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FRChristians in Syria fear for their lives. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad/Getty Images)
The small city of Al-Suqaylabiyah has long been an indicator of Christian-Muslim relations in Syria. And two days ago, masked militants doused the northern Syrian city’s Christmas tree in petrol and set it alight. The message is clear: Christians beware. Now, Christians all over Syria are nervously watching what happens next in Al-Suqaylabiyah; among other things, places like this are on the front line between two very different conceptions of God.
If you ask Sunday school children to draw a picture of God, you often get two sorts of images. The first is a cloudy scribble, generally pretty abstract and amorphous. It could be fire or a depiction of wind. This is God the unknowable. The second sort of image is of a kindly face, mostly a man with a beard. Sometimes a baby. People have killed each other over this difference, and continue to do so right up to this day. It’s a difference that gets to the theological heart of why Christians in Syria are so nervous about the return of Islamism. This is a Christmas story set against the violence of world events.
Idolatry is probably the number one thought crime in the Hebrew scriptures. God alone is worthy of worship, and to imbue divine status to anything less than God Almighty is a capital offence. “Show them no pity or compassion and do not shield them. But you shall surely kill them; your own hand shall be the first against them to execute them. Stone them to death” as the book Deuteronomy puts it. Judaism and Islam share a profound hostility to any kind of depiction of the divine; for them, the real God is unrepresentable. The second commandment prohibits the representation of God, and representational art is profoundly suspect. So, in many ways, Rothko is the archetypal Jewish artist. And Islam focuses a great deal of its visual aesthetic energy into calligraphy. At the extreme end of this scale are the fighters of Islamic State blowing up statues in Palmyra.
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.
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SubscribeChristian populations of every Muslim country has dropped drastically over the last century, to almost nothing in Egypt, Syria, and yes, Turkey, that Muslim nation that brims with righteous rage against the bad things that Israel apparently does. In Israel alone, do the Christians worship in safety and grow in number. May God bless the God-fearing and those who are good of heart …
I think Copts are about a third in Egypt, and several in the cabinet.
Egyptian censuses have not reported on religion since 2006. Current estimates for Copts are 10% at most.
I think this is a very good and important article.
People in the west really need to know this kind of history before allowing Muslims to settle here. I wonder if pro-palastinian demonstrators are aware of this aspect of the people they are supporting?
They’re not interested in the Palestinians. It’s only hatred of Jews that motivates them.
Not just the Jews
For goodness sake face the facts! It isn’t war between ‘Islamism’ and Syrian Christians, it’s between Islam and the rest of the, non-Islamic, world.
Christians and Jews are ethnically cleansed everywhere Muslims go. They are now coming to Europe. Giles – why not bring out the logic of your position. Stop Muslim immigration entirely. Eject those who won’t assimilate consciously and full heartedly. And privilege Christians in all cases of asylum. Without a foundation at the urban core of civilization, Christianity will succumb to the violent interloper. This is why St Paul and St Peter went to Rome – and through their martyrdom and hundreds of years of evangelism, the construction of the catacombs….the one true religion was able to transform the west, and through the west the world. Turn our back on this …in the spirirt of what Gad Saad calls suicidal empathy…which is Christianity without Christ….and a world in which all individuals (Imago Dei) matter….will disappear into the rearview mirror. Perhaps at that moment of final eclipse, compelled to where a Burkha and to watch the public beheading of the last remaining Martyrs and Muslim apostates……perhaps at that moment, those ‘kind’ liberal women (and the men in their wake) will have cause to understand what they have thrown away in the most self-harming temper tantrum in history (because that is what woke is)
The future of Christianity in the Middle East looks grim.
The question is will this country follow suit
“Show them no pity or compassion and do not shield them. But you shall surely kill them; your own hand shall be the first against them to execute them. Stone them to death” as the book Deuteronomy puts it.
These words are pulled from one of the foundational books that underpin Judaism, Islam and Christianity. We don’t even need to get into what happened to the people who inhabited the ‘promised land’ when Joshua and God’s chosen ones arrived although that story is a real humdinger!
Who could possibly doubt that these are the words of the one true God? The God that created the universe. The God that created the earth and brought forth all life on it (including his worshippers).
Who could possibly doubt the truthfulness of these foundational texts?
The killing will commence there, soon. As it does everywhere these three ‘faiths’ come into close contact – especially when they do in the Holy Land.
Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Happy Ramadan.
Have at it.
The holy texts of all sincere religions contain a core of truth, and much that it would have been better to leave out. Yet perhaps we can privilege the words of Jesus on Christmas Day: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her”.
