Islam Destroying Eastern Christianity

This news report is not at all news to those who follow these things, which, alas, is not many of us. It discusses the release of a new study on the decline of Eastern Christianity under the Islamism increasingly rampant across the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere.

The full report may be read here in a PDF, and I commend it to your interest.

One of the people quoted in the article is Anthony O'Mahony of Heythrop College in London, which regularly hosts conferences on Eastern Christianity and on its relations with Islam. O'Mahony, as I've noted before, is the author or editor of numerous important books on these matters, including two with Emma Loosley:  

Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East and  

Christian Responses to Islam: Muslim-Christian Relations in the Modern World. 

In addition, he has edited, with John Flannery, of The Catholic Church in the Contemporary Middle East: Studies for the Synod for the Middle East.


The author of the report, Rupert Shortt, has recently published a book entitled Christianophobia: A Faith Under Attack (Rider, 2012).

About this book the publisher tells us:

On October 29, 2005, three Indonesian schoolgirls were beheaded as they walked to school – targeted because they were Christians. Like them, many other church members around the world face violence or discrimination for their faith. Why is this religious persecution so widely ignored?

In Christianophobia, Rupert Shortt investigates the shocking treatment of Christians on several continents, revealing that they are oppressed in significantly greater numbers than members of any other faith. The extent of official collusion is also exposed. Even governments that have promised to protect religious minorities routinely break their pledges, with life-shattering consequences.

Young Christians don’t easily become radicalized but tend to resist non-violently or keep a low profile. This has enabled politicians and the media to play down a problem of huge dimensions.

Shortt demonstrates how freedom of belief is the canary in the mine for liberty in general. Published at a time when the fundamental importance of faith on the world stage is at last being recognized, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in people's right to religious freedom, no matter where, or among whom, they live.

Eastern Christianity and the Encounter with Islam

As I've noted before, Anthony O'Mahony is a prolific fellow, frequently teaming up with Emma Loosley as fellow editor. One of their most recent and outstanding volumes is

Anthony O’Mahony and Emma Loosley, eds., Christian Responses to Islam: Muslim-Christian Relations in the Modern World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), x+246pp.

This is an excellent and highly welcome book that belongs in every course and on every bibliography about contemporary Christian-Muslim relations. General (especially undergraduate) readers will benefit from a text that is both scholarly and eminently accessible—not an easy balance to strike in this area. The authors are balanced, moreover, in their tone, avoiding polemics, but certainly (and thankfully) not shying away from noting again and again how often Christians have suffered, and continue to suffer, at the hands of Muslims. Almost no politician or academic today has the courage to acknowledge this.

Almost all the contributors are British academics, but this book’s focus is truly global: there are only two articles on contemporary Britain, and a third on Western Europe. The others deal with Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, South Africa, West Africa, and the Sudan. One article, Andrew Unsworth’s “The Vatican, Islam, and Muslim-Christian Relations,” is a very interesting (if too brief) treatment that seems to have been written before Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address, which it does not treat.

Eastern Christians will be especially interested in the four articles focusing on Russia, Egypt, Syria, and Iran. Basil Cousins’ “The Orthodox Church, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in Russia” is a decent general overview that gives brief historical detail before focusing on events in the last two decades. It is, however, very thinly sourced, and one is a little disconcerted to see an over-reliance upon a handful of dubious websites including Wikipedia! Cousins inexplicably overlooks a burgeoning scholarly literature in two key areas: the Russian Church in the post-Soviet period and several recent books by major publishers on Islam in Russia.

Fiona McCallum’s “Muslim-Christian Relations in Egypt: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century,” is excellent but limited in scope. Her focus is on events since 1970, which saw Sadat take power politically, followed very shortly (1971) by Patriarch Shenouda III assuming the Coptic papacy. These two would clash repeatedly, leading the former to exile the latter to a desert monastery over his opposition to the proposed introduction of shari’ah law and his frequent demands that the government do something about Muslim violence and Muslim interference with the construction or repair of Coptic churches.

