Christian communities in the Arab Middle East: the challenge of the future 9780198293880

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
List of Figures (page vii)
List of Maps (page viii)
List of Tables (page ix)
Notes on Contributors (page xii)
Introduction (ANDREA PACINI, page 1)
1. The Arab Christians: From the Eastern Question to the Recent Political Situation of the Minorities (JOSEPH MAÏLA, page 25)
2. The Arab Christians of the Middle East: A Demographic Perspective (PHILIPPE FARGUES, page 48)
3. The Christian Communities, Active Members of Arab Society throughout History (SAMIR KHALIL SAMIR, page 67)
4. The Churches of the Middle East: Their Origins and Identity, from their Roots in the Past to their Openness to the Present (JEAN CORBON, page 92)
5. The Law of the Nation-State and the Status of non-Muslims in Egypt and Syria (BERNARD BOTIVEAU, page 111)
6. The Emigration of Christian Arabs: Dimensions and Causes of the Phenomenon (BERNARD SABELLA, page 127)
7. The Cultural Production of Arab Christians Today: An Expression of their Identity in a Predominantly Muslim Society (CAMILLE HECHAÏMÉ, page 155)
8. The Political Dynamics of the Copts: Giving the Community an Active Role (DINA EL KHAWAGA, page 172)
9. The Place and the Present Role of the Copts in the Egyptian Economy: Traditions and Specializations (ADEL A. BESHAI, page 191)
10. The Dynamics of the Lebanese Christians: From Paradigm of the ٔāmmiyyāt to the Paradigm of Hwayyek (ELIZABETH PICARD, page 200)
11. The Christian Communities and the Economic and Social Situation in Lebanon (BOUTROS LABAKI, page 222)
12. Socio-Political and Community Dynamics of Arab Christians in Jordan, Israel, and the Autonomous Palestinian Territories (ANDREA PACINI, page 259)
13. The Christians of Syria (HABIB MOUSSALLI, page 286)
14. Christians in Iraq (YŪSUF HABBI, page 294)
Appendix 1: The Rites of the Churches of the Middle East (page 305)
Appendix 2: The Relations of Orthodox and Catholic Churches, and the Eastern Patriarchates (page 308)
Appendix 3: The Jurisdiction of the Churches of the Middle East (page 311)
References (page 327)
Glossary (page 340)
Index (page 357)

Citation preview

CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES IN THE ARAB MIDDLE EAST

BLANK PAGE

Christian Communities in the Arab Middle East The Challenge of the Future edited by

ANDREA PACINI

CLARENDON PRESS - OXFORD

This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard specification in order to ensure its continuing availability

UNIVERSITY PRESS

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing world-wide in Oxford New York

Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

© Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli 1998 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Reprinted 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 978-0-19-829388-0

| CONTENTS

List of Figures vil List of Maps Vil

List ofContributors Tables Ix Notes on Xi

Introduction | ANDREA PACINI

1. The Arab Christians: From the Eastern Question to the

Recent Political Situation of the Minorities 25 JOSEPH MAILA

Perspective 48

2. The Arab Christians of the Middle East: A Demographic PHILIPPE FARGUES

3. The Christian Communities, Active Members of Arab

| Society throughout History 67 SAMIR KHALIL SAMIR 4. The Churches of the Middle East: Their Origins and Identity, from their Roots in the Past to their Openness

to the Present 92 JEAN CORBON

5. The Law of the Nation-State and the Status of

non-Muslims in Egypt and Syria 111 BERNARD BOTIVEAU

6. The Emigration of Christian Arabs: Dimensions and

Causes of the Phenomenon 127 BERNARD SABELLA

7. The Cultural Production of Arab Christians Today: An Expression of their Identity in a Predominantly

Muslim Society 155 CAMILLE HECHAIME

vi Contents 8. The Political Dynamics of the Copts: Giving the

Community an Active Role — YT2

DINA EL KHAWAGA

9. The Place and the Present Role of the Copts in the

Egyptian Economy: Traditions and Specializations 191 ADEL A. BESHAITI

10. The Dynamics of the Lebanese Christians: From the Paradigm of the ‘ammiyydat to the Paradigm

of Hwayyek 200 ELIZABETH PICARD

Situation in Lebanon 222

11. The Christian Communities and the Economic and Social BOUTROS LABAKI

12. Socio-Political and Community Dynamics of Arab Christians in Jordan, Israel, and the Autonomous

Palestinian Territories 259 ANDREA PACINI

13. The Christians of Syria 286 HABIB MOUSSALLI

14. Christians in Iraq 294 YUSUF HABBI

Appendix 1: The Rites of the Churches of the Middle East 305 Appendix 2: The Relations of Orthodox and Catholic Churches,

and the Eastern Patriarchates 308

References 327 Glossary 357 | 340 Index Appendix 3: The Jurisdiction of the Churches of the Middle East 311

LIST OF FIGURES 2.1 Percentage of Christians in the Near East (present-day

Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria) from 1580 to 1995 60

East, 1894-1986 62

2.2 Growth rate of the Christian population in the Middle

A2.1 The origins of the Catholic Eastern Churches from the

corresponding Orthodox Churches in the Middle East 309 A2.2 The ancient Eastern Patriarchates in the pattern of their multiple correspondencies to the different Churches of today 310

LIST OF MAPS 1 The Jurisdiction of the Eastern Orthodox, Greek

Orthodox, and Catholic Churches of the Middle East 312-13

2 Assyrian Church of the East 314 3 Syrian Orthodox Church 315 4 Armenian Apostolic Church 316

5 Coptic Orthodox Church 317

6 Greek Orthodox Church in the Middle East 318

78 Chaldean Maronite Church 319 Church 320

9 Syrian Catholic Church 321 10 Armenian Catholic Church 322 11 Coptic Catholic Church 323

12 Melkite Church 324 13 Roman Catholic Church in the Middle East 325 14 Protestant Churches in the Middle East 326

LIST OF TABLES 2.1 Religious composition of the population of the Fertile Crescent by denomination and by province,

1580 and 1881-2 54

2.2 Size of the Christian population in each country of the

Middle East according to the censuses of 1894-1986 59

in 1995 61 diaspora 129

2.3 Christian affiliation among Arabs in the Middle East: number of adherents of each Church and in each country

6.1 Percentages of Middle Eastern Christians found in the 6.2 Geographic distribution and religious composition of

interviewed households 139

6.3 Intention to-emigrate according to religion and education 143 6.4 Intention to emigrate according to religion and

marital status 144 income brackets 145

6.5 Intention to emigrate according to religion and

employment 146 ©

6.6 Intention to emigrate according to religion and

6.7 Intention to emigrate (‘Yes’ and ‘Maybe’ answers)

according to religion and occupation 147

6.8 Intention to emigrate according to religion and presence

of relatives outside the country 148

Lebanon : 224

11.1. Main characteristics of the religious communities in

11.2 Evolution of the resident population belonging to the

main Lebanese communities, 1922—90 225

the war, 1975—90 225

11.3. Summary of the global estimates of human losses in

1989 226

11.4 Geographical distribution of medium- and long-term displacements according to religion between 1975 and

X List of Tables

the war 226

11.5 Rate of schooling of the population before and during 11.6 Evolution of the number of private schools for

pre-university education between 1972-3 and 1981-2 227 11.7 Christian schools closed in the regions abandoned by

Christians between 1982 and 1987 228

education, 1975-87 229

11.8 Estimate of material damage suffered in state and private

11.9 Net annual number of Lebanese emigrants, 1975-94 229 11.10 Confessional composition of the population born in

Lebanon and resident in Australia, 1971-81 230

11.11 Confessional distribution of the population of Beirut and

of Lebanon at the end of the Ottoman period 237

11.12 Confessional composition of members of the professions between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of

the twentieth century 237

11.13 Confessional composition of students qualified from the

Syrian Protestant College, 1871-82 238

11.14 Composition according to community of businessmen at

the end of the Ottoman period, 1889-1911 238

Beirut in 1889 239

11.15 Confessional composition of some artisan professions in

1924 940 1960 244 school in 1981-2 244

11.16 Confessional composition of workers in the silk mills in

the whole of Lebanon, 1911-12 239

11.17 Confessional composition of students in state schools in

11.18 Illiteracy in the different communities in 1932 240 11.19 Distribution of pupils in the state, private, and foreign

sectors, according to community, 1933-5 241

11.20 Confessional composition of students at the Lebanese

University according to faculty, 1960-6 243

11.21 Confessional composition of students in state schools in 11.22 Regional distribution of pupils in the different types of

11.23 Distribution of private schools according to community

from 1944-5 to 1977-8 245

List of Tables xi 11.24 Religion and level of education expressed as a

percentage of the population, Lebanon 1974 248

11.25 Confessional composition of the Lebanese university

population in 1972-3 248 professions, 1943-78 249

11.26 Evolution of the religious composition of some

11.27 Trends in the sale of landed property by Christians in the different regions of Lebanon after 1975; localization and

1986-95 255

motivation of the sellers and category of buyers 250-1 11.28 Forced displacements and cases of families returning,

14.1 Distribution of the population of Mesopotamia according

to the main religions at the end of the nineteenth century 296

14.2 Distribution of ethnic groups in Iraq, 1936 299 14.3. Distribution of the Chaldeans in the different cities, 1936 299

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ANDREA PACINI, researcher at the Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli in Turin,

Italy, is in charge of the research programme ‘Islam and Modernity’. As a part of the programme he is senior editor of the series ‘Dossier Mondo Islamico’, published by Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli. JOSEPH MAILA, Lebanese, is lecturer in political sciences and dean of the Institut des Sciences Economiques et Sociales of the Institut Catholique in Paris. PHILIPPE FARGUES, French, demographer of the Arab world, is currently director of the Centre d’Etudes et de Documentation Economique, Juridique et Sociale (CEDEJ) in Cairo (Egypt). He is specialized in the religious demography of the Middle East. SAMIR KHALIL SAMIR, an Egyptian Jesuit, is lecturer in the history of Arab culture and in Islamic studies at the University of Saint-Joseph, Beirut (Lebanon) and the Pontifical Institute of Oriental Studies in Rome. He 1s also director of the Centre de Documentation et de Recherches Arabes Chrétiens (CEDRAC) in Beirut (Lebanon).

JEAN CORBON, a French Melkite priest, is lecturer in theology at the University of Saint-Joseph in Beirut (Lebanon). He is a member of the Vatican International Committee of Theology and of the international mixed committee for theological dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church.

BERNARD BOTIVEAU, French, is lecturer in the sociology of Muslim

law at the Institut de Recherche et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman (IREMAM) in Aix-en-Provence (France). Since 1995 he has

been carrying out studies and research at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherche sur le Moyen Orient Contemporain (CERMOC) in Amman (Jordan).

BERNARD SABELLA, Palestinian, is lecturer in sociology at the Catholic University of Bethlehem. His specific field of research concerns the

migratory dynamics of Palestinians, with particular attention both to Palestinian Christians and more generally to Eastern Christians in Arab countries.

Notes on Contributors X11 CAMILLE HECHAIME, a Lebanese Jesuit, is director of the publishing house Dar el-Machreq and chief editor of the journal al-Machriq. A scholar of the history of Arab culture, he has specialized in the study of the modern cultural production of Arab Christians. DINA EL KHAWAGA, Egyptian, is a researcher in sociology at the University of Cairo.

ADEL A. BESHAI, Egyptian, is lecturer in economics and Head of the Department of Economics of the American University of Cairo. ELIZABETH PICARD, French, is a researcher in political science at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at the Fondation National de Sciences Politiques in Paris. BouTROS LABAKI, Lebanese, is lecturer in the sociology of economics at the Lebanese University and at the University of Saint-Joseph in Beirut. He is currently Vice-President of the Lebanese Council for Development and Reconstruction. HABIB MOUSSALLI, Syrian, is lecturer in Arab literature at the Pontifical Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies in Rome. YOUSUF HABBI, an Iraqi Chaldean priest, is Episcopal Vicar of the Patri-

archal diocese of Baghdad (Iraq), a member of the Academy of Sciences of Iraq, Professor of the History of Eastern Canon Law at the Pontifical Institute of Oriental Studies in Rome, and director of the ‘Babylon’ Institute of Philosophy and Theology in Baghdad.

*K * * MICHELE VALLARO, compiled the glossary, except for those entries marked (AP), which are by the editor. FIONA TUPPER-CAREY, translated the work from the original Italian.

BLANK PAGE

Introduction ANDREA PACINI In the Arab and Turkish areas of the Middle East today Islam undoubtedly represents the majority culture, although to a lesser extent than in presentday Maghreb,' which is almost totally homogeneous. Until today in fact, the regions of the Mashreq have been inhabited throughout the centuries

by people of many different religions. Thus Muslims, Jews, and Christians have traditionally lived together within the same social system, although

the institutional and social terms on which this system was based have undergone changes during the course of history up to our most recent era. The most substantial changes to the population distribution of the Jews in the Middle East have occurred in this century and particularly after 1945, with the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948. The founding of Israel as the Jewish people’s State, in which in principle all the Jews of the Diaspora had the right to settle, caused large portions of the Jewish communities in the southern Mediterranean and surrounding areas to emigrate to the new State. Besides the attraction to the ideal of founding their own State, the difficulties in Arab-Israeli relations which immediately arose

also led most Middle Eastern Jews to emigrate either to Israel or to the West. These new trends in the second half of this century have brought two substantial changes to the religious map of the region. On the one hand they have created a new, well-defined, and politically recognized area

with a predominantly Jewish population, the State of Israel, where not only Jews from the Arab region but also from other areas, especially Europe, have converged. On the other hand they have caused the almost total disappearance, or the considerable reduction, of the network of large Jewish communities which was once spread throughout the whole area, both in Mashreq and Maghreb.’ ' The present Christian population in Maghreb is mostly of European origin. There is only a very small number of autochthonous Christians conversions from the Islamic religion: see H. Teissier, La Chiesa nell’ Africa del Nord (Milan: Edizioni Paoline, 1991). * Youssef Courbage and Philippe Fargues, Chrétiens et Juifs dans I’Islam arabe et turc (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 261-2; Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 189-91.

2 Andrea Pacini In the Arab part of the Middle East—which includes Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories—in Israel, and to a lesser extent in Turkey, Christian communities are still scattered in various numbers around the region. Although considerably reduced in size today, in each individual State they nevertheless represent an autochthonous Christian presence, whose origins date further back than the birth and spread of Islam and which has contributed throughout history towards cultural, social, and economic development in the region. We are therefore _ dealing with a Christian presence whose roots are fully embedded in the Middle East and that to all intents and purposes belongs to it. They therefore share the same history and a large part of the cultural heritage of the rest of the population. The only important difference, which has numerous social and cultural consequences, is their adherence to the Christian religion in a world where Muslims are in the majority. Christian affiliation must not be understood in a monolithic sense, however. The particular character of Middle Eastern Christianity stems from the fact that it

consists of a large number of communities from each of the different Churches, each with its own tradition and liturgical rite. These Churches have played a part in both the ancient and the more recent history of Middle

Eastern society and are an eloquent testimony still today to the rich cultural and religious life led by Christians of various Eastern traditions over the centuries (see Chapter 4). With the increasing spread of Arab Islam from the seventh century onwards, a process of conversion to Islam began, which gradually extended to the whole region of expansion in the Middle East. For the Christian communities the Muslim conquest meant their incorporation into a political and social structure which was based on the new Muslim religion and which provided a specific statute for non-Muslims, regulating their integration into Muslim society. It is a statute whose fundamental elements were still widely in force throughout the area until the last century and which still influences cultural, social, and legal practices sometimes now. A study of the present situation of the Christian communities in the Middle East must therefore include a consideration of how Islam administered relations with the different religious denominations in its own political sphere on an institutional level. This was a problem which Islam had to face right from the beginning. In organizing the newborn Islamic community, Muhammad had to legislate on the kind of relations to be held with the Jews and Christians living in the cities of Arabia. Then, when the Arab-Islamic conquest subsequently spread, the Muslims, victorious both politically and militarily, had to face the problem of relations with the peoples they had conquered, the majority of whom were Christian.

Introduction 3 From the start therefore, Islam adopted legal and institutional terms based on religion, to establish the type of recognition Islam should give to the other religions. Thus, although Islam was the true religion revealed by God and as such enjoyed absolute superiority, there was also room for members of ‘religions of the book’, in other words of religions based on a sacred book. These were firstly Jews and Christians, but later included the Sabeans and during the expansion in the Sassanid Empire, the Zoroastrians. Members of other religions were not allowed to reside in the Islamic

world and were obliged to convert to Islam, as it happened for example to most Arabs who followed the autochthonous religious traditions of preIslamic Arabia, who were considered pagan. The fundamental aspect of the structure of these relations was nevertheless the religious and denominational one, which determined the social and political role of the members of each religion.

