Posted on 11/19/2015 8:27:29 AM PST by Trumpinator
‘No happy endings’ between Eastern Christians and Islam, professor says
By Corine Erlandson
FORT WAYNE — When it comes to Christians in the Middle East, there are “no happy endings.†This was the blunt assessment of Dr. Adam DeVille in a Nov. 11 talk on “Eastern Christians and Islam†at Brookside Mansion at the University of Saint Francis. This talk was part of a series open to the public offered by the Department of Philosophy and Theology. There were close to 50 people in attendance.
DeVille started his talk by telling his audience about the status of Eastern Christians in countries such as Iraq, Egypt and Syria today. “We have to appreciate the messiness of these issues. It’s not going to be neat and tidy. There are no happy endings with this topic, unfortunately,†DeVille said.
DeVille began by giving some historical background. The Emperor Constantine issued an edict making Christianity legal in the year 313. Constantine moved his imperial residence from Rome to the “New Rome†of Constantinople. From there emerged the division of the Byzantine-Orthodox Christians headquartered in Constantinople, and the Roman-Latin Christians, headquartered in Rome.
DeVille says that the Orthodox Church of the East and the Roman Catholic Church of the West agree on many theological issues such as the Trinity, the Eucharist and Mary the Mother of God. “The two churches are very close on many issues. The one thing that divides them is the question of the papacy, who gets to be the boss,†DeVille said.
DeVille said that Eastern Christians have dealt with Muslims from around the seventh century on. After Muhammad founded Islam in the early 600s in Arabia, Islam rapidly spread into Syria, Egypt, Armenia, Libya and Spain.
Followers of Muhammad established Islam in these territories, and the Islam faith was in the ascendancy, while the Eastern Christians and Jews were in the minority. The Islamists in power gave the Christians and Jews in these territories three options: Convert to Islam, fight to the death, or accept “dhimmi†status.
The Arab-Muslim overlords imposed “dhimmi†laws and restrictions that the Christians and Jews had to abide by, if they wanted to survive and practice their faiths. These restrictions included that the Christians and Jews lived in ghettos; church cupolas and Jewish synagogues could not be taller than Islamic mosques; Christian and Jewish celebrations had to be subdued with no public displays; Christians could not wear headdresses, to distinguish them from the Muslims wearing turbans; Christians and Jews had to step down from the sidewalk to the lower street or ditch in order to let Muslims pass by. The most hated part of the “dhimmi†status was paying a “jizya†poll tax to the Arab Muslim overlords.
While this sort of treatment strikes 21st century American Catholics as overtly unfair and trampling on religious freedom, DeVille said that it did allow Christians and Jews in these lands to survive and to continue practicing their faiths. The Christians and Jews were exempt from military service in the Islamic armies, as long as they continued to pay the “jizya†tax. The “dhimmi†laws and restrictions continued all the way to the 19th century. By 1918, most of the “dhimmi†laws had disappeared.
DeVille then moved to the present day to discuss the state of Eastern Christians. “The Christians in Iraq number half today what they numbered 12 years ago,†DeVille said. This was after the U.S. involvement in the two gulf wars. Iraqi Prime Minister Saddam Hussein was captured, tried and executed by the Iraqi Interim Government in 2006. The Shi’ite Party is in power today in Iraq.
DeVille turned to Egypt. In the wake of the Arab Spring, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was put on trial and imprisoned. After Mubarak was removed from office, the extremist Muslim Brotherhood came into power, which repressed the rights of women and Christians.
DeVille then considered Syria. “What a mess Syria is today,†DeVille said, with its civil war and the recent exodus of its people escaping to western Europe. DeVille considered these three rulers — Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. “These three rulers were, and are, all thugs. They all did violence against their own people. They were not the ones you wanted to invite home to meet your mother,†DeVille said. Yet these despots were able to maintain some control over the most extremist factions in their countries, and “they all protected the Christians in their regions,†DeVille said.