After Sadat’s assassination, relations between the patriarch and the new president, Hosni Mubarak, improved somewhat. Mubarak has attempted a balancing act by offering, on the one hand, “a gradual process of Islamisation” (71) in the hopes this would placate the hyper-hostile Muslim Brotherhood and, on the other, by offering some benefits to the Copts (e.g., declaring Christmas a national holiday for all Egyptians). Further complicating matters are efforts from well-meaning Copts, especially in North America, to draw attention to ongoing Muslim violence in Egypt. The patriarch, whose delicate internal balancing act is apparently upset by such external critics, has said in public that these expatriates unhelpfully distort the true nature of the problems in Egypt. McCallum does not say if this is a genuinely held position of the pope, or if he has been forced—by events, the government, or other forces—to take such a position much as Orthodox hierarchs in Eastern Europe did during the Cold War when, pressured by the KGB, they used to attend ecumenical events in the West to argue with a straight face that there was religious freedom in the USSR.

The eleventh chapter, by Loosley, treats “Christianity and Islam in Syria: Island of Religious Tolerance?” She begins by rightly recognizing that “Syria remains remarkably mysterious” (162) to many in the West, and Christianity in Syria especially so. Since her article was published, however, we have other recent treatments that attempt something of a demystification: two articles in Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East (Routledge, 2010); and four articles in Christianity in the Middle East (Melisende, 2008); the latter volume will be noted on here in due course and reviewed in Logos next year. Additionally, we have the frequently delayed book by Norirko Sato on Syrian Christianity that, if it ever appears, may shed light here.

In the present article, Loosley notes that Muslim-Christians relations in Syria enjoy a level of tolerance perhaps higher than anywhere else in the Middle East. Nonetheless, the Christians (figures for which range from 8-15% of the total population) continue to decline because the bad economy causes them to have fewer children, and many of those children end up leaving for better opportunities elsewhere.

The final article of note is O’Mahony’s “Christianity, Shi’a Islam, and Muslim-Christian Encounters in Iran.” He focuses on three communities in particular: the Assyrians, the Chaldean Catholics, and the Armenians, each of whom continues to maintain significant numbers in Iran under highly restricted circumstances. (A tiny handful of Arab and Russian Orthodox parishes also eke out an existence.) He also notes that both Anglicans and Roman Catholics had a well-established presence in Iran but after the 1979 revolution both lost everything and some of their faithful were martyred.

In sum, this volume gives a good overview of some of the relations between Eastern Christians and Muslims, and once more we are in Loosley and O'Mahony's debt for pulling together an important and useful collection such as this. 

Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East

As I have noted before, we have seen a slew of recent books on Eastern Christianity in the Middle East, including:

Anthony O’Mahony and Emma Loosley, eds., Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East (London: Routledge, 2010), xiii+184pp.

  

Emma Loosley says that this book seeks to offer “both specialists and general readers some degree of understanding into the daily realities of…Oriental Christians…from the Eastern Mediterranean to the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan” (1). Her introductory chapter very briefly attempts an overview of Eastern Christianity in all its forms.

We have two chapters on the Syrian/Syriac churches, both Catholic and Orthodox, both in the Middle East and in India (including the Malankara Orthodox, whose synod we see assembled above in what is indisputably the most fantastic collection of cassocks ever amassed in one room). The well-known Oxford scholar Sebastian Brock has a chapter “The Syrian Orthodox Church in the Modern Middle East.” Brock spends most of his time on the modern period—from the seventeenth century onwards. He details struggles, historical and current, of Syriac Christians, but ends on a hopeful note, observing that monasticism is on the rise in this Church, and communities in the West are flourishing.

Fionna McCallum’s article, “The Maronites in Lebanon” is helpful, sympathetic portrait of one of the few Eastern Christian communities to avoid the fate of being dhimmis. The Maronites were able to do this largely because of their political skills, including their alliances with France, leading one priest I know to observe sardonically that the operative Maronite soteriology is “salvation comes from the French.”

John Healey’s article on the Church of the East is a very brief overview of the history and current reality faced by that Church. Other recent book-length studies will be more useful to the specialist than this chapter. Surprisingly, Healey’s discussion (and the book’s bibliography) of the approval for intercommunion between the Church of the East and Chaldean Catholics overlook Robert Taft’s significant and characteristically rigorous scholarly contributions to that agreement.

O’Mahony’s “The Coptic Orthodox Church in Modern Egypt” is an excellent overview that avoids the simplistic portrait one sometimes finds. Especially useful is O’Mahony’s amassing of statistical data on the size and demographic changes in the Coptic population over the last three centuries especially. Obtaining current data, however, is extremely difficult because census-taking is so fraught with political considerations, and the data subject to gross political manipulation. So nobody conducts a census. Instead we are left with guesses that Copts range from 6% to 20% of the total population.

