ARAB CHRISTIANS: AN ENDANGERED SPECIES
The Claggett Lecture
April 10, 2002

By The Right Reverend Riah Abu El-Assal, Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem

In the second chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, we read of the presence of Arabs at the first Pentecost. Two millennia later, Arab Christians, largely unnoticed and in serious danger of extinction, still inhabit the land where the Christian Church and the Christian faith was born.

Although they are members of 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 twenty seven thousand Arab Christians inhabited Jerusalem in 1967; less than seven thousand remain. In Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel, with a population of over seventy thousand, Christians formerly constituted a significant majority. Today, the figure is closer to thirty four percent - and falling.

Arab Christians find these trends 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 are saying. "All that would be left of our faith would be the holy shrines."

The causes of the new Diaspora are multiple. These include the manifold problems that Palestinian Christians in Israel share with their Muslim brothers and sisters: Policies of economic, political, and educational discrimination from a government, which systematically violates the basic human rights of its Arab citizens.

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 children from the land of their birth - and the land of Jesus' birth.

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 two thousand 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 hundred years when the faith was closely aligned with European imperial power.

The history is complex, mingled alienation and hope. Not only were Arabs among the three thousand converts on 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, their impact has been felt throughout the world.

The first event was theological. In an era when a multitude of heresies flourished throughout Christendom, one particular theology spreading through 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, 0 Jesus, Son of Mary, hast thou said unto mankind, take me and my mother as two Gods, besides God?" 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 Christendom 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 Moslem army a force capable of restoring the freedom, which had been lost for so many years.

These events conspired in the sixth century, to cause those Arabs who clung to their Christian faith to do so at a cost to 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 nineteenth and twentieth century, missionaries, Western Christians have tended to view their Arab coreligionists as distant and somewhat backward cousins, rather than full-fledged brothers and sisters in Christ. Moreover, they were almost invariably accompanied by mercantile entrepreneurs, military troops, and would-be political rulers. These forces all 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 structure, on the other hand, was indigenous to the region, rooted in its customs and mores, and generally more tolerant of religious pluralism than their European counter-parts. 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 Khaled 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.

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 its 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 led 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 Manichean 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 Al-Din, is not yet forgotten in the Holy Land, nor is the treachery and brutality of the Frankish Christian who opposed him.

Even in the past two centuries, Arab Christians in the Holy Land have rarely been encouraged to affirm the roots 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 the 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 comic side - like convincing Arab Anglicans to observe high tea at four Greenwich 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 telling example of cultural imperialism is the Greek Orthodox Church. Though its present population in the Mid-East is over 99% 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 is generally true of the indigenous Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, where only recently have some Arab bishops and patriarchs been named.

It is no wonder 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 small wonder that Arab Christians, 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 exacerbated by the tendency of some Christian Arabs, along with many Jews and Muslims, to view Christians as not Arab at all. Many young Lebanese Christians, to be 'true' to their faith, deny their very nationality, styling themselves Phoenicians rather than Lebanese.

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, the efforts have met with some success, convincing many Christians, not only in the Holy Land, but also throughout the region, that their roots are not in the soil of their countries but in Europe and America. 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.

Modem Arab Christians particularly if they are also Palestinian and Israeli, not only look west but also go west - often to stay. Encouraged by Western political powers, the exodus has reached such proportions that in Sweden some forty thousand Syrian Christians, Iraqis, etc. are now living in special villages, in every major city in the U.S., 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 grace 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 is not only 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 Moslem brothers and sisters as well.

Such is the stated goal of the growing political movement of the right, especially followers of Kach and Moledet in Israel calling for transfer of Arabs. Public opinion polls confirm an increasing support, particularly among young Israeli Jews. The expulsion of Arabs from their homeland may be justified and may be implemented at a time when the international community is either busy with some crisis away from the Middle East, or as a result of ignorance of the facts on the ground and the indifference that comes as a result of such ignorance.

The counter measure, proposed by more moderate Zionist forces, is to call for the ineligibility of such strategy. Yet, the same measure, as a gesture of 'reconciliation' to the radical right, would also prohibit movements such as the Progressive List For Peace, which is both progressive and could be effective in the process for peace and co-existence.

Such proposals reinforce the perception of the Palestinians that, in addition to being forced to live under a near-apartheid-style régime, their plight will evoke no outcry in the West similar to that against South Africa.

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 Arabs, who originally welcomed the new Jewish settlers to their country, is less easily comprehended.

The psychological problem is enormous for Palestinian Christians. Younger Palestinians are generally more conscious of their Arab and Palestinian identity. And they analyze their situation and their options, worry of their 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 open to Palestinian Christians are few. By accepting the status quo, they doom 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, the muzzling of effective political participation. The worst 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 yourselves 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 forty 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 ever more violence in a land where violence is already a fact of everyday life. The violence of the oppressor is answered by violence from the oppressed until the violence of the past will be understood as only 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 land made sacred by the footprints of the Prince of Peace.