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I don't know what to say any more. I read and hear the reports coming out of Syria, which has been by far the bloodiest and most violent of the uprisings known as the 'Arab Spring'. The governmental crackdown has slaughtered innocent men, women and children indiscriminately. Journalists and foreign reporters have been targeted and marked for death. Atrocities and violence has been the hallmark of this uprising which was supposed to be about democracy and freedom and has now become of international concern as Russia, China, Iran and the United States are becoming increasingly involved. There looms on the horizon the possibility of escalating war and violence that may involve super powers and their allies. Syria and the region is in deep trouble, and the violence could spill over into and involve neighboring countries like Lebanon, pitting Sunni and Shi'a Muslims, secularists and pro theocrats against each other in a long anticipated apocryphal showdown like never before. Religious as well as political aspirations and fears are unraveled as in all the uprisings in the Arab world, but perhaps the Syrian uprising will have the greatest impact on the near future of the Middle East.
The increased involvement of the Islamists supporting and fighting for the rebels in Syria plays a role that may change the very face of the country. Should the revolution succeed, the Islamists who are there now in alarming numbers fighting for the liberation of the Syrian people will undoubtedly demand a role in Syria. For them Damascus represents the seat of the caliphate, as the success of this struggle for them is all about the forces of Islam against the evil of the secular Baathist regime of the Al Assad family. If and when that victory happens, the following day will be a nightmare for many Syrians, including secular minded Muslims. How they will deal with the Shi'a and the Iranian backed Hezbollah of southern Lebanon is another question. Yes, it's all rather complicated with little prospect for the positive and the peaceful.
What needs to be mentioned, I think, is the fate of the Christians and Christianity in Syria. Though they have been exploited and oppressed by Muslims in the past, the Christians of Syria are facing the dilemma of extinction, a dilemma never before experienced at such a level. Recently there have been reports that Islamist jihadis have been ordering the Christians to leave their homes. In the town of Qusair, in the province of Homs which has been the scene of serious struggle and violence, the Christians were told, via the loudspeakers of the minarets, to leave the city. "All Christians must leave Qusair at once!" Some 10,000 Christians immediately left the city in fear. This is similar to events in Egypt as well, when Salafis attacked and burned Coptic churches as only a few came to their rescue.
The Syrian Christians, as a minority, would naturally support any secular government just as Christians have done in Iraq and in Egypt. They support, to some extent, the Assad regime because that regime has allowed them some autonomy and afforded them a tolerance which has not been demonstrated by the Islamists in other countries.The reason they support this secular regime, cruel as it is, is because they fear the rise of the Islamists who would impose the second class status of dhimmi on them. In Lebanon, the Christians who live in the mountains along with the Druse can maintain their identity due to geographical factors that have protected them for centuries. But for those living in the urban centers of the Middle East, or in the dirt poor villages of Egypt, eviction seems to be the modus operandi for the rising Islamist surge. Dreams of a successful state based on the promises of Islam and it's Sharia are what many Muslims are seeking, or say they are seeking, even if that dream is a nightmare to other religious minorities. The unfolding events reveal an atmosphere which holds no place for the ancient eastern churches and their congregants. It's Islam's turn to run the show, according to the whims of the Islamists, and they are out to show the world that they can do it too. They lack the political savvy as well as the economic expertise of the Christians, but frustration with 'foreign' styles of government has reached it's limit. Yes, a child may think he can drive a car, but how many parents would actually let them do this? A number of Muslims of the Arab world have come to believe that Islam, or rather their version of it, can answer the questions regarding the problems they face which were caused by the reliance on European inspired secularism, which failed. In other words, the consensus is "it's our turn".
However, no thinking or feeling Muslim in their heart of hearts can or should condone this. Building a society out of rubble or chaos is no easy task, and Muslims are constantly teaching and preaching to the world that Muhammad, a clever and successful society builder in his time par excellence, did so and included the non Muslims in his city state known as Medina. He actually did make laws and give rights to the 'Ahl i Kitab', the People of the Book as they were known. Their property was sacred, their lives and happiness guaranteed, their religion and it's institutions were to be respected and no compulsion should come upon them. It was the duty of Muslims to protect them, hence the idea of jizya, a tax paid to the state that insured their protection, respect for their property and defense of their faith for all time. That protection however, in time, became exploitation and oppression quite different from what Muhammad had in mind.
