Wherever you go in the Middle East today, you see the Arab Spring rapidly turning into the Christian winter. The past few years have been catastrophic for the region’s beleaguered 14-million strong Christian minority.
In Egypt, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood has been accompanied by a series of anti-Coptic riots and intermittent bouts of church-burning. On the West Bank and in Gaza, the Christians are emigrating fast as they find themselves caught between Netanyahu’s pro-settler Government and their increasingly radicalised and pro-Hamas Sunni Muslim neighbours. Most catastrophically, in Iraq two thirds of the Christians have fled the country since the fall of Saddam.
It was Syria that took in many of the 250,000 Christians driven out of Iraq. Anyone who visited Damascus in recent years could see lounging in every park and sitting in every teahouse the unshaven Iraqi Christian refugees driven from their homes by the sectarian mayhem that followed the end of the Baathist state. They were bank managers and engineers, pharmacists and businessmen — all living with their extended families in one-room flats on what remained of their savings and assisted by the charity of the different churches.
William Dalrymple | Read this article in full at thetimes.co.uk £
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Christianity is slowly dying in its homelands
7th August 2012
Wherever you go in the Middle East today, you see the Arab Spring rapidly turning into the Christian winter. The past few years have been catastrophic for the region’s beleaguered 14-million strong Christian minority.
In Egypt, the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood has been accompanied by a series of anti-Coptic riots and intermittent bouts of church-burning. On the West Bank and in Gaza, the Christians are emigrating fast as they find themselves caught between Netanyahu’s pro-settler Government and their increasingly radicalised and pro-Hamas Sunni Muslim neighbours. Most catastrophically, in Iraq two thirds of the Christians have fled the country since the fall of Saddam.
It was Syria that took in many of the 250,000 Christians driven out of Iraq. Anyone who visited Damascus in recent years could see lounging in every park and sitting in every teahouse the unshaven Iraqi Christian refugees driven from their homes by the sectarian mayhem that followed the end of the Baathist state. They were bank managers and engineers, pharmacists and businessmen — all living with their extended families in one-room flats on what remained of their savings and assisted by the charity of the different churches.
William Dalrymple | Read this article in full at thetimes.co.uk £