when a multitude of
heresies flourished throughout Christendom, one particular theology
spreading though Arabia proclaimed a divine triad rather than a
Trinity. The deity, according to this teaching, was God the Father,
God the Mother, and God the son. Mohammed relates to this teaching
in the Quran: “God shall say, O Jesus, son of Mary, hast thou said
unto mankind, take me and my mother as two Gods, besides God?” Surah
5:116. Therefore, when Mohammed appeared teaching the oneness of
God, many Christians embraced Islam, initially unaware that it was a
new and different religion. Likewise in the west, much of European
Christianity at first perceived Islam as simply another Christian,
or conceivably Jewish, heresy.
The second major event of this era was political. The spiritual
imperialism of Byzantium, implemented in the Arabian peninsula by
its vassal Ethiopia, exerted a control so complete and so alien
that, unsurprisingly, many Arab Christians welcomed Islam as a new
indigenous power. They saw in it the promise of a political
liberation: and they saw in the Muslim army a force capable of
restoring the freedom which had been lost for many years.
These events conspired in the sixth century, to cause those Arabs
who clung to their Christian faith to do so at the cost of their
Arab identity. And events of succeeding centuries did little to
mitigate the growing perception of Christianity as an un-Arab
religion. From the Crusades to the 19th and 20th century
missionaries, western Christians have tended to view their Arab
co-religionists as distant and somewhat backward cousins rather than
full-fledged brothers and sisters in Christ. Moreover, they were
almost invariably accompanied by mercantile interpreneurs, military
troops, and would-be political rulers. These forces sought not only
to bring the kingdom of God into “heathen territory” but also to
promote the interests of western economies and European princes and
parliaments-- inevitable at the expense of local business and Arab
autonomy.
Muslim power structures, on the other hand, were indigenous to the
region, rooted in its customs and mores, and generally more tolerant
of religious pluralism than their European counterparts. Until the
time of the Ottoman Turks, their ascendancy usually heralded periods
of greater peace and tolerance than what ensued under Christian
rule.
It should not surprise us, then, that the father of St. John of
Damascus was the man to open the gates of his city to the incoming
army of the Muslim Khalid Ibn al-Walid, or that the Jews of Spain
welcomed the Muslim invaders as liberators. (In fact for a short
period, the Spanish Jews wrote Hebrew in Arabic script, as evidenced
by the Geniza manuscripts). Such events were symptomatic of a sort
of religious/cultural schizophrenia already pervasive among Arab
Christians and which events of later periods would do little to
alleviate.
March 18, 1999
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The historical
alienation of Arab Christians may have been made inevitable by
certain philosophical underpinnings. Even in its earliest years, the
development of the Christian faith was almost exclusively influenced
by western philosophy. For all their eastern origins-- Nazareth,
Bethlehem, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Carthage in Tunis-- were, after
all, the cradles; the shift of power to Rome and Constantinople in
Christianity’s formative years lead to the notion that the faith was
a western invention.
Moreover, by the time
of Mohammed, the true message of the gospel lay buried under a heap
of senseless superstition. Many believers were more enthusiastic
about fighting over doctrinal controversies than spreading the Word
of God. In seventh century Arabia, distortion of the faith took such
forms as worship of the wood of the cross and images of holy men as
well as extreme forms of Mariolatry. One sect, the Collydrian,
allowed the Virgin to share the Godhead. Many Manichaean ideas
invaded Christian thinking, including the notion that Simon of
Cyrene had been crucified rather than Christ. External rites and
bodily exercises were emphasized at the expense of the inner
spiritual life.
Furthermore, the
whole structure of church and empire was founded on a foreign
hierarchy and an alien Greek philosophy. Christianity, as Mohammed
encountered it, was born error-filled and without indigenous
identity. It was no longer the religion of the people with God
personified as one of their own, it had become the imposed faith of
conquerors whose adherents were, all too often, rightly perceived as
conspirators in the subjugation of their own people.
This perception was
scarcely lessened in later centuries by the crusaders. They came
into Arabia more zealous than any Muslim force to slaughter the
infidels, to destroy homes as well as mosques, and to assume
temporal as well as spiritual power. The chivalry of that most
unlikely of conquerors, Salah El-Din, is not yet forgotten in the
Holy Land, nor is the treachery and brutality of the Frankish
Christians who opposed him.
Even in the past two
centuries, Arab Christians in the Holy Land have rarely been
encouraged to affirm the rules of their faith in native soil. Until
very recently, most church institutions resembled small colonies
administered and controlled by Europeans, with only the most menial
roles assigned to an underclass of Palestinian Christians.
