Christians Feel Under Siege in the Mideast

CAIRO — A merchant family in central Egypt received a startling handwritten note, delivered by strangers.

“Ten thousand pounds by tomorrow. We will not accept one piaster less,” warned the Arabic missive, signed by “The Islamic Group.” “If you bring the money one day late, it will be 15,000 pounds. If you do not bring it then, we will not accept even millions. . . . And you know the penalty.”

The anxious family--whose members still fear retribution two years later and ask not to be identified--immediately went to police. The authorities’ response was to invite them to become bait for an ambush. Not wanting to be killed by either police or Islamic militants, they demurred.

The police chief next insisted that they move away for their own safety. In armored trucks, the extended family of more than 20 abandoned their stores and a large house near Abu Qurqas on the Nile River.

What caused this tragic upheaval? To the family’s mind, there is one explanation: They are Christians in a Muslim world.

Across the Middle East, dig a little and there are similar stories to be found. Religious hatred and discrimination are killing some Christians, pressuring others to abandon their beliefs and causing a steady drop in the number of faithful in the Middle East and North Africa, including in the land where Jesus was born and where Christianity has a 2,000-year history.

The picture is not black-and-white. For example, in Cairo, the Mideast’s largest city, a glance across the jumbled rooftops at dusk shows a wondrous panoply of silhouetted minarets and crosses, side by side. In Syria, Muslims make pilgrimages to ancient Christian mountain shrines, removing their shoes and kissing the stones to venerate the saints and prophets both faiths share. In Bethlehem, Palestinian Christian processions wind their way on narrow streets where most of the people are Muslims.

But for many Christians, such tolerance and acceptance are the exception. Faced with hostility that ranges from petty prejudice to outright persecution, they view the Middle East as increasingly hostile ground.

In this region’s archipelago of roughly 12 million Christians in a sea of 275 million Muslims, the troubles are many--from murders and massacres, forced evictions and conversions, rape and blackmail to everyday bias and verbal abuse, including bureaucratic harassment and obstruction in matters as mundane as getting a permit to fix a broken toilet in a church.

Human rights are less than ideal in most Middle Eastern countries anyway, but Christians feel singled out for harsh treatment by Islamic-oriented governments or by extremist groups. Especially now, when political emotions are raw because of the stalled Arab-Israeli peace process, Christians in Arab lands say they are viewed suspiciously as a potential fifth column, a stand-in for an enemy Western world hostile to Islam.

And in Washington, the issue of the persecution of Christians has suddenly been raised with new vigor, especially by conservative Republicans and fundamentalists who have created a ruckus with the State Department and other elements of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.

In Egypt, one bearded Christian bishop recounted that when he walks through the street in his traditional black cap and robe, he is accustomed to hearing himself described with the muttered Arabic pejorative howaga, or foreigner--an ironic epithet, given that Christians predate Muslims in this land by more than 600 years.

The Rev. Riad Jarjour, general secretary of the Middle East Council of Churches, recently deplored the “Christian demographic hemorrhage” in the region. He cited emigration, reduced birthrates among Christians and the rise of political Islam.

From Persecution to Prohibition

How are Christians treated in the Middle East?

* In Saudi Arabia, the practice of any religion besides Islam is prohibited. Arabia was the birthplace of Islam’s founder, Muhammad, and authorities do not recognize any other faith. Christians among the hundreds of thousands of foreign workers from India, Pakistan and the Philippines must worship in secret, if at all. Christians can be arrested, lashed or deported.

* In Lebanon, 15 years of civil war--from 1975 to 1990--caused an exodus of hundreds of thousands of Lebanese Christians to Europe and the United States. Christians once made up more than half of the nation’s population. Now they are a dwindling minority of 30% to 40% and have lost their privileged position in governing the country.

* In Egypt, where Copts are by far the largest Christian population in the Middle East, Christians find themselves on the losing side in a contest between the government and extremists to determine who is more Islamic. There were two massacres of Christians earlier this year, one inside a church. In parts of upper Egypt, Islamic militants extract large sums in “protection” money from their Christian neighbors. And the leader of the banned but influential Muslim Brotherhood recently suggested that Christians be kept out of the army because their loyalty is questionable.

