A fearful Christmas in Syria Christianity is threatened by Islamism

But Christianity works in a completely different way, and because of Christmas. For the mad idea that God is born into the world as a child, and grows up to be a man, introduces the thought that the Almighty has a face. That He has a certain look. And all of a sudden, permission seems to have been given for this look to be reproduced. As the Epistle of Colossians puts it, “Christ is the image of the invisible God”. And with that idea everything changes, especially for artists.

The Arab theologian St John of Damascus did the most to defend the use of images for Orthodox Christianity. St John was an Arab Christian, born in 675, and into a city that only 40 years previously had fallen to the Muslim army. It was here that he defended the use of icons, focusing his argument on the incarnation, the coming of God into the world as flesh. “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us,” he says in the familiar Christmas reading. Suddenly there is something specific you can draw. In fact the whole tradition of Western art, with its representations of the birth of Christ, and of the Cross, owes its existence to a little Syrian monk writing in the seventh century. Long before Islam, Syria was the place of St Paul’s conversion and baptism, one of the great cradles of the Church. And though Christians have been leaving Syria in droves since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, there is still a significant Christian population there.

In the centre of Damascus, along Straight Street, where St Paul rested after his traumatic conversion, a number of churches cluster together for security. They are all brimming with icons and images, twinkling with gold. These are identity markers for orthodox Christians. Far more than nice decorations, icons speak of the coming of God into the world. Not unlike the Eucharist for Catholics, they are sacramental, and represent what it is to be an Orthodox Christian. But to Islam, these images are an insult. And to radical Muslims of the Islamic State kind, an absolute abomination.

I left Syria in May 2015, and recall being driven at a ridiculous speed through the checkpoint into Lebanon to Beirut airport by a mad Syrian monk who had to get back for a service. It is the closest I have ever felt to death. Uninterested in the police who were attempting to flag him down through various concrete chicanes, he wound down the window to reveal his priestly robes — better than a passport, apparently. The fact that the Syrian police let him through was testament to the kind of relationship the Christian community had built up with Bashar al-Assad and his family. They didn’t like Assad, though they only whispered it, frightened like everyone else. But they were terrified of Islamic State. “Better Assad than ISIS” — I heard this several times. A few weeks after I left, ISIS detonated mines around the 2,000-year-old temples in Palmyra, out in the eastern Syrian desert. Their campaign against the idolatrous culture of the ancients was uninterested in pathetic Western cries of heritage. And now that Assad has gone, the Christian community are secretly terrified that this sort of Islamism is coming for them and their precious icons.

Not every Christian image in the churches of Straight Street is a beautiful icon. The Armenian Orthodox church has a representation of the Armenian Genocide in its courtyard, one of the most gruesome and disturbing images I have ever seen. It recalls the Turkish (then Ottoman) mass murder of its Armenian Christian population during the First World War. During that period, more than one million Armenian Christians were wiped out by the Turkish authorities. Many Armenian Christians were forced to convert to Islam, others were driven into the Syrian desert to die of starvation. This is why what is now Turkey, once a wellspring of Christianity, is now pretty much Christian-free. “Who now remembers the Armenian Genocide?” Hitler once said, as he prepared to copy it in his genocide of Jews. Mostly, we don’t remember. But they do in Damascus. This is where terrified Christians fled from Ottoman bayonets. And Christians on Straight Street keep the memory of those horrors alive to this day.

Will Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, and his Turkish backers, bring liberation as he seems to have promised, or further misery for the Christian community in Damascus? In truth, no one yet knows. For now, a huge Christmas tree is raised in Abbasiya Square in the city centre. The lights are on in Straight Street. Joy to the world. Even the first Christmas was set against dangerous world events, with Matthew telling of Herod ordering a massacre of children. This may feel like an old story to us. It is all too horrifically real to the Christians of Damascus.

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Giles Fraser is a journalist, broadcaster and Vicar of St Anne’s, Kew.

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