It’s astonishing this story has not received greater coverage in the media. The Jerusalem Post reports that Saudi Arabia has deported 35 Ethiopian Christians, after detaining them in allegedly brutal conditions for seven months, for conducting a private prayer meeting last Christmas. The Ethiopians, who had been working in Jeddah, were arrested in a raid on December 15 and, according to human rights organizations, subjected to beatings, sexual assaults, and attempts to force them to convert to Islam. The Saudi government never formally charged them with a crime, though it did suggest at one point it was holding the detainees on the charge of illicit mingling with the opposite sex. In February, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom had called on Saudi Arabia to release the Ethiopians.
Syrian Archbishop: “They Don’t Tell Us Who Is Coming”
From PRI’s “The World,” an interview with the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Aleppo, Mar Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim, on the precarious state of that city’s Christians, who are trying to negotiate a neutral status in Syria’s civil war. “They are talking about the change of the President,” Mar Gregorios explains, “but they don’t tell us who is coming to rule this country. Anything could happen . . . for example, the fanatics [may] come and control the country. We need to hear that nothing will happen to the Christians in Syria.”
More on Syria’s Christians
As I wrote here last fall, Syria’s Christians have shown a lot of ambivalence about the civil war taking place in their country. Assad runs a police state, but his secular government protects Christians, who make up about 10% 0f the population, allowing them churches, schools, and community centers. When Syria’s Christians consider the persecution of Iraqi Christians that followed the fall of Saddam, and the persecution of Coptic Christians that followed the fall of Mubarak, they wonder what a “democratic” government in Syria would do for them. Not without reason, they worry that the Sunni opposition, if it ever gained power, would be less concerned with their human rights than the Ba’ath Party.
Two recent articles provide some background on the situation. The first is an essay in the New York Times by Clark University historian Taner Akcam, whose recent book I noted here. Akcam writes that Turkey’s Prime Minister Recip Erdogan has been speaking a lot lately about the need to protect human rights in Syria. Erdogan’s statements are unlikely to reassure Syrian Christians, Akcam Read more
Sharp, “Orthodox Christians and Islam in the Postmodern Age”
In a dialogue between the West and Islam, Orthodox Christians can play a 
crucial role. Unlike Catholics and Protestants, Orthodox Christians have lived in Muslim societies in numbers for centuries. They suffer discrimination and sometimes outright persecution, but they still comprise the largest Christian communions in the Middle East today. Orthodox Christians thus occupy a unique position that allows them to help interpret Islam for the West and the West for Islam. Andrew Sharp (Virginia Commonwealth University) has written a new book on the subject, Orthodox Christians in the Postmodern Age (Brill 2012), the latest in Brill’s ongoing series on Christian-Muslim relations. The publisher’s description follows.
The patristic, ecclesiological, and liturgical revival in the Orthodox Church has had a profound impact on world Orthodoxy and the ecumenical movement. Orthodox leaders have also contributed to the movement’s efforts in inter-religious dialogue, especially with Muslims. Yet this book is the first comprehensive attempt to assess an Orthodox ‘position’ on Islam. It explains why, despite being neighbors for centuries, relations between Orthodox Christians and Muslims have become increasingly complex as internal and external forces challenge their ability to understand each other and live in peace. It demonstrates how a growing number of Orthodox scholars and leaders have reframed the discussion on Islam, while endorsing and participating in dialogue with Muslims. It shows how a positive relationship with Muslims (and Islam in a general sense) is an essential aspect of Orthodox Christians’ historical past, present identity, and future aspirations.
Turkish High Court Rules Against Monastery; EU Voices Concern
Another blow for Christian minorities in the Middle East: last week, Turkey’s highest court ruled against the Mor Gabriel Syriac Orthodox monastery (left), the oldest functioning Christian monastery in the world, in a long-running lawsuit brought by local villagers. The lawsuit accused the monastery of “anti-Turkish activities,” including the illegal occupation of land that allegedly belongs to the government. Most commentators have dismissed the merits of the lawsuit — among other things, the suit claims the monastery occupies the site of a pre-existing mosque, even though the monastery predates Islam by centuries — and the high court’s behavior during the litigation has not reassured people. At one point, for example, the court apparently “lost” the documents the monastery submitted in support of its claim. The monastery will now appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled against Turkey in a similar case involving the Greek Orthodox a while ago. The EU, meanwhile, has expressed “serious concern” about the decision.
Syria’s Threatened Christians
The authors of this New York Times op-ed discuss the threat anti-Assad forces, which include increasing numbers of Sunni jihadists, pose to Syria’s Christians. “The ousting of the Assad regime has become a global moral obligation,” they write, “but so has the duty to ensure that Syria’s future holds a place for all minorities.” A nice thought, but given the track record, can anyone seriously expect that either Western governments or the international human rights community will do very much for Syria’s Christians?
