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Charles Malik, Christian Diplomat

Thu, 28 Apr 2022 06:00:00 -0400

Thirty-five years ago, in a hospital in East Beirut, Charles Malik lay dying of vascular and kidney disease, both his legs amputated above the knees. He passed away on December 28, 1987, weeks shy of his eighty-second birthday.

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The Body and the Blood: The Holy Land’s Christians at the Turn of a New Millennium, A Reporter’s Journey

Sat, 01 Jun 2002 00:00:00 -0400

Travel literature presents the reader with singular challenges, foremost among them the need to discern the limitations of the genre. When an accomplished writer such as V. S. Naipaul, for instance, journeys through Islamic lands and writes anecdotally about their culture and attitudes, his accounts, while highly readable and stimulating, do not escape the stigma of prejudice. When a journalist travels and records impressions gathered usually in haste, the problem of fair representation is compounded by the fact that journalists by trade tend to seek “the scoop” and have little time for in-depth analysis or a balanced airing of perspectives. Reporters often read up hurriedly on a region before covering it, and what they read mostly boils down to the popularized narratives of other reporters who have done the same thing before them. Soon a literature accumulates that is superficial in its evaluations, sensationalist in its emphases, and incestuous in its biases. There is nothing wrong with the first impressions or immediate impacts served up in unpretentious travel chronicles that aim mainly to entertain. But these ought not to be confused with serious scholarship offering responsible and measured assessments of complex issues with long, convoluted histories.

The predicament of the Middle East’s native Christian communities is not a subject to be treated glibly, nor one to be left solely to the devices of foreign correspondents. There is, to be sure, room for empirical investigation through interviews conducted by careful and discriminating reporters. Charles M. Sennott, former Middle East bureau chief for the Boston Globe , is the latest in a series of journalists to traverse the Levant in search of a prism through which to view the morass of the Arab-Israeli conflict. His chosen focus in The Body and the Blood is the region’s indigenous Christians, and his “journalistic pilgrimage,” as he calls it, recapitulates the stations of Jesus’ earthly life and aims “to document the dramatically diminishing Christian presence in this land where the faith began.”

Sennott concentrates on Palestinian Christians, since the path of Jesus’ life, which he says he uses as “a narrative theme and an organizational device,” moves mainly west of the Jordan River, with occasional excursions into Egypt and Lebanon. Already here there is a problem of misfocus. Palestinian Christians receive disproportionate attention, given their actual importance in the overall tapestry of Middle Eastern Christianity. The two largest and most significant Christian communities are those of Egypt and Lebanon, and neither interprets its history or its existential anxieties in the region the way the Palestinian Christians do. By highlighting the Christian Palestinians with their highly politicized faith, Sennott ends up legitimizing the view that confrontation with Israel is the overriding theme of Christian life in the Middle East. But this is an error, the result of a misplaced emphasis. Sennott should have been more cautious about accepting the preoccupations of Palestinian Christianity, which is hardly representative of the Christian communities of the wider region.

For Palestinian Christians, Palestinian nationalism, not religious identity and faith, is their ultimate allegiance. Many in fact relish cultivating a secularist outlook that they feel strengthens the bonds of unity with their fellow Palestinian Muslim nationalists. The myth circulating in Palestinian intellectual circles is that sectarian hatreds and interconfessional bloodletting is happily absent from their land, where Muslims and Christians find themselves united as Palestinians against the Zionist usurper and occupier. With the recent resurgence of militant Islamism among the Palestinians, this bluff has been called. Palestinian Christians, including the self-styled secularists in their ranks, have found themselves increasingly sidelined and rendered largely irrelevant.

The fact is that if the Islamists ever fulfilled their dream of defeating the Israelis and hurling the Jews into the sea, they would hardly be predisposed to share power with Palestinian Christians, secular or otherwise. Instead, they would proceed to establish a fundamentalist Islamic state that would be guaranteed to suppress all its non-Muslim inhabitants without exception. In other words, Israel or no Israel, the mirage of Palestinian nationalism will not save the Christians from the oppression that awaits them at the hands of the radical Islamists who are increasingly calling the shots in Palestinian society.

