War, Terrorism
and the Christian Exodus from the Middle East
By Robin Wright
A decade ago, I spent Easter in Damascus. Big chocolate bunnies and baskets of pastel eggs decorated shop windows in the Old City. Both the Catholic and Orthodox Easters were celebrated, and all Syrians were given time off for both three-day holidays on sequential weekends. I stopped in the Umayyad Mosque, which was built in the eighth century and named after the first dynasty to lead the Islamic world. The head of John the Baptist is buried in a large domed sanctuary—although claims vary—on the mosque’s grounds. Muslims revere John as the Prophet Yahya, the name in Arabic. Because of his birth to a long-barren mother and an aged father, Muslim women who are having trouble getting pregnant come to pray at his tomb. I watched as Christian tourists visiting the shrine mingled with Muslim women.
and the Christian Exodus from the Middle East
By Robin Wright
A decade ago, I spent Easter in Damascus. Big chocolate bunnies and baskets of pastel eggs decorated shop windows in the Old City. Both the Catholic and Orthodox Easters were celebrated, and all Syrians were given time off for both three-day holidays on sequential weekends. I stopped in the Umayyad Mosque, which was built in the eighth century and named after the first dynasty to lead the Islamic world. The head of John the Baptist is buried in a large domed sanctuary—although claims vary—on the mosque’s grounds. Muslims revere John as the Prophet Yahya, the name in Arabic. Because of his birth to a long-barren mother and an aged father, Muslim women who are having trouble getting pregnant come to pray at his tomb. I watched as Christian tourists visiting the shrine mingled with Muslim women.
At least half of Syria’s Christians have fled since then.
The flight is so pronounced that, in 2013, Gregory III, the Melkite Patriarch
of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, wrote an open letter to his flock:
“Despite all your suffering, stay here! Don’t emigrate! We exhort our faithful
and call them to patience in these tribulations, especially in this tsunami of
stifling, destructive, bloody and tragic crises of our Arab world, particularly
in Syria, but also to different degrees in Egypt, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon,”
he wrote. “Jesus tells us, ‘Fear not!’
Syria’s Christians are part of a mass exodus taking place
throughout the Middle East, the cradle of the faith. Today, Christians are only
about four per cent of the region’s more than four hundred million people—and
probably less.Read on...
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