The Vanishing review – faith, loss and the twilight of Christianity in the Middle East
Speaking in 2014, a decade after the US-led invasion of Iraq, Prince Charles remarked:
“It is an indescribable tragedy that Christianity is now under such threat in the Middle East, an area where Christians have lived for 2,000 years and across which Islam spread in 700 AD, with people of different faiths living together peaceably for centuries.”
The threat to Christianity in its original heartlands in the Middle East did not begin with the war to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein or the dreadful destruction which followed. But what is sadly apparent is that ancient Christian communities became part of the “collateral damage” which that conflict helped generate. A previously gradual decline in Christian numbers in the region was transformed into an ongoing rush for the exit.
Janine di Giovanni is a distinguished Italian-American journalist who made her name covering conflicts and social disruption in the Balkans and the Middle East. The Vanishing is very much the work of a reporter; a listener to members of threatened communities and an observer of a seemingly inexorable tragedy. In the space of little more than 200 pages, the reader encounters many of the rich varieties of Christians in the Middle East from Copts in Egypt to Catholic Chaldeans in Iraq and to the Orthodox and Armenians in Syria.
In Mosul and elsewhere, there are Christians who still pray in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. In Gaza, a tiny remnant of believers lives on a strip of land on which the Apostles once walked and preached to the earliest Christians in the 1st century AD. Even in Egypt – which until the 14th century was majority Christian – the faithful are under pressure and often fearful. Monastic communities of ancient lineage across the region are determined to hold on despite the odds against them. Asked what he most feared losing as a consequence of the terrible destruction of recent decades, a priest said simply and starkly: “History”.
One of the strengths of The Vanishing is the way in which recent events in Iraq and Syria and in Gaza and Egypt are related to patterns formed in the past. In the Middle East, the past is not “another country” and Di Giovanni vividly draws out the deeper trends with origins across the centuries. Through her analysis of the Christian predicament is considered country-by-country, wider religious and political connections constantly hover overhead.
The common ancestry and monotheism of the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, has often been a source of curdling animosities and violence. However sometimes, and more happily, it has fostered a kind of tolerance, not least in the Middle East under the Ottomans. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War had profound and long-lasting effects in the region, effects which resonate still. As Di Giovanni relates the provinces of the former empire were corralled (under a League of Nations Mandate) by Britain and France into new “nations” which were almost as artificial as they were unstable. Unsettled Christian communities in Palestine, Syria and Iraq sought protection where they could find it, initially with the European powers. And whilst they suffered more discrimination than persecution, even the large Coptic community in Egypt was not unaffected.
In the 1950s, Arab nationalism sprang up first in the Egypt of Colonel Nasser and thereafter in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the al-Assads’ Syria. Both these Ba’athist rulers ruthlessly centralised state structures under their direct control. The fact that they both came from minority Muslim groupings meant they sought support from other minorities, including Christians. The latter, in turn, came to rely on them for protection in return for regime loyalty. In the years after 2003, such loyalty and perceived privilege often had fatal consequences for increasingly beleaguered Christian communities.
Energised by widely held resentments among Arabs at the still unsettled status of Palestine and influenced by increasingly brittle relations between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in the wider region, radical and increasingly intolerant and violent Islamic groupings came to the fore at the end of the last century. Ignoring centuries of Ottoman coexistence with other Abrahamic religions, these new groupings – notably Al Qaida and the (Sunni) Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – sought the establishment of an exclusive caliphate and the universal application of Sharia law.
Other longer-established groups, notably Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, also sought exclusivist political outcomes. Outside the immediate area – but not much touched upon by Di Giovanni – two other wider-regional players, namely Iran and Saudi Arabia, lent support to certain radical client groups.
The Christian communities had increasing grounds for concern as radical Islam gathered – or enforced – support. Even the Copts in Egypt became targets for Islamic militancy. What dramatically increased the risk to Christians from 2003 was external military intervention by the US and its allies in Iraq and what followed thereafter, especially once coalition forces had departed. The regional situation was already combustible but then it really caught fire. Christians found themselves caught not only in intra-Islamic crossfire but became targets of anti-Christian attacks both directly and by association with collapsing authoritarian and secularist regimes.
The Vanishing alerts the reader to most of these wider developments, but what it does most effectively is to use meetings with local Christians to show how their communities were being damaged (in Egypt) or torn apart (in Iraq and Syria). As ISIS expanded its reach, whole communities were ravaged, perhaps most comprehensively in Mosul (in Iraq) where churches, libraries, monuments and other traces of the ancient Christian community were laid waste. It is estimated (all figures are estimates) 100,000 people were displaced from Mosul as a result of three years of ISIS rule. In Raqqa, the ISIS “capital”, brutal beheadings, including of Western journalists, were harrowing examples of a descent into primitive brutalism. In the ancient city of Aleppo (in Syria) a pre-war population of 160,000 (at least 10 per cent of whom were Christian) was reduced to some 5,000.
Di Giovanni draws attention to further regional dimensions, affecting Christian and Muslims alike, by reference to Gaza and briefly to Lebanon. In Gaza, the economic challenges facing an increasingly isolated population are generating very high levels of unemployment among all communities (though it is 70 per cent among Christians) and high levels of emigration. Christians constituted 7 per cent of the population in 1946 but are now only 1-2 per cent with only around 900 still living there. In Lebanon, which has suffered so much from conflict, the delicate balance between Christians and other communities is being disrupted as large numbers of refugees, Muslim as well as Christian, have sought escape from Syria since 2015.
The core question raised by The Vanishing is whether the ancient Christian communities in the Middle East – with the Copts in Egypt, for now, the exception – have reached a tipping point. It is true that the numbers of Christians in the Middle East have been in slow decline over a very long period, but after 2003 their numbers appear to have taken a nosedive. The Pope’s visit to Iraq earlier this year and religious leaders’ commitment to work together for renewed co-existence and respect give some grounds for hope.
“In many ways, this is a book about dying communities,” writes Di Giovanni, “but it is also about faith. I wrote it so that the people I documented would never disappear … But I also wrote it as a way of acknowledging that their faith, in many ways, is more powerful than any of the armies I have seen trying to destroy them.”