Much of this escapes Sennott, who, like the very Christian Palestinians he observes, turns a blind eye to the endemically subordinate status that has always defined that community. Palestinian Christians are no different from 90 percent of the Middle East’s Christians in being essentially dhimmis— namely, second-class citizens who are denied many of their basic rights and freedoms. Unsurprisingly, sensitivity to the reality of dhimmitude is almost entirely lacking in Sennott’s account, as he wanders through one Palestinian village after another attempting to tease out the story of the Christians there. Without probing the subtle and insidious effects of prolonged subjugation under dhimmitude , very little can be understood about the plight of Palestinian or Middle Eastern Christians generally, and one is ultimately unable to fathom the roots of the Christian anguish that prevails in cultures in which Islam predominates.

Although Sennott gets it more or less right when discussing Hanan Ashrawi, the most eloquent spokes person for the Palestinians, he stops short of drawing the necessary conclusions. An academic, a woman, and a Christian, Ashrawi represents the highest and most influential level a non-Muslim has attained in Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. Her articulate television soundbites in English defending Palestinian aspirations have become a staple for Western audiences.

Yet Ashrawi, as Sennott indicates, has privately displayed increasing unease about the growing control that Palestinian Islamists have been exercising among her people, as evidenced by the overtly religious character of the latest intifada. Sennott relates how she correctly warned that the disappearance of the Christians would adversely affect the standing of women in Palestinian society. Still, Sennott does not see that Ashrawi’s reluctance to dwell upon her Christian identity, an attitude long predating the current wave of violence and motivated by her desire to emphasize a shared Palestinian nationalism with the Muslims, is an expression of a deep-running and symptomatic dhimmitude . Downplaying her religious affiliation has done Ashrawi and others like her little good when Islamism reared its head on Palestinian streets. Today, Ashrawi can be seen to be moan the sad state to which she and her fellow secular nationalists have been reduced. In the end, dhimmitude inevitably leads to the fate of another high-profile Palestinian woman, Suha Arafat: conversion.

Turning to the Coptic Christians of Egypt, Sennott describes in some detail a series of disturbing incidents experienced firsthand. They mainly involved punitive measures taken against the Copts, both by the authorities and vigilante Islamists, following a double murder in a small town that was pinned on a local member of the Coptic community. The entire sequence of events represents a template of recurring persecutions directed at the Copts, the Middle East’s most typical dhimmis . For the past 1,400 years, the Copts haven’t known what it means to lead a free and dignified existence. Although they are the largest native Christian community in the Arab world, numerical size is really irrelevant here since chronic dhimmitude renders its victims incapable of making a positive contribution to their surroundings. Any accurate account of this tragic community would have to focus on the persistent abuse and repression that has afflicted it. It is thus unfortunate that Sennott expresses such deep skepticism about the horror stories published by the Coptic associations of America—especially when Sennott himself provides graphic accounts of their mistreatment in Egypt.

It is when he comes to the Maronite Christians of Lebanon that Sennott displays the worst side of journalistic travel literature. Not only does he choose the occasion of Israel’s chaotic withdrawal from south Lebanon in May 2000 to pronounce solemnly, and disdainfully, on Maronite history and on the community as a whole; he also traffics in the quasi-racist jargon of earlier journalistic gurus, Robert Fisk and Jonathan Randall, who have written about the Maronites.

As the last remaining free, though embattled, Christian community in the Arab world, the Maronites long ago made the historic decision to resist dhimmitude , and their destiny ever since has been to pay a high price in blood and treasure. Sennott views the entire community and its tenacious struggles against oppression through the lens of the collapse of Israel’s proxy, the South Lebanon Army (SLA), and especially through the eyes of SLA leader Akl Hachem, who was assassinated by Hezbollah. For Sennott, Maronite rejection of external Syrian occupation and internal Islamization, along with their battles in the 1970s against Arafat’s armed state-within-a-state, are all signs of “cultural arrogance,” and their thirst for a free existence in dignity merely an expression of “megalomaniacal imagination.”

