... But There’s a Slim Hope in History

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By ANTHONY SHADID
Published: November 19, 2011
Beirut

NOT so long ago, I was in the town of Beit Meri for the baptism of a friend’s daughter. The church, Mar Elias, was perched over Beirut and the Mediterranean Sea and built amid the Roman ruins of the town. Incense that symbolized prayers lifted to God filtered through the hall. So did history, all those rituals of a Christian community indigenous to a region whose faith runs as deep as its diversity.

Chants vaulted over the stone, their rhythm defiantly Eastern, with an intimation of Constantinople, and inflections of Greece, Rome, Persia and the ebb and flow of Arab tribes moving across the Syrian desert. There were echoes of lamentations recited in Ashura, the holiest time in the Shiite Muslim calendar, or the cadence of the call to prayer, from the Sunni Muslim mosque in my neighborhood in Beirut. Beliefs separated the rituals, but history, culture and language bound them — at least for now.

“Of whom shall I be afraid?” the priest intoned, as the baptism unfolded.

Fear is, in fact, a sentiment voiced often these days by Arab Christians, a sad refrain for an ancient community that was so long a force in politics and culture in the Arab world. These days, a community that still numbers in the millions — with the largest populations in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and the Palestinian territories — finds itself little more than a spectator to events reshaping a place it once helped create, and sometimes a victim of the violence that those events have unleashed. In all the narratives that the Arab revolts represent — dignity, democracy, rights and social justice — many Christians hew to a far bleaker version of events: that their time may be running out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/sunday-review/the-hatred-and-hope-for-arab-christians.html

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