The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

by Philip Jenkins

In 1800, the population of the whole Middle East region was perhaps 33 million, a number that had grown only to 44 million by 1900. That 1900 figure was about the same as the national population of France, and considerably below the population of Germany. Ironically, this historic center of urbanization had utterly failed to compete with the growth of cities in the West. Still in 1900, only Constantinople could compete with the booming cities of Europe, while cities like Damascus, Alexandria, and Baghdad had a mere two or three hundred thousand residents apiece. Christians in the Middle and Near

THE CHRISTIAN WORLD AROUND 1900 Continent Number of Christians (in millions) Percent of overall total Africa 10 2 Asia 22 4 Europe 381 68

Latin America 62 11 Northern America 79 14 Oceania 5 1 TOTAL 559 100

Reading an account of the Christian Middle East in the early twentieth century—of Smyrna or Trebizond or Diyarbakir—is to excavate a lost world. From the First World War onward, Christian communities were systematically eliminated across the Muslim world, and the Armenian horrors of 1915 are only the most glaring of a series of such atrocities that reached their peak between 1915 and 1925.

In 1850, an experienced British traveler was just reflecting the common wisdom when he predicted the imminent Russian takeover of the Middle East: From Mount Ararat to Baghdad, the different sects of Christians still retain the faith of the Redeemer whom they have worshipped according to their various forms, some of them for more than fifteen hundred years; the plague, the famine and the sword have passed over them and left them still unscathed, and there is little doubt but that they will maintain the position which they have held till the now not far distant period arrives when the conquered empire of the Greeks will again be brought under the dominion of a Christian emperor.27

Anti-Christian policies began a vicious circle. The more brutally the Turks treated their minorities, the greater the Western clamor for intervention to protect the victims. The closer the harmony of interests between domestic and foreign enemies, the greater the Turkish hostility to Christian minorities.

Violence escalated during the Greek revolt that began in 1821, when mass killings claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Muslims on Greek soil. These acts left a lasting memory, suggesting the likely fate of Turkish minorities should Ottoman rule ever weaken. Across the Greek-speaking world, the Ottomans responded by a series of massacres, and many clergy died in the ensuing repression. The patriarch of Constantinople was hanged outside his cathedral—on Easter morning!—and other archbishops and patriarchs were hanged or beheaded, at Adrianople and Thessaloniki, and across Cyprus. Turkish massacres culminated in the slaughter on the island of Chios, where perhaps twenty thousand Christians were killed.

Lord Byron and Victor Hugo both helped mobilize public anger.

Anti-Turkish feeling provoked armed intervention by Britain, France, and Russia, who combined to crush the Turkish navy in 1827.

Looking at the unintended consequences of these liberalizing pressures, modern observers might draw analogies with Western states forcing Middle Eastern nations to grant democracy and freedom of speech, only to find that the greatest beneficiaries of this openness are radically anti-Western Islamist parties.

Turkish forces and mercenaries commonly did choose Christian leaders and properties for special attention during Balkan counterinsurgency campaigns, burning churches and killing clergy.

In 1860, Druze and Muslim forces massacred ten thousand Maronite Christians in the land that would later become Lebanon, raising fears of the wholesale extermination of one of the largest surviving Christian groups in the region.

Muslim forces attacked Assyrian and Nestorian Christians between 1843 and 1847 and again in the 1890s, killing and enslaving thousands. Many more Christians perished during the Bulgarian wars of the 1870s.

the French were already carving out a Christian protectorate around Mount Lebanon.

a hundred thousand Christians perished. Armenians were the primary targets, as “the murderous winter of 1895 saw the decimation of much of the Armenian population and the devastation of their property in some twenty districts of eastern Turkey.”

A killing spree occurred in Urfa—ancient Edessa—where Armenians made up a third of the population. Eight thousand were killed, including three thousand who were burned alive in the cathedral where they had sought sanctuary. A thousand more were killed in Melitene. The Syriac Christians of northern Mesopotamia also suffered during the red year of 1895, especially in the ancient sanctuaries in and around Amida and Tur Abdin.

French ambassador reported at this time that “Asia Minor is literally in flames…. They are massacring all the Ch...

The violence that began in 1915 killed perhaps half the Armenian Christians in the region. Although the accumulated stories of massacre numb after a while, some of the atrocities cry out particularly. One of the worst storm centers was the wilayet, or province, of Diyarbakir, under its brutal governor, Reşid Bey. Here, “men had horse shoes nailed to their feet; women were gang-raped.” One source placed the number of murdered Christians in this province alone at 570,000.