The primary accomplishment of Sennott’s book is to underscore the well-known fact of steady Christian demographic decline throughout the Middle East. On the real danger afflicting these Christians—the spread of dhimmitude— it has precious little to offer.

Habib C. Malik teaches history and cultural studies at the Lebanese American University (Byblos campus) in Lebanon.

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Christians in the Land Called Holy

Fri, 01 Jan 1999 00:00:00 -0500

Over the centuries, political Islam has not been too kind to the native Christian communities living under its rule. Anecdotes of tolerance aside, the systematic treatment of Christians and Jews (who fall under the Islamic category of dhimmi ) as second-class citizens is abusive and discriminatory by any standard. Though in some respects Christians and Jews fared better under Islamic rule than Muslims and Jews did, say, at the time of the Catholic reconquest of Spain in the late fifteenth century, the long term debilitating effects of dhimmitude have proven more detrimental. Under Islam, the dhimmi are not allowed to build new places of worship or renovate existing ones; dhimmi women are available for marriage to Muslims while the reverse is strictly prohibited; the political rights of dhimmis are absent; and the targeted dhimmi community and each individual in it are made to live in a state of perpetual humiliation in the eyes of the ruling community. These measures can only spell a recipe for gradual liquidation. With the notable exception of the Christians of Lebanon, Christian communities native to the Middle East today exhibit the scars of centuries of inferiorization and marginalization. They constitute living relics of the ravages of a system that, although technically abolished in many modern Arab states, continues on the level of official as well as popular attitudes and practices. The Christians of the Holy Land, for example”Palestinian Christians”are symptomatic of this dhimmi genre and its attendant complexes.

According to reliable sources, the number of Christians of all denominations today in Israel (including Jerusalem), the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip is in the neighborhood of 150,000. Christians in Jerusalem number around seven thousand. Between 1947 and 1967, the Christian population dropped from over forty-five thousand in the Old City and its environs to twenty-eight thousand. The trend is clearly towards an emptying out of the city’s dwindling Christian population: “Emigration has for some time threatened to reduce Jerusalem to a museum of Christian history rather than the center of a living Christian community,” writes Norman Horner in his A Guide to Christian Churches in the Middle East . Informed Palestinians often speak about an identity crisis that afflicts Christians in their ranks. Being neither Muslim nor Jewish, they feel rejected by the two larger communities. Being Palestinian, they can never be a part of Israel even if some of them carry Israeli passports. And being Christian Arabs, they are not easily integrated into the wider Christian world. Add to these factors the economic difficulties that many of them have faced”the land seizures and the arbitrary hirings and firings”plus the obstacles they experience in trying to get a higher education (only 5 percent of the students at Israeli universities are Arab) and the rising tide of Muslim, Jewish, and evangelical Christian fundamentalisms”and the pressures to emigrate become very palpable. Nor does it help that the hierarchy of the largest Christian denomination, the Eastern Orthodox, is composed of ethnic Greeks, thereby creating a linguistic and cultural rift between church authorities and their Arab congregations.

By and large, Palestinian Christians have looked to Palestinian nationalism for a meeting ground with their Palestinian Muslim counterparts. This point of intersection has all too often been mythologized by intellectuals and clergymen who never tire of insisting that harmony has always prevailed between Muslims and Christians in Palestine. The Anglican Bishop of the Diocese of Jerusalem Riyah Abu-‘Assal stated emphatically to this author: “The entire history of Palestine never witnessed any religious conflict between Christians and Muslims.” In her book This Side of Peace , Hanan Ashrawi declares that while growing up she felt no difference between Palestinian Christians and Muslims: “We did not know who was what, and it was not an issue.”

This sentiment is motivated primarily by a desire for a unified position vis- -vis Israel. But it also stems from a deeper dhimmi psychological state: the urge to find”or to imagine and fabricate if need be”a common cause with the ruling majority in order to dilute the existing religious differences and perhaps ease the weight of political Islam’s inevitable discrimination. The history of Palestinian Christianity has, for the most part, been no different from that of dhimmi Christianity throughout the Levant. Were Israel not in the picture the problem of dhimmi subservience would still exist for Palestinian Christians. And even with Israel as the perceived and proclaimed enemy of both Muslim and Christian Palestinians, the specter of dhimmi subjugation continues to lurk just below the surface. Palestinians, particularly Christians, get very agitated and defensive when confronted with reports of persecution of Christians by Muslim Palestinians. Their reflex attitude is to dismiss such reports as lies inspired by Israeli disinformation.