John Whooley’s “The Armenian Church in the Contemporary Middle East” is the longest and most detailed, but he needs the length to explain the very complicated ecclesiological structure of the Armenian Church which, as I have discussed elsewhere at length, is entirely unique in the world. Whooley does a very good job at tracing out the historical and political reasons for these multiple structures, and their strengths and weaknesses. He is also very forthright in acknowledging that nationalism is perhaps more potent in the Armenian Church than in any other. That has helped preserve the faith in a history so often written in blood and drenched with tears, but it has also, at times, turned the church into a surrogate state rather than the sacrament of salvation.

O’Mahony ends the book with a fascinating study of the Syrian Catholic Church, though it leaves several unanswered questions. E.g., he says the vocation of this church is to “bring Christianity and Hinduism together, particularly in terms of spirituality” (133) but does not specify what this might mean in practice or how it might be accomplished. He also overlooks the question of whether both Hindus and Christians are open to such a rapprochement, which seems doubtful given a number of reports over the last decade of violence between the two, including an especially alarming attack just last week. He ends by expressing his hope that “the Syriac Christian Orient cannot be regarded as just a curiosity, or as an optional extra on the fringe of the Greek and Latin West” (137) but will come to be taken more seriously as the “third lung” (as others have expressed it) of apostolic Christianity. Judging by the number of recent publications on Syriac Christianity, we have cause to hope that it is now finally getting its long overdue recognition.

In sum, this is an excellent collection, and Loosley and O'Mahony are to be congratulated for gathering together so many fine contributors and producing such a smoothly edited, lucid, and useful collection that very much deserves a place in courses on Eastern Christianity and Middle Eastern history and culture.

The Basilians of Grottaferrata in Albania

The Basilians are sometimes thought to be the "bad boys" of Eastern Christianity, especially among Ukrainians, because they are and have been heavily Latinized in many ways for many centuries, betraying, inter alia, authentically Eastern monasticism and introducing into both Eastern Catholic and some Orthodox churches practices that are not aboriginal to them. (I remember very clearly reading the extremely hostile descriptions of them when I visited Pochaev in 2001, where they once ruled for a time.) It's true that they were reformed by the Jesuits along the lines of a Western order like the Jesuits. Now a new book by Ines Angeli Murzaku of Seton Hall University proposes a fresh look at them:

Ines Angeli Murzaku, Returning Home to Rome: The Basilian Monks of Grottaferatta in Albania (Athens: Analekta Kryptoferris, 2009), xxi + 309 (38 photos).

Drawing on extensive research in Vatican dicasteries, Jesuit archives in Italy, the state archives of Albania in Tiranë, the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, the University of Calabria, and other private archives in Calabria, the author sheds light on Catholic-Orthodox relations in southern Italy and Albania as well as Christian-Muslim relations. I asked Anthony O'Mahony, of Heythrop College, University of London, who has published in this area, to review this book for us in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2011.

Christianity and Jerusalem

Anthony O'Mahony of Heythrop College in the University of London is a most prolific fellow whose scholarship largely focuses on relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. He's recently edited (and written introductions and articles for) three substantial collections, all published in the last 18 months, all dealing with Christianity in the Middle East. The first to be noted here is:

A. O'Mahony, ed., Christianity and Jerusalem: Studies in Modern Theology and Politics in the Holy Land (2010), 326pp. 

This is a very ecumenical collection whose contributors offer a wide-ranging overview of many aspects of Christian life in Jerusalem, historically and currently. As Stephen Need, dean of St. George's College in Jerusalem, notes in an article in the current issue of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies,  the future for Christians does not look good given recent trends of many Christians leaving or having very small families. Need will review this book for Logos in the fall of 2011. The book addresses itself to a variety of issues:

• Christianity in modern Jerusalem
• Jewish-Israeli views on Christianity and Christians
• Hebrew Catholicism in modern Israel
• the Vatican, Israel, Palestinian Christians and Jerusalem
• the Intifada and Palestinian Christian identity
• Palestinian Christians and liberation theology
• the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem - Church-State politics in the Holy Land
• indigenisation and contextualisation: the Anglican and Presbyterian Churches 
• Jewish fundamentalism
• Jewish-Muslim encounters
• Jerusalem, the Holy City: a possible way to share Jerusalem in peace
• Contributors include: Anthony O'Mahony, David Mark Neuhaus SJ, Leon Menzies Racionzer, Drew Christiansen SJ, Leonard Marsh, Sotiris Roussos, Michael Marten, Nur Masalha, Rob Johnson, et al