Iraq's Disappearing Christians
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 24, 2004
 

"What are the Muslims doing?" asked Brother Louis, a deacon at the Our Lady
of Salvation, an Assyrian Catholic church in Baghdad minutes after it had
been bombed. "Does this mean that they want us [Christians] out?"

Well, yes, it does. Our Lady of Salvation was just one of five churches
attacked in a series of coordinated explosions in Baghdad and Mosul on Aug.
1, a Sunday, between 6 and 7 o'clock in the evening. In total, these car
bombings killed 11 persons and injured 55. In addition, the police defused
another two bombs.

The timing of the assault guaranteed a maximum number of casualties. August
1 is a holy day for some Iraqi Christian denominations and because Sunday is
an ordinary workday in mostly Muslim Iraq, Sunday services take place in the
evening.

The five bombings were by no means the first attacks targeting Iraq's
Christian minority since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Others, according
to the Barnabas Fund (an organization assisting persecuted Christian
minorities), were bunched together at the end of 2003 and included a missile
attack on a convent in Mosul; bombs placed (but defused) in two Christian
schools in Baghdad and Mosul; a bomb explosion at a Baghdad church on
Christmas Eve; and a bomb placed (but defused) at a monastery in Mosul.

In addition, Islamists have attacked the predominantly Christian owners of
liquor, music, and fashion stores, as well as beauty salons, wanting them to
close down their businesses. Christian women are threatened unless they
cover their heads in the Islamic fashion. Random Christians have been
assassinated.

These assaults have prompted Iraqi Christians, one of the oldest Christian
bodies in the world, to leave their country in record numbers. An Iraqi
deacon observed some months ago that "On a recent night the church had to
spend more time on filling out baptismal forms needed for leaving the
country than they did on the [worship] service. ... Our community is being
decimated." Iraq's minister for displacement and migration, Pascale Icho
Warda, estimates that 40,000 Christians left Iraq in the two weeks following
the Aug. 1 bombings.

Whereas Christians make up just 3 percent of the country's population, their
proportion of the refugee flow into Syria is estimated anywhere between 20
and 95 percent. Looking at the larger picture, one estimate finds that about
40 percent of the community has left since 1987, when the census found 1.4
million Iraqi Christians.

Although Muslim leaders uniformly condemned the attacks (Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani termed them "criminal actions," while the interim Iraqi
government bravely declared that "This blow is going to unite Iraqis"), they
almost certainly mark a milestone in the decline and possible disappearance
of Iraqi Christianity.

This seems all the more likely because Christians, due mainly to Islamist
persecution and lower birth rates, are disappearing from the Middle East as
a whole.

· Bethlehem and Nazareth, the most identifiably Christian towns on earth,
enjoyed a Christian majority for nearly two millennia, but no more. In
Jerusalem, the decline has been particularly steep: in 1922, Christians
slightly outnumbered Muslims and today they make up less than 2 percent of
the city's population.

· In Turkey, Christians numbered 2 million in 1920 but now only a few
thousand remain.

· In Syria, they represented about one-third of the population early last
century; now they account for less than 10 percent.

· In Lebanon, they made up 55 percent of the population in 1932 and now
under 30 percent.

· In Egypt, for the first time ever Copts have been emigrating in
significant numbers since the 1950s.

At present rates, the Middle East's 11 million Christians will in a decade
or two have lost their cultural vitality and political significance.

It bears noting that Christians are recapitulating the Jewish exodus of a
few decades earlier. Jews in the Middle East numbered about a million in
1948 and today total (outside Israel) a mere 60,000.

In combination, these ethnic cleansings of two ancient religious minorities
mark the end of an era. The multiplicity of Middle Eastern life, most
memorably celebrated in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet (1957-60), is
being reduced to the flat monotony of a single religion and a handful of
approved languages. The entire region, not just the affected minorities, is
impoverished by this narrowing.