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Christians in the 1980s reportedly made up 20 percent of Iraq’s teachers and many of its doctors and engineers.48
As so much of the story of Middle Eastern Christianity has its origins in northern Mesopotamia, it is appropriate that it should end there. One of the most active priests in Mosul was Father Ragheed Ganni, a Chaldean Catholic of the church that traced its origins to the Nestorians and, before them, to “those of the laying on of hands at Antioch.” By 2007, as the situation was becoming desperate, he tried to preserve a note of optimism: The young people organized surveillance after the recent attacks against the parish, the kidnappings, the threats to religious; priests celebrate mass amidst
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The remaining 10 million Christians in the Middle East could easily be reduced to a handful, while the story of their churches would continue only outside the region—in Detroit and Los Angeles, in Sydney and Paris.
Driving a religion to extinction means never having to say you’re sorry.
Even where Christianity has seemingly been eradicated, we find many traces of it on the cultural and religious landscape.
One spectacular example of such crypto-Christianity occurs in Japan, where seventeenth-century governments extirpated a thriving European Catholic mission that at its height had three hundred thousand followers. The last priests were killed or expelled about 1650, and tens of thousands of laypeople also perished: suspicion of Christian loyalty could lead to the death penalty.
in 1865, a Catholic priest received some surprising visitors. Nervously, in constant fear of detection, fifteen elderly Japanese peasants wanted to ask him what he knew about the faith they had maintained secretly for so long. They asked particularly about O Deusu Sama, O Yasu Sama, and Santa Maria Sama, by which names they designated God, Jesus Christ and the Blessed Virgin. The view of the statue of the Madonna and Child recalled Christmas to them…they asked me if we were not in the seventeenth day of the Time of Sadness (Lent); nor was St. Joseph unknown to them.1
wholly rooted out on at least two occasions, once in the tenth century and again in the fourteenth, before being replanted. Yet despite this, some communities kept the faith alive through long years of persecution. About 1300, Marco Polo reported Christians who had maintained continuity of practice over seven centuries—that is, from the time of the first Nestorian missions. In 1605, Catholic missionary Matteo Ricci told how “[i]n the central region of China there lived for five hundred years a considerable number of Christians and…there have remained important traces of them in many places.”3
Generally, Catholic authorities adopted a much harder line than the Orthodox, presumably because their hierarchy did not live under Muslim rule, while most of their Orthodox counterparts did. Nevertheless, throughout Ottoman times, Catholic clergy ministered to secret Christian communities in the Balkans.
The great image at the Suwa shrine, which attracts tens of thousands of faithful Shinto devotees each year, is almost certainly a Spanish or Portuguese statue of the Madonna and child.8
Islam retained much more from Christianity—especially in its Eastern forms—than just the buildings, to a remarkable degree for anyone who knows the religions only in their modern forms.
We see this in the oldest texts of the religion, as well as in many of the practices that today seem so unfamiliar and “Oriental.”
Timothy debated religion with the caliph, he lauded Muhammad as one who “separated his people from idolatry and polytheism, and attached them to the cult and the knowledge of one God.”
Earlier in the eighth century, indeed, Saint John Damascene saw Islam not as a new religion but as a Christian heresy, the sect of the Ishmaelites or Hagarenes. “From that time to the present,” he wrote, “a false prophet named Mohammed has appeared in their midst. This man, after having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and likewise, it seems, having conversed with an Arian monk, devised his own heresy.”16
Throughout the Middle Ages, Christians saw Muhammad as a schismatic rather than the leader of an alien faith. It is his role as “seminator di scandalo e di scisma,” sower of scandal and schism, that earns him his place in Dante’s hell.17
As it stands, the story of monkish borrowing is pure legend, and ignores the complexity of the Quran: it would be absurd to treat Islam as merely a bastardized offshoot of Christianity or Judaism. But just as certainly, Islam arose in dialogue with those other faiths.
Even what appear to be strongly Semitic currents might have flowed from the Syriac-speaking churches.
The Quran tells many familiar biblical stories, featuring Abraham, Moses, and other key figures of the Old Testament, in addition to lengthy passages concerning Jesus and Mary, and of course the Quranic focus on the Last Judgment strongly recalls biblical texts. But generally, the most potent outside influences seem to have come from Eastern forms of Christianity. Most of the Quranic stories about Mary and Jesus find their parallels not in the canonical four Gospels but in apocryphal texts that circulated widely in the East, such as the Protevangelium of James and the Arabic Infancy Gospel.
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presents the death of Jesus in exactly the language of those heretical Eastern Christians known as the Docetists, who saw the event as an illusion rather than a concrete reality: “They did not kill him and they did not crucify him, but it was made to seem so to them.” One sura includes the common Christian legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ep...
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In a controversial work, German scholar Christoph Luxenberg suggests that the Quran is a confused translation from earlier Syriac Christian texts, at a time when Syriac was the lingua franca of the Middle East.
Often, obscure Quranic phrases make sense when understood in the Syriac context, and can be elucidated from the well-known works of Syriac writers like Ephraem the Syrian.19
Muhammad’s world in western Arabia was surrounded by potent Christian forces to north, south, east, and west. Two leading Arab kingdoms were Christian: the Lakhmid state based in al-Hirah, in Mesopotamia; and the Syrian Ghassanids.
The Christian presence across Arabia survived at least into the tenth century.22
Arian monks were not common in the region at the time, but both Nestorians and Jacobites were. The Quran refers to Christians as al-Nasrani, using the archaic term commonly used by East Syrian churches themselves.