Of course, things changed over the centuries and while some Muslim leaders have been faithful to the concept of coexistence with non Muslims, far too many have used the poll tax to oppress and exploit non Muslims. Along with the exploitation has come contempt for non Muslims. It wasn't always this way, but developed over time due to mistrust, especially during and after the Crusades, as well as when Christians sought protection from Muslim oppression with the rise of European powers. In the 19th century Russia, seeking to make land grabs on the then dying Ottoman empire, proclaimed themselves the protectors of all Orthodox Christians. The French, not to be outdone, called themselves the protectors of all the Catholic subjects of the Ottomans, such as the Maronites of Lebanon. English and Scottish Presbyterian and American Protestant missionaries sought converts in what is now Palestine and Iraq. Mind you, France was a secular republic which shouted the praises of men like Diderot who despised religion and it's affiliations. But colonialism was a greedy battle for the control of other people's property, and greed knows no bounds. World War I would settle all that.
My personal concern is the mentality and the inner heart feelings of the Muslims of the region towards the Christians of Syria, which by proximity and cultural ties includes Lebanon. Islam owes Syria and it's Christian legacy. Long before any caliphate, long before the Umayyads made Damascus the capital of the then world's largest known empire, long before Arabic became the official language or before anything remotely 'Islamic' was associated with Syria, the land and it's people were heirs to the legacy of early Aramaean Christianity. Learning from the gnostic hermits of Egypt, Syrian Christianity emerged into a form of the faith that placed the personal mystical experience with the God of Abraham via Jesus Christ above all else. Here, in what is now Syria, Lebanon and southern Turkey, mystical Christianity began to express itself in the writings of early church fathers such as John of Damascus, Ephrem the Syrian, Bardaisan and Amphrahat, names long forgotten in western Christianity but nonetheless important in constructing the foundations of spiritual intellectual studies associated with Christian theology. Using the vehicle of poetry to express their ecstatic mysticism, these and countless other writers would influence the phenomenon of the Sufis, centuries later, who put into prose and rhyme the truths they learned in their meditations with God. Great works like the Diatessaron and liturgies such as the Doctrina Addai (teaching of Thaddeus) as well as many musical hymns written in Syro-Aramaic or Greek were part of the prolific outpouring of scholarly and artistic works which came about during this glorious time. Indeed, this intellectual and mystical Christianity would be the cultural axis and intellectual center for a number of churches that would spring up along the Silk Road, and connect and inspire peoples of many faiths from Egypt and Ethiopia, across the Middle East and up into the Armenian and Georgian highlands in the Caucasus, across the Iranian plateau then the steppes of central Asia, deep into China and along the coasts of India. Aramaic and Greek were both used as written languages by these educated men, and ideas from Buddhism and Zoroastrianism interchanged freely with eastern Christian thought. In the northwest region of Syria near the city of Aleppo (Haleb) are some 700 abandoned 'dead cities'. These abandoned ruins tell a story of a time when it was Syria that led the Christian world in scholarship, education and spiritual pursuits from the 3rd through the 8th centuries AD. Among these ruins are to be found ancient monasteries, churches and libraries, revealing a rich and cultured past. So many individual churches and ideologies would be established based on the teachings of these many holy men, each expressing sometimes a slightly, sometimes drastically different feature of the Jesus story and his teachings, indicating that the pursuit of truth was an individual journey for each and every person's spiritual experience according to their conscience. The Nestorians, the Maronites, the Melkites, Chaldeans, Jacobites, Anchorites, Arians, Ebionites, Paulicians, Assyriani and a host of other churches sprung up or were influenced by the hermits living in the deserts and mountains of Syria, all seeking and trying to explain the mystery of God, his love for humanity and his compassion for the salvation of our souls though the personage, whether dual or monophysite in nature, of Jesus the Christ.