As it is written, these words—plus scrawling on the ground and a presence of authority—saved the life of one woman from a vengeful mob that was raised in a version of the Old Faith.
Geopolitical strategists and Islamists share one supreme principle: ideas count, people don’t. The cause is higher than the casualties. The Islamists know this. A few Christians in a strange foreign sect? Our cause is sacred. We understand each other.
It’s strange how the various bad guys we have deposed or helped to depose managed to keep a lid on sectarian tensions.
Syria is likely to join Iraq and Libya as states we have broken or helped to break. And for what?
At the end of 2010 I was on sabbatical study in Syria where I found over 90% of Syrians, especially, women, desperate for the West (US, Saudi, Qatar, etc) to stay out of Syria where the Assads were the ONLY bulwark against an exclusive and vicious Islamic theocracy: ‘We have seen the results of your humanitarian intervention to bring democracy in Iraq and we want none of it here. You do not understand the local realities.’ The West’s aim was always to destabilise the countries around Israel and for the US military industrial complex to profit by furthering the conveniently named ‘war on terror’. One could spot the infiltrators already present in Homs, Hama, Aleppo, etc by their boots, their cigarette packets, and their dialects or absence of Arabic. Syrian bishops had pleaded with our government and with Lambeth Palace not to support the incursion but neither would listen. When I returned to the UK in 2011 and watched and heard the egregious misrepresentations of the situation in the media I wrote to William Hague. The reply was the West’s totally self- interested line, ‘We are supporting our US colleagues in liberating Syria from a barbarous dictator.’ Those on the boards of the US companies and the US Zionists care only about their profits and the survival of the secular atheist state of Israel. Those who support Israel – and one should note this does not include orthodox religious Jews, only their self-styled ‘Liberal’ and ‘culturally Jewish’ contemporaries whose moral compass is so much in need of reorientation – should be ashamed of themselves for the death and destruction they have caused. The motives of AIPAC and their catspaws in the US Administrations, whether Republican or Democrat, I can understand; but it has always astounded me how so-called ‘Christian’ Zionists in the US can continue, in spite of the overwhelming evidence of apartheid and genocide, to support the secular atheist nationalism of an expansionist, colonialist oppressor of their brothers and sisters in Christ.
I worked in northeast Syria in 1995 and 97.
The evidence of a harsh totalitarian socialist government was everywhere. The bureaucracy, the inefficiency, the secret police.
But Christians and Jews existed relatively unmolested.
Women were visible and thriving, their heads and faces uncovered in the cities and towns.
(Not so much in the Bedouin villages)
The dark open secret was that Islamic fundamentalists were oppressed and imprisoned. As much as people hated the Assad regime, they were happy with this fact.
Then came that so-called “Spring”.
They’re probably more nervous of being killed by Israeli bombs or having their land annexed by Israeli settlers.
Hardly.
Unlike Western terrorist apologists, they are realistic enough after years of civil war to know that Israel is not the main threat, or even the second or third threat.
Merry Christmas everyone, Giles Fraser included. I understand that you have seen much, but the next time you send a message of hope or good cheer will be the first I have seen from you, sir.
What a terrible holiday focus! What do even suggest, Mr. Fraser, that we do about any of this?
Ive been energized by Giles Fraser’s contributions. Not entertained. Frank admission – I am one of the vast disapora of child sexual abuse survivors and maybe my views on hope have room for improvement. I am thankful that Mr Fraser writes for the present moment for those who have little reason for hope and maybe many others. I am genuinely thankful that Mr Frasers writes.
I’m sorry for what you’ve suffered. May I ask though: Energized in what way, or toward what action?
in re-reading Fraser’s article I see more substance in it, and an implied call for mutual tolerance that at least stops short of killing in the supposed name of God. That’s better than nothing, even if the focus seems to me inimical to the Christmas spirit, or the good news of Jesus of Nazareth.
Sometimes hope is more of a stubborn determination or a willingness, assisted by grace, to see goodness and joy alongside sorrows and horrors. It needn’t be mere naive wishing. I doubt the true spark can come from what I’d call an external source, instead of the kingdom of heaven that is within us. But small comforts may keep us alive and fed; hoping for hope so to speak.
That’s my experience as one who has weathered long seasons of emptiness and anguish, but thankfully not on a major scale for over fifteen years now. I’m glad you have taken some energy from Fraser’s writings. I should not have responded to what I perceive as his negativity with more of the same. Without running the risk of becoming a saint, I could be a lot less hypocritical and more understanding. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.