Generally speaking Islam projected itself as a universal culture in which the religious element included and legitimized the legal, political, and social elements. The same approach also took shape clearly in the organization of relations with the various religious communities present inside it. Essentially the status attributed to members of the religions of the book was that of dhimmi, or protected people, who in exchange for recognition and acceptance of Muslim political power and the social superiority of Islam, could continue to live and practise their religion within a Muslim political context. Thus Islam has in fact practised tolerance towards Christians and Jews. This tolerance had well-defined limits however, which were

institutionally ratified by a number of laws making Islam the dominant religion from a political and social point of view. These laws gradually enabled the Islamization of areas under Muslim rule (see Chapter 3). The first type of limits imposed on Christians and the other dhimmi were religious. They could follow their own religion but were forbidden from engaging in any kind of missionary activity, while Muslim missionary activ-

ity was encouraged. In addition the various Muslim law schools drew up different laws regarding the practice of the Christian religion, but all limited its public expression. Hence processions, displaying Christian symbols in public, and bell-ringing were all forbidden. Very strict laws were also written for the building of new churches or the restoration of old ones.* The second type of restrictions were mainly social and clearly stated the inferiority of non-Muslims, both socially and legally. The latter ° A. Fattal, Le statut légal des non-Musulmans en pays d’Islam (Beirut: Imprimérie Catholique, 1958), 174-8.

4 Andrea Pacini were not allowed to hold any kind of political or military power and were subject to heavier taxes. Besides taxes on land and on different kinds of assets, they also had to pay a special per capita tax, the jizya, considered compensation for the protection given to them by the Muslim political powers.* Muslim superiority was also guaranteed in family matters. The special laws regarding mixed marriages allow only one kind of mixed union:

that of a Muslim man with a Christian or Jewish woman, whose offspring must be brought up as Muslims. A non-Muslim man wanting to marry a Muslim woman is required to convert to Islam. This particular system of laws seems to have played a very important role in the substitution of the Christian population with a Muslim one during the first centuries of the Muslim empire (see Chapter 2). With the total disappearance of autochthonous Christianity in Maghreb from the twelfth century and the gradual reduction of the Christian population in Mashreq,” the social and legal order established by Islam thus led to the Islamization of the present-day Arab Middle East over the centuries. Yet Christians had an active and often little-known role in the development of Arab culture. This was precisely because, being excluded from politics and the military, as well as from positions in government, they dedicated themselves to those professions which remained open to them, particularly public administration and culture, including the study of philosophy and the sciences. With their knowledge of Greek and Syriac and their Hellenistic and Byzantine cultural background, the Eastern Christians played a fundamental role as mediators between this culture and the Arab Muslims, both as regards state administration and purely cultural matters. They therefore made an essential contribution to the emergence of the new synthesis of Islamic culture and philosophy, which built on the Greek cultural heritage. It was Christian philosophers in fact who played an active and creative role by translating the most important Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, Plato, and the neo-Platonists, from Greek or from Syriac versions into Arabic. Particularly when the Abbasid Empire was formed in 750 and the capital was moved to Baghdad, the caliphs boosted

culture greatly and encouraged the spread of Greek works throughout the Arab empire. For this they mainly relied on the Christians, who as important cultural mediators in the Arab world, laid the foundations for the subsequent development of science and philosophy in the Muslim world. Although at its apogee Muslim culture influenced European culture in a 4 A. Ferré, ‘Chrétiens de Mésopotamie aux deux premiers siécles de |’Islam’, Islamochristiana, 14 (1988), 71-106. 5 Joseph, Cuog, L’ Eglise d’ Afrique du Nord, du II’ au XII’ siécle (Paris: Centurion, 1984).

[ntroduction 5 revolutionary way in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, particularly with the translation of Aristotle’s works into Latin from Arabic versions, it was nevertheless the Christian part of the Arab world which enabled the transmission of Greek and Hellenistic culture in the Arab Muslim context (see Chapter 3). The role and influence of the Christians was to decrease from the tenth century on, mainly because of their fall in numbers, which made it more difficult for them to play an important role in Arab society. In the meantime, however, thanks to the cultural work of the preceding centuries, a greater number of Muslims dedicated themselves to different disciplines

of study with excellent results. From the tenth to the seventeenth centuries the Arab Christians declined: in 1570, when the first census of the Ottoman Empire was carried out, they were reduced to just the 8 per cent of the whole population of the Empire.

It was under the Ottoman Empire, nevertheless, that the situation of the Christians improved considerably. In the following centuries this led to their numerical increase on one hand and a restoration of their importance in social and cultural life on a large scale. In its administration, the Ottoman Empire adopted the system of millets (nations), through which it gave legal recognition to the multi-religious composition of the Empire and gave an organizational framework for it within the state apparatus. Millets were defined according to religious denomination and identified the main denominations which the peoples of the Ottoman Empire belonged to. In the beginning four millets were recognized: Muslim, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian. Later, during the nineteenth century, often under pressure from the European States, the number of Christian millets increased to give specific recognition to the various Eastern-rite Catholic

communities. The peculiarity of this system was that the millets, defined on a religious basis, became intermediary bodies between the individual and the State. All the subjects of the Empire were in fact ascribed to their own millet, whose representative authority was made up of members of the religious hierarchy. For the Christians it was the Patriarchs and their local representatives, for the Jews it was the members of the hierarchy of the Rabbis, and for the Muslims it was their ulemas and muftis (see Chapter 1). The religious authorities of each millet acted both as representatives of the members of their millet and as intermediaries between the latter and central power in administrative matters. They were recognized as having jurisdiction over their own community not only in religious

affairs, but also in civil and penal matters. They were also responsible for the collection of taxes, which were then handed over to the state author-

ities. The millets therefore covered wide areas of social life and despite differences of opinion about how they actually functioned during the entire

6 Andrea Pacini Ottoman era, it is certain that, at least from the eighteenth century onwards, they had a decisive structural role.° An extremely interesting aspect of the millet system is that it formulated the identification of nation with religious denomination and brought this idea to later Middle Eastern cul-

ture. In this sense the millet system resumed the practice of using religious affiliation as the main basis for defining the status of the subjects of the Empire, according to Muslim political and legal traditions. At the same time, however, it institutionalized the idea of denomination even more, laying the basis for the identification of nationhood with religious affilia-

tion, which was to have a deep influence on trends inside the Ottoman Empire towards the end of its existence, when religion as identified with nationhood caused the break-up of multi-religious society in the Turkish and European areas of the Empire.’ It is also important to remember that the millet system granted and insti-

tutionalized the different legal statuses of the Christian and Jewish religions from Islam, according to the tradition of the dhimma. The Muslim millet was in fact recognized as the dominant one, to which the others had to be subordinated. This subordination was established by the legal and social limitations imposed on non-Muslims. Only with the reforms (tanzimat) of 1839 and 1856 was the legal equality of members of all religions proclaimed and the restrictions on Christians and Jews abolished. These measures were part of a wide spectrum of reforms of the Ottoman State, aimed at modernizing the economy and the administration, while strengthening central power. The concrete ways in which the tanzimat were applied, including those in regard to Christians, vary according to place and local governors. In many towns they were greeted with public demonstrations of affiliation to the Christian religion, which had been unthink-

able before and which often provoked the opposition of Muslims, who | considered the freedom and equality conceded to non-Muslims as an unjustified subversion of the social order.* The strategies of the European powers had an important influence on internal developments in the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries. Great Britain, France, Austria, and Russia in © Benjamin Braude, ‘Foundation Myth of the Millet System’, in B. Braude and B. Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, 1 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982),

ie a Karpat, ‘Millets and Nationality; the Roots of the Incongruity of Nation and State in the Post-Ottoman Era’, in B. Braude and B. Lewis, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, 1: 141-69. 8 M. Ma’oz, ‘Communal Conflicts in Ottoman Syria during the Reform Era: The Role of Political and Economic Factors’, in B. Braude and B. Lewis, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, 2: 91-105.

Introduction 7 particular increased their commercial and political links with the Empire,

competing with each other to assure themselves the best relations and the consequent benefits. Here too the millet system was a decisive factor in determining the Ottoman Empire’s image outside its borders, on which

political strategies were based.’ In fact the European nations saw the Ottoman Empire as an empire of communities, organized according to religion and headed by the Sultan, the highest political authority, who also held the highest Muslim religious authority, that of caliph. During the period of Europe’s penetration of the Ottoman Empire, the European nations used the institution of the millets for their own ends, in particular by acting as protectors of the Christian communities of the East against Muslim central power. This phase of the history of the Mediterranean region, characterized by the numerous European efforts at penetration of the Ottoman

Empire (see Chapter 1), also marked a new phase in the history of the Arab and Eastern Christian communities. Precisely because of their religious affinity with the European States, the Christian communities were identified by them as privileged partners of dialogue in the East and they benefited from their new position. Even though the support of the European nations often turned into manipulation for economic and geopolit-

ical gains, it is undeniably thanks to their greater contact with Europe that the Christians encountered a new world. They discovered Enlightened culture, they learned European languages, they improved their economic Status, especially in the areas of trade, state administration, and the professions. This new cultural openness also found political expression, which was addressed towards the Ottoman State. There were requests for mod-

ernization on an institutional level, giving all subjects, including nonMuslims, equal rights, along the lines of liberal principles. In this context the arrival of European missionaries belonging to the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant communities further promoted the Eastern Christians’ encounter with modern life. The missionaries established a net-

work of health institutions and schools through which they contributed enormously towards cultural development and the improvement in the stand-

ard of living of Arab Christians in particular, who were offered access to modern education locally. An analysis of data regarding the rate of school-

ing in some provinces of the Arab area of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth century shows that everywhere Christians had a much higher rate of schooling than Muslims and often, with the exception of Aleppo and Basra, than the Jews.'° The last phase of the Ottoman Empire ” Georges Corm, ‘Géopolitique des minorités au Proche-Orient’, Hommes et Migrations, 1172-3 (Jan._Feb. 1994), 7-15. '0 Y. Courbage, and P. Fargues, Chrétiens et Juifs dans l’Islam arabe et turc, 187.

8 Andrea Pacini therefore marks a period of prosperity for the Arab and Eastern Christians. They played an important economic and social role and possessed vast, innovative cultural tools, which opened up new spaces for them, including in the administration of the Ottoman State, which was committed to modernizing its own structure. On the other hand, the ideas of the Enlightenment on citizenship, equality, and other fundamental liberties influenced

Christians in a special way. It was the Armenians who first asked for a revision of the ways in which their millet was administered, in order to limit the power of the Patriarch and guarantee the control and wider participation of the community in its administration.'! Lastly, quite apart from their concrete results in a State which was by now in crisis, the tanzimat were a sign of legal and political recognition that new cultural syntheses

were required to found the relationship between citizens and the State. By affirming the equality of all the subjects of the Empire, regardless of — religious affiliation, in principle at least, they sanctioned the new position both of Christians and of Jews in the Ottoman Empire. Despite this, however, the subsequent political process of modernization was to involve regressions and conflicts in which Christians were the first to be affected. The social development of the Christian community during this time was also evident demographically. Towards the end of the Ottoman Empire, in 1914, Christians were about 24 per cent of the population of the Empire,

rising to 30 per cent in the area of Greater Syria, including present-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. In the first few years after 1915 a new geopolitical order was defined in the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire finally fell apart and the new national States began to be formed. The first of these were independent Turkey and the Arab regions under European mandate, which achieved full independence in the 1940s. It was from this period that the situation of the Christian communities in the East changed, with those in Turkey encountering completely different conditions from Christians in the Arab area. In Turkey the national State was based on the concept of Turkish identity, leading to the total exclusion of Christians from the new State.

, The identification of nationhood with religious affiliation, as implied by the millet, led to the linking of Turkish identity with Muslim culture, despite the decidedly secular political origins of the new Turkish State. The Armen-

ians were the first to suffer the consequences of the new national trends which appeared after 1908, when the “young Turks’ came to power. They '1 B, Braude, and B. Lewis, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, 1: 21-2, H. Barsoumiam, ‘The Dual Role of the Armenian Amira Class within the Ottoman Government and the Armenian Millet (1750-1850)’, in B. Braude and B. Lewis, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, 1: 171-81.

Introduction 9 had already been subjected to repression by the Ottoman government in 1895—6, which had been both preceded and accompanied by an intensive policy of increasing the Kurdish population of the area, with the purpose of changing the ethnic composition of this prevalently Armenian region. The ‘young Turks’ installed a constitutional regime which was shortly to regress to an authoritarian one.'* The ideology of the rulers was based on open nationalism, which clashed with other political ideas common among some Armenians, who were demanding autonomy for the Armenian region, as happened both in the Arab area and the Balkan area of the Ottoman Empire. However, while the separation of Arab and Balkan areas did not pose a problem for the new Turkish political and institutional system which was taking shape, the autonomy of the area of Anatolia inhabited by Armenians, who did not represent a complete majority in any one place, would have meant an unacceptable loss of territory for Turkey. This was especially true as the Armenians’ claims carried the support of Russia, which was trying to extend her influence, just as Austria had widened hers by supporting the Balkan regions which broke away from the Ottoman State after the 1908 revolution.'’ As the mainly Christian Balkan regions gradually separated from the Ottoman State, the Armenians, whose millet was traditionally loyal, began to be perceived as a danger to maintaining a single Turkish state structure. This was because of the movements for autonomy active among them, although the majority of the Armenian population of Anatolia was unaware of the political games being played and remained loyal to the State. To eliminate any possible risk, in 1915 the government of the ‘young Turks’ decided to repress the Armenians. The repression was carried out both by regular troops and especially by Kurdish and Circassian Muslim tribes, with whom they shared the same territory and who were driven against the Armenians in the name of the jihdd against the Christian infidels. However, the resort to a holy war and the use of religious instigation was

purely instrumental. The government wanted to incite the Muslim population to take reprisals against the Armenians. The real reason for the mas-

Sacre was the desire to make Turkish ethnic and cultural identity the dominant basis for the creation of the national State and to eliminate the components which might obstruct this in the immediate future.'* From this point of view Christianity was a negative factor, as it reinforced Armenian '2 Laurent Chabry, and Annie Chabry, Politique et minorités au Proche-Orient: les raisons

d’une explosion (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1987), 229-33; Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (London: OUP, 1968), 175—230.

'S Ibid. 214-19. '* L. Chabry, and A. Chabry, Politique et minorités au Proche-Orient, 230-3.

10 Andrea Pacini identity and enabled the Armenians to have close cultural relations with the Christian powers, notably Russia. It is estimated that between 550,000 and one million Armenians were massacred during the course of the repression.'’° The survivors went into exile, though a small number of them settled in Istanbul. Of the thriving Armenian population in Turkey at the beginning of this century only 70,000 people are left today, concentrated in Istanbul.'° A similar expulsion, though with different methods was also enacted by the Turkish government against its own citizens belonging to the Greek

Orthodox Church. During the peace negotiations at the end of the war between Turkey and Greece in 1922, won by Turkey, the Turkish government ordered an exchange of people, forcing the majority of Greek Orthodox Christians to leave Turkey. About 464,000 Muslims are estimated

to have entered Turkey from Greece, compared to 1,344,000 Christians of the Greek Orthodox Church who were sent to Greece. These were mainly Christians who had been subjected to strong Turkish influence, whose expulsion was decided on the sole basis of their religious affiliation, which was

considered a potentially disintegrating factor for Turkish national identity.!7 Hence in Turkey the process of building the modern national State led to the almost complete end of the multi-religious tradition which had characterized the Ottoman era, but which had failed to find new political syntheses to face the spread of liberal ideas and nationalist ideologies. Turkish nationalism, although based on a secular ideology, had a selective effect as far as religion was concerned. The result of this was the almost total disappearance of the Christian population in Turkey."*

The experiences of the Arab Christians within the creation of the new national States were different. Here the Arab Christians played an 15 Yves Ternon, Les Arméniens. Histoire d’un génocide (Paris: Seuil, 1977); Gérard Chaliand and Yves Ternon, 19/5: Le génocide arménien (Brussels: Complexe, 1991); for a synthesis of various estimates of the size of the Armenian massacre, see Y. Courbage, P. Fargues, Chrétiens et Juifs dans I’Islam arabe et turc, 222-7 and table VI: 8. 16 There are different figures for the size of the Armenian population before the 1915 repression: according to the last Ottoman census, in 1914 there were 1,200,000 Armenians; according to the Armenian Patriarchate, the Armenian population was double that size in 1882, numbering 2,400,000: see Justin Mc Carthy, Muslims and Minorities. The Population of Ottoman Anatolia at the End of the Empire (New York: New York University Press, 1983). 17 B. Lewis, Le retour de I’Islam (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 457-9.

'8 According to the Ottoman census, in 1914 there were at least 2,800,000 Christians in the area of present-day Turkey; today about 115,000 are left; see Y. Courbage, and P. Fargues, ‘De l’empire multinational 4 la Republique laique: la disparition du Christianisme en Turquie’, in Chrétiens et Juifs dans Islam arabe et turc, ch. 6, 191246.