So many of these individual churches evolved that the Byzantines, seeking religious unity for the purpose of an empirical dominance based in Constantinople, began to persecute these churches, primarily because of the monophysite/diophysite controversy (referring to the single or dual natures of Christ) as well as their refusal to accept the final verdicts of the council of Nicaea. One can visit the caves in central Turkey, in Cappadocia, to see where these Christians would have had to hide from marauding Byzantine raiding parties who would put to death any and all heretics who were unlucky enough to be caught. The Muslim Arab armies invaded the region at the request of the local Christians who formed a coalition called the Ghassanids. Oppressed under Byzantine tyranny, the Christians of Syria sought the protection of the Arab Muslims, fellow Semites who were far more lenient and tolerant than their fellow Christian Greek rulers of the eastern Roman empire. As an initial result of the Arab invasion, many of the ancient churches survived, and survive to this day. In fact, so similar to the ancient Syrian Christians were the early Arab Muslims that the Byzantine emperor thought them yet another Christian group to emanate from the hot bed of Syrian heresy. Arab Muslim tolerance, however, was eventually replaced by intolerance towards the end of the 10th century. The Maronites, followers of one Mar Maron based in northwestern Syria, sought refuge from the persecution of their once former liberators in the mountains of Lebanon, where they remain to this day. Other groups like the Ebionites and the Arians unfortunately disappeared from history as eventual Muslim intolerance began to finish the work the Byzantines had begun centuries before. Islam was a double edged sword for eastern Christianity. On the one hand, when wise caliphs made tolerance a public policy, it preserved some of eastern Christianity's most revered and ancient churches. Yet on the other hand, Muslim intolerance was complicit in eventually destroying them and rendering Syro-Aramaic, as a language, virtually extinct except for in a few isolated places. Let us make no mistake about it- there was such a thing as intolerant eastern Christianity towards other faiths as well. The attacks on the Manichaeans, which led to persecution of the followers of that dualist faith and eventually caused it to disappear, like the burning of the library of Alexandria, the physical and scholar-based attacks on the Jews of the Byzantine and Aramaean realms are no credits to anyone or any culture or faith. We have to do more research to see whether St. Augustine truly converted to Christianity and willingly spoke against the Manichaeans as he did, as he was once a member of that faith, or is his life one of legend and near myth? Yet his writings are replete with dualism and the battle of light and dark, influencing Christian thought even further in that area. We all wish to see a happy ending to any story, but the part of the play where Islam enters the scene depicted as a gallant hero is short lived. The religion which was meant to be a culmination and a unifier of ideas both spiritual and political yielded to the political powers of the time, as everywhere.
By the 7th century eastern Christianity was in the midst of defiant anti Byzantine upheaval, persecution and chaos. It was in this heated and debated religious environment that a young Muhammad, traveling with caravans from his home in Mecca deep in the pagan Hejaz of Arabia, would come upon and be uplifted by these Aramaean men of books. He had a keen interest in their stories of Jesus and Mary, and the prophets and figures of the Bible. He was intrigued by their devotion, how they would sit in caves for days, even for weeks on end and attain spiritual enlightenment from their solitary ordeal. Islamic tradition knows of two of them, Warraq and Bahira the Monk, whom Muhammad had the utmost respect and love for, but there must have been many more throughout the length and breadth of Arabia. The teachings of the church fathers, in the form of poetry, must have been like fire from heaven for him. And, let us not forget that this merchant Muhammad was, like most of the people of his day, illiterate, and the Syrian rabbani and the khouri (literally 'one who recites') he met inspired him to be near obsessed with this secret of personal spiritual development. Reading meant the ability to decipher books and collect knowledge, and to have knowledge at one's fingertips was the deciding factor as to whether a human being was indeed cultured or a barbarian. Muhammad chose culture by approving of reading and writing, and this would influence him throughout his career. Mention should be made at this point that Muhammad very likely, in fact most certainly understood some Syro-Aramaic, as he was a merchant. In dealing with the businessmen of the Levant, Aramaic was a necessity as these people had yet to adopt Arabic as their language. Arabic would come with those conquerors who came after Muhammad and made Damascus their capitol. Muhammad heard the ancient tales of the Bible in the language of the Syrian monks, namely Syro-Aramaic. He probably heard some Greek, too.
When he returned to Mecca after his enlightening encounters with these learned men, he used to imitate these monks and he too would sit in a cave. One night, after spending many days and nights in the cave alone, he had an experience that the monks knew too well about. The angel Gabriel visited him and revealed those all too famous words known to both the Muslim faithful and the historian, words that would become part of the book known as the Quran: "Read in the name of thy Lord, who createth Man from a drop of blood congealed, who teacheth man by the pen, teacheth Man that which he knew not, read!"
Should we be surprised about this? Muhammad followed the advice of these monks who tutored him. He sought the God of Abraham according to their practice of meditation and prayer and lo and behold, this God revealed himself to him. To reassure him that it was not hallucination, as Muhammad ran home in fear he turned around and saw Gabriel standing on the mountain that housed the cave, who reminded him that he was indeed Gabriel and Muhammad was the messenger of God. When he hid under his blanket at home, shivering from the experience, Gabriel once again told him "Oh thou wrapped up in thy mantle, arise ye and warn".
