In the Heart of the Ottoman Empire

The situation of Christians in the three countries with an Islamic majority, but professedly secular. The genocide of Armenians, the flight of many faithful, the post-Gulf War era

by CAMILLE EID

The heart of Eastern Christianity is generally considered to be Palestine, but it could be enlarged to include the rest of the Middle East. Essential events in the life of St. Paul and the first apostles took place in Asia Minor, what is now Turkey. Sites from Gospel times like Antioch, Constantinople (now Istanbul), Ephesus, Odessa, Mesopotamia, and Cappadocia evoke all the splendor of the Byzantine, Syrian, and Assyro-Chaldaean East; the hundreds of fifth century churches and religious buildings scattered among the “dead cities” of the Orontes Valley, the saints and hermits (Ignatius, Simeon Stylites, and John of Damascus, to name just a few) all testify to the particularly deep roots of the faith in the “Holy Land of the Church.”
How do Christians live today in three of this region’s largest countries (Turkey, Syria, and Iraq), all with an Islamic majority, but professedly secular states? In actuality, the situation is not as one might imagine in Western secular states, especially since it is the army that defends the secularity of Turkey rather than civilian institutions, and since hiding behind the secularism of Syria and Iraq are the interests of a determined confessional minority–some might even say clan. There are also the social discriminations that render the fate of Christians not too different from what it is under more openly Islamic governments.

Turkey
In Turkey, the problem of secularity is still topical, even though many decades have passed since it came into effect. But attempts to insert this question into the political debate meet strong resistance from military circles. Here the origins of the secular system lie in the nationalist ideologies developed in the period immediately after World War I, with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the loss of its Balkan and Arab possessions. The desperate struggle of Turkish secular forces (the Young Turks first, then later, Kemal’s party) to keep at least Anatolia out of the area divided into zones of foreign influence (French, Greek, Italian, and Russian) and to prevent the birth of a free Armenia and Kurdistan resulted in an insistence on the Turkish–and thus Islamic–nature of the State. Still today, the word Turk is applied, according to a commonly admitted convention, only to Muslims. The genocide of the Armenians (at least 700,000 victims, not counting those deported into the Syrian Desert) and the exchange between “Greek” and “Turkish” populations (1,344,000 Orthodox Christians repatriated into Greece against 464,000 Muslims sent back to Turkey), ratified by the Treaty of Lausanne, had in the meantime almost completely uprooted the two major Christian communities of the former empire. Many deportees were ignorant of the Greek language and were simply Turkish Christians.
Preserving its memory as the capital of Orthodoxy, the population of Istanbul in principle eludes this barter. But, deprived of its background, the metropolis witnesses a constant decrease in the number of Christians: 136,000 in 1927, 86,000 in 1965, just a few thousand in 1983. Far from tranquillizing the last survivors of the minorities, the secularity of Turkey ends up accentuating the precariousness of their situation, forcing them to emigrate.
A particularly dramatic fate has fallen to the secular Syrian communities of Tur Abdin, on the boundary with Syria, who have found themselves, in contrast to the three non-Islamic minorities protected by the Treaty of Lausanne (Greeks, Armenians, and Jews), deprived of every guarantee of freedom of worship and expression. Whoever travels today through those regions cannot fail to be moved by the sight of entire abandoned villages and ancient, tumbling-down churches.

