The researchers of World Christianity and its intercultural, global relationships tend recently to point in an emphatic accent to the fact of the geographical shift of Christianity’s graphite centre from Europe and the north-western half of the globe into its east-southern half, as well as to the rapidly escalating spread of Christian belief through Africa, Latin America, Middle-Asia and the Far-east. Yet, these scholars hardly talk about a similar Christian demographic development in the Near-East or the Arab world. Contrary to Africa, Asia and Latin America, the Christians’ number in this part of the world has drastically decreased due to the high immigration rate among the region’s eastern and Arab Christians during the past century. The scale of the Christians’ decrease was on the demographic, sociological and cultural scales indelibly radical; so much so that one can say that while the world still speaks about eastern Christianity and its historical presence in the Arab world, most of the eastern Christians, who represent it and carry it in their narratives, memories, convictions, values and even genes, live outside the eastern Christianity’s homeland.
The Christians’ immigration from the Near East is also a challenge in the life of the Christians in contemporary Syria. Syria also suffers from the Christians departure from the country and the Syrian society witnesses the same challenges and questions, which the immigration of the Christians puts before the governing regimes of the neighbour countries, like Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon. Syria is also losing a substantial component of its society, despite the fact that the Christian Syrians, the residents and the immigrants alike, have never quit declaring Syria the most secure Arabic and Islamic sphere for the Christians of the region. What makes, nevertheless, the Christians’ situation in the Arab world those days a worth pondering case-study more than ever before are the recent uprisings that beamed almost all-over the Arab world and shocked radically its long unchanged, static foundations from east to west and from north to south. There is, in my view, a necessary need for listening to the voice of the Christian minority – whose version of the region’s story is enchanted often law and rarely listened to – in the context of the events that strike Syria and challenge its regime these days.
The Christian people need to speak about their presence in Syria, and the relation of the conditions of the country to their life’s various political, economic, cultural and sectarian dimensions, within the framework of their identity as a group of people who belongs to a non-Christian-majority (Muslim) society. The Christians need also to discern this presence in its spatio-geographical nature, which in turn underpins the Christians’ escape and immigration from the Arab world. The Christians opt for departure not because they do not feel affiliated to this land and its pain, but actually because they cannot ripe off their imagination the image of an open, pluralist and biocenotic Syria, which they believe in and had grew up in. And, when the Christians sense any threat or decay to this image, they, obligatorily not voluntarily, rapidly seek refuge in another land.
I write on my homeland, Syria, and the living experience in it while I personally reside abroad as an immigrant. I left my costal hometown, Lattakia, when I was nineteen years old, to find myself in the following two decades moving between Lebanon, England, America and finally Germany. Despite my physical remoteness, and like other Syrian immigrants, I have never stopped visiting my hometown, and, more importantly, I have never quit tracing the news of its sociological sphere’s developments and changes. In every visit I made, I wish to witness new changes that testify to Syria’s procession within the international track of progress and demonstrate clearly that my country is dynamically moving toward the future with other nations on the globe. Yet, and with slight greed, I also hope that one and only thing would never change in Syria, but would remain one of its clearest, everlasting features: the pluralist Syria; the beautiful mosaic which contains therein all the religious, sectarian, ethnic, gender and cultural affiliations. Every time I visit Syria, this wish not only make me keen on meeting up with my friends, but also building up new friendships with people from the different societal segments, which Lattakia beams with: Muslims, Christians, Orthodox, Catholics, Armenian, Sunnite, Alawait, religious and atheists, indifferent and agnostics, secular and cultured people. Very recently, I was overwhelmed with pride and pleasure when one of my Muslim friends said that ‘all the inhabitants of Al-Saliyybah neighbourhood knows you’ (Al-Slaiyybah neighbourhood is a sunnite-majority zone in the city of Lattakia. Its inhabitants have always lived in it without its name, which is derived from the Arabic word for the cross ‘Saleeb’, causes them any religious irritation). I have also always been happy to hear the Alawite (the followers of Ali, the prophet Muhammad’s cousin) and Murshedite (a special esoteric group from the Alwaite sect originally) friends of the extended Awads family saying that the Awads are their siblings and cousins, who lived with them for decades in Lattakia’s country-side. I have also always smiled, being a theologian who teaches Christian faith and previously served the church in the past, when my dear friend, the Muslim poet Monzer Masri, introduced me to other Muslims saying ‘my friend, Reverend Najeeb’ before he laughs and continues ‘our father the poet’.