DeVille asked the hypothetical question: Should the West play a role in deposing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who is still in power? “Let’s look to Egypt and Iraq and see how those scenarios turned out. Who comes after Bashar al-Assad could be as bad, if not worse,†DeVille said. “When Western powers intervene in these regions, they often end up making things worse for the Christians there,†DeVille said.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently begun bombing raids in Syria against ISIS and rebel groups. Putin says he is ordering the bombings to protect Orthodox Christians in Syria, but DeVille believes that Putin senses an opportunity to assert Russian power in the region.
DeVille considered the sharp demographic decline of Christians in Iraq, Egypt and Syria. In the first centuries of Christianity, there were two cities that had vibrant and growing Christian populations — Antioch in or near Syria, and Alexandria in Egypt. DeVille delivered a striking and sobering thought: In these places where Christianity first took root and flourished in the early centuries, “we might see Christianity exterminated in these places in some of our lifetimes.â€
Posted on November 17, 2015, to:
Bad choice of term “happy endings”
Me thinks the book of Revelations explain it.
Kemal Ataturk was the great bringer of Turkish secularism. Like later Muslim dictators in the Middle East, he regarded imam-driven political Islam as competition to be crushed. Nasser, both Assads, Saddam, & Gaddafi followed his example.
But Ataturk sowed mass murder among Christians in Asia Minor. He was part of the operation to exterminate Christian Armenians in 1915, and the entire Greek Christian community in the new Turkey was either wiped out or forced to flee.
Google Armenian Massacre
Thought that was a Chinese thing.
Much of the remnant that survived, unconverted, under the Ottomans were killed or driven west to Greece before, during, and after WWI (1913-1923). It’s called the Greek or Pontic genocide. The genocide of Armenians in the north on the edge of the Caucasus is more famous. I’ve been to Turkey many times and have encountered a few remaining Jews but, unlike in the Arab countries bordering like Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, I never met a living Christian.
Ataturk did not really bring secularism to Turkey but a nationalized Turkish new Islam to go with a nationalized ethnicity. On the face of it it seems better but ironically it was also genocidal because it was based on an exclusive nationalist religious identity.
I think the Greek side of genocide is downplayed because the Greeks could escape and their plight is more like an ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Turks (last one happened in Cyprus in the 1970s - so it is ongoing) but the Armenians had no easy escape to their own country nor could the west come to their aid - especially with the rise of communism in Russia.
A just solution would be to grant all the persecuted Christians in the Moslem world sanctuary in Israel, trading them one for one with Moslems discontented to live in a Jewish state, who can then go and live under a Moslem government.
I don’t think Israel would want that to be honest.
The Jewish state will protect Christians who are natives (and Muslim citizens, also) but I don’t see them opening their small country to Christians who would then change the demographics of Israel even more.
Bad idea. Middle Eastern chrstians are more anti-Jewish than the moslems are. Plus diluting the Jewish character of Israel is not something they want, regardless of which group does it.
Fixed it.
You’re right. And it’s also that the Armenian community here in the USA have done a better job making even the typically-ignorant-of-any-history-American vaguely aware of what happened. The Greek genocide was overshadowed first by the war and then by all the other post war migrations and “adjustments” in borders. But at least on the Greek side, for older people there I’ve met, the hatred still burns very hot.
IIRC, Arab Christians hate the Jews just as much as Arab Muslims. Kind of a me too wannabe thing.
Of course, some say that the massacre of Jerusalem in 1099 A.D. when Crusaders captured the city was contracted to local Christians when it came to killing Jews. This was because the Muslim rulers of Jerusalem had required non-Muslims also to wear Islamic garb. Hard to sort out.
Arab Christians are probably native Jews who converted to Christianity at the beginning of the religion since they predate the arrival of Islam and would not have converted afterwards.
But anyway, many eastern Christians think American Protestants have them marked for death since American policies since the cold war ended have been a horror show for eastern Christians.
Go to youtube for Walter Cronkite’s Twentieth Century piece, “The Incredible Turk”.
Ataturk did romanize written Turkish, outlawed the fez, liberated women sort of, and closed Hagia Sophia as a mosque. He abolished the Caliphate but again that may have been a competition thing.
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