European languages
were taught in schools and used in homes and churches-- which, while
adding to the “sophistication” of the students, further fragmented
the indigenous Christian community. The various colonizing and
missionary groups sought to impose their own imported customs and
traditions on the local Christian population without regard to their
suitability to Middle-Eastern life.
Much of the cultural
legacy of the French, Dutch, British, Italians, and Americans has
its comical side-- like convincing Arab Anglicans to observe high
tea at four Greenwich Mean Time! But, it has harmed Palestinian
Christians, already adherents to a faith considered alien and
aberrant by their neighbors, leaving them without control of their
own church or power to implement the tenets of their faith.
A very relling
example of cultural imperialism is the Greek Orthodox Church. Though
its present community in the Holy Land/Palestine is over 99 per cent
Arab in origin, it continues to be known as “Greek”. Its patriarchs,
archbishops and bishops are all natives of Greece, and only recently
has any of its liturgy been read or chanted in Arabic. The same
pattern was generally true of the indigenous Roman Catholic and
Anglican churches, where only recently some Arab bishops and
patriarchs have been named.
It is no wonder,
therefore, that many Arab countries continue to view the Arab
Christian community as foreign to the land and collaborators with
western dominated governmental and economic forces. Even the Arab
Christians themselves, who have endured such domination for
centuries, sometimes wonder if their neighbors may not be correct.
For young Palestinian
Christians, the struggle for self-determination and justice is
exasperated by the tendency of some Christian Arabs, along with many
Jews and Muslims, to view Christians as not at all. Many young
Lebanese Christians, to be “true” to their faith, deny their very
nationality, styling themselves Phoenicians rather than Lebanese.
Although the
Christian Arabs are one of the oldest communities of believers,
present- day Arab Christians are experiencing a new Diaspora. Not
only is the psyche of every Palestinian Christian in Israel at
peril; the very survival of the community is in gravest jeopardy.
Some 27,000 Arab Christians inhabited Jerusalem in 1967; less than
7,000 have remained today. In Nazareth the largest Arab City in
Israel with a population of almost 70,000 Christians, formerly
constituted a significant majority. Today, the figure is closer to
34 per cent (of a total population of 90,000)-- and still falling.
Thoughts about the
future fill the Arab Christians with foreboding. Many in the
Christian community in Israel today, especially the young, are
voicing their fears of extinction. “So many people here are hoping
we will simply disappear” they say. “All that would be left of our
faith are the holy shrines”.
In the same way, with
the same zeal, chairman Arafat, when visited by five bishops whom I
accompanied in October 1993, warned us that unless and until the
church acts for the welfare of her people in the land of Christ,
that same land would become a mere museum of holy stones.
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The causes of the new
Diaspora are multiple. For example, one may mention the manifold
problems that Palestinian Christians in Israel share with their
Muslim brothers and sisters: government policies in Israel,
economically, politically and educationally show a clear case of
discrimination, violating basic human rights of its indigenous Arab
citizens.
As a result of the
rise of fundamentalism and fanaticism-- Jewish, Christian, and
Muslim-- the Christian indigenous community face a psychological
trauma. Not only does living become difficult and pressured by this
complex situation, but also life becomes more frustrating with the
indifference and ignorance of the Christian brother or sister, the
pilgrim, to the living stones. At a time when the indigenous
Christian believes this pilgrim to be the bridge between the
conflicting parties, s/he finds that hope in this brother or sister
has hopped the twig, and left. This reason seems to have caused many
to be disappointed to the point of frustration-- the way one could
imagine the man left dead on the side-walk between Jerusalem and
Jericho, having been ignored, bypassed, and neglected to the point
of death.
Christians have
always struggled to comprehend the mystery of the Trinity-- three
persons in one God. Palestinian Christians in Israel face a similar
struggle of integrating the four persons within themselves: Arab,
Palestinian, Christian, Israeli citizen. This struggle for identity
is made all the more difficult when many of their western brothers
and sisters join with Zionist propagandists in distorting biblical
teachings. The result of such distortions are political policies
which drive Arab Christians, their children, and their children’s
from the land of their birth-- and the land of Jesus’ birth.