This is Syria which I left once and I still visit and fear for from our ungratefulness, greed and evil. I worry if Syria lost its pluralist, non-exclusivist and biocenotic sphere because of any hegemony, corruption, intolerance and suppression created by narrow political and privative interests. This is also the same Syria, wherefrom thousands of Christians immigrated escaping from life difficulties, rulers’ suppression, corruption and public demagogy. This is Syria in the eyes of its Christians, even those among them who immigrated out of fear for their religious affiliation. This image has not merely originated in the Christians’ minds since the past forty years, as if it is an achievement of the recent ruling political system in the country. It is rather a genuine expression of a mosaic life sphere, which Syria has always enjoyed and whose presence has even been clearer and more constitutive of the Syrian Society than it is during the Ba’athist regime’s era. The credits of this pluralist sphere’s existence in Syria are to be ascribed to the Syrian people and no one else.
The shores of the Syrian above mentioned mosaic sphere is stricken those days by the tsunami of the Arab uprisings and public riots against the ruling regime’s tyranny, corruption, oppression, and its catastrophic outcome of humiliation, poverty and dictatorship that were exerted over the people for more than four decades. I look at the latest public uprisings in Syria vigilantly and anxiously, holding on to my belief that the beautiful Syrian mosaic will pass this storm without damage, but will rather emerge out of it brighter and stronger. Syria, which has always been the mother of all its children, will remain so in the coming years too. I can sense the pulse of the Christian public-square in Syria during the latest challenging events in the country. I know that the Christians will not roll down to the streets as one public mass, and none of their representatives, laity or clerics, would participate in the uprisings and speaks in it on behalf of them. I do also know, however, that the Christians of Syria believe in the longevity of Syria’s mosaic and they do not envision any secure or possible existence in the country apart from it. They, like other citizens in this country, are eager for change and reformation; for building a free and civil society; for decent and dignified life; for national reconciliation and for a country that respects and preserves the dignity and integrity of its inhabitants.
The Christians’ participation in the political and demanding movement of the Syrian public-square is in general privative and individual in nature, with a genuine and honest, yet also low criticising or opposing tune. In their standing in the midst of Syria’s complex political and societal developments and stormy events – and in the light of their minority situation and their resentment from any power-gaining ambition (contrary to the Lebanese Christians, for instance) – the Christians are divided in their political position in the country into two groups:
the first is a group that is occupied with a serious fear from the jurisdictional and political outcomes of the recent uprisings. More specifically, they reflect deep intimidation from the prevalence of an Islamist ruling, political and constitutional, alternative and its possible endeavour to re-treat the Christians with an implicit, yet real and influential, dhimmitud treatment. Driven by this fear, the members of this group tend to express support and allegiance to the recent ruling power. Not because they support the regime, but because they cannot whatsoever stand with any alternative that, in their view, will opt for suppressing the Christians be means of their minority status.
The second group, on the other side, shares principally with the first group the fear from dhimmitud and the islamization of the state or the constitution. Yet, its main concern and occupation is the daily-life situation and the stability of living status resources. It is a group that is generally indifferent to politics and power-games. It is not involved in any clash that may take place between the regime and any form of opposition. It rather does not pay attention to the subject of political reformation per se, because it primarily hold no conviction that such a reform would make a real difference and a true pivotal change on the public level of societal living. This group is pragmatist in nature, busy with the daily goodwill of the family and its survival.
One can see almost equal followers to the above mentioned positions among the Christians of Syria, those who still reside in the country and those who immigrated from it alike. However, this fact does not stand against emphasising the existence of lively and patriotic intellectual interactions between the Christians in the country and that the outcomes of such interaction are versatile and multi-faceted in nature and extent. In the midst of this intellectual variety, numerous are also the Christians who believe that what threatens the pluralist and tolerant structure of Syria and equally stands against its freedom, change and progress influences negatively all the Syrian people indistinguishably. Every diseased that infects the internal situation of the country will deplete all the society’s civil body and will not distinguish between the ruler and the ruled, the strong and the weak, the majority and the minority. It will permeate, instead, through all the religions, the ethnicities, the sects and the sexes. Every corruption, fragmentation and corruption infects the country’s body will leave negative and demolishing impacts on all the citizens, the immigrants included.