Syria
The secular ideology of Arab nationalism–initially conceived by Christians–has its last exponents in the Ba’th (meaning Rebirth) Party, in power in Syria and Iraq. The Ba’thists have long tried to maintain the party’s secular connotations, posing a limit to the place of Islam in society and attempting to integrate the country’s various minorities in a wider concept of “Arabness.”
In Syria, the Constitution does not recognize Islam as the state religion, but only as obligatory for the President of the Republic. To legitimize his leadership of the country, the late President Assad ordered a fatwa (religious decree) stating that the Alawite sect to which he belonged–historically considered heretical by Muslims–was a branch of Shiite Islam.
The maintenance of a framework of institutional secularity ensures an essentially egalitarian treatment for Christians. The Christian communities are free to buy land and build churches, while priests are exempt from military duty. In the schools, Christian students must take catechism classes–unified for all the communities–while their classmates have lessons in the Islamic religion. Above and beyond this experience of “advanced ecumenism,” the public schools must deal with the problem of teacher competency. Often these are Christian teachers of other subjects who take on this assignment in order to earn extra money. The situation is different in the former private Christian schools, nationalized in the 1950s, where religion classes are taught by priests or qualified teachers of the subject. These schools are now administrated by the Church, which handles enrollment applications and hires the teachers, but they are subject to the authority of a government inspector whose task it is to oversee their curricula.
Since it claims to be secular, the Syrian regime is sinking under the problems of the minorities and witnessing to its strategy of abolition of confessional differences shared by the integralist movements (which call it “atheist”), with an accentuation of Islamic identity. The “Islamist” phenomenon (spread of Muslim dress, increasing number of mosques) is, in effect, expanding so fast that the leaders themselves are trying to get around it by incorporating religious references into their political speeches.
As opposed to other Arab countries, the threat of the fundamentalist movements has been curbed by repression, reinforcing in this way the cohesion of Christians around a government considered the “guarantor” of their survival. This lies behind the extreme prudence shown by the faithful toward a government that protects them in the short term, but that risks condemning them to suffer in the future the revenge of an intransigent Islamic power.
The question–legitimate in this transitional period–concerns the precariousness of a situation tied to the permanence in power of an authoritarian regime that is also a minority.
And too, the protection of the state is not without other negative aspects. Diffident toward everything that eludes its control, the Damascus government neither encourages nor facilitates the contacts of the local Church with the outside world. Another problem regards emigration. Since 1958, at least 250,000 Christians have emigrated to Australia, Sweden, and America. Their initial motives stemming from nationalization measures have been joined by others, like the desire of young men to avoid military service. Furthermore, the rural Christian population (such as in Jazira, in the northeast) is in constant flight toward the suburbs of the large cities, pushed by strong Muslim pressure and the lack of infrastructures capable of offering them the solidarity of religious works. This process risks stimulating the newest arrivals, not adequately integrated socially, to keep moving in the direction of emigration abroad.

Iraq
The picture in Iraq is in sharper contrast. As opposed to Syria, where the Christian presence is equally subdivided into three main communities (Greek-Orthodox, Melchite, and Armenian), with another ten or so other churches, here the Chaldean Catholic community dominates, comprising 70% of the Iraqi faithful. Despite the secular ideology of the party in power and the constitutional recognition of freedom of worship for all citizens, Islam has been declared the state religion of Iraq, and Islamic law permeates a large part of civil law. Christians can build new churches without difficulty, administrate a vast network of infrastructures for social assistance and pastoral work, train their future priests in a major seminary, and teach catechism in schools where at least 25% of the students are Christian. Nonetheless, they do not own their own schools (nationalized at the end of the 1960s) and must, like all other citizens, request authorization for social events, closely controlled by authorities out of fear that they could give rise to dissent toward the regime.
The presence of someone like Tareq Aziz, a Chaldean Christian, as Vice-Minister in the government, must not lead one to think that Christians are numerous in the state administration. Frequently found at the middle level (thanks to their good education), Christians are absent at higher levels. This marginality is due to many factors, from the fact that the country is run on the basis of alliances between families, to the strong concept of the political domination of Islam, considered an essential component of Arab culture. And too, Christians themselves tend not to compromise themselves too much with the regime, to avoid endangering their possible future relations with the Shiite opposition in case it comes to power.
The Church, led by the Chaldean patriarch Bidawid, is in the front line of the problems emerging from the two Gulf wars, and the local Care organization (Caritas) is doing its best to alleviate the suffering of a population that for ten years has been subjected to a harsh embargo. Their efforts have not succeeded in blocking the hemorrhage of the faithful. Those who want to emigrate sell everything, buy their authorization to leave at a high price, and go to Jordan to knock on embassy doors requesting visas. It is estimated that 30% of Iraqis who leave the country today are Christians, and that at least 150,000 Iraqis have left Iraq since the “end” of the war.