This centuries-long
effort by the west, reinforced by policies of the state of Israel,
is reminiscent of efforts to create a black European community in
India and Africa. As the Lebanese example illustrates above, the
efforts have met with some success, convincing many Christians, not
only in the Holy Land, but throughout the region, that their roots
are not in the soil of their countries but in Europe, the Americas
and Australia. They have come to believe that Christian belief is
indivisible from western social structures-- forgetting the earthly
roots of Jesus. The long years of oppression have done their work.
Modern Arab
Christians particularly if they are also Palestinian and Israeli,
not only look west-ward but go west-ward-- often to stay. Encouraged
by western political powers, the exodus has reached such proportions
that in Sweden some 40,000 Syriac and Iraqi Christians are now
living in special villages. In every major city in the US,
Australia, Canada, and Western Europe, there are now Arab quarters
of significant population, most of them growing ever larger and
nearly all of them predominantly Christian.
These migrations have
a profound impact on global geopolitics. They tend to foster
single-religion states throughout the Middle East: Judaic in Israel,
Muslim in the remaining countries. They also place at grave risk the
very survival of Christianity over an area extending from the
Bosporus to the Indian subcontinent and from the Suez to the African
Atlantic shore.
Many believe that, if
current policies within Israel and among the western democracies
persist, the extinction of Arab Christians in the region will not
only be possible but probable. It seems increasingly credible that,
by the turn of the century, the Holy Land will have become only a
place of pilgrimage, holy shrines without an indigenous Christian
community. The new Diaspora may threaten not only Christians but
their Muslim brothers and sisters as well.
Therefore,
Palestinian Christians face a particular dilemma. The animosity of
Jews toward Christians is readily understood. Yet, that same
animosity directed against Arabs, and particularly Palestinian
The psychological
problem is enormous for Palestinian Christians. Younger Palestinians
are generally more conscious of their Arab and Palestinian identity.
They analyze their situation and their options, care for historical
heritage and the current fragility of democratic institutions in
Israel-- a concern now being voiced openly throughout the country
and shared by many of the Jewish Compatriots.
The choices opened to
Palestinian Christians are few. By accepting the status quo, they do
themselves and their children to second, or even third-class
citizenship. They would be accepting economic deprivation,
substandard education, inadequate housing and social services,
cultural rejection, and in the best of circumstances, they would be
facing overt repression and violation of the most basic of their
human rights.
Yet, any peaceful
change in their situation requires the moral commitment of the west.
Palestinians know the effectiveness of such a commitment-- they
witnessed its value for the Zionist cause. That same commitment,
often sought by Palestinians, has been withheld.
Still, Palestinian
Christians seek that moral partnership, crying out to the western
democracies, and especially to their brothers and sisters in Christ.
“Know that we exist”, they say. “Make your selves aware of our
situation. Join your cry with ours for justice in our native land.
Tell all around you that we must have justice if there is to be
peace in the land of our Lord”.
That cry has come for
nearly 50 years from a people wracked by psychological trauma and
deep historical alienation. The cry of the Palestinians-- and all
Arab Christians-- is induced not by madness but by the fact that
they are entirely sane. Their cry continues because they know the
results when it is not heard.
The alternative is
evermore violence in a land where violence is already a fact of
every day life. The violence of the oppressor is answered by
violence from the oppressed until the violence of the past will be
understood as only a prologue to a saga of bloody struggle. That
violence is a part of a story of holocaust and Diaspora for a people
who lived, since before the days of Joshua, on the land made sacred
by the footprints of the Prince of Peace.
To conclude, one may
mention that international concern for the conditions of Christians
in the land of the Holy One has reflected the dire circumstances of
that community. Pope Paul VI, decried in 1974 the fact of the
diminishing number of Christians in the Holy Land. He predicted that
if their presence in the Holy Land were to cease, “the shrines would
be without the warmth of living witness of the holy places of
Jerusalem and the Holy Land would become like a museum. The
archbishop of Canterbury, George Carry, expressed, too, his fear
that, “in 15 years time Jerusalem and Bethlehem, once centers of
strong Christian Presence might become a kind of Walt Disney, theme
park. We must not allow that to happen”, he insisted.
A Palestinian Christian Israeli, Riah Abu El-Assal is a refugee,
politician, deacon, priest, archdeacon, canon, ecumenist, and
inter-faith activist. He is presently Bishop Coadjutor of the
Diocese of Jerusalem and the Middle East. In 1994, he was invited by
Norway and PNA Chairman Yasser Arafat to attend the Nobel Peace
Prize ceremony in Oslo. Bishop El-Assal was honored last year with
the Jerusalem Decoration, the highest in Palestine. He is author of
Bridges for Peace, launched in September 1998. |