* In the United Arab Emirates, a Lebanese Christian was jailed for 20 months for marrying a Muslim woman, after the woman’s relatives complained. He was to have been lashed as well, but that punishment was waived. In many Arab countries, it is illegal for a Christian man to marry a Muslim woman, although a Muslim man may marry a Christian woman without problems.

* In Israel, Arab Christians feel squeezed between their more powerful Jewish and Islamic neighbors. A magazine recently reported that Christian houses and cars had been firebombed in one northern village in a feud that erupted after militant Muslim youths disrupted a church service. Christians, meanwhile, complain of contempt from Jewish authorities and fear a proposed new law to make possession of “missionary” literature a crime.

The number of Christians in the Middle East is subject to some debate. No one has precise figures, in part because Egypt and Lebanon, the two countries with the largest Christian populations, have not released recent censuses. The Coptic hierarchy in Egypt, for instance, routinely speaks of there being 10 million to 12 million Christians, information it says is based on the number of baptisms and of pupils in catechism. But the Egyptian government usually says Copts make up 10% or less of the population--fewer than 6 million people.

Christians point out that they are not immigrants to the Arab world because they were here long before Muslims and are ethnically and racially indistinguishable from the larger community. The London-based group Christian Research, which publishes the World Churches Handbook, estimates that Egypt has 8.7 million Christians and Lebanon has 1.1 million.

Other Middle Eastern countries with significant numbers of Christians are Syria (809,000) and Iraq (602,000), while more than 300,000 Christians are estimated to live in the Holy Land itself: Jordan, Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Most other Arab countries have tens of thousands.

Among these Christians is a mosaic of sects and denominations. Popes and patriarchs abound, as well as hermits and monks, nuns and penitents. Ancient monasteries survive in desert oases; age-old rituals are thick with incense.

In Egypt, some adherents employ the Coptic language inherited from the pharaohs. In Syria, they speak a version of the Aramaic spoken by Jesus. Small Armenian churches are scattered throughout the region. Tarik Aziz, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, is a Chaldean Catholic. Copts come in Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant varieties. Filling out the picture are Maronites, Melchites, Nestorians, Nazarenes and Seventh-day Adventists, among others, as well as members of the Greek, Russian and Abyssinian Orthodox faiths.

Declining Population Under Pressure

What is clear to all observers is that the proportion of Christians is falling everywhere in the region and that the Christians who remain are under pressure from the rising tide of Islam to keep a low profile.

The family in Abu Qurqas say they learned their lesson. They fell victim to the gizia--which can be translated as “the tax”--a mafia-like system in which Islamic militants extort money from Christians under threat of killing them or their children. The crime occurs under the noses of Egyptian police, assert two brothers who have experienced it. “What they want is to drive away all the Copts,” one brother said bitterly.

Another outrage reported by Christians, but disputed by the government and Muslims, is the abduction of teenage girls by young Muslim men. Thomas, the Coptic bishop in El Qusiya, near Asyut in upper Egypt, said he hears of such cases regularly and thinks that they may occur several hundred times each year across the country.

A 60-year-old father broke down in tears as he recounted his story. His daughter went to church on a Friday (many Christians here worship then because Sunday is a workday) and never returned. He found her later in a police station with a Muslim man who claimed that she wanted to be his wife and convert to Islam. Despite pleas by the father and the girl, the police would not surrender her, the older man said.

Instead, he said he was handcuffed and could hear his child screaming in the next room. He believes that she was raped in the station, then was forced to marry the Muslim in an illegal ceremony. The father is still in a court fight to win her return. He offered a pile of documents to support his claims.

“She has become a slave now, literally a slave,” he said. “I need nothing but my child.”

American Groups See Parallels With Jews

The plight of such families recently has been moved to the top of the American human rights agenda through efforts of an alliance of evangelical right-wing Christians and Jewish intellectuals, some of whom see parallels between the persecution of some Christians around the world today and the treatment of Jews in the past. They have, among other things, prodded the State Department to issue a report about global persecution of Christians.