Introduction 11 important role both from a cultural and a political point of view. They were actually among the first exponents of the Nahda, the movement for cultural and political renewal which emerged in the Arab world in the nineteenth century and developed in the first half of this century. The aim of the Nahda was the political, social, and cultural renewal of Arab society and it considered Arab identity as the common base for this. Emphasizing Arab identity therefore gave an ideological base for the construction of national independence and also meant that both Muslims and Christians could be involved in constituting the modern States, as religious differences were integrated into the idea of a common Arab identity. A great many Muslims adhered to the Nahda, although two different basic lines of thought emerged within it. Besides a more clearly secular current, there were also other currents within the movement which considered Islam to be the predominant cultural feature of Arab identity and called for it to be recognized as such. The cultural development of the Christians in the preceding decades and their exposure to Western liberal ideas allowed them to have undeniable influence within the different movements for national independence and cultural renewal.'? On a more specifically political level, Christians participated in most of the secular and national political parties. In the Syrian area the Greek Orthodox Michel “Aflaq founded the Ba'th Party, whose basis was strictly secular, while in Egypt the Copts played an important role in founding the Wafd nationalist party.’° In Syria a political formation emerged which was truly exceptional in the Middle East—the Syrian National Social Party—and its ideologue was the Greek Orthodox Antin Sa‘ada. In the beginning this party opposed the Arab identity of the State and the nation, seeking to replace it with a strictly ‘Syrian’ identity, based on pre-Islamic history. It had the support of minorities like _ the Kurds, the Alevites, the Druze, and some Christians. The SNSP also had a strictly secular ideology and integrated the Sunnite Arab majority with the minorities in a nationalist framework which, by favouring preIslamic traditions, gave a prominent role to the ethnic or religious minorities. The Ba'th Party on the other hand integrated all types of minorities into a very wide concept of Arab cultural identity.2! These are two examples of the cultural and political ferment of the period of the Nahda

and the important role Middle Eastern Christians had in it. The aim of the frequency with which Christians played a cultural role was the birth 07 * Makdissi, ‘Les Chrétiens et la Renaissance Arabe’, Islamochristiana, 14 (1988), 107-26. *® Dina El Khawaga, ‘Le développement communautaire copte: un mode de participation au politique?’, Maghreb/Machrek, 135 (Jan—Mar. 1992), 8-10. *1_L. Chabry and A. Chabry, Politique et minorités au Proche-Orient, 161-8.

12 _ Andrea Pacini of States and societies which adopted democratic principles and a secular vision of the institutions, which sought to construct frameworks for the modern State in which adhesion to the State depended on a common national citizenship and not on religious affiliation. This new political culture, shared by large sections of the Muslim élites, was obviously particularly favourable to the Christians, as it finally allowed them to overcome the traditional social and political framework of the Muslim State, which kept non-Muslims in a subordinate position. For some regions of the Arab Middle East, the result of the change to independence was thus the constitution of new States with a mainly secular structure. The choice of secularism was a clear symbol of their definite entry into the modern world and a break with the Ottoman, tribal past. However, the democratic structures within them were in most cases fragile and they often regressed towards nationalistic, authoritarian governments. This happened in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. It is in the framework of this nationalist authoritarianism, often accompanied by nationalization of the economy (see Chapter 9), that identification with the national cause declined among some Christians and they began to emigrate to Western countries. Because their cultural background was more modern and open to liberal ideas, Christians seem to have felt the lack of freedom more acutely and to have been induced to look for more favourable conditions outside their homeland.

At the same time, the two-sided cultural debate within Islam has continued and intensified until today between the creators of a reform movement on the one hand, open to modern ideas and on the other, move-

ments which originally appeared in the first decades of this century, as a reaction to such processes of social, political, and cultural modernization, which now support the return to hard-line Islam, both politically and culturally. Such movements range from the Muslim Brothers, founded in Egypt in 1928, which subsequently spread to all the countries of the Middle

East, to the new radical Islamic movements of more recent times. These political and cultural trends, marked by political authoritarianism and by renewed attempts at Islamization, have resulted almost everywhere in the incomplete development of ‘secular’ forms of State, in which all citzens, regardless of religious affiliation, have equal rights and duties. In practice the secular element is incomplete because Islam or the shari‘a appears in various forms in almost all the constitutions of the Arab countries, often because it has been reintroduced recently. Furthermore, in most of these state systems, which in principle have followed secular nationalism, far from guaranteeing equal rights, the dominance of one community (a religious or ethnic segment of the population) over the others has

Introduction 13 actually been encouraged.” In Egypt it is the Muslims who predominate over the Copts, in Syria it is the Alevites who predominate over the other communities, and in Iraq it is the Sunnites over the Shiite population. The political trends common to the Arab States from the time of their independence, particularly those of the 1960s and 1970s, have affected the situation of the Christian communities in the various States in different ways. To simplify for the sake of brevity, three main social and political directions have characterized the Middle Eastern countries in recent decades. The first is the affirmation of a nationalist policy, particularly evident in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. The second is the emergence and intensification of the process of Islamization, which increased particularly from the 1970s onwards. The third is the eruption of prolonged wars, not only over the Palestinian question and—from 1975 to 1990—Lebanon, but also more recently, with the Gulf War of 1991. These main trends have had a decisive influence on the internal and foreign policy of these States, as well as on the more specific situation of Christians. The re-emergence of militant Islam on a political and social level has marked a clear return of the importance of religious affiliation and its influence on institutions and society. The question of the secularity of the institutions and the idea of citizenship, both decisive for status of non-Muslims, are again open to question in the political debate. Different situations have emerged in the various States. For several decades Iraq and Syria have been governed by the Ba‘th Party. Although the governments of both countries have been strongly authoritarian, the institutions have been secular and this has guaranteed Christians more or less equal treatment. This is particularly true in Syria, whose population belongs to a large number of different religions. Here, the influence on society of the dominant religion, Sunnite Islam, is checked by the presence of other sizeable religious communities, such as the Alevites, the Ismailis, the Druze, and the various Christian communities. The secular nature of the constitution has been preserved thanks to two essential factors. Firstly, the ideology of the ruling Ba‘th Party is secular. Secondly,

political power is administered by the Alevite minority,”> to which President Assad belongs. He governs with the support of the other minorities, including the Christians. In conformity with the secular ideology of the Syrian Ba‘th Party, Islam is not recognized as the state religion in Syria. Pressure from Islamic movements, particularly the Muslim Brothers, *2 Elizabeth Picard, ‘Les habits neufs du communitarisme libanais’, Culture et Conflits, 15—16 (Fall-Winter 1994), 55-6. 3 _L. Chabry and A. Chabry, Politique et minorités au Proche-Orient, 160-89.

14 | Andrea Pacini who have repeatedly called for the Syrian State to conform more closely to Islam, has been resisted. Having thus failed to achieve recognition of Islam as the state religion, in 1973 they succeeded in getting a law passed which stipulates that the head of State must be a Muslim. In later years there was further pressure as well as demonstrations by the Syrian Muslim Brothers to obtain a more clear-cut Islamization of the state institutions. These culminated in 1982 in the revolt of Hama, in which the Muslim Brothers aimed to install an Islamic government. The response of President Assad’s government was both prompt and harsh however. The Hama rebellion was put down by military force and the Muslim Brothers, who had enjoyed considerable freedom of organization until then, were banned and subjected to continuous repression.” Thus the threat of political Islam has been checked in Syria, at least for the moment. Yet such events have merely strengthened the unity of the Christian communities around the government which, although authoritarian, is considered the guarantor of a principally egalitarian and secular State. In this situation the relations between the State and the Christian communities are mainly good (see Chapter 13). For despite the considerable difficulties imposed on political and civil life by an authoritarian regime, the Christian communities seem to have a certain interest in supporting President Assad’s. government. This is because it represents a buffer against the attempts at Islamization of state institutions and society, which would be bound to have a negative effect on the situation of the Christian and other non-Sunnite minorities. There are nevertheless criticisms in Christian circles of the author-

itarian nature of the regime, although they are expressed prudently. In Iraq the situation of the Christian communities is more complex and difficult, both on account of the internal situation and of difficult international relations following the Gulf War (see Chapter 14). Internally the various religions are closely controlled, for fear they may give rise to dissent against the regime. The government’s offensives have been directed particularly towards the Shiite part of the population, to which more than

half of Iragis belong. In Iraq too, the Shiites have shown a tendency to follow the political ideology of the Iranian Shiites, who proclaimed the Islamic Republic in 1979. In view of this the government began to bring the Shiite sect under state control in 1976, suppressing their autonomy as regards the administration of religious property and transforming the imams into state officials, both paid and controlled by the government. At 24 M.C. Hudson, ‘Arab Regimes and Democratisation: Response to the Challenge of Political Islam’, in Laura Guazzone (ed.), The Islamist Dilemma (New York: Ithaca Press, 1995), 222-3.

Introduction 15 the same time the government tried to reinforce its own position by seeking the support of the Sunnite Muslims and the Christians, who make up 3.2 per cent of the population in Iraq. However, the status of Christians was in danger in 1981, when a law was proposed, though later suspended, to bring the Christian churches under state control too. In these difficult ~ political and social conditions, Iraqi Christians find themselves in an ambivalent situation. Economically the Christian communities were on the whole

prosperous, though today they have to face the same economic hardships as the rest of the population because of the international embargo. Politically, however, they play a marginal role, despite a few exceptions. In all the organs of the ruling Ba‘th Party, Christians are almost totally absent and in the National Assembly there are only four Christians out of 250 deputies, a much lower percentage than their proportion of the population. In contrast to Syria, the Ba‘th political ideology does not seem to play such an efficient role in keeping Muslims and Christians together within a national perspective. The political marginalization of the Christians in Iraq can actually be understood on the basis of two reasons. First, despite its secular character, the Iraqi Ba‘th Party recognizes Islam—the state religion in Iraq—as an essential part of Arab culture. Christianity is not recognized as having this status. We must also consider that in Iraq, as in many other Arab countries, power is administered according to family alliances, in which Sunnite Muslims are the prevailing ethnic group, especially from an anti-Shiite point of view. On the other hand the Christians themselves do not seem to be interested in taking a clear political stand in the present situation and prefer instead to stay on the sidelines of the political field. Any form of dissent against the present government is impossible anyway; furthermore being such a small minority it is difficult for them to foresee their real chances in case of a political change. The situation is different in Egypt, where there has been a succession of nationalist and authoritarian governments since 1954. However, these

governments, starting with President Sadat’s, have nevertheless introduced gradual economic and political freedom. The presence of a sizeable Christian community, the large majority of which belong to the Coptic

Orthodox Church, has led to Christians in Egypt adopting a series of community strategies to enable themselves to play a political role in Egyptian society (see Chapter 8). The case of Egypt is particularly important as Egyptian society is undergoing a period of intense cultural activity both

in Christian and Muslim circles. At the same time a process of intense Islamization, both of society and of state institutions, is also underway, through the spread of Islamic movements and the substantial influence of the official Islamic institutions. These are the conditions in which the Coptic

16 Andrea Pacini community is trying to defend its rights, while remaining nonetheless committed to the national cause. The Copts’ action is important firstly because of the strategies which have been adopted within their community. By encouraging community-level organization, social and educational activities, the Coptic Church has managed, despite some internal tensions, to unite the community, making it equipped to face the new challenges within Egyptian society.** The case of Egypt is also important as, despite the cultural evolution and reinforcement of nationalist ideology there, Coptic affiliation has not been completely integrated on an equal basis into the concept of national identity. Even the Wafd nationalist party, which initially enjoyed substantial support from the Copts, has distanced itself from them since 1936, when the independence agreements were signed. Being

the biggest and by far the most popular party in Egypt, it was deliberately accused of being led by Coptic members. This accusation came from the various minority parties, the Royal family and the top hierarchy of the Islamic al-Azhar University. The Wafd party made no attempt to defend the principles of equality of religions and national integration of the minorities against such accusations. Consequently Coptic membership of the party gradually diminished.” A clear break with the founding principles of the party came in 1948, when the Wafd party struck an official alliance with

the Muslim Brothers in the run-up to general elections, a strategy it has repeated in recent years. It is this disappointment in the political institutions that has spurred the Copts to strengthen their community, in order to make their voice heard more effectively in politics, again with the aim of national integration. The fact that this goal has still not been achieved is shown by the persistence of a whole series of laws which in practice do not recognize the same rights for Copts as for other citizens. One example is the law in force at present regarding the building and restoration of places of Christian worship. Permission for this is only obtainable by special decree from the President of the Republic, which is only issued upon satisfaction of a whole series of requirements, which include a minimum distance from the nearest mosque.”’ No such conditions are necessary for the building or restoration of mosques. Besides this example 25 TL. El Khawaga, ‘Les services sociaux dispensés par |’église copte. De l’autonomisation socio-economique 4 |’affirmation politique’, in G. Kepel (ed.), Exiles et Royaumes (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1994), 189-212. 76 [D, El Khawaga, ‘Le développement communautaire copte’, 9-10. 27 These are the regulations for the building of churches contained in the Khatt-i humayun, promulgated by the Ottoman government in 1856, incorporated into a decree by the Egyptian government in 1934 and still in force now: L. Barbulesco, Les Chrétiens egyptiens aujourd’ hui: elements du discours, Dossier no. 1 (Cairo: CEDEJ, 1985), 65.

Introduction 17 regarding places of worship, there are a large number of legal and social practices which tend to favour affiliation to Islam. These include the law by which Arabic is only taught by Muslim teachers at school, the public funding of the Muslim school system, under the authority of al-Azhar, while the Christian schools receive no funds from the State, and the clear and significant decrease in the number of Copts employed in all sectors of public administration, where Muslims seem to have preference.** Given these conditions, the Coptic Church and community’s attempts on all levels to obtain recognition of equal rights and to oppose the various processes of Islamization are understandable. Indeed such attempts led to a decidedly stormy relationship between the Coptic Patriarch, Shenida III and President Sadat, whose policy in the latter years of his government favoured the demands of Islamic movements and of the official Islamic institutions, in order to obtain their support against the growing opposition of the left-wing parties. This is the only time in recent history that the Coptic community, through its church leaders, has taken a clear stand against the government because of its concession of the Islamization of political and national institutions. The crisis between the government and the Coptic Church hierarchy reached its climax when Patriarch Shentida lil was forcibly detained in a monastery. After Sadat’s assassination by Islamic militants of Jihdd, Mubarak’s government pursued a policy of clear opposition to the Islamic movements, with a substantial improvement in relations with the Copts. Patriarch Shenuda III was reinstated and the Coptic

community and church hierarchy renewed their support for the Egyptian national cause. This improvement in relations between the Egyptian govemment and the Coptic community is part of a wider strategy of the State’s Opposition to political Islamization and the Islamic movements. As a part of their campaign in favour of an Islamic State ruled by the shari‘a, these movements often commit acts of violence against the Copts, who, according to some of their leaders, should be relegated again to the status of dhimmi. Since the spread of Islamic ideology there have been numerous religious conflicts, both in the country and in the towns and universities, particularly in the area of Assiut, which traditionally has a large Coptic population.” The interesting aspect of the Copts’ response to pollitical and cultural developments in Egyptian society is that in defending their rights, they do not insist on the fact that they are a minority whose rights must be defended, but on the State’s responsibility to guarantee equal

8 Tbid. 79-83. *” C, Guyomarch, ‘Assiout. Epicentre de la sédition confessionel’, in G. Kepel (ed.), Exiles et Royaumes, 165-88.

18 Andrea Pacini rights to all citizens. For this reason the Copts emphasize their adherence to the national cause and insist that both Coptic identity and Muslim identity should contribute equally towards the construction of Egyptian national identity.*° Contrary to Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, which adopted secular nationalist

policies after gaining independence, despite all the limitations of secu- | larism in these countries, Jordan’s and Lebanon’s political solutions had a more traditional base, although in many ways they were innovative, especially in Lebanon. Jordan is an important example of a State which has officially declared

itself Muslim since its independence and in which the monarchy is legitimized by the fact that it descends from the prophet Muhammad. Yet the explicit affiliation to Islam as the state religion and the religious legitimacy of the monarchy have not led to the Islamization of law and of the institution. On the contrary they have served to justify a whole series of modern, political, economic, and legal reforms. Although a clear minority, Christians have always played an active role within the tribal struc- _ tures which have characterized Jordanian society until this century, and which still have an important influence today (see Chapter 12). In the refor-

mulation of these traditional relations into a modern institutional form, the Jordanian State chose to guarantee Christians’ participation and presence in the new Parliament. In this case the modernization of traditional relations has served to promote the integration of the different components of society in the Jordanian State. Nonetheless there are tensions today, due to Islamic movements calling for greater Islamization of the institu-

tions on one hand and some parts of Jordanian society calling for more secularism and democracy on the other. The latter express themselves through left-wing parties which group Muslims and Christians together,

often with Christians occupying leading positions. , Lebanon based itself on an original reinterpretation of Ottoman tradition. When the national States were formed after the First World War, it did not choose a secular state system but defined itself as a multireligious State.*! Taking the traditional Ottoman idea of community, the Lebanese system turned the idea of a democratic society made up of many different religious communities into a political system. Since Christians

constituted over half the Lebanese population, they were able to exert considerable influence over the creation of the new State and to gain a 30 —D. El Khawaga, ‘Le développement communautaire copte’, 14—18. 31 G. Corm, Contribution a I’ étude des sociétés multi-confessionnelles (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1971), App. 3: 273-87.