Palestinian Christianity differs from the rest of Middle Eastern Christianity in that it is marked by an obsession with the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian problem. Christians in Palestine improbably suppose that all persecution of Christians in the region would be softened, if not alleviated altogether, if the Palestinian problem were solved. This view relies on the myth that everything was fine between Christians and Muslims until Israel came along.

There are two big problems with this Palestinian Christian interpretation. First, it does not account for the subtle complexities and convoluted nuances of a region like the Middle East. Once again, removing Israel from the equation and satisfying the Palestinians beyond their wildest dreams would not eliminate the violence against non-Muslims inherent in political Islam. Second, this interpretation is not shared by the vast majority of the region’s Christians, whether dhimmi or free. Egyptian and Lebanese Christians, the largest and most significant Christian communities of the Arab world, do not share the same set of anxieties as the Palestinian Christians do. They know better than to believe that once the Palestinian problem is laid to rest all will be well.

Palestinian Christians further differ from other Christian communities in the region in their acute discomfort with the Jewish Old Testament. They cannot bear to recite certain Psalms or to read the Old Testament stories because of their immediate associations with today’s state of Israel and the Arab-Israeli confrontation. This unfortunate situation is tantamount to a modern version of the Marcionite heresy, which was put to rest in a.d. 144. Marcion ( c. 90-c. 165) rejected all appeals to the Old Testament and urged Christians to concentrate exclusively on the New Testament Gospels and the letters of St. Paul. In the spirit of Marcion, some Palestinian Christians in their liturgies have excised or doctored specific references to the Old Testament and to the People of Israel. These contemporary Marcionites transpose their current political tragedies resulting from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the realm of religious faith, with much doctrinal confusion as a result. This misdirected and unnecessary alienation of Palestinian Christians from the Old Testament ought not to be encouraged. The last thing their traumatized and precarious ancestral faith needs now is to be burdened with a Marcionite heresy.

Whichever way one looks at it (except as an expression of the prevailing dhimmi motif), Palestinian Christianity is unrepresentative of the wider Christian communities scattered throughout the Middle East. There lurks a disturbed restlessness in the Christians of the Holy Land not shared by their brothers in neighboring lands. Maybe there is no remedy for this restlessness, this anxiety and confusion about who they are and whether they have a future and, if so, what and with whom that future might be. I have been pondering these questions for years, as have others, and answers are in very short supply. I try to nurture a hope that from within Palestinian Christianity will emerge an understanding that is the exact opposite of Marcionism: a theology and moral vision that will recognize Jews as elder brothers in the faith of Abraham, and offer them the land freely. On such a basis, or so I would like to believe, Jews and Christians could work out a peaceful and enduring relationship to their mutual benefit. With God all things are possible, and we should not despair of that happening. Meanwhile, the ominous prospect is that there soon will be no Christians who call home the land that Christians call holy.

Habib C. Malik teaches at the Lebanese American University (Byblos branch).

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Islam and Modernity

Tue, 01 Jan 1991 00:00:00 -0500

As Communism loses its menacing posture and its threat recedes globally. Western concentration is beginning to focus increasingly on an old and inscrutable foe: Islam. The vast natural resources of the Middle East, the birthplace of Islam, coupled with the inherent political instability of the region have hastened this shift of Western attention. The clash of opposing values between Islam and the West has recently been vividly played out in the sands of Arabia, where young American soldiers have come face to face with strict prohibitions placed by an alien culture on alcohol, women, freedom of expression, and freedom of worship. This “encounter in the desert” between the secular West and the closed Islamic society of Saudi Arabia raises basic age-old questions that transcend the narrow confines of any single crisis or set of historical circumstances: How compatible is Islam with modernity, democracy, and pluralism? What sort of relationship will Islam have with the West in the coming century?

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