Egypt has responded testily to outside criticism of its religious protections. Commentators here see a fair measure of hypocrisy in the sudden emphasis on Christians’ rights. They suspect that the charges are a convenient weapon with which the West can demonize Islam while taking pressure off Israel, which in Arab eyes has been backsliding on the Middle East peace process.

“All that is said about the ‘oppression’ of Copts in Egypt can easily be refuted,” said Fahmi Howeidi, one of the country’s most prominent journalists. “The harm done to them [Copts] by extremists is but a small proportion of the harm done to their Muslim compatriots.”

To even air the problem is considered taboo, an act of betrayal. But in Bishop Thomas’ view, nothing will get better unless some questions are frankly addressed: “How many governors are Christian? None. How many Christians are in the state security department of the police? None. How many heads of universities? None. It is as if they are telling Christians that you are not worth it. You are not trusted. If we want a sound relationship, equality should be given.”

But at a time when Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt are seeking foreign investment, tourism, and military and development aid--all of which come mainly from the United States and Europe--acknowledging the problems of Christians does not help.

Christians in the Middle East trace their present predicament to a wave of radical Islam that swept from Afghanistan to North Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. The Islamists’ banner--”Islam is the solution”--was an attractive cure-all for the Arabs’ bitter humiliation by Israel in the 1967 Mideast War.

The oil boom of the 1970s further fueled the trend. It brought profligate spending and Western materialism that offended pious Muslims in the region, while many of the petrodollars earned went to endow religious schools and universities, educating a generation of youth from across the Arab world in the Persian Gulf’s strict and puritanical understanding of Islam.

“When the Islamic movement started, Muslims started to keep a distance” from Christians, said Father Mina Moussa, pastor of the Mare Girgas Church, a peeling edifice in Cairo’s Choubra district. “So when they live in the same house, this could lead to disturbances, quarrels and bad treatment.”

Even today, some Mideast Christians argue that if it was not for the glut of oil money, the Islamist movement would wither. “If they stopped the funds coming from Saudi Arabia and Iran, all these problems would end,” declared Father Ibrahim, a priest at the Ghamra Church in Cairo.

But others see the seed of discrimination in Islam itself. “Muslims generally don’t like other religions. Anyone who is not a Muslim is a kafir--an infidel or an atheist,” said Girgas Shafik, a volunteer at a Coptic church in the Choubra district. “Sometimes they say, ‘We love you.’ But in their hearts, no. When something violent happens, the truth comes out.”

Milad Hanna, a Coptic journalist and lay leader for Egypt’s Christian community, believes that Christians are the “secret ingredient” of Egypt and have an important role to play in curbing fanaticism and bringing about a more tolerant society.

Hanna thinks that the Egyptian government has been mistaken, surrendering too much in its fight against Islamic extremists. “The Egyptian government wanted to say we are better Muslims than you,” he said. “So they’ve made the role of [Christians] weaker in the political and cultural arena.” As a result, Christians in Egypt “have retreated to their shell, and their shell is the church. They find spiritual refuge.”

Some Progress Toward Parity

Egypt shows signs of wanting to rectify some of the problems. One of the most painful issues for Egyptian Copts is the difficulty they experience in obtaining permission to build churches. Under a law held over from the Ottoman Empire, the president himself must give approval for each church’s construction and repair. Some bishops’ applications languish for years, and it is not uncommon for Muslim throngs to burn down a church in response to a rumor that it is being built illegally.

But last month, the Justice Ministry formed a committee to prepare a law that would apply the same rules to the building of churches and of mosques. The law is expected to be presented to parliament later this year. President Hosni Mubarak said recently: “Egyptian Coptic Christians are an original part of Egypt’s national cohesion. Their rights are guaranteed because they are the rights of each Egyptian.”

Across the Middle East, many Christians would dispute that their rights are being respected. They believe that these are among the worst of times for the faithful, but they vow to keep alive their creed in the land where it began.

“We see it as a test from God,” said Shafik, the church volunteer. “But that doesn’t mean we like it.”