Introduction 19 recognized political role which is unique in the entire Arab world. In the Lebanese system all the religious communities share power according to their percentage of the population. For a long time this has given the Christians a dominant role, as they were the majority of the population. The stipulation that the head of State should be a Maronite Christian not only guaranteed equality for Christians, but also had huge symbolic importance. For the first time since the expansion of Islam in the Middle East, Muslims no longer had a monopoly of the highest level of political power, as dictated by Muslim political tradition. The choice of a multi-religious system in Lebanon aimed to guarantee the participation of all religious communities in the running of the State, while maintaining the dominance of the Christian component, in which the Maronite community—which strongly identified with Lebanese nationalism—had a predominant role. Despite its limits, due to the fragile balance between state institutions and the size of the different religious communities, which is changing, the Lebanese political system has given birth to the only real democracy in the Arab world. Nevertheless the ArabIsraeli conflict, as well as the political fragility inherent in the Lebanese system (see Chapters | and 10), caused a break in the internal balance at the beginning of the 1970s. The immigration of large groups of highly politicized Muslim Palestinians, the demographic changes which increased the Shi’ite component of the population, the difficulties imposed on its political integration, were all elements which destabilized the situation in Lebanon. This destabilization led to a conflict lasting fifteen years, which turned into a full-scale civil war between the different religious communities and the various factions within them. It was a considerably destructive conflict, which was only ended by Syrian intervention and occupation to which long-term political solutions have not yet been found.

Lebanon is now also facing the fundamental problem of creating a political and institutional framework which finds available compromises between the multi-religious composition of the population, and the need to guarantee the same civil rights for all citizens. The problem, which has still not been solved, consists of finding an institutional system which can guarantee such a framework. It remains to be seen whether the option of the religious communities system could still work, or whether a much more

secular option would be more suitable. For such an option to work however, a Set of common principles would need to be found around which to unite all the components. These principles would then form the basis of the Lebanese State and would be binding for all parties.** Although 32 E. Picard, ‘Les habits neufs du communitarisme libanais’, 49-70.

20 Andrea Pacini this second option would suit the Christians, without a clear national pact it would raise fears that, by adopting a majority system, the Shiites would gain too much influence. In fact within the Shi’ite community a number of currents still favour plans to Islamize the state institutions, plans which

could only have a harmful effect for the other religious communities, particularly the Christians. Although temporary, the current subsistence of the Lebanese community system, as decided by the Taéf agreement, together with the constitutional changes giving a fairer distribution of power

among the different religious components, has nevertheless generated a political impasse which arouses concern for the long-term solution of the Lebanese crisis. The policies of the neighbouring Arab States and the evolution of the Israeli—Palestinian peace process have and will have also an important influence on Lebanon. Syria seems to keep its traditional desire to expand into. Lebanon. Saudi Arabia has had a decisive role in the decision to maintain the political system based on religious denominations temporarily. To promote its own internal and international political interests, it favours political regimes founded on the basis of religious affiliation and is in no way sympathetic towards the birth of secular and democratic systems in the Arab region, which could put into question the rigidly Islamic state of the Saudi kingdom. At the same time because the Saudi system is based on rigid, Hanbalite Sunnism, it views an increase

of Shiite power with concern. It has thorny relations with the Shiites both in international policy regarding other Muslim states—its relations with Iran—and in religious and political matters at home.

A wholly unique case in the Middle East is that of Israel and the Palestinian territories. Here the situation of Arab Christians has been deeply

affected by the political events leading tc the founding of the State of Israel and the Israeli—Palestinian conflict, which has lasted over forty years.

Among Palestinians the common commitment to the national cause has acted as a strong cohesive force between Christians and Muslims. For the moment the radical Islamic movements seem to be more interested in blocking the peace process than in putting forward concrete proposals for the future institutional framework of the autonomous Palestinian territories (see Chapter 12). In Israel the state structures are basically secular, though Jewish culture and religion have a great influence. In principle, formal citizenship is the same for Israelis and Arab Israelis, although there are still many ways in which the latter have not yet been fully integrated into the State. This brief appraisal of how the Christian communities in the East have been affected by political developments in the various States, reveals two main causes of acute social unease among large sections of the population

Introduction 21 and particularly the Christian communities. First, the political and cultural

development of Arab society is insufficiently linked to the principles of secularity and democracy, even in countries which adopted a policy of national integration on a secular basis. In addition, renewed Islamization has spread. The proposal of Islamic movements to return to state structures based on Muslim political and legal traditions could well mean that Christians would again have inferior legal status. They would therefore be denied the equal rights which are typical of the modern concept of citizenship. Quite apart from the possibility of a regression to radical Islam, the problem of citizenship and equal rights as contained in the modern status of citizen, is still unresolved in Arab and Muslim traditional culture. The concept of citizenship continues to be influenced by religious affilia-

tion, to a greater or lesser extent. The idea of citizenship thus continues to base itself on the idea of religious affiliation rather than simply on an individual’s affiliation to a State. This situation has been termed *imperfect citizenship’ (see Chapter 5). If the influence of the religious factor on citizenship is a reality for all citizens, including Muslims, for Christians it is a particular problem, as Muslim culture only recognizes full citizenship to followers of Islam. The frequency of the imperfect citizenship, which stems from the problem of defining the relationship between State

and nation and nation and citizens,’ still unresolved today, explains the existence of social and legal practices which deny equal opportunities to Christians or other minorities.** Often, therefore, the status of a non-Muslim

citizen in a Muslim country remains slightly precarious. In these circumstances, the continued efforts of Christians to guarantee their rights can be understood. The social unease of Christians in the Middle East has been aggravated further by various wars, which have caused the deterioration of economic

and social conditions, which were not all that good to start with. This has created an added incentive to emigrate. Both the Israeli—Palestinian conflict and the Lebanese conflict stem from the current difficulties involved in governing Middle Eastern areas where different communities live together and show the full potential for conflict of these difficulties. A consideration of the most recent events in the Israeli—Palestinian question and Lebanon shows that the use of violence simply increases the need

to find new guidelines to enable different religious and ethnic groups to live alongside each other and to enjoy equal rights as citizens of their 3 Ghassan Salamé (ed.), Democracy without Democrats? (London: I. B. Tauris, 1994). ** Abi-Sahlieh, Sami A. Aldeeb, Non-musulmans en pays d’Islam, Cas de I’ Egypte (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires Fribourg Suisse, 1979).

22 Andrea Pacini respective States. An obvious sign of social unease among Arab and Eastern

Christians, as well as of the difficulties up to now in creating democratic and pluralist societies in the Middle East, is the high level of emigration among them. Poor social and economic prospects, together with the political and social situation of Middle Eastern society, as well as successive wars, have spurred a steady stream of emigration among Christians in recent years (see Chapter 6). Both the different demographic tendencies of Christians as compared to Muslims, as well as the rate of emigration, have drastically reduced the Christian population in the Arab Middle East. While in 1914 Christians represented 24 per cent of the population, today they are estimated at no less than 6.3 per cent. Although it is difficult to assess the exact size of the Christian population in the Middle East today and there are different estimates in the various States, they all nevertheless indicate the clear fall in numbers, although with different margins.*° Emigration is therefore the biggest internal problem facing the Middle Eastern Christian communities and has increased particularly in the last few years. It is not just a problem of the diminishing size of the community, but also of the diminishing quality of it. For once a community falls below a certain size, it loses its cultural and social importance. For some communities, such as the Syrian Orthodox or Armenian Catholics, there are estimated to be more members abroad than in the country of origin. Nowadays all the Eastern Churches have a large diaspora spread around Europe, the Americas, and Australia. In a situation where Eastern Christians are continuing to leave the Middle East, the need to find ways of making them more active in local political and social affairs, where they can make a valuable cultural contribution and which might act as an incentive for them to stay, appears all the more urgent. Lebanon has an important role to play in this sense. After the end of the war, Lebanese Christians have had to face the difficult problem of finding new ways in which to participate in the running of the country (see Chapter 10). They _ 35 There is considerable debate today around the present number of Christians in the Middle East. Of all the Arab States, only Egypt and Jordan still record religious affiliation in their official censuses, as does Israel. However, there is no mention of religious affiliation in censuses in Iraq, Syria, the Palestinian territories, and Lebanon. Furthermore the reliability of the Egyptian censuses has been questioned. The local churches give higher estimates for the number of their own members, which can only partly be believed, since the churches sometimes tend to overestimate their size. The estimate of about 6,600,000 Christians in the Arab countries of the Middle East and in Israel, which corresponds to about 6.3 per cent of the whole population, must therefore be taken as a minimum figure. It is nevertheless a reliable figure, although higher figures may be given in some cases, particularly in Egypt and Syria. Because of the difficulty in giving an exact figure, due to the lack of official statistics, emigration and ‘political’ reasons, the estimates proposed by each author have been left and the reader is referred to ch. 2 for a proper demographic analysis.

| : Introduction 23 have also had to implement a large number of economic, social, and educational strategies to encourage the Christian population, which has suffered worse effects from the war than the other religious communities, to stay in the country (see Chapter 11). Similar social and economic strategies have also been carried out, although with some difficulty, in Palestine, where a very high proportion of Christians have emigrated. As well as economic and social strategies, Christians need to revitalize their cultural role if they are to continue to contribute towards the societies they belong to. In this way, to various degrees and in various ways, they could help the growth of pluralist ideas and of dialogue with the rest of the world, as they have done with excellent results in their recent history (see Chapter 7). As in many cases Christians are the only non-Muslim autochthonous presence left in the Middle East, they represent a valuable and irreplaceable force for pluralism within Arab societies. If they were able to play a significant cultural, social, and political role, they would undoubtedly stimulate the development of societies open to pluralism and democratic values, adding their contribution to the efforts of those Muslims who pursue the same aims. In this light the present and future situation of Arab Christians depends on a whole range of factors. Most important of these are international polit-

ical events and the cultural debate in Arab Muslim societies about how to reconcile Islam to modernity. There are many intellectuals, politicians, and legal specialists of Muslim culture and with different ideological positions, who are actively trying to promote a modernization of Arab Muslim culture and of Islam. They are also proposing a new consideration of Islamic sources which would allow the acceptance of liberal ideas of democracy and human rights within Islam.*° If these efforts are intended to prevent Islamic culture and politics from moving towards fundamentalism, they are essential to the formulation of new criteria for citizenship within Muslim culture, which guarantee equal rights for all citizens and which value religious and cultural pluralism. Christians must also contribute actively to this cultural evolution of Middle Eastern societies by rediscovering their

difficult, but unique role, on account of their unusual identity as ‘Arab °° Fouad Zakariya, Laicité ou islamisme. Les arabes a Il’heure du choix (Paris: La Découverte, 1991); Muhammad Sa‘id al-Ashmawy, Islam and the Political Order (Washington Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 1994); Dibattito sull’ applicazione della shari‘a, Dossier Mondo Islamico 1 (Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1995); J Fratelli Musulmani e il dibattito sull’islam politico, Dossier Mondo Islamico 2 (Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1996); M. Talbi, ‘Religious Liberty: A Muslim Perspective’, in L. Swidler (ed.), Religious Liberty and Human Rights in Nations and Religions (New York: 1986), 175-88; Tareq Mitri, Religion, Law and Society: A Christian-Muslim Discussion (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1995); id., Religion

and Human Rights (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1996).

24 Andrea Pacini Christians’. Such an unusual identity distinguishes them both from the rest of the Christian world and from the Muslim majority, with whom they have shared the same society for centuries and with whom they must now face the task of creating new cultural bases for national integration in the different states. This urgent need to create a new basis for a multi-religious society and for a wider relationship between nation and State, seems to have given the Arab and Eastern Churches a sense of their special mission to the societies in which they live. This has taken two main forms: an increase in ecumenical activity, including frequent inter-denominational discussions on important social and political issues and the start of religious and cultural dialogue with Muslims (see Chapter 4). Both initiatives are extremely important. The first is bound to strengthen unity between the Churches and enhance their efforts to promote a new role for the Christian community in Middle Eastern society. With this in mind it is urgent that the Churches should recognize the need to collaborate as much as possible, to put aside old rivalries and fixed ideas of community, and to draw up common plans for their pastoral activity and their relationship with society and the States in which they live.°’ The start of religious and cultural dialogue with Islam, despite the difficulties it involves, is certainly very positive, as it increases both sides’ knowledge of each other, enriching each one. It also creates a link at the level of civil society, which could provide a basis for a new social and political integration, based on equal rights, within the different States.** In fact, the future of the Christian communities in the Middle East depends not only on the solution of specific political situations, such as the Palestinian and the Lebanese ques-

tion, but also on the more general evolution of Arab Muslim culture in relation to modern society. If this evolution is encouraged and supported by the various social, political, and cultural actors, then a new basis for national integration in the Middle East will be possible. This would have a beneficial effect on the ability of different religious groups to live together and many of the present problems affecting not only Christians, but Middle

Eastern societies as a whole, could be solved. 37 Jean Corbon, L’Eglise des Arabes (Paris: Cerf, 1977); Council of Eastern Catholic Patriarchs, Quatriéme Lettre Pastorale des Patriarches Catholiques d’ Orient: Le Mystére de l’Eglise, Bkerké, Lebanon, Christmas 1996. 38 The Catholic hierarchies insist on these ideas: see Council of Eastern Catholic Patriarchs,

Troisiéme Lettre Pastorale des Patriarches Catholiques da’ Orient, Ensemble devant Dieu pour le bien de la personne et de la societé: la coexistance entre musulmans et chrétiens dans le monde arabe, Christmas 1994; id., Deuxiéme Lettre Pastorale des Patriarches Catholiques d’ Orient, La présence chrétienne en Orient, Mission et Témoignage, Easter 1992.

i The Arab Christians: From the Eastern Question to the Recent Political Situation of the Minorities - JOSEPH MAILA 1. Preliminary Remarks

In the last few years we have seen a renewal of interest in the study of Arab Christianity, and such an interest was undoubtedly due to a large number of reasons, linked both to recent political events and to an increase in specialized academic research on the Middle East and its problems.

As far as recent events are concerned, a few of them have obviously cast Arab Christianity in a bad light. The first of these is the Lebanese War, a conflict with strong religious overtones. Since the early 1970s, atten-

tion has been drawn to the involvement of Lebanese Christians, mainly Maronites, grouped together in political parties or in militias, in a succession of clashes and acts of violence which were to mark the country for over fifteen years. Once the beacon of Arab Christianity and a place where Christians have traditionally held leading political positions, this country was to meet a tragic destiny, which was to have a considerable effect on the situation of Christians and their position within the national community. Similarly a lesser known war, in southern Sudan, is a fleeting reminder of the tragic fate met by the non-Arab Christian population of this Arab country. The emergence of Islam has also drawn attention to the new climate which has begun to form in several countries. More specifically, the harassment frequently suffered by the Egyptian Copts, particularly in Northern Egypt, underlines the difficult situation of this community, which has been an integral part of the country for almost two thousand years. Other causes for concern, the most important being the emigration of Christians from the Arab countries to Europe, the Americas, or Australia, raise serious questions about the future presence of Christians on Arab soil. The question of the status of Jerusalem, currently the subject of talks between Israel and the Palestinians, includes the problem of the Christian Palestinians in the city, whose number (now about 10,000) is continuing to fall.

26 Joseph Maila However, while highly topical events arouse periodic interest among the general public, academic interest in Arab Christians is more constant. Apart from purely religious studies on the organization and liturgical life of the Middle Eastern Churches, studies of Arab Christians focus on three main fields. The first of these is history, particularly ancient history, beginning from the birth of the Christian communities in the Near and Middle

East to their councils and schisms, but also the history of their relations with the West, beginning with their first contacts with the outside world, from the Capitulations to the twentieth century. A second branch of study examines the different Arab Christian communities from the point of view of their status; this includes their social status, within the field of the sociology of minorities, but especially their legal status,’ to which some authors are now trying to draw attention, representing Christians under threat of a return to the status of dhimmi.* The last field of study is the one which opened up at the beginning of this century in the wake of the creation of the Arab national States. In each newly created national State (except for

Lebanon), Christians were then called on, like their Muslim fellow citizens, to participate in a new state order, dominated by a Muslim majority. Studies in this field aim to identify the ‘strategy’ (this is the rather emphatic, exaggerated term for the study of the policies of minorities within

their State or environment) and the position of Arab Christians in relation to the objectives they are trying to achieve and to the restrictions they inevitably come up against. Researchers often give appraisals of this strategy, voicing frequently contradictory opinions about the best chances of Christians’ integration and participation, or alternatively, expressing pessimism about their future in the Muslim Arab world.’

From a quick glance at the academic literature we can see the areas opened up by the study of the Arab Christian communities. The historical approach looks at their identity: who are they? how are they organized?

what is their role? The study of their legal status examines the specific position of Arab Christians in society: are they active members of the | A. Fattal, Le statut légal des non-musulmans en pays d’Islam (Beirut: Imprimérie Catholique, 1958). 2 Bat. Ye’or, Les Chrétientés a’ Orient entre jihad et dhimmitude, VII-XX siécle (Paris: Cerf, 1991). 3 e.g. see Albert Hourani, Les Chrétiens d’ Orient (Paris: Peyronnet, 1955); Robert Brendon Betts, Christians in the Arab East, a Political Study (Athens: Lycabettus Press, 1975);

Ronald D. McLaurin, (ed.), The Political Role of Minority Groups in the Middle East (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1979); Laurent, Chabry and Annie Chabry, Politique et minorités au Proche-Orient: les raisons d’ une explosion ( Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1987); Mordechai Nisan, Minorities in the Middle East, A History of Struggle and Self Expression (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1991).

