Christians in the Middle East

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Friday 9th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I congratulate the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury on securing this debate and on introducing it with the great wisdom and compassion that we have come to expect of him.

There are 14 million Christians in the Middle East, which is roughly equal to the number of Muslims in the European Union. In recent years, they have been subjected to discrimination, harassment and violent attacks. We know all this. There is insufficient emphasis on the fact that many Muslim converts to Christianity have also been suffering very quietly because they are not recognised as Christians. In fact, conversion to Christianity is frowned upon, with the result that Muslim converts to Christianity continue to be treated as Muslims and subjected to Sharia law.

Rather than rehearse what has been said about violent attacks on Christians, I shall address two questions. First, why is this happening and, secondly, what should be the nature of our response to it? By and large, Islam has been tolerant, even respectful, of Christianity. For hundreds of years, its record in the Middle East has been fairly good and in some respects even better than the record of Europe with respect to Muslims. Why, then, have these things begun to happen during the past 30 or 40 years?

There are four or five factors which are largely responsible for it. First, in many Middle Eastern countries, there is a deep concern to unite the country and secure its stability by adopting a particular view of national identity. That view is that the country belongs to its majority. Therefore, the national identity is defined in ethno-nationalist terms. It is argued, for example, that only an Arab can be a true Egyptian or Syrian and, further, that only a Muslim Arab can be a true Arab. As a result of that, minorities—Christians and others—get excluded and come to be seen as an alien wedge because they are not part of the national identity.

Secondly, religious minorities in the Middle East, as in every other part of the world, tend to align themselves pretty closely with the established regime for protection, for status and for other obvious advantages. When that regime is challenged, as it is challenged when democracy arrives, minorities become a target, even a scapegoat. That is why democracy sometimes takes an anti-minority orientation. This is not peculiar to the Middle East; it is also to be found in south Asia and, in some respects, is also a part of our own European history.

The third factor responsible for the rise of violence has to do with—let us be frank about it—our own foreign policy. Riah Abu el-Assal, a former Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, recently said that he had warned Mr Tony Blair a month before the invasion of Iraq in 2003 that if he continued with what he was contemplating:

“You will be responsible for emptying Iraq, the homeland of Abraham, of Christians”.

The fourth factor has to do with the fact that some of these acts of violence have been provoked by Governments. We saw that in the role played by the Ministry of Interior in Egypt when Mubarak thought that he was under threat. By creating conflict and division of this kind, it becomes possible for a Government to pretend that they alone stand between stability and anarchy.

The final factor has to do with our old friend al-Qaeda carrying on its crusade from God-knows-where it was left off last and talking in terms of civilisational conflict. Its anti-Western and anti-Christian propaganda, although limited to a few, continues, sadly, to influence a large number of people. I could mention many other factors, but these are some of the important factors that have played a role in violent attacks on Christians.

How should we respond to this? Here, the most reverend Primate set absolutely the right tone. There is always a danger of thinking in terms of Christians versus Muslims—us identifying with Christians against them, Muslims. Once we begin to think along those lines, we are already storing up trouble for our future. I suggest that we need to bear four or five important things in mind as part of our normative strategy. First, we should speak for all minorities and not just Christians. There are three good reasons for this. First, if we speak only for Christians, we get identified with a particular religion and forfeit our claim to impartiality. Secondly, Christians in the Middle East for whom we speak come to be identified with a foreign power and their loyalty to their country of origin is questioned. Thirdly, if we say we speak only for Christians, we create tension in our own society because we give other religious minorities the impression that we are essentially a Christian country standing up for Christians abroad and not for others.

The second thing that we should bear in mind is that Christian leaders in the Middle East should not ask or expect their followers to think of themselves in exclusively religious terms or act as a homogeneous bloc. Christian leaders in the Middle East, for example, like to say, “We Christians should be standing up for this or that”. That is a language to avoid, because it has certain obvious dangers. It implies that they should not interact or work with their fellow citizens who happen to be non-Christians. It also reinforces religious consciousness, of thinking of Christians in the Middle East only as Christians, and does not allow them to transcend that consciousness by thinking of themselves as fellow citizens. This became particularly clear in Egypt. The Coptic Orthodox Church has been ambiguous in this respect. Pope Shenouda III urged Copts to vote for the best candidates during the run-up to the parliamentary elections irrespective of their religious affiliations. That was fine. Later, it transpired that the Alexandria churches were producing lists of recommended candidates based largely on religious considerations. This rightly provoked an outcry from Coptic activists, many of whom were secular liberals, and eventually a denial from the church’s ecclesiastical council.

The third thing that we should bear in mind is that we must trust democracy and not make the mistake that we made in Algeria several years ago, or were almost tempted to make in Egypt, of supporting the army as the only way to stem the tide of religious fundamentalism. Democracy has a paradoxical logic. It encourages populism, panders to religious passions and gives salience to religion, because that happens to be the fact that weighs with the majority. At the same time, it also works in the opposite direction. It exposes internal tensions within radical and moderate Islamists. When these parties come to power, they are not able to deliver and therefore get exposed. Democracy also gives minorities some political power and the opportunity to criticise the goings-on within the Government and various political parties. In other words, democracy is its own corrective. As long as it is conducted in a reasonably peaceful and non-threatening manner, it has a way of getting rid of its own toxicity. This is how Hindu fundamentalism was ultimately defeated in India. For several years, we thought that the BJP, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Hindu fundamentalists, when they came to power, would refashion the country. Today, nobody is interested. How did this happen? In a country where 84 per cent of the people are Hindus and mostly illiterate, Hindu fundamentalism was defeated by the weapon of democracy. We need to bear in mind also that, in a democracy, people do not vote along religious lines nor should we expect them to; in fact, we should encourage them not to. The result is that class and other factors begin to play a part.

I say in support of what the most reverend Primate said that the struggle has to be conducted within the Middle Eastern countries themselves, and it has to be an intellectual struggle with two basic goals. The first is to get people to recognise that a society cannot be held together on ethno-nationalist lines—it must be multicultural and its identity must be defined in generous terms. Secondly and more importantly, people must read their own history sensibly. As the most reverend Primate said, Christians have played a fundamental role in the greatness of Arab civilisation. They plugged it into the Hellenic legacy; they were the custodians of the Arab heritage; and they played an important part in the Arab Awakening, not to mention the enormous role that they played when they chafed against the Byzantine yoke and even helped Saladin’s recapture of Jerusalem in 1187.

Reading history in this light helps Muslims to understand that Christians have been an integral part of their world for 2,000 years, that they continue to play an important role and that they are valued members of their community. When that happens, there is mutual respect, mutual appreciation, and the kind of violence that we saw becomes difficult to contemplate.