I’m not the sort of person who would ordinarily read a book about ecclesiastical history. In fact I’m quite happy to admit that I know very little about religion – except that I don’t like it. Nevertheless I found myself engrossed by William Dalrymple’s 1998 book “From the Holy Mountain”, an account of his travels around the ancient Christian sites of the Middle East.
Dalrymple sets out in the footsteps of another author, the sixth century monk John Moschos, who travelled through modern day Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Egypt recording the teachings of the holy men of Byzantium. Obviously something of a monastical anorak, Dalrymple displays an impressive grasp of early Christian architecture. As he travels through the Levant he visits the ruins of churches dating from Moschos’ day and sleeps in the same monasteries as the monk once did fourteen centuries before.
The real appeal of the book though is not Dalrymple’s encounters with ancient ruins but rather his observations of real living human beings, namely the remaining Christians of the Near East. Just as Moschos documented the world of hermit monks on the brink of collapse, so Dalrymple records the beginning of the end of Christianity in the Middle East. With his keen observation of human behaviour and his fine rendering of dialogue, Dalrymple illuminates this tragic story of loss.
Those he speaks to have varying narratives. However, be they unemployed Armenians in Jerusalem, bitter ex-Phalange in the Beka’a Valley or frightened Copts in Egypt, common threads are easily discernible. All Christian communities in the Middle East are in precipitous demographic decline, trapped in a pincer movement of low fertility and high emigration. All fear that an increasingly polarised Middle East could lead to their annihilation. None are optimistic for the future. Most speak of better days when their community was much larger and self-confident.
Each country Dalrymple visits has its own particular story of loss and suffering. In Diyarbakir in Turkey, the author meets Lucine the last Armenian in a town which once had thousands. She is old and mute but her Kurdish guardian Fesih speaks of the changes she has witnessed:
“There used to be thousands of them. I remember them streaming out every Sunday, led by the priest. But not now. She is the last.”
When Dalrymple visits Diyarbakir, workmen are busy converting the town’s cathedral into a mosque.
Further south in Lebanon, one finds it much harder to feel sympathy for the Christian population, architects, as they are, of their own decline. Their attempt to turn Lebanon into a Francophone outpost in the Middle East has ended in disastrous failure. The future for many young Maronites lies in Australia and the US, not Beiruit. One third of all Lebanese Christians no longer live in the country.
In Palestine the Christian population suffers from Israeli policies of under-development, pauperisation and territorial encroachment. In the Old City of Jerusalem Israeli settlers attempt to gain a foothold in the Christian quarter by hook or by crook. Economic discrimination forces many to emigrate as Bishop Hagop notes:
“I have seen my community wither like a diseased tree. The Armenian community used to contain millionaires. Now the young Armenians in my choir look up to their contemporaries who manage to get jobs as waiters in Israeli restaurants.”
Across the Sinai in Egypt the Middle East’s largest Christian population also forsees a bleak future. Churches have been attacked by radical Islamist groups. Egypt is becoming an increasingly Islamic society where Christians no longer feel welcome. The churches of Alexandria, once a cosmopolitan city of Italians, Greeks and Jews, now lie empty.
The only country with a confident Christian population is, surprisingly, Syria. Along with various Muslim sects, the Christian communities have conspired to rule Syria under the aegis of Assad’s Ba’athist party. What happens once this otherwise horrible regime collapses is unclear. Revenge of the downtrodden seems a good bet.
Throughout the book Dalrymple picks up a strong sense that Christians in the East feel betrayed by their co-religionists in the West. Muslims and Jews all over the world take an interest in the politics of the Middle East. Not so Christians who sit and watch as their holy sites go from living places of worship to museum pieces. This is what gives Dalrymple’s book its poignancy, a sense that the world he is charting is fast disappearing while the world outside shrugs its shoulders and turns away. Most of the Christians he interviews seem resigned to their fate. They are either too tired, too scared or, perhaps, too wise, to fight the inexorable march of history.