Discerning the aforementioned danger is what makes many Syrian immigrants, the Christians included, believe that they have to serve Syria despite their residence abroad. The western public, scientific and intellectual circles often reveal their interest in conversing with the Syrian and the Arab Christians about the Christians’ situation in the Arab world and their position towards the latest events against the ruling regimes in that region. In the past few weeks, I was asked by many friends and academic colleagues, German and westerners, about the public Arabic uprisings and the Christians role in them. Some of them recited before me the popular claim that the Syrian Christians are not exposed to religious persecution like their brothers and sisters in Egypt and Iraq, for example. Therefore, as this opinion proceeds, the Syrian Christians uniquely enjoy a secure, prosperous and ideal life among the Muslims and they must support the Syrian regime and be grateful to it because of this. I often comment on this claim by stressing that the absence of any religious persecution in Syria against the Christians is correct. However, the credits of this religious security are not to be primarily attributed to the ruling political system. It is rather the fruit of the pluralist and mosaic inheritance which is inherent to Syria’s social history and the tolerant and moderate Islam that is deeply characteristic of the Syrian people. The absence of religious persecution is to be attributed to the positively open, horizontal co-existence between all the segments of Syrian society in the past and the present, and not during a specific ruling era. On the other side, I also try to stipulate that even if the Syrian Christians pride about the absence of religious persecution in Syria, they know clearly that there are other dimensions of oppression and pressurization which do not differ in features and ramification from those of persecution. They actually invite us to broaden the spectrum of our understanding of ‘persecution’ as a practice and to perceive the negative influential presence of such a broad phenomenon of persecution in Syria. There is in Syria a political, economic, cultural, and civil suppression that bewilders the country and lays unexceptionally its destructive influence and results not only on the Muslims, but also on the Christians and all the country’s other inhabitants. I always affirm that this fourfold persecution needs to be addressed seriously and its dangers need to be dealt with.
The Christians dream that tomorrow’s Syria would remain the beautiful mosaic that they know. They yearn for the remaining of Syria an oasis of moderation, pluralism, co-existence and other-accepting. Therefore, they wish to see Syria emancipated in all its components from every kind of vertical oppression and tyranny by means of upholding to its mosaic that is reach with many forms of positive, horizontal interaction. Therefore, and along their belief in change, freedom, justice and truth, the Arab Christians in general and the Syrians in specific remain alarmed, lest any public uprising for the sake of obtaining these rights may convert into an oasis of violence, vengeance, anger and hatred, or just an endeavour to snatch the stick of hegemony and domination from its recent holder, instead of breaking the stick and erasing its marks altogether. From their long and complicated historical experience of living in a multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian world, the Christians have already learned that what starts with blood and fire ends with similar blood and fire, and that the vicious circle of death is a bottomless whole, and that what was built upon hatred and grudge does not vanish, but lurks buried as charcoal under ash waiting for the right time to burn everything up.
The Christians dream of a civil, pluralist, democratic and secular state that treats people on the basis of citizenship and qualifications, under the rule of civil law and the principle of human rights, not on the basis of religion and religious or non-civil jurisdiction (be it even Christian jurisdiction). Thus, the Christians of Syria are hesitant to adopt positively and enact factually the idea of supporting any rebellion attempt that is energized by any tribalist, nomadic, exclusivist, fundamentalist, judgmental, condemnative, retaliatory, religionist, backwardly or discriminative discourse or ‘number one declaration’. They believe that such discourse or agenda would steel from Syria its mosaic identity and drowns the nation’s fate in an oppression and counter-oppression whirlpool. Let us always recall, in addition, that the late devastating experiences of the Iraqi and Egyptian Christians, despite the collapse of the dictatorial regimes in these two countries, still gnaws the Christians in Syria and make them count to thousand before saying: ‘this uprising represents the Syria we belong to’.
I lie on my immigration shore. My body is remote, yet my heart, soul and mind are day and night occupied with Syria and its latest events. I invoke with deep belief the beautiful, rich and versatile mosaic of my country, the womb I was born from and the lap I grew up onto. I long to be in Lattakia, sitting with my sunnite, alwaite and christian friends, converse and differing in opinions, visions and convictions. And, when we totally disagree and our views contrast, we remember that at the end we hold the same eyes that are wet with wishing the good, the best and the most sublime to this country, and that we breathe the same salty air of the Lattakian sea, from the free blowing of which we learn the meaning of freedom and experience the marks of its powerful hand, saying eventually in the same language, though in different ways and terms: God protects you, Syria. We miss the ‘spring’.
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The Arabic version of this article was published in http://o2publishing.com/_new1.php?FileName=20110331223607.