During the 1915–16 era, at least 1 million Armenians were displaced, and plausible estimates for those actually killed range from eight hundred thousand to 1 million.

In the Christian-majority region of Lebanon, the Turkish military deliberately induced a famine that left a weakened population unable to withstand the ensuing epidemics: a hundred thousand Maronite Christians died. All told, including Armenians, Maronites, and Assyrians, perhaps 1.5 million Christians perished in the region.35

the Turks purged the Greek Christians of Asia Minor, as ethnic cleansing continued through the early 1920s. The campaign reached its horrifying peak in the destruction of Smyrna in 1922, allegedly causing the deaths of a hundred thousand Greek and Armenian Christians in what had been the City of the Giaour.

in Iraq by 1933, it was “the universal belief of the Arabs that the war was between the Crescent and the Cross…. Hundreds of thousands of Arabs volunteered to fight a handful of unbelievers and infidels.”37

Before 1914, Christian pockets were numerous and widespread, while by 1930, most had vanished or were in the process of disappearing.

Constantinople, which had over four hundred thousand Christians in 1920, today has perhaps four thousand.

One tactic was the creation of a protected Christian reservation, a state that would be able to defend Christian interests. This separatist goal explains the creation of the nation of Lebanon.

After the First World War, with the horrible experience of the Armenians fresh in their minds, the French arbitrarily detached the most Christian sections of Syria as a separate enclave, which achieved independence in 1943 as the state of Lebanon. Though Maronites and other Christian sects initially formed a solid majority, the territory also included substantial Muslim minorities, which grew significantly over time in consequence of their higher birthrates. The lack of

Christians today represent at most 40 percent of the nation’s people.

In 1947, Michel Aflaq, of a Greek Orthodox family, cofounded the Baathist Party, which long ruled Iraq, and which still holds power in Syria.

The 44 million people who populated the Middle East in 1900 grew to over 300 million by the end of the century, and the figure will probably rise to 450 million by 2025.

Khalil Gibran, author of The Prophet, was a Lebanese American,

between 2003 and 2007, two-thirds of Iraq’s remaining Christians left the country, and

Syrian Orthodox have created new European monasteries in the familiar tradition: the Netherlands has a Mor Ephrem, while a new Mor Augin rises in Switzerland.

Middle Eastern Christianity has, within living memory, all but disappeared as a living force.

Most of the great cathedrals and holy places of Europe stand on the sites of pagan shrines and temples, part of a deliberate attempt to win over the loyalty of a newly Christianized population.

The cathedral in Mexico City is one of many Christian centers built on the ruins of an older holy place—in this instance, an Aztec temple.

mosques built on the remains of churches,

those Muslims are the lineal descendants of communities that were once Christian, and that often maintained their Christian loyalties for a millennium or more.

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. Japan remained a closed society until 1853, when a U.S. warship forced the nation to open its borders to external trade and contact. Christian missionaries were among the other Europeans who arrived over the following years, and in 1865, a Catholic priest received some surprising visitors.

the remnants of the Japanese churches still survive as hidden Christians, kakure kirishitan, having outlasted four centuries of persecution and discrimination.

Much of the work of the Spanish Inquisition consisted of uncovering and condemning the Jewish or Muslim rituals and practices that people kept alive even after their formal adherence to Christianity.

In China, most sources confidently assert that Christianity was 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

The best-recorded examples are found in the Balkans—in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Albania—and

throughout Ottoman times, Catholic clergy ministered to secret Christian communities in the Balkans.

A Spanish-Irish cultural axis was well in place by the seventh century, and was reinforced by refugees fleeing the Muslim conquest.6

Through most of history, conquering a territory with a different religion meant that the victors unapologetically took over the places of worship of the losers, or at least the most prominent and significant buildings, and converted them to their own faith.

One of the great Christian shrines of the Near East was the church of John the Baptist in Damascus, which an eighth-century caliph confiscated in order to convert it to a mosque.

Damascus Christians had access to only fourteen of the forty-two churches they once had at their disposal. These Muslim acts of seizure should be stressed in light of claims by modern-day writers anxious to present Muslims as infallibly tolerant of the religious practices of their subjects.

hundreds of examples of venerable churches transformed into mosques.

When the Ottomans occupied Budapest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all the churches but one became mosques.