So Muhammad was put upon on his life's journey to establish the way of God upon his ignorant, pagan and illiterate people. The experience that directed him to do that was so like the writings of the early Syrian church fathers that those scholars, writers and historians who do not claim Islam or any faith as their own, personal religion sometimes have concluded that this description was but an adaption of some hermit's personal diary. But, that aside, it is clear that Muhammad had an experience unlike no other among his own people, and it happened because he followed the advice of those who were schooled in the hermitic practices that developed originally in Gnostic Egypt and in Syria among hermits at the time. Muhammad's fellow pagan Meccans thought him slightly eccentric for sitting in a cave. Muhammad sought God's intervention for his chaotic society and God answered him via a few wise priest's teachings and advice. Arabia would never be the same again, and Muhammad's experience of solitude would change the world. The Quran, meaning 'the recitation' (like the Aramaic word khouri, one who recites, qari in Arabic) was of a language and a type of near poetry unlike anything that the Arabs ever heard. The verses are unique in their style, as were the Christian inspired verses of the likes of Jacob of Sarug or Ephraim the Syrian in their time. So powerful was the sound of the Quran on Arab ears that not a word is supposed to be changed from that which has come down as original. Within this text one can read long forgotten stories Muhammad probably learned from listening to those monks and priests, such as the story of The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, a clearly eastern Christian tale, and the legend of Zulqarnain the two horned king, of whom some claim is Alexander the Great himself. Both of these stories are found, ironically, in the chapter titled 'Kahf'...The Cave.
Later, when the phenomenon known as the Sufis came into existence after some Muslim believers decided that there had to be more to a spiritual connection with this loving and compassionate God than just what was being offered at the time, it was among the eastern Christians that the experience of seeking proximity to this God was again found. The hymns of the early churches of Syria (known as madrasa!) inspired what would become the ilahis, ghazals and the nefes of the Sufi repertoire, with the flute known as the ney, the frame drum and cymbals forming an important element in the instrumentation of such an ensemble. The Sufis would link their repertoire and tradition all the way back in religious heirarchy to David who danced his way to spiritual ecstasy to the repetition of the Psalms set to music, and even unto the ancient Greek scholar Pythagoras, who's work was well known and studied by the early church scholars of Syria, Turkey and Lebanon. Thus the Sufi tradition is a connection, as they readily describe, to the intellectual accomplishments of the past. These accomplishments and their connections to that rich past of the ancients came to them though the religious scholars of the then Aramaean speaking Christian Fertile Crescent. It was this intellectual knowledge that was embodied, collected and codified by the priests and monks of the Levant which was passed on to the Muslim scholars in the golden age of Islamic civilization, the 8th to the 13th centuries, who in turn unknowingly jump-started a European Renaissance. Our modern world owes much to the work and legacy of the monks and priests of Syria.
It is a crime today that the Islamist movement chooses to conveniently forget the contributions of this important part of ancient history, Syrian Christianity's connection to the very faith and roots of Islam. The gifts that the rabbani gave so selflessly have been forgotten and ignored by modern Muslim leaders and their dreams for redeeming the mythical fallen state of Islam. But in this too is a lesson to be learned, if one is wise enough to learn it. Historically, while Muslim rulers in the early centuries of the Islamic era were tolerant of the Christians and Jews who were their numerous subjects in the 7th to the 10th century, success was guaranteed for the caliphs and emirs who ruled from Spain to China. The intellectual, economic and mercantile connections of the non Muslim subjects supported and made possible the empire through trade and scholarship. When that tolerance began to die in the end of he 10th century, things began to change, and the fate of the Islamic world began to change for the worse, as Crusaders and Mongolian hordes took advantage of the internal fighting and bickering that became emblematic of the fledging Muslim states. The day Muslim rulers began to sneer at their dhimmi subjects was the day that Islamic civilization began to die, sinking into a murky political abyss accompanied by an ignorance heralded by caliph imposed religious clerics who saw to it that no spirit of ijtihad, Islam's own tradition of critical thinking, would ever raise it's head again. By the 14th century, it was over. Islam has not been able to recover since. With the wisdom of the ancients a memory, so was Islamic greatness. The knowledge passed to them by eastern Christianity was forgotten, and a once vibrant civilization became virtually comatose. Only when Muslims, individually and collectively, practice and manifest their faith with God as a one on one personal relationship with their creator, in the spirit of the practices of the early church fathers who codified and taught these experiences to Muhammad himself setting the foundation stones for what would become a then new faith, will they deliver themselves from the clutches of those militant minded Islamists who use a corrupted Islam founded on myths to forward a political rather than a spiritual agenda.
My heart goes out to all the Christians of the Middle East. I have longed for a day when Muslim, Christian and Jew would live together in harmony and in a spirit of united Abrahamic brotherhood. When the call to prayer would mix with the sound of church bells and the ancient hymns of monks. There was a time when any person, Muslims included, would be welcomed to the monastery of some retired rabbaniya with warm greetings and a glass of hot, sweet tea, some cheese and some freshly baked bread brushed with olive oil and thyme, so as to ask questions of the learned men who resided in these mountainous retreats. Their expertise in all matters spiritual go back a long time. Muhammad knew he could learn from them, and did. Why are modern Muslims so dismissing of this important level of the school, this early class in our religious tutorship? Please dear Muslims, do not turn your backs on the plight of the Christians of the Middle East, and do not forget the legacy of Syria. There is still much to learn from these learned 