A merry Spring to Arab Christians

As we cross the threshold of a new year and join millions of people around the world in Christmas and New Year celebrations, we can only offer our best wishes and blessings to our people and nation. We direct these especially at the Christians of these countries and the salt of its earth who have made invaluable contributions to the creation of its glory and its civilisation across the decades and centuries. On this occasion, we pause to consider the matter of Christians and the Arab Spring. I commence by noting that the two years of the Arab Spring have not been years of stability for the Christians of these countries. The change in Iraq, which preceded the Arab Spring by eight years, did not bring them general peace. In Egypt, as well as Syria (taking the varying circumstances and conditions into consideration), they are experiencing their biggest challenge in years and decades. Unless we acknowledge these facts and search for solutions to uproot the phenomena of discrimination, coercion and exclusion, this countenance and future of this region will never be as the people want. The driving and influential forces behind the Arab revolutions and uprisings and the regimes before them, or lack thereof in the case of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, did not register as good news with the Christians of Egypt, Iraq and this Eastern region in general, I believe. For the past decade, the Christians of Iraq have been open to displacement, bombing and marginalisation. The Christians of Egypt face the grey rhetoric of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, implying infidel status. As for the Christians of Syria, they have fixed their gaze on the future in anticipation of what they may come up against over the course of the Syrian crisis or once the weapons of the civil war are laid aside. There is, in the current populist discourse, especially among Islamists, a tendency to blame Christians themselves for their current condition. There is a widespread claim that the Christians of this region stood behind thee corrupt regime and did not join the revolutionary ranks, or that only some of them joined up in the final stages. These two accusations are promoted in order to exonerate the political and ideological currents and movements which have failed at presenting a discourse that reassured the Arab-Christian component. If they did not blaze the trail of the Arab Spring’s revolutions and uprisings, they were at least present among the elite since the very beginning. At any rate, it is unfair and equivocal to claim that they supported and embraced the corrupt and despotic regimes which were shrewder and more cunning than many popular movements, in their success at promoting the idea of their protection of Christians, always with an eye to elicit the support and understanding of the Christian West. Then the post-Spring constitutions, governments and parliaments reinforced the Arab Christians’ anxieties over their citizenship and their futures. The fruitless and inconsequential rhetoric of the Muslim-Christian brotherliness and citizen equality was not translated into clear articles in the new constitutions, and the presence of the Christian component in the post-revolutionary Arab formations and frameworks remained pale and tokenistic. The spread of extremism in some Arab Islamist circles has also helped create extremist Christian strands, especially in Egypt and in Lebanon and Iraq, maybe now possibly in Syria as well. These currents began with a call for Christians to look Westwards, toward the northern Mediterranean and the Atlantic, instead of working at activating collective national identities and stimulating the processes of national and societal integration. In some countries, Christian extremism takes on cloaked forms. We see it as an isolationist Phoenician and Pharaonic tendency in Lebanon and Egypt, regionalism in other countries [Jordan, for example] and we also see it behind the mask of leftist ideologies and pan-Arabism. This use of the taqiyya tactic, however, has failed to hide the closed-minded and sectarian substance. In short, there is no Christian solution to the problem of Christians in the Arab world. Only the democratic solution based on the concept of citizen equality as the source from which all rights and duties are derived; the preservation of religious, cultural and social diversity; respecting the principal of the basic circulation of power and the safeguarding of public freedoms, including the rights to free expression, worship and conviction can provide a solution to the problem of all majorities and minorities in the Arab world. It is within this framework that we find the historic role played by Arab Christians of all leanings, congregations, political and intellectual schools. It is the same framework within which all the work of democrats and reformists can be found. There is no Christian solution to the problem of Christians in the Arab world beyond the bounds of the Qatari national project and its nationalistic and democratic aspects, nor beyond the bounds of a pan-Arab project. They are an integral part of this region’s history, present and future. They are neither expat communities nor a pro-Western fifth column. They are the pioneers of the Arab renaissance and enlightenment from amongst whom dozens and hundreds of the nations’ brightest stars, intellectuals and fighters have emerged. That's how Christian Arabs have been and so they should remain. --- The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent or reflect the editorial policy of Arabstoday.