Geopolitical Dynamics of Arab Christians 27 whole of society or do they only act for their own society? In other words, are Arab Christians full members of the Arab East, of its geography and culture, or are they separate members, to be considered differently on account

of their religious status? Lastly, their political role shows the extent to which they are integrated, as well as their overall relationship with their environment, in terms of the extent to which they participate in national affairs. In a region of the world where the dominant religion provides the

basis for the allocation of opportunities of both political and symbolic importance, there may be discrepancies in the access of Christians to the political arena.

2. Preliminary Objections Although objectively speaking Arab Christianity seems to be a valid subject of study from the aspects we have mentioned, objections are sometimes raised as to the legitimacy of such studies. Not, of course, because of any doubt about the existence of Arab Christians, but because they are composed of so many different ethnic groups and are spread around a large number of different countries. There is therefore a risk of considering them as a single community with common interests, which acts as such.

The second objection, which has been raised several times, is that if there really is such a thing as Arab Christianity, meaning a number of Arabs belonging to the Christian religion, this affiliation ought to be a Strictly personal matter, as it concerns individual conscience. The religious beliefs of individuals should not have anything to do with a wider social or national definition of the existence of Arab Christians. Many Christians in the Middle East identify themselves solely as Arabs. The refusal to be seen in terms of religious denomination, the preference for an Arab identity as opposed to a religious one, a demand from the laity for the separation of religion, as a personal creed, from politics, as a nondiscriminatory area of public activity, are all reasons why the term ‘Christian’ should be restricted solely to the area of personal conscience. This secular current of thought considers that to pick out a sociological and analytical category of ‘Arab Christians’ from Arab identity would be both problematic, in terms of finding a valid basis for defining the category and dangerous, as it would sanction the confusion of religion with politics. What is more, it must be pointed out that the intellectuals of Christian origin who influenced the development of the Arab world or of their own nation or region, for instance thinkers in the late nineteenth century movement of Arab renewal, Nahda, never stressed the fact that they

28 Joseph Maila were Christians. On the contrary, to give a more recent and more political example, the Christian Palestinian leaders have never played on their religious affiliation. So why insist on singling out ‘Christian’ Arabs when we should only be talking about Arabs? These objections are not purely formal. They show the difficulty in defining a social entity which is distinguished solely on the basis of religious creed, as well as the need to consider the whole context of Eastern Christianity. If nothing else, a consideration of these objections will at least lead researchers to give more precise parameters to their field of study.

In answer to the first objection it could be said that Arab Christianity is not in fact a single entity and its plurality removes an implicit presumption that Eastern Christians possess the same aspirations and the same attitudes, just because they have the same faith. Arab Christians are different from each other. The fact that they all have one faith, manifested by a large number of denominations and rites, does not mean that they act as one body, or that they exist as one united community ignoring state boundaries. It is of course interesting to note that this type of unitary vision is expressed when the Church hierarchies, particularly those of the Catholic communities, meet to examine the overall situation of their Churches. By contrast it is never found in any circumstances in politics.

Although there are almost ten million Christians in the Arab East, they do not form political parties across nations and they have no political structures which unite them over different Arab territories. In other words they are politically loyal to the State to which they belong. Consequently affiliation to a community of faith does not necessarily lead to the formation of a specific cultural community. On the contrary, it is their affiliation to the Arab cultural community which gives Arab Christians a sense of their special identity as Christians within the Arab world. The fact of being Arabs is what makes them different in the eyes of the rest of the world, particularly the West, with whom they share the same faith. Their Christianity is what makes them different in the Arab world, with whom they share culture and destiny. Middle Eastern Christians are thus Arabs by

culture, Christians by faith, and citizens of separate States by political definition.

It must not be assumed, however, that all the Christian communities regard their Arab identity in the same way. Some identify with Arab culture more than others. The Orthodox communities for instance are the most ready to call themselves Arabs. On the other hand the Lebanese Maronite community has a difficult relationship with its Arab identity. The extent to which the different communities identify with Arab culture depends

on many factors: how long they have existed alongside Islam, how late

Geopolitical Dynamics of Arab Christians 29 their liturgical language was changed to Arabic script or to the Arabic language, how much contact they have had and especially how close their relations are with the West, as well as whether or not they have benefited from the West’s protection. For this reason even when Arab Christians place their religious identity before their Arab one, stressing their affiliation to Christianity or to a particular Church according to the circumstances,

it must be understood as just one way of reacting to and dealing with their environment. Yet this reaction confirms the three levels of identity (cultural, religious, and political) on which Arab Christians act. It simply establishes a different set of priorities, giving more importance to religious identity particularly in periods of crisis and self-reflection. The other objection, that the emphasis laid by certain Arabs on Christianity amounts to integrating religious belief into the definition of political citizenship, can only be answered by looking at the extent to which these States and the mentality of the people have developed. Although there is a political current, particularly among Christians, struggling for secularity and an end to communities based on religious affiliation, in some Arab countries (such as Lebanon), affiliation to a religious community is

taken into account, sometimes on an institutional level, in the formation of governments and the administration of the State. In other countries, (such as Egypt, Iraq, and Syria) there may be an unofficial requirement for the representation of Christians in politics and administration. In any case differentiation still exists on a social level, as individuals still recognize each other according to their religious identity. Although this identity is not the main factor that determines social status, it is nevertheless an important one when the distinction is not encouraged by Christians themselves. A religious sociology of Arab societies can therefore justifiably consider the existence of communities whose complex links with the State, with civil society, and with the other communities must be specified within each separate national context. This sociological approach to the communities does not mean that Arab society is reduced to a ‘mosaic’,

or an agglomerate of minorities. It simply recognizes that contemporary Arab societies are not national States built exclusively on links of citizenship. The persistence of divisions between religious communities is the clear sign of the limits of the ‘modern’ State and in a way, of its failure.“ The Arab national State, as everyone knows, has an official religion, Islam; its head of State is Muslim (except in Lebanon) and family law is * B. Ghalioun, The Community Question and the Problem of Minorities (in Arabic) (Beirut: Dar el Talia 1979); L. Chabry and A. Chabry, Politique et minorités au ProcheOrient, M. Nisan, Minorities in the Middle East.

30 Joseph Maila administered by religious courts or by jurisdictions which apply the law of the religious community. This observation does not mean that community links are permanent or in some way tremovable. Neither does it mean that plans to modernize Arab political society have been halted. It simply denotes awareness of the difficulties of the national State in facing the authoritarianism of Arab political societies, which penalizes the full participation of Christians as citizens in the life of the nation. Likewise the recent threats to the already precarious status of Arab Christians posed by attempts at Islamization and the application of Muslim law, the shari‘a, should also be pointed out. These limitations of Arab society, which do not allow the religious and ethnic minorities to benefit from the rights due to them as citizens, may paradoxically lead the minority communities to negotiate with the democratic elements of civil society for a wider participation, on a more or less equal level, in political life.” We must hope at least that the cautious attempts at democratization within the Arab world will lead to this. In the following pages I will deal with the origin of the Arab Christian communities and the changes they have undergone throughout history. I will start by showing the important stages in their evolution, from the time of the Empires (Byzantine, Muslim, and Ottoman) to the birth of the modern States. In the process I will consider the “Eastern question’, which marks the beginning of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the Strategies of the Western powers towards Arab Christians in the Empire. Lastly I shall examine the geopolitical situation of the Arab Christian minor-

ities within the individual states created after the First World War. 3. The Age of Disputed Identity (the Eastern Roman Empire)

When the Eastern Christian Churches formed, in the wake of the missionary campaigns which passed through the region of the Middle East after the death of Christ, they established themselves as distinct geopolitical centres. Their theological disputes, which characterized Eastern Christianity, actually portray the complex geography of interests and influences which grew up in the region. From the third century to the seventh, the date of the Arab conquest, Christianity dominated a region extending from Egypt to Mesopotamia

1994). |

5 For an exploration and a pluralist consideration of the problem of the minorities and ethnic groups, see Ibrahim, Sa‘d Eddine, Humim al-aqalliyyat fi !-watan al-‘arabi [The concerns of the minorities in the Arab Homeland] (Cairo: Ibn Khalditin Study Center,

Geopolitical Dynamics of Arab Christians 31 in the East, including Palestine, Syria, and Western Asia. To the South, in Arabia, Christianity spread among a small number of Arab tribes. Three Patriarchates dominated Eastern Christianity: Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople, which recognized each other in communion with Rome. After the split of the Roman Empire in 395, Constantinople became the most important Patriarchate. The councils of Nicaea (325), Constantinople (381), of Ephesus (431), and of Chalcedon (451), which established Christian dogma, were held under the authority of the Roman Emperor. However, the last two councils were to cause the separation of the Eastern Churches. The decisions of the Ephesian Council, which condemned Nestorius, and those of the Chalcedon Council, sparked the reaction both of the Churches of the Sassanid Empire and of the Monophysites. This marked the beginning of Constantinople’s persecution of the Monophysites. The theological disputes were a thin veil for cultural clashes (between Greeks, Copts, and Syro-Arameans), as well as for the rivalry and an- tagonism between Alexandria and Constantinople, thus mainly between Egyptians and Greeks. Antioch was divided into two camps on each side

of the argument. From the second half of the fifth century the Chalcedonian Churches split from the non-Chalcedonian Churches (Coptic, Jacobite, and Armenian), a division which was to sour the climate of Eastem Christianity. —

In Alexandria as in Antioch (whose hierarchy sided with Constantinople) Monophysitism became the national ideology and expressed the rejection of Constantinople’s influence. It became a fierce fight between the Emperor, who had to apply the decisions of the Council, and the southem provinces of his empire. The Emperor’s persecution of the Monophysites gave an indirect advantage to the Muslim conquest. When the Muslim armies invaded Egypt, Syria, and later Persia (where the Nestorlans were exposed to Sassanid oppression), the people welcomed them as liberators.

4. The Age of Suppressed Identity (the Muslim Empires)

The Arab conquest changed the situation of the Eastern Christians of Syria, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. By escaping the authority of Byzantine power and coming under Muslim rule, they acquired a different status. From subjects in conflict with the Eastern Roman Empire (except the Nestorians of Persia), they became communities tolerated by the Omayyad (661-750) and later the Abbasid (750-1258) Muslim Empires. Christians

32 | Joseph Maila acquired the status of dhimmi, meaning individuals belonging to the category of ‘Peoples of the Book’, as specified in the Koran, who benefit from the physical protection of the Muslims. Under this new status Islam allowed Christians to practise their religion freely and to engage in enterprises. They were also given protection of their lives and possessions. However, they did not take part in the government of the city and had to pay a per capita tax (jizya) and a land tax (khardj). In some cases they continued to be subjected to humiliations which were indicative of their inferior position in society.

At the time of the Muslim Empires Christians seem to have benefited from a relatively privileged status. They belonged to a community (ta@’ifa) which was recognized by the central power. They were sometimes allowed to be administrative officials of the State, as in the Omayyad era.

They were actively involved in the translation of Greek works and in the spread of knowledge during the Abbasid era. They were scribes, philosophers, physicians, or poets. Their political situation remained uncertain and precarious. Some of them experienced difficult periods, as in Egypt at the beginning of the Fatimid era (969-1171) or the Mameluke era (1250-1516), or during the Crusades. During both the Omayyad and Abbasid caliphates, a vast number of Christians were subjected to a strong Arab influence. Initially this influence was imposed most heavily on the Church hierarchies, but gradually it extended to the people too. Their liturgies soon followed the same fate. Coptic sermons were in Arabic from the eleventh century; those of the Melkites and the Syrian Jacobites from the tenth century. In the Omayyad era the Syrian Jacobites played an essential role in translating Greek or Syriac manuscripts into Arabic. At the dawning of the Ottoman Empire, Christians were therefore already integrated into the Islamic world. They

had a different religion, of course, but the same language (except for a few communities such as the Maronites, who underwent Arab influences later). Other Christians, who descended from the Arab tribes of the Northern part of the Arab peninsula, were ethnically Arabs. From this period on, religious affiliation was to determine the social identity and political status of all of them for a long time to come.

5. The Age of Organized Identity (millet) The fall of Constantinople (1453) and the subsequent rise of the Ottoman Empire, saw an important change in the status of Christians. Not that there

Geopolitical Dynamics of Arab Christians 33 was any radical change in the laws regarding Arab Christians, but the communities were increasingly institutionalized. The religious or ethnic groups of the Empire were organized by then

into millets, or ‘nations’. The Greek (Orthodox) millet, headed by the Patriarch of Constantinople, restored to his position of power, and later the Jewish and the Armenian millets, formed the nations of the Ottoman Empire. Together with the Muslims they made up the multinational State,

based on the religious and national divides of its people, which was to become the Ottoman Empire. The millets did not all have the same social status of course, as the Sunnites were entitled to a position of superiority at the heart of the State. The creation of the millets gave communities a wide autonomy to run their own civil, marital, and financial affairs, as well as to organize both the life and the properties of the community.

The importance of the millet as a legal structure must not be overestimated.® Clearly the millet did not arise from a conscious effort by the Ottoman administration, but from the need to deal with communities or tawd@ if (plural of ta’ifa) which, in the case of Christians, designated a strongly united social group linked to a Church and its representatives. The Ottomans had to converse with these groups to gain their loyalty and to guarantee payment of taxes. The Church authority seemed to be the natural representative of these communities, especially as they had had no figure of purely political authority since the Ottoman conquest. The millet system, which was to form the unique organizational framework of the Ottoman Empire, was only put into effect at a late stage. However, at least two aspects of this system were to make it important in the construction of society. Firstly, the division of the population into millets was to differentiate among the peoples of the Empire according to certain ‘nationalities’, which became fixed. [t mattered little whether these divisions corresponded to real distinctions (the Christians of Mount Lebanon were initially put in the same category as Croats and Hungarians under the ‘Armenian Gregorian Orthodox’ millet). Neither did it matter whether or not they applied to the whole population (some communities, such as the Shiites, had no millet). What seems to be important is the idea of dividing society up into groups. This idea was in fact to become an all-encompassing rule: only individuals who belonged to an identified and recognized group could be recognized. © On this point see Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. The Functioning of a Plural Society, 2 vols. (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982).

34 Joseph Maila Secondly, and this is undoubtedly an important aspect, other countries’ perception of the Ottoman Empire as an empire of millets eventually accen- _ tuated this type of division. When the European States insisted on obtain-

ing privileged status for their citizens living in the Empire or for their partners in trade, they created the need for a category, and in some senses a millet, of non-Ottoman residents of the Empire. This was to give rise to the Capitulations.’

6. Europe and the Eastern Question

To understand how Western influence increasingly spread into ‘ArabOttoman’ territory, we must undoubtedly start from the Capitulations. The first Capitulations were treaties drawn up between a Western power and the Ottoman Empire, according to which, residents of the Empire from the Western State in question were granted certain trade advantages,

various forms of legal and jurisdictional protection, as well as the protection of certain freedoms, including religious freedom. Such measures were in fact a revocation of Ottoman common law. The first occasion on which they were introduced was the signing of an agreement with the Republic of Venice, which became recognized as the protector of Franciscans in the Holy Land. They were to become very common in relations with France from 1535 onwards and extended to other European powers too.®

In the wake of the Capitulations, France opened consulates in Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and later in Mesopotamia. In 1604 the Capitulations with France concerned the Holy Places and the protection of monks who served there, as well as French guardianship of the goods and property of the Catholic monks in Palestine. The Capitulations were renewed

by the different regimes which followed in France and were also confirmed by the Treaty of Berlin (1878). At the same time, the Capitulations

began to be influenced by strong supremacist tendencies, which took them out of their specific technical, and legal context, and gave them a stronger political connotation. Traders, missionaries, Western citizens living in the Empire, and soon Eastern Christians too, all found themselves ’ Frederick William Hasluck, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929). 8 Herman Tiichle, Cornélius Bouman, and Jacques Le Brun, Nouvelle histoire de I’ Eglise, 3 (Paris: Seuil, 1968); B. Homsy, Les Capitulations et la protection des Chrétiens au ProcheOrient au XVI, XVII, XVIII siécles (Harissa, 1956); R. Mohanna Haddad, Syrian Christians in Muslim Society. An Interpretation (Princeton, 1970).

Geopolitical Dynamics of Arab Christians 35 placed under the protection of the French kings. Gradually a tradition of French protection of Eastern Christians was formed. King Louis XIV and King Louis XV of France were declared the protectors of all Roman Catholic clergy on Ottoman territory. In the middle of the eighteenth century France

was recognized by the Holy See and by the European powers as the protector of Christians affiliated to Rome. In so many words, the Capitulations granted to France had come to mean ‘the protection of Christians of the Ottoman Empire’.’ Tsarist Russia had equally supremacist tendencies. However, unlike France the influence she was seeking to acquire in the East was primarily military. The Russian dream was to make ancient Byzantium the capital of an Orthodox vassal State of Russia. Russian troops launched into attack on the Crimea, where they settled (1711), and then annexed it (1784).

