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As Iraq and Lebanon are torn apart by
sectarian mayhem and war, only Syria's religious tolerance offers
refugees shelter
Wander through the streets of Damascus this week, and you will see signs
everywhere of the conflict in Lebanon. The bearded, black-turbaned
Hassan Nasrallah stares out from every shop window, even in the
Christian quarter. Here electric-blue neon crosses wink from the domes
of the churches, and processions of crucifix-carrying boy scouts squeeze
past gaggles of Christian girls heading out on the town, all low-cut
jeans and tight-fitting T-shirts. The video shops are full of DVDs
showing "highlights" from the war - exploding Israeli tanks and jubilant
Hizbullah fighters - which sell even better than the ubiquitous pirated
versions of the latest Hollywood releases, The Devil Wears Prada and The
Da Vinci Code: evidence that in the contemporary Middle East you don't
have to hate western culture, or even be a Muslim, to relish the bloody
nose given to ill-judged Israeli and American attempts at imposing their
hegemony in the region by force of invasion and cluster bombs.
Evidence of the conflict in Iraq, Syria's neighbour to the north-east,
is at first harder to spot than the ubiquitous images from Lebanon, but
on closer examination it is no less pervasive. Lounging in every park
and teahouse are unshaven, tired-looking Iraqi refugees, driven from
their homes by sectarian mayhem. This summer, as Baghdad spiralled out
of control, with more violent deaths in one fortnight than in Israel and
Lebanon together in nearly a month of warfare, Syria responded by
providing asylum (though not work permits) to all Iraqis who were forced
to flee, as well as free education for their children.
Talk to the refugees in Damascus, however, and you soon find that one
group predominates: the Iraqi Christians. Although they made up only
about 3% of the population of prewar Iraq - 700,000 people - under
Saddam they were a prosperous minority, symbolised by the high profile
of Tariq Aziz, Saddam's Christian foreign minister. Highly educated and
overwhelmingly middle class, the Christians were heavily concentrated in
Mosul, Basra and especially Baghdad, which before the war had the
largest Christian population of any Middle Eastern town or city.
Now at least half of these Christians - around 350,000 people - have
fled Bush's new Iraq and its violence, mass abductions and economic
meltdown. Wherever I went in Syria I kept running into them - bank
managers and engineers, pharmacists and scientists, garage owners and
businessmen - all living with their extended families in one-room flats
on what remained of their savings, and assisted by the charity of the
different churches.
"Before the war there was no separation between Christian and Muslim," I
was told by Shamun Daawd, a former liquor-store owner who fled after he
received Islamist death threats. "Under Saddam no one asked you your
religion, and we used to attend each other's religious services and
weddings. After the invasion we hoped democracy would come; but instead
all that came was bombs, kidnapping and killing. Now at least 75% of my
Christian friends have fled. There is no future for us in Iraq."
His friend Sabah Mansur Nesco told a similar tale when I met him at the
Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate, where he had come to collect the rent
money it provides for its more impoverished laity. He had lived in a
wealthy mixed area of Baghdad, al-Doura, he said, until two of his
nephews were kidnapped: for the first they had to arrange a $30,000
ransom; for the second $10,000. The boys were returned, having been
tortured and beaten. Then some Christian neighbours were killed by
jihadis. Five Baghdad churches were bombed, and stories began to
circulate that Christian girls were getting raped at the university. The
family decided enough was enough, and drove to Damascus.
The Christian community in Iraq is one of the oldest in the world, and
has existed since the first century; according to tradition it was St
Thomas and his cousin Addai who first brought Christianity to the
Parthian capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon soon after the resurrection. At
the Council of Nicaea, where the words of the Christian creed were
thrashed out in 325 AD, there were more bishops from Mesopotamia and
India than there were from western Europe.
Later, the region became a refuge for groups considered heretical by the
Orthodox Byzantine emperors - such as the Mandeans, the world's last
surviving Gnostic sect, who follow what they believe to be the teachings
of John the Baptist; and the Church of the East, or Nestorians, who
played a key part in bringing Greek philosophy, science and medicine to
the Islamic world. It was from the Nestorian school of Nisibis, via
Córdoba, that many of Aristotle's and Plato's works reached the
universities of medieval Europe. Yet in three years most members of this
ancient church, and almost all the Mandeans, have been forced to flee
the anarchy their western coreligionists have helped unleash.
This is part of a much wider problem across the Middle East. Almost
everywhere the Christians are leaving, as ill-judged Anglo-American
adventures, intended to suppress terrorism, actually have the reverse
effect and steadily radicalise the entire region. Today in the Middle
East the Arab Christians are a small minority of 12 million; in the last
decade at least two million have left to make new lives for themselves
in Europe, Australia and America. Only in Syria has this pattern been
resisted.
Now there are worries that Syria, one of the last countries in the
region without an Islamist movement, is also in Washington's cross
hairs: Donald Rumsfeld, among others, has accused Syria of sponsoring
the Islamic resistance in Iraq and in Lebanon.
Few would deny that Syria has much to reform. It is a one-party
Ba'athist state, where political activists are suppressed and an
extensive network of secret police fills the prisons with political
prisoners. Violent opposition to the regime is met with overwhelming
force, most dramatically in the case of the armed rising of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Hama in 1982. The city was sealed off and at least 10,000
people were killed - a similar operation to that undertaken by the US in
Falluja, except that Syria did not use banned chemical weapons.
Yet if Syria is a one-party police state, it is one that tends to leave
its citizens alone as long as they keep out of politics. And if
political freedoms have always been severely, and often brutally,
restricted - as is also the case in most of the US's ally states in the
region - Assad's regime does allow wide-ranging cultural and religious
freedoms, which give Syria's minorities a security and stability far
greater than their counterparts anywhere else in the region. This is
particularly true of Syria's ancient Christian communities.
The Assads are Alawite, a Shia Muslim minority seen by orthodox Sunni
Muslims as heretical, and disparagingly referred to as Nusayris, or
Little Christians: indeed their liturgy seems to be partly Christian in
origin. The Assads have stayed in power by forming in effect a coalition
of religious minorities, through which they were able to counterbalance
the weight of the Sunni majority. In Syria the major Christian feasts
are national holidays; Christians are exempt from turning up to work on
Sunday mornings; and churches and monasteries, like mosques, are given
free electricity. This is unknown anywhere else in the Middle East.
It would be tragic if the British now assisted the US in destabilising
not just Iraq and Lebanon, but also Syria. As Sabah Mansur Nesco put it:
"Bush brought nothing but killing, violence and mass emigration - not
just to Iraq but to Afghanistan and Palestine also. Now we just pray he
leaves Syria alone. For us it is the last place of refuge."
• William Dalrymple is the author of From the Holy Mountain: A
Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium.
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