In the Shiite tradition, for instance, the Alawites make up just 11 percent of the population of Syria, but they hold disproportionate political power under the Asad family and the Baathist Party, which has been in office since 1970. They not only venerate the prophet Ali, but see him as an incarnation of God—an idea that appalls orthodox Muslims. They have a special devotion for Jesus, they celebrate some Christian holidays, and Christian elements survive in their liturgy.
Muslims drew explicitly from Christians in constructing their new religious buildings, and not just because they had appropriated old churches for their own uses.
Originally, though, mosques appeared as they did precisely because they were imitating Byzantine Christian churches of the sixth and seventh centuries.
As the Arab conquerors had scant experience in monumental architecture, they naturally turned to the available experts to build their mosques, and that normally meant Christian designers and craftsmen.
“[T]he architecture of the earliest minarets unmistakably derives from the square late antique Syrian church towers.” Late-seventh-century Christian travelers to Syria had no difficulty in identifying the structures the “unbelieving Saracens” were building for prayer:
From Ethiopian churches, Muslims learned to construct the pulpit, the minbar—a raised platform in the mosque from which preachers still deliver Friday sermons.30
It is not always easy to tell whether Muslims were influenced by practices they witnessed in Ethiopia or the eastern Syriac world, because the two were so closely related, but somewhere they observed the Christian practice of fasting, which shaped the Islamic custom of Ramadan.
the prostrations, rak'a, that are so common a feature of Muslim prayers, and which to Western eyes surely denote characteristically “Oriental” behavior. Yet these, too, have undeniable Christian precedents. The earliest Christians prayed standing, but kneeling or prostration became increasingly common in the early centuries, especially for penitential prayer.
“Islam and the Eastern Christians have retained the original early Christian convention: it is the Western Christians who have broken with sacred tradition.”35
yet somehow Muslims had both to assert the claims of Muhammad and to establish the Muslim view of Jesus. They accomplished this by reading prophecies retroactively into Christian texts, or by cultivating alternative scriptures. Often, they argued that the Christian Gospels would speak more directly to Muslim needs if they were the “real” Gospels, and had not been adulterated by devious churchmen. One weapon in such debates was the Gospel of Barnabas, a pseudo-Gospel originally constructed in the fourteenth century but probably using some ancient early sources, perhaps even the Diatessaron. The
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In East Asian practice, it is quite common for a given individual to draw freely on the religious images and practices of a number of different faiths, whether Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucian.
What Westerners call the Middle Ages was to Muslims the golden age of their faith, and central to that era were the great Sufi brotherhoods, mystical orders that first appeared in the ninth and tenth centuries and spread over the whole of the Muslim world, dar al-Islam, between 1200 and 1500.
Muslim rule, churches were tightly constrained in their ability to project their presence physically into the landscape, by the public display of icons and images or statuary, by bell ringing or public processions.
Nestorians abandoned what had once been their common use of icons,
Already in the eighth century, Arabic was the language of politics and administration from Spain into central Asia, although Persian and Turkish would both become critical vehicles for Islamic thought and culture.
early as 800, Christians like Theodore Abu Qurrah, a Melkite bishop born in Edessa, were publishing their treatises in Arabic. The greatest Eastern Christian philosopher of the tenth century, Yahya ibn 'Adi, wrote in Arabic and lived in a thoroughly Arabized intellectual world. Even in the self-confident world of Syriac literature, ninth-century hymn writers began introducing the Arabic poetic device of rhyme.14
That fact may be troubling to Christians, whose faith so often extols the triumph of the meek and humble while rejecting worldly success, and who are so familiar with the concept of defeat as the root of long-term victory. In practice, though, Christians often had used material successes as proofs of their faith. As we have seen, church writers pointed to miracles and healings to vouch for the power of Christ, and such events often explained important conversions. Though such claims continued to be made, they were increasingly outweighed by the obvious successes of Muslim states and armies.
After the fall of Acre, the long sequence of Ottoman victories meant that it would be over four centuries before Muslims ceased extending their power over new groups of Christians, or until Christian states and forces once more gained the upper hand in their struggles against Muslim forces.
Theodor Mommsen wrote: “In the development of Christianity, Africa plays the first part. If it arose in Syria, it was in and through Africa that it became the religion of the world.”
North Africa in the century after 560 was a potent center of spiritual, literary, and cultural activity: “in no part of the West were the clergy and people so orthodox as in Africa.”1 Yet within fifty years of the completion of the Arab conquest in 698, local Muslim rulers were apologizing to the caliphs that they could no longer supply Christian slaves, since Christians were now so scarce.
What little remained by the twelfth century was ended by the fiercely pious Almohad rulers. For all intents and purposes, though, North African Christianity had largely perished centuries before.
Over the previous century, African Christians had suffered appalling sectarian divisions between various groups, each denouncing the others
Indeed, we might take the depth of partisan-ship as a measure of the passion that believers felt about their religion, making it unlikely that they would renounce it overnight.
Evidence of the neglect of the countryside can be found in the letters of Saint Augustine, by far the best known of African bishops, whose vision was sharply focused on the cities of Rome and Carthage; he expressed no interest in the rural areas or peoples of his diocese.3
a Victorian scholar noted, “[T]he African churches were destroyed not because they were corrupt but because they failed to reach the hearts of the true natives of the province…. They fell because they were the churches of a party and not of a people.”4
When nineteenth-century scholars translated the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone, they did so by using the language they found spoken in the liturgies of the Coptic church.