Akçam, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity
The Armenian Genocide of 1915 had many causes, but one major factor was sectarian hatred, exacerbated by Christians’ assertions of equality under Ottoman law — assertions that contradicted traditional Islamic law. Clark University historian Taner Akçam has done a new study of the Genocide, The Young Turks’ Crime Against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton 2012), which highlights the event’s religious dimensions. The publisher’s description follows.
Introducing new evidence from more than 600 secret Ottoman documents, this book demonstrates in unprecedented detail that the Armenian Genocide and the expulsion of Greeks from the late Ottoman Empire resulted from an official effort to rid the empire of its Christian subjects. Presenting these previously inaccessible documents along with expert context and analysis, Taner Akçam’s most authoritative work to date goes deep inside the bureaucratic machinery of Ottoman Turkey to show how a dying empire embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Although the deportation and killing of Armenians was internationally condemned in 1915 as a “crime against humanity and civilization,” the Ottoman government initiated a policy of denial that is still maintained by the Turkish Republic. The case for Turkey’s “official history” rests on documents from the Ottoman imperial archives, to which access has been heavily restricted until recently. It is this very source that Akçam now uses to overturn the official narrative.
The documents presented here attest to a late-Ottoman policy of Turkification, the goal of which was no less than the radical demographic transformation of Anatolia. To that end, about one-third of Anatolia’s 15 million people were displaced, deported, expelled, or massacred, destroying the ethno-religious diversity of an ancient cultural crossroads of East and West, and paving the way for the Turkish Republic.
By uncovering the central roles played by demographic engineering and assimilation in the Armenian Genocide, this book will fundamentally change how this crime is understood and show that physical destruction is not the only aspect of the genocidal process.
More on the Holy Sepulcher
Back in January, I wrote about the Status Quo at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the informal set of customs that governs the rights and responsibilities of the major Christian communities in the shrine. From a secular and theoretical perspective, the Status Quo is a fascinating answer to a collective action problem. But the church is a place of deep faith as well, a site that has drawn pilgrims for centuries. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a piece that adds some human context to the subject, an essay on the nightly liturgies that take place in the church. It’s all very beautiful, but, in keeping with the Status Quo, there’s an undercurrent of watchfulness. “We keep almost awake at night here to see that things are done properly, on time, that no one will trespass the other’s right by doing things that he’s not supposed to do,” one priest explains. “So we have to be careful and watch what we do or what they do.” Worth reading.
Armenian Genocide Commemoration Day
Today is the 97th anniversary of the start of the Armenian Genocide, an 
ethnic cleansing campaign in the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Although the Genocide had many causes — political, economic, social — law and religion were major factors.
As Christians, Armenians had a precarious position in Ottoman society. They could exist, even thrive, but only if they accepted the second-class status that classical Islamic law allowed them. In the 19th Century, under pressure from European governments, the Empire had adopted a reform program, known as the Tanzimat, that granted legal equality for the first time to Armenians and other Christians. Conservative Muslim opinion could not accept this, and the Tanzimat led to a violent backlash against Christians in the 1890s, particularly in the Anatolian provinces, in which hundreds of thousands of Christians, mostly Armenians, died. A pattern of resistance and oppression ensued, until finally, under the cover of World War I, the Ottoman government decided to remove the Armenian population of Anatolia. Historians estimate that between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians, as well as tens of thousands of Syriac Christians, died during the death marches into the Syrian desert.
The story of the Genocide, and how it led to the first international human rights campaign in American history, is told well by Colgate Professor Peter Balakian in his book, The Burning Tigris. For my own reflections on how the failure of Ottoman legal reform contributed to the Genocide, please see here.
Catholic Bishops Issue Report on Threats to Religious Freedom
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops today issued a report, Our First, Most Cherished Liberty: A Statement on Religious Liberty, on threats to religious freedom in America and abroad. The report lists several recent actions by the federal and state governments that endanger religious freedom — including the HHS contraception mandate, state laws that forbid assistance to illegal aliens, and moves by public universities to deny recognition to evangelical groups on campus — and discusses the persecution suffered by religious minorities, often Christians, in other parts of the world. The report calls on clergy and lay Catholics, as well as adherents of other faiths, “to impress upon our elected representatives the importance of continued protection of religious liberty in a free society.” In particular, the report proposes that Catholic bishops in America organize a “fortnight for freedom” this summer, a fourteen-day “period of prayer, study, catechesis, and public action [to] emphasize both our Christian and American heritage of liberty.”