Elsewhere, from the Caucasus to the Balkans that is, they fought against the Turks. An important aim was achieved in 1774 when, as victors over

the Ottomans after a six-year war, the Russians obtained recognition as protectors of Christians. Article 16 of the treaty of Ktictik Qainarge (1774) made the Russian tsar the guarantor of commitments undertaken by the Sultan for the protection of the Christians of the Empire. The door was opened to Russian claims to take on the role of protectors of Ortho-

dox Christians. In 1853 Nicholas I tried to obtain a protectorate over the Orthodox Christians of the Empire through a bilateral treaty signed with the Sultan. The Ottomans refused immediately. Europe also rose in defence against Russia’s claims, however. The French and the British were worried by the Russian victories over the Ottoman Empire, by the annexation of part of Armenia (1828), and by her control of the Bosphorus.

From then on they tried to thwart her plans, beginning with the Paris Conference of 1856, at which Russia temporarily renounced her claim to the protectorate of the Orthodox. In 1878 however, at the signing of St Stephen’s treaty following a victorious war in the Balkans, the Russians obtained their much-desired protectorate from the Sultan. Again under French and British pressure they abandoned their ambitions in Berlin in 1878. From this moment up to the victory of Bolshevism, the tsars dedicated their efforts to the situation of the Greek Orthodox communities in the Ottoman Empire and showed particular interest in the city of Jerusalem. Great Britain, unlike the Russians and French, had no Christian ‘protégés’ to speak of. Her ‘Arab policy’ consisted of counteracting French ” Jean-Pierre Valognes, Vie et mort des Chrétiens d’ Orient. Des origines a nos jours (Paris: Fayard, 1994).

36 Joseph Maila influence, whether in Egypt, the Lebanese Mountains, or in Syria. In Egypt

the British set about preventing Paris’s influence on Muhammad ‘Ali and his son Ibrahim Pasha. London took over in Egypt as conqueror in 1882. In Syria she forced Ibrahim Pasha’s troops, supported by France, to retreat, to save Turkey from defeat. During the mountain massacres of 1840 and 1860 in Mount Lebanon, she pitched the Druze against the Maronites, who were protected by France. Transformed into political instruments and ‘clientele’, the Christians of the Arab world became cards to play in the contest between the European powers. The ultimate aim of the West’s strategy was to dismember the Ottoman Empire.

7. The Western Missions and their Consequences

During the Capitulations it was the Western religious missions which benefited from extensive protection. It was then that the Christian communities of the East made lasting contact with the Western missionary orders and the autocephalous Churches of the East were subjected to the slow but corrosive influence of Latin culture. Apart from the interlude of the Crusades, the Christian communities on either shore of the Mediterranean knew very little about each other. While the Crusades saw the start of relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Maronites, they nevertheless left bitter memories, particularly among the Orientals, after the plunder of Constantinople in 1204. Apart from the long-standing presence of the Franciscan order, which had been maintained there since the Crusades in the ‘Holy Land’, Catholic missions only returned to the East in the seventeenth century. The Capuchins arrived in Aleppo, in Syria, in 1625, and later on the Lebanese coast and in Iraq. The Jesuits settled in Istanbul in 1609, and later in Syria, Beirut, and Cairo. The Carmelites arrived in Aleppo in 1626; the Dominicans settled in Mosul in 1750, and the Lazarists took over from the Jesuits when their order was dissolved in 1773. Latin influence was making its presence felt, with two consequences. The first consequence was the creation of an extremely dense network of schools, charitable organizations, and centres of Latin influence. The provinces of the Ottoman Empire were to become enmeshed by a web of different kinds of missionary institutions. Not all the Eastern communities were to look on this fact with the same favour, if with any favour at all. The Maronites, affiliated to Rome, welcomed the various Western missions. The Maronite Patriarchate in Antioch had had relations with Rome

Geopolitical Dynamics of Arab Christians 37 since the sixteenth century. The foundation of a Maronite college in Rome

(1584) had enabled useful exchanges and the training of Maronite prelates in the Vatican. In the seventeenth century, the relations with Florence and Tuscany entered into by Emir Fakhreddin, and the relations with the Holy See and with France which followed, brought Mount Lebanon into very close contact with the modern Western world. The Mount Lebanon Synod (1736), called by the Roman Church, decided to restructure and reorganize the Maronite Church and in a sense to ‘Romanize’ it.’° This was simply the beginning of the modernization of the Maronite Church in theory, as the decisions of the synod were slow to be carried out. The reaction of the autocephalous Coptic Church couldn’t have been more different from the Maronites’. Pressure from Catholic (Jesuit or Franciscan) or Protestant missionaries on Coptic Christians to ‘convert’ led to hostile reactions towards the missionaries. From 1730 the Coptic Church hierarchy was highly alarmed by the influence of the West, particularly of the Roman Church. It even turned to the Mameluke Muslim authorities for protection, before retaliating itself by obstructing conversions and taking on the task of creating its own network of schools.

The second consequence was the division of some of the Eastern Churches under the influence of Rome. This is how the Uniate Churches —Eastern Churches reunited with Rome'!—were gradually born. In 1662 the Syrian Catholic Church was founded. In 1672 the Chaldean Patriarch,

Joseph II, was reinstated; his Church was created in 1553 from the Nestorian Church. He was Patriarch of Babylon and the Chaldean nation. The Melkite Catholic Church of Antioch (Greek Catholic) was founded in 1724, and the Armenian Catholic Church in 1742. Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century, a Coptic Catholic community was established. To this list we can add the Maronite Church, whose links with Rome are much older. In the wake of this rising tide of Western influence, two other ‘Eastern’ communities were formed. In 1847 the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem was formed. The Vatican,

Supported by France, was anxious to assert its rights to custody of the Holy Places. This right was also being contended by the Russians, French,

British, and Prussians (from 1842 there was an Anglo-Prussian Episcopate in Jerusalem) through the medium of the local communities. In a ferman of 1852 the Ottoman Sultan divided custody among the Greek, Roman Catholic, and Armenian Churches. The Treaty of Berlin (1878) then '0 Tbid. 80.

'! See Joseph Hajjar, Les Chrétiens uniates du Proche-Orient (Paris: Seuil, 1962).

38 Joseph Maila ratified this situation, which has lasted until today. A Roman Catholic com-

munity of Eastern Christians gradually formed around the Latin (Roman Catholic) Patriarchate of Jerusalem. For Rome the time for Romanizing the Eastern communities was past. Very soon, in 1894, Leo XIII was to prohibit proselytizing among members of the Eastern Churches separated from Rome. Another intellectual and religious source of influence appeared in the Middle East. Under the auspices of Britain, and later of Prussia, Protestant missionaries settled there. The American Board for Foreign Missions (Congregational) arrived first in 1821, followed by the Presbyterian Board in 1870. Their influence spread in Syria, Turkey, and Beirut, drawing protest from both the Eastern Patriarchs (the Ottoman government banned the import of Bibles in 1824) and the Muslims. Schools were established, and the first foundations were laid for an American university, which later became the American University of Beirut. Saint-Joseph’s University, the Jesuit university in Beirut, was quick to counteract it. 8. The Outcome of the Eastern Question The Eastern question, which was supposed to lead to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, thus ended favourably for the Western powers. After having fought the Empire, imposed their influence on it, and seized its provinces of North

Africa, Libya, and Egypt, they emerged as the victors of the First World War. The Western powers were henceforth the heirs of the Ottoman Empire. The fate of the Eastern provinces of the Empire, which were placed under mandate by the Society of Nations,'* was decided principally by the French and the British. Almost 150 years passed, from the Kiiciik Qainarge Treaty

in 1774 to the Mudros armistice, signed on 30 October 1918, before the ‘new world order’ was established. During those 150 years Arab Christians emerged into a new world: they were no longer part of the Empire but belonged to new nation States. Before looking at this new situation, we shall try to assess the results of Western influence on Arab Christians in the Middle East. One advantage gained by the Arab Christians after 150 years was the change in their status, on paper at least. Towards the middle of the nineteenth century the Eastern question gave rise to constant pressure from the European powers on the Sultan to declare the equality of all the citizens of the Empire. Those who benefited most from this declaration were non-Muslims, 12 Matthew Smith Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774-1923 (London: Macmillan, 1966).

Geopolitical Dynamics of Arab Christians 39 to whom equal rights were granted on two occasions (in the Khatt-1 sherif of Giilkhaneh in 1839, and in the Khatt-i humdayun of 1856). This formal recognition of equal civil rights for Muslims and non-Muslims was

obtained in spite of the opposition from followers of Islam, who were outraged by such an idea in an empire whose Sultan was also Caliph of the Muslims. Resistance also came from high-ranking Christians, who faced losing the privileges they enjoyed within the structure of the millet. How-

ever, the millet system did not in fact disappear. Article 2 of the Khatt-i humdyiin preserved the rights obtained within the millet, as a renewed guarantee to the minorities (sic). The millet only disappeared at the end of the Ottoman Empire. In the meantime Arab Christians became used to the idea of freedom and equality, which they continued to claim through the Nahda movement. The second fruitful result of the Eastern question for Arab Christians was their modernization. Through contact with the West, with missionary teachers, with Western universities, diplomats, and traders too, Arab Christians were more exposed to modern education and technology than the rest of the population. Their role as cultural intermediaries, their traditional presence in public administration, and their leading position in trade and the professions were reinforced, especially in the future mandates of Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine. Encouraged by their newly acquired education and their intellectual achievements, it was surely natural in these circumstances that Christians should become promoters of reform in the Middle East. Nahda, the literary movement for the renewal of ideas and of the Arabic language, was the field for debate on fundamental issues: nationalism, Arab identity, women’s rights, the importance of progress, and the need to promote a scientific way of thinking among Arabs. In all these areas the reform movement was largely made up of Christian intellectuals (Yazigi, Boustani, Antoun, Chemayyel, and others). However these ‘positive’ aspects of the outcome of the Eastern question should not mislead us. In many cases, there was another side of the coin.

First of all we must not forget that the West used Christians as pawns in their disputes over supremacy in the Middle East. The bloody events in Mount Lebanon and the massacres of the Armenians, both at the end of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century, were a result of this. The Armenians found themselves in the crossfire of tsarist Russia against the Ottoman Empire. The annexation of Armenia after the war between Russia and Turkey from 1877 to 1878 was a heavy blow for the Ottoman Empire. The Russians had declared they were going to war

40 Joseph Maila to defend the Christians of Armenia. In 1894 the latter were massacred, almost like an omen of the slaughter of May 1915. Several other events during the Eastern question also aroused bitterness among Christians. The Orthodox communities began to distrust the Catholic ones, and both suspected the Protestant communities of being spokesmen for new influ-

ences from the West.

There seems very little doubt that it was the European States’ assertion of power, which began to be felt in the Middle East at the end of the nineteenth century, which gave rise to a new plan for the region, the Zionist

plan. We should not need reminding that, had the West not defeated the Ottoman Empire in 1918, the State of Israel would never have been born. It was a promise made by Lord Balfour on 2 November 1917, on behalf of Her Majesty’s government, which eventually allowed the creation of the State of Israel.

The last point to note is the creation of an expectation of protection among the Christian minorities. The constant concern shown by the European consuls for the Christian minorities, attested in numerous diplomatic documents, as well as the number of times they intervened on their behalf at the Sublime Porte, turned them into political patrons of Europe, and made them extremely dependent psychologically on the West. From minorities within the Empire, Christians became children of the West. France’s ‘humanitarian intervention’, as it was termed in international law at that time, on behalf of the Christians of Mount Lebanon, who were massacred by the Druze in 1860, gave credit to the idea that Christians could always count on physical protection from outside. The troops sent by Napoleon III, followed by the French mandate a few decades

later, as well as the arrival of American marines on the shores of Beirut in 1958, allowed Lebanese Christians to go on believing for a long time that the West would intervene to help them. Many aspects of their strategy during the war starting in 1975 were based on the idea that the West would intervene as the crisis became international. The outcome of the events in Lebanon helped to remove this illusion. The Eastern question thus had mixed results for Arab Christians. At the dramatic close of the Ottoman Empire the West, as ‘protector’ of the Christians, imposed its will on the East. The Ottoman Empire’s attempts at reform did not succeed. Middle Eastern society was unable to modermnize itself, so the West imposed its own ideas and structures, as well as the form of the States which were created. The fall of communism in the Soviet Union can give us an idea of what happened when the Ottoman Empire collapsed. The desire for perestroika recalls the Ottoman policy of tanzimat (restructuring). It simply accelerated the end of the Soviet Union

Geopolitical Dynamics of Arab Christians 4] and opened the way to disorder. All this confirms Tocqueville’s statement that the worst is to be feared from a weak government which has decided to reform itself. But in the case of the Ottoman Empire there were powers who could put the pieces of the ‘collapsed Empire’ together again, in whatever way suited them.

9. Arab Christian Communities and their Strategies in the Individual States This is not the place to recount the details of the historical events which led to the formation of national States in the Middle East under the auspices of France and Great Britain, from the Sykes—Picot agreement (1916) to the Sévres treaty (1920) or the Lausanne treaty (1923)."° In these newly created States, as well as in Egypt, a much older State, Arab Christians experienced different situations. We can divide them into four different national patterns, which emerged after the First World War. First of all there were Arab Christians living within an ancient national structure, like the Copts in Egypt. Their Church is a national Church and has always been present in the history of the country. That is why the Copts, although a minority, identify with their State. Despite this, however, they participate very little in the State, a situation they are continuously trying to reverse.

The second situation is the opposite of the first. It concerns the Maronites, a Christian community which obtained its own State in 1920, through the help of France and the mobilization of the community, led by its Patriarch. It must be said that the intervention of the European powers in 1860 and the semi-autonomous status obtained in 1864 paved the way for Lebanese independence. In 1920 the Maronites succeeded in exerting the necessary pressure on Clémenceau, at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, to obtain acceptance of the idea of a greater Lebanon. Together

with other Christians, the Maronites formed the majority in this State. As the national Church, the Maronite Church and its followers identified with the State of Lebanon and played a dominant role in its political life. All the subsequent problems were to arise from the loss of their position as the ethnic majority after a war which was disastrous for this commun-

ity. Hence the present danger of a loss of identification with the State, and consequently, of a lack of their participation in it. It is a modern-day situation of ihbdt (disillusionment). '> About this matter see Georges Corm, L’Europe et I’ Orient (Paris: La Découverte, 1989).

42 Joseph Maila The third situation is that of Christian communities which are divided among different States, within which they are all minorities (the Greek Orthodox, the Melkites, the Chaldeans). Although the élite and leading members of some of these communities campaigned in 1920 for the creation of a great Arab State, under the auspices of the Emir Faysal (in place of the territorial divisions which were eventually imposed by the Western States), their integration into the new States is unquestionable, as is their loyalty. At the beginning of the century however, a sense of frustration

still remained over the setback to the plan for Arab unity. This is the reason why the expression of their national loyalties, particularly those of Orthodox Christians, oscillates between siding with local power (or with

the local community in power) and trying to look beyond the national State towards a larger Arab community, the umma. The fourth situation is one which must be mentioned, both for the sake of historical accuracy and remembrance. Like the case of the Armenians,

it concerns a State within which a minority was promised privileged status. This is what could have happened to the Assyrian ‘religious and national’ minority. These Christians from Kurdistan, who lived in an area

between Mosul and Hakkiari and still used their own language, were promised a State by the British. Later, the Treaty of Sevres added a vague protection to the section regarding the minorities (Article 62, as well as 141, 145, 147). In 1933 a large number of them were massacred and over sixty of their villages were raised to the ground. These different patterns of integration of Arab Christians have given rise to different political approaches. An examination of them reveals a phenomenology of the different approaches rather than real strategies.

In the first situation the Copts were induced to negotiate the way in which they were to participate in the life of the nation. There is no question about their adhesion to the State. They participated in the struggle

for national independence and were actively involved in the political parties, especially Wafd. Historical figures such as Makram Obeid, who placed Egyptian patriotism before religious loyalties, had great influence. During the period of the monarchy and between the two wars the Copts’ representation in parliament was guaranteed through elections. The period of Nasser’s presidency marked a sharp reduction in the Copts’ presence in politics. President Nasser inaugurated a constitutional practice of nominating Christian members of parliament to compensate for their absence. This approach is a very good example of the subordination of ‘members of parliament’ to executive power, to whom they owe their mandate! The rising dominance of Islam during President Sadat’s term of office weakened the Copts, who were easy targets for the Muslims’

Geopolitical Dynamics of Arab Christians 43 revenge. The reaction of Coptic Church leaders to the policy of the State,

as well as to its negligence and to the fact that it had openly favoured the radical Muslim groups, opposing the communist or left-wing groups, brought Patriarch Sheniida’s arrest and his forced internment in a monastery. At the same time calls began to be heard within the community

for a stronger stance over the situation the Copts found themselves in. A powerful movement was set up among Coptic emigrants, particularly in North America, to criticize the Egyptian government and denigrate its image abroad. It was this which gave rise to the violent reaction from the government inside the country. Nonetheless the situation of the Copts, which contained hidden discriminations, as well as clear obstacles to equal access to posts of public responsibility (in high officialdom, in the army, and in higher education), left a continued feeling of discontent and did nothing towards achieving the national consensus which the Copts never tire of proclaiming their support for.

In the second scenario, that of Lebanon, the political approach of Christians, especially of the Maronites, has been one of self-assertion and

prominence. Here participation in political life has undoubtedly been achieved, unlike all the other cases in the Arab world. The same applies to equal rights within the system of communities and the distribution of power. Although the Lebanese system based on religious communities has been widely discredited and held responsible for all Lebanon’s troubles,

it is the only one in the Arab world within which a genuine democracy has been created. The Maronite community never took advantage of the positions it held within the Lebanese State (in particular the presidency or the command of the army) to impose a sectarian dictatorship, like the Sunnites in Iraq or the Alevites in Syria. The aim of the Christians was always to stay close to the centre of power in order to obtain institutional guarantees for their political freedom, as well as for the freedom of society as a whole. Their mistake was in not allowing greater participation for a growing community like the Shiites and in neglecting the need to secularize certain aspects of the political system. Their stubborn defence of Lebanese independence led them, through lack of foresight, to follow a dangerous policy of alliance with Israel. Looking at it now purely from the point of view of the Maronite community, their resort to a State not yet accepted by the Middle Eastern world, which aroused unanimous Arab hostility towards it and provided a continuous source for political action

in the surrounding autocratic States, seriously damaged the image and the overall strategy of the Lebanese Christians, especially the Maronites of the Lebanese Front. Having chosen a policy which set the rest of the Arab world against them, the Christians found themselves short of allies.

Ad Joseph Maila Europe was powerless in the Middle East, the USA was not interested in the Lebanese problem, except indirectly, and Syria was just waiting for an opportunity to take control in Lebanon. Thus the war between Christian factions of 1989-90 began to underline an overall failure brought about by pressures which were too heavy for such a small country, by a hostile environment in the surrounding area, but also by the irrational behaviour of those who had aimed to protect the independence of their country.

In the third scenario a number of different political approaches can be seen. For the Christian minority scattered among small communities, they range from the need to stay close to power to guarantee their protection (in Jordan), to the whole-hearted, patriotic involvement in a struggle for national freedom (Palestine), or a modest participation in power together with other minorities (Syria, Iraq). This scenario must also include the approach which today leads Christians to join pan-Arab parties or to participate in the administration of power in the present-day Ba‘thist regimes,

and which in the past led them to participate in the national coalition governments (in the newly independent State of Syria, for example). For these Christians the ideal of integration lies in secular nationalism. As a minority whose role has become redundant, they are trying to find a new position for themselves in society, a position defined by secular criteria and no longer by sectarian criteria.

| Conclusions | It is difficult to say which of the two models of participation in political life (one based on religious affiliation, the other on a professed ‘secular’ approach) the minorities tend to follow today. Undoubtedly they follow neither of the two, given the current climate of religious tension and strained

identities. There is no sign of the second model and the first deliberately and increasingly accentuates their condition as minorities. So what model can be proposed for the future of Arab Christians? Before answering, insofar as it is possible to answer this question, we must of course point out the present condition of ‘Arab Christians’. Their condition 1s mainly characterized by a gradual erosion of their numbers. More than by the fear of Islamic fundamentalism, that, despite the way it is presented, it is also a threat to Muslims—perhaps an even greater one —the most severe problems are raised by the perceivable reduction of the numbers of Arab Christians. It is difficult to give precise reasons for

Geopolitical Dynamics of Arab Christians 45 this reduction. Experts talk of a population ‘eclipse’,'* other researchers are already reporting a certain death.'? Should the less pessimistic theory become a reality one day, there would have to be a sufficient number of Arab Christians to allow them to play a leading role and to justify attributing them with a ‘strategy’. In this case, what general problems would the study of Arab Christianity present? First of all we must accept the fact that the paradoxical nature of the Christian communities in the heart of the Arab world 1s unlikely to change and we must act accordingly. For a long time to come these communities will continue to have a dual nature. In their native land they are both religious groups, as they bring together members of the same faith and rite, and national groups, as these members are also citizens struggling for full participation in political life. They are also integrated communities, as far as the world of work, production, and civil society is concerned, while remaining excluded and discriminated against either in the law or in matters of symbolic importance. Lastly, they are communities which help to build the nation when they act as open groups, ready to participate with others, and communities which help to destroy it when they are gripped by fear and fall back on a religious or sectarian identity to replace a precarious national one. While, unfortunately, Arab identity automatically means a Muslim identity (Arab therefore Muslim)'® in the eyes of public opinion and some-

times even of Arab leaders or of Islam itself, the identity of Arab Christians is transversal (they are Arabs and Christians). It constantly clashes with its much greater rival, Islam, and has difficulty in establishing a balanced relationship with its other counterpart, the West. This paradoxical nature of the ‘Arab-Christian situation’ introduces a second aspect of the problem: the basic complexity of the Arab Christian community, as of any other community. The traditional view of the Christian communities as compact, social groups based on religious identity, deciding and acting as ‘one man’ within the context of society or the state, must really be abandoned. Like the Ottoman millet, the Arab Christian communities are not a caste. To represent them as a united mass following one patriarch or pastor would merely create a myth. On the contrary they are stratified entities which have been shaped by a large number of different people and by contradictory strategies. They are dynamic entities '* See Youssef Courbage and Philippe Fargues, Chrétiens et Juifs dans I’ Islam arabe et turc (Paris: Fayard, 1992). 'S J.-P. Valognes, Vie et mort des Chrétiens d’ Orient. ‘© Cf. the question asked by Col. Qadhafi in August 1990: ‘How can you be Arab and Christian?’

46 Joseph Maila which serve as a framework for action or as a symbolic landmark for a large number of different people. In this respect the concept of an ‘island community’ should be replaced with that of a ‘matrix community’. Far from being a solid group moving as a single pawn on the social chessboard, to which we can attribute one voice (‘the Lebanese Christians think

... 3 ‘the Copts believe that...’; ‘the Syrian Orthodox act in such and such a way’), we must think of the communities like a matrix, composed of institutions, associations, values, and symbolic landmarks, all throwing out, like a kaleidoscope, different attitudes, approaches, and plans of action, both individual and collective, of a large number of people. There are thus different social and political tendencies, as well as numerous different methods of compromise, negotiation, or conflict within a national context, which is itself also undergoing construction. The Christian communities are therefore the architects of their own future. They acquire an identity and a role by interacting with the other forces in their society, in an Arab State which is also searching for an identity and a role. Here we come to the third aspect of the problem. Although it is quite legitimate to talk of ‘strategies’ or policies of the minorities, we should undoubtedly make this approach more relative, by considering the practical attitudes of Arab Christians towards human relationships, which have an age-old ‘wisdom’. The attitudes of the community leaders, including unfortunately the sometimes excessive ones, often spring from behaviour learned from others and copied. It must be recognized that the twentieth century, a century of hard trials for the Eastern and Arab Christian communities, has witnessed the birth of new obstacles, deriving from a hardening of Islam. The long awaited modernization of Muslim thought and practice, especially in politics, along the lines of Muhammad Abduh, seems to have turned into a fundamentalist reworking of a plan for the Muslim City, where hakimiyya, shard, and dhimma, if not even the wildyat alfaqih, are part of the agenda. In any case, although Arab Christians may take the threat that militant Islam poses to them seriously, nothing prevents them, as Arabs above all, from considering Islamic fundamental-

ism less as a manifestation of aggression and more as an ideology of resentment, a form of protest against a sense of ill-being in our century. In this respect Islam and Christianity are perhaps closer than they think, as both seek a solution to the problems involved in adapting to our times. Hence, rather than talking in terms of geopolitics or strategies, Arab Christians should commit themselves to reconciliation and responsibility. Such an ethic, based on wisdom, discernment, remembrance, and

an insistence on dialogue, tolerance, and mutual respect, seems like a durable, though temporary moral position. While it may be impossible to

Geopolitical Dynamics of Arab Christians 47 guarantee the future, this temporary moral stance can at least assure the present. As for the future, only the achievement of genuine national citizenship will be able to solve the current dilemmas facing the Christian minorities. In the meantime we can still suppose that, even in the worst possible event, there is a future for the Christian minorities, since they play a fairly important role within their society. Yet quite apart from this diversion which hedges the problem, why should a minority have to ‘earn’ its recognition? Equal rights and full citizenship should be the natural results of integration, but these conditions have not yet been obtained. It is therefore a hard task to write a sociology of Arab Christians. Innumerable factors, from the demographic to the spiritual, must be taken into account, to the point where it becomes a sociology of the uncertain, just like the subject of its study.

2

The Arab Christians of the Middle East: A Demographic Perspective PHILIPPE FARGUES

| Introduction There are between six and seven million Arab Christians in the Middle East today (1995). They represent 6.3 per cent of the whole population of the countries among which they are spread: Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine. This is more or less the same percentage the Ottomans found almost 500 years ago, when they wiped out the Mameluke and Persian dynasties which shared control of the region. However, this does not mean that the ratio of Christians to Muslims is permanently fixed. On the contrary, after four centuries of Ottoman rule, during which an unexpected resurgence took place, Christianity reverted to the downward trend it had followed during the first millennium after the Hegira. In the twentieth century Islam has advanced at a pace comparable to that

of the pre-Ottoman era. However, the mechanisms which have influenced this modern trend belong to a different kind from those of the preOttoman era; all are linked to modern political, economic, and demographic processes.

The study of the demography of Christians in the Arab East involves looking at the frequency of a particular characteristic—teligious affiliation—in the population as a whole, as well as describing the evolution of this characteristic over a very long period of time and over a very wide area. Essentially it means studying Islamization, bearing in mind that the term is used here simply to mean the increase in the percentage of Muslims. There are four processes which may have led to this: conversion from one religion to another, sometimes of individuals, sometimes of whole groups; massacres and exoduses with a religious connotation This chapter is widely based on Youssef Courbage, and Philippe Fargues, Chrétiens et Juifs dans I’ Islam arabe et turc (Paris: Fayard, 1992). I wish to thank my co-author, with whom many of the ideas here proposed were elaborated.

Demography of Eastern Churches 49 —both exceptional—which result in the substitution of one population by another; the fusion of population groups of different religions which, through

mixed marriages, produces a second generation of one religion; differential population growth, where different birth and death rates influence the speed of population growth according to religious affiliation. Each of these processes has its own time scale. As demographic processes inevitably occur over long periods of time and follow a rhythm of their own, they do not generally fit in with the important moments of factual history. On the other hand they do coincide with the longer periods of social and economic history or of important geopolitical relations. The explanations for demographic processes therefore lie in general contexts rather than in specific events in history. 1. The Change to a Position of Minority, from the Hegira to the Mamelukes

At the birth of Islam in the seventh century, Christianity had become the faith of the vast majority of the population of the Fertile Crescent and of Egypt, although compromises were made with the ancient beliefs, and

although the spread of the faith undoubtedly varied according to time and places. When the population of the Arab East was counted for the first time, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the process of Islamization seemed to be coming to an end, as had happened three centuries earlier in the Maghreb. The number of Christians in the Fertile Crescent was then slightly less than 10 per cent of the whole population.' The figure

was very possibly the same in Egypt too.” There is no direct information about the population of the first ten centuries of Islam and even less on the evolution of the religious composition of that population. The sources, which are incidental, fragmentary, and disparate, provide informa-

tion which is only indirectly linked to demography: taxation, military recruitment, production, trade, and settlement. Besides the natural margin of uncertainty of such sources, there is also that of their numerical ratio to the population. Furthermore these sources, invariably intermittent, give at the very most a few isolated traces, and never a complete series of ' The registers of the vildyets of Aleppo, Tripoli, Damascus, Baghdad, and Basra show a total of 1,708,805 Muslims, 135,280 Christians, and 16,155 Jews in 1580. See Omer Lufti Barkan, ‘Research on Ottoman Fiscal Surveys’, in M. A. Cook (ed.), Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East from the Rise of Islam to the Present Day, 2nd edn. (Oxford: OUP, 1978). * No statistics for the population of Egypt are available before 1882. The census of 1846 is currently being examined at the CEDEJ.

50 Philippe Fargues facts. To describe how 90 per cent of Eastern Christians became Muslims we can therefore only resort to hypotheses. I will begin by destroying a myth: that of an invasion by an Arab Muslim population. Frequently referred to by some Maronites in their claims to descend from the ancient Phoenicians, or by some Copts in their claims to descend from the Egyptian Pharaohs, this myth infers that Christians in Lebanon or in Egypt are of a different ethnic descent from their Muslim countrymen. Religion is quite an important distinguishing feature in the East

today. There are moments when this distinction is felt as a real difference. It is easier then to accept these differences if they can be explained by foreign descent. The myth is thus founded by modern experience, and not by demographic history. The Arab peninsula has never, in any period, had a large enough population to produce an emigration which could account

for more than a tiny minority of the present population. Like many other conquests, that which came from Arabia in the seventh century involved small military groups attacking whole populations. On their arrival the conquering soldiers nevertheless proclaimed the division of the world into two parts: lands already acquired and placed under the control of the Muslim State, and the remainder of the universe, which still had to be conquered. Everywhere it established itself, Muslim power naturally tried to keep the peace and to guarantee economic prosperity. So instead of direct attacks on the religious faith of the people they had conquered, which represented one of the most deep-rooted features of their identity, Islam drew up a code to define the status of those who professed Christianity or Judaism, the monotheistic religions from which it claimed to have descended. The coexistence of different religions was enshrined in law. Among the practices instituted by this code was a per capita tax paid by Christians and Jews. At the outset the Muslim State used this to fund the war. The preservation of non-Muslim populations under its jurisdiction thus became, paradoxically, a means for its territorial expansion. Political conquest advanced much more rapidly than spiritual conquest. However, the status accorded to Christians and Jews turned out to be ambivalent. The recognition of their existence allowed their communities to survive; at the same time the establishment of certain discrepancies encouraged them to join Islam. This change was most probably a slow, gradual process, apart from a few waves of mass conversions, particularly at the end of periods of religious tension caused by the international

situation. This was undoubtedly the case during the reign of the first Mamelukes, whose arrival ended the difficult period of the Crusades. The disparity in numbers of the conquerors and the populations they conquered soon set another mechanism in motion, the fusion of different

Demography of Eastern Churches 51 populations. The soldiers, preachers, and merchants who first brought Islam out of Arabia formed a predominantly male population which was too small to allow marriages solely within the group. Mixed marriages were necessary for its survival. Here Muslim law instituted an important asymmetry: whatever the combination of the parents’ religions, the offspring would always be born Muslim. In fact children belong to the religion of their father. The marriage of a Muslim man to a Christian woman thus produces Muslim offspring. Symmetric marriages, between a nonMuslim man and a Muslim woman, are forbidden, and require the man’s prior conversion to Islam. If we suppose that marriages occurred regardless of religion, that is at random, and that this process of fusion was the only factor, Islamization can be said to have followed a logistic (S-shaped) curve. Although slow to begin with, it accelerated later, until the Muslims began to number half of the population, after which it slowed down again. A simulation shows that over the period in question, covering a thousand years, mixed marriages alone, and the conversion required for men in half of these cases,’ would have sufficed to create a proportion of Muslims of around 90 per cent. Of course marriages do not occur at random, but follow all sorts of rules from the social and cultural to geographical proximity. This does not prevent the demographer from seeing this simple arithmetic of mixed marriages as an essential factor in mass Islamization. There are no certain indications of the other two processes, the substitution of one population to another by violence, or differential population growth. There were undoubtedly periodic massacres, as under Caliph alHakim in Cairo (996-1021), but none was large enough to be considered even local exterminations. Some groups were also driven out of their territories, but they were not always Christians. On the contrary the most famous example, and a much debated one, is the exile of the Shiites of Kesrouan in Jabal ‘Amil. Punished by the Mamelukes for their dissent from orthodox Islam, and possibly also for their recent openness towards

the Frankish kingdoms, the Shi’ites left the field free for the influx of Maronites from the Qadisha. This was perhaps the first time, though not the last, that a Muslim power was to defend itself in this way from the geographical expansion of a Christian population. As for natural demographic processes, there may have been slower or faster population growth according to different religions, but there is no evidence to support even

the least hypothesis on this account. As an aside it is worth remembering the poet al-Djahiz (ninth century), who observed that Christians ‘fill * During the period of the conquest, when the Muslim group was composed predominantly of men, less than a half of the mixed marriages required a conversion to Islam.

52 Philippe Fargues the earth’, put their prolific numbers down to their practice of monogamy. The remark would be very apt today, when Muslim marriages have proved to be more unstable than Christian ones, because they have been undermined by divorce and polygamy.

2. A Change of Tendency under the Ottomans Before conquering Syria and Egypt, the Ottoman Sultans reigned over a mostly European and Christian Empire. In their Balkan possessions and in Istanbul they devised, and then tried out, a new system for the coexistence of different religions, which they extended to their Arab provinces. They replaced the series of rules which had previously governed all relations between Christians, or Jews, and Muslim society and power with the millet, which gave legal recognition to the main non-Muslim communities. In their private lives—marriage, inheritance, family roles, education, health, and so on—individuals were now subject to an authority belonging to their religion, to whom the Sultan of Istanbul delegated power in all matters pertaining to the millet. This system of mediation sanctioned the communities, which were composed at least of stable groups | within a multi-religious society,* although not yet of embryonic nations. It played a highly important role in the demographic evolution which began at that time. We have reconstructed this evolution? by putting together the

figures from the censuses of two eras, the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, classified separately by Omer Liifti Barkan® and Kemal Karpat,’

as well as by a few other contemporary historians.° Under the reign of the Ottomans, the percentage of Christians in the

Fertile Crescent tripled. Having fallen to 7 per cent at the end of the Mameluke era (according to records of 1570—90), it rose to 20 per cent (1914), rising even to 33 per cent overall in ‘Greater Syria’ (Lebanon, * The Capitulations produced the same demographic result for the communities they applied to; however, over time, the foreign vassalage they implied produced religious NS1ONS.

. 7 The results of this reconstruction, which shows a considerable resurgence in the number of Christians in the Arab East during the Ottoman era, are expounded in Y. Courbage, and Ph. Fargues, Chrétiens et Juifs dans l’Islam arabe et turc. © O. L. Barkan, ‘Research on Ottoman Fiscal Surveys’. ” Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population, 1830-1914, Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 8’ Muhammad Adnan Bakhit, ‘The Christian Population of the Province of Damascus in the Sixteenth Century’, in B. Braude and B. Lewis (eds.), Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, 2 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1982).

Demography of Eastern Churches 53 Syria, Palestine). It was a genuine turnabout in the tendency of the preced-

ing millennium, which seemed to lead towards the imminent extinction of Christianity. The resurgence of the Christian population was certainly not continuous throughout the four centuries considered. It was concentrated instead in two periods in which there was a general population growth in the Southern and Eastern Mediterranean: the sixteenth century and the second half of the nineteenth century. Furthermore it is highly likely that

it did not take place in Egypt,? where the percentage of Christians had fallen to about 8 per cent under the Mamelukes and was still the same at the beginning of the twentieth century (see Table 2.1). The demographic reasons for the turnabout which appeared in the Fertile

Crescent!° lie in each of the four processes mentioned in the introduction. The two mechanisms which had allowed Islamization during the previous millennium, conversion and fusion, virtually ceased to operate, at least on a mass scale. The economic incentive of conversion to Islam disappeared and such conversions therefore became rare. In fact, due to the continual decline in the Christian population, who paid a per capita tax, taxation had been changed. From the beginning of the Ottoman era the jizya was no longer a very heavy tax. It was gradually reduced, until it was finally abolished through the tanzimadt. Individual conversions certainly continued, for sociological or marriage reasons, but there were no more conversions of whole groups. There are

also known to have been conversions from Islam to Christianity in this period for the first time. The conversion of the Shebab Emirs of Mount Lebanon is proof of this. Originally Sunnites, although Emirs of the Druze,

they adopted the religion of the Maronites in 1756. These were nevertheless isolated cases; what is most important to remember about the period

of the millet is that each individual, whether Muslim or Christian, kept his own religion. Mixed marriages also became exceptional. Over time the Christian populations had gathered in territories where most of the population were of the same religion. The de facto separation of the communities, even within districts of the same town, made social contact between different religions difficult and rendered opportunities for mixed ” Egypt was never included in the registers of the Ottoman population. Could this be because it had become a separate province, owing to its distance from Istanbul? Or was it rather because, being such an old and indestructible nation, it had preserved a wide administrative network which meant that the centralized census was not in the least necessary for the collection of taxes? Whatever the case, the first census of its population dates from 1846. The results are not yet known. The oldest record currently available of the religious composition of the population is provided by the census of 1907. '° The same change of tendency also occurred in Turkey.

54 Philippe Fargues TABLE 2.1. Religious composition of the population of the Fertile Crescent by denomination and by province, 1580 and 1881-2 (total number and percentage)

Province Population in 1580

Muslims Christians Jews

No. % No. % No. %

Aleppo 643,285 97.3 16,930 2.6 1,165 0.2

Tripoli/Beirut* 195,070 76.4 58,840 23.0 1,535 0.6

Damascus 452,155 90.1 39,335 7.8 10,440 2.1

Mosul —— —0— __ _ Basra 98,305 100.0 0.0 0 0.0 TOTAL 1,708,805 91.9 135,280 7.3 16,155 0.9 Baghdad 319,990 93.2 20,175 5.9 3,015 0.9 Population in 1881—2°

Muslims Christians Jews

No. % No. % No. %o Aleppo 690,184 86.3 99,269 12.4 9,913 1,2

Tripoli/Beirut? 537,388 59.1 367,701 40.5 3,541 0.4

Damascus 338,931 83.3 61,576 15.1 6,368 1.6

Baghdad 298,704 91.2 3,326 1.0 25,364 7.7

Mosul 329,186 3,326 7.4 Basra 158,49692.0 99.0 7580.9 0.525,364 880 0.5

TOTAL 2,352,889 79.5 535,956 18.1 71,430 2.4 4 Including the Mount Lebanon, which was separated from the vildyet of Beirut in 1881-2. > Figures of 1897 for Basra. Source: Figures for 1580, O. L. Barkan; figures for 1881-2, K. Karpat; for the Mount Lebanon, V. Cuinet.

marriages rare. The consolidation of the communities through the establishment of the millet put a final seal on this separation. Although the Copts,

the largest Christian community in Egypt, had a slightly different status from that of the millets of the Empire, from which Egypt in fact remained isolated, the two tendencies previously described also appeared in this country. The end of conversions and the rarity of mixed marriages brought an end to a very long, initial period of Islamization. In the Fertile Crescent the separation of the communities also encouraged the development of natural, independent demographic patterns. Differential birth and death rates led to very different population growth rates from one community to another.

Demography of Eastern Churches 55 Little is known about the variations of birth rates according to religion during the Ottoman era. On the basis of their greater family stability, mentioned earlier, we can only suppose that Christians must have had a higher birth rate than Muslims. At any rate this was perceivable on a local level in Mount Lebanon in the nineteenth century.”

On the other hand we know that for long periods, although not continuously, Christians had a lower death rate than’ Muslims. This explains their extraordinary growth. Three main factors played a role in this: reltgious geography, behaviour patterns during epidemics, and the adoption of modern social customs. Religious geography was the first factor. Since the Conquest, Islam had taken root more deeply in the Arabian peninsula and Mesopotamia than in the areas bordering onto Byzantium in the West. The Crusades on one hand, and the Mongol invasions on the other had later accentuated the concentration of Christian communities in territories along the Mediterranean coast, in the mountains bordering the sea, and, to a lesser extent, in the westernmost cities of the steppe. The economic expansion of the Christian West, from the Renaissance onwards, increased the concentration of Eastern Christians in areas along the Mediterranean. A common religion, some Eastern branches of which had reestablished direct contact with Rome,'? soon made the Christians of the East the favoured partners in dialogue and trade of European merchants and diplomats. Furthermore in the sixteenth century the prosperity and stability brought by the domination of the oceanic trade routes spelled the disappearance of the great famines and led to a positive population explosion in the Mediterranean. For the simple reason that they were more Closely linked to the Mediterranean world, and therefore had more contact with the West, Christians were the main beneficiaries of this boom. However, although famines became less frequent, the opening of the Mediterranean to the flow of goods and people from distant lands facilitated a few outbreaks of epidemics. There is ample evidence that, on these occasions, the behaviour of Christians limited the spread of the epidemics. While Muslims presented a united front against the illness, increasing contact

with each other in their efforts to face it, Christians reacted instead by isolating themselves. They followed the example of the Western merchants of their own kind, falling back on their families and shutting up their houses. Consequently, almost all the statistics for deaths show that epidemics were actually less fatal among Christians than among Muslims. Nature also helped '' Dominique Chevallier, La société du Mont-Liban a I’ époque de la révolution industrielle en Europe (Paris: Geuthner, 1971). '2 The Greek Catholics’ (Melkites’) adhesion to Rome dates from 1724.

56 Philippe Fargues to mitigate the spread of epidemics in certain Christian communities, particularly the Maronite community. The mountain they inhabited provided a climatic barrier to many of the infections which struck in the plains and the cities at the time. From the second half of the nineteenth century modern social customs

became a third fact in favour of Christians. Control not only over epidemics but especially over the high death rate which was normal at that _ time is ultimately a consequence of the acquisition of knowledge and its diffusion among the population. Many demographic studies of reduc- _ tions in the death rate in a wide variety of contexts show that the spread of school education is a highly important factor. It was in Christian communities that schools first became accessible to common people.'? Access to knowledge, of an elementary kind for most, but nevertheless sufficient to change attitudes to hygiene and illness, undoubtedly became the most important reason for Christians’ advantage in terms of a lower death rate. There was no such differentiation in the death rate of different religious groups in Egypt. The Copts had no special geographical characteristics —like the Muslims they were more rural than town-dwelling and the region where they were concentrated, Central Egypt, had no particular contacts with the West—nor were they any more advanced in the education of their children than the Muslims. From what we can suppose, they must have had the same death rate as Muslims. This explains why their percentage in relation to the whole population did not change. Alongside the strong differential tendencies in death rates, migrations also played a role in strengthening or weakening the proportion of Christians in the population in different places. Local and regional migrations were relatively intensive during the Ottoman period, as the status of the millet gave the community a transnational quality, continually disassociating it from any particular territory. Whether from Istanbul, Aleppo, or Beirut, people who professed to belong to the same Church came under the same authority. The borders between provinces were open. Four great migratory movements within the Empire shaped the religious map of the Arab East one after the other. The first was the convergence towards Aleppo of Christians from Anatolia, Iraq, and Syria from the sixteenth century onwards. The expansion of the Maronite territory in the Lebanon Mountains, due to fighting among the Druze at the beginning of the eighteenth century was the second. This was followed by the settlement of Syrian 'S This is particularly evident in the figures collected at the end of the nineteenth century and published by Vital Cuinet, Syrie, Liban et Palestine. Géographie administrative, Statistique et raisonnée (Paris: E. Leroux, 1896).

Demography of Eastern Churches 57 or Lebanese Christians in Egypt from the first half of the nineteenth century. Lastly, there was the movement of Christians from Mount Lebanon first of all, then also from Damascus and central Syria, and soon from all the other provinces of the Empire towards the coast, especially to Beirut; this movement was noticeable from the beginning of the seventeenth century, and then increased until the beginning of the twentieth. These migrations were sometimes spurred by the desire to flee from religious tensions,'* sometimes by the attraction of a dynamic region which had many contacts with Europe.

The first long-distance emigration of modern times in this part of the world also had a paradoxical effect on local demography. To escape the overpopulation of the mountainous area, made worse by the crisis in silk production, many Lebanese, mainly Christians, moved to the New World after the civil war of 1860. Three thousand people left every year between 1860 and 1899, and fifteen thousand between 1900 and 1913. Many of them made their fortune. The links they kept with their country of origin soon took the form of investments, which overturned the economic situation of Mount Lebanon. The new prosperity enabled an increase in the population, and continued, vigorous population growth. This is how Mount Lebanon, a predominantly Christian area, became the most densely populated region in the Arab Orient east of the Nile.

3. The Increase in Islamization in the Era of the Nation-States There are various estimations, often contradictory, of the current size of the Christian communities, provided both by the authorities of the Eastern or Western Churches and by a number of scholars. However, in both cases, the estimations are not always based on the best modern source of demographic information, the population census. On the contrary, when they inform us about the size of the different religious communities they often dispute the validity of the censuses. I therefore hope that the reader will forgive the following digression on the question of statistics, which I feel is necessary before going back to the four processes which influence the religious composition of society. '4 The main tensions were between Muslims and Christians, as in Damascus in 1799 and in 1866, as well as Napoleon’s advances on the coast and the war between Druze and Christians in Mount Lebanon. However, there were also tensions among Christians, namely between Orthodox and Melkites in Aleppo. '° Elie Safa, L’ émigration libanaise (Beirut: Université Saint-Joseph, 1960).

58 Philippe Fargues Among the seven Middle Eastern countries which currently have an Arab Christian community—Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine—Egypt is the only one to meet the two conditions which enable its Christian population to be examined over the course of time. One of these conditions is the recording of religious affiliation as a variable, individual characteristic in all the population censuses since 1897; the other is the geographical consistency of the territory covered by these censuses. The latest, carried out in 1986, showed 2,829,349 Christians, 5.9 per cent of the whole population of the country. Updated to 1995, this percentage would give a figure of 3,300,000 people. The Coptic authorities, some politicians, and a number of Coptic or Muslim intellectuals consider this figure to be a gross underestimation of a community which may actually number between 6,000,000 and 12,000,000 people, in other words between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of Egyptians. The statistic is thus alleged to be false, both directly—the results of the census are said to have been manipulated at the top before being published—and indirectly, as it is claimed that some Christians tend to declare themselves Muslims, due to pressure from their environment. Contrary to these allegations however, the statistic seems to be reliable, with the margin of error that all statistics carry. This argument, developed in another essay,’° is based on the observation that the Egyptian figures are consistent in two respects: both over the whole period of time and at each individual moment in time. The graph formed by the nine Egyptian censuses over a period of ninety years is quite regular, both as regards the whole country, where the percentage of Christians falls in a gradually sloping straight line from 1927 (see Table 2.2 and Figure 2.1), and in the different provinces. If there had been any manipulation, this pattern would not have been constant. On the contrary there would have been variations in the numbers and perhaps also in the consistency of the graph, according to the changing attitude of political forces, of regimes, and of society towards

the Christian part of the population. Furthermore, censuses are not the only source of religious statistics in Egypt. The registration of births, mar-

riages, and deaths provides another source. The two operations are carried out by completely separate branches of public administration using quite different methods. They nevertheless provide results which are com-

pletely consistent with each other. For example, the birth rate of 30 per thousand, obtained by matching the 85,000 Christian births recorded '6 ‘Y. Courbage, and P. Fargues, Chrétiens et Juifs. A fairly similar argument had already

been developed by Maurice Martin, SJ, ‘Statistiques chrétiennes d’Egypte’, Travaux et Jours, 24 (July 1967).

— Cc WO GS = nA 2 wn © Ww nN AN

va) N W Ss ~‘ — © No) S Ww o NI O 2 eo Ly TL A oC. S. o7 ne) ae WY on) \O \O On fom}

5)

20 =x S GS S & & p zs

Oo 8 oOo ” t tc = 23 2 3 es 8 8 36 so Si) a = = ™ Ee} 00 \O t © tt 3 iom N +t i) — \O '~) &\O oO wt &OoPaoe « 6N Z — ~ o+\O +— on)zZ OC ob \O 561A oO WwW ON p> SF N 0°ag) N 2~ =

5Sy |] ¢ S A ne Ni 9: — oo N val st _ — a ong] Vv S| aD OD on Nn cn iz Oo 0 + on om) 33s F o|/ am om N a Sina a oat on) 5) a. be tm ON WL) on) _ ao =} 6 — GN \O o ) ce mM Vay UOnO|Z aft aq 8 @

S m6 00 ' = o - SE \ ™. a

”EH r . @>) Sony =< —_

—

5v S&S ~ S+0c= on Nm~on wt 2= OOM oY ~ t™ N 6 6 06 — ™~om o Oo nmoe| za

© pam

N oO=SSVan oN 3” -ras, Tel Aviv/®, 4 [ri @Amman - ~ xe |a ¥ ‘. J’ JORDAN ~-s o~ LIBYA Cairo ar seer “75K WAIT ,

tL \ Ms 77 - te 2

! EGYPT Cc ARABIA 0 ©

: [(3.100.000/6.000.000 * SAUDI Re

Origins. After the Council of Chalcedon (451), which condemned Monophysitism, the Coptic Church did not adhere to the doctrine of the dual nature of Christ as contained in the Chalcedon Definition. It was considered Monophysite by the Chalcedonian Churches. The Coptic Church and the Roman Catholic Church have begun official theological dialogue, through the establishment of an international mixed committee. In 1973 and 1988 both Churches signed a statement of common Christological faith. Patriarchal See. Cairo. Patriarchal title. Patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa. Liturgy. Alexandrine rite in Arabic and Coptic. Number of followers in the Middle East. Between 3,200,000 (P. Fargues) and 3,900,000 (R. G. Roberson) and between 6,000,000 (J. Valognes) and 8,000,000 (D. Rance), almost all in Egypt. Percentage of the total Christian population in the Arab Middle East. Between 48.4 (P. Fargues) and 70 (Valognes) or 75 (Rance). Number of followers in the diaspora. About 400,000, mostly in Europe, the USA, Canada, and Australia. There is an ecclesiastical structure in the diaspora, with dioceses and parishes.

318 Appendix 3

oe Pe ° Coe : } ; 6. Greek Orthodox Church in the Middle East

BULGARIA A giack Se, GEORGIA cesta o Ni

Leon ft 7 tt istanbul _ “verre! DS * 5

: _ Low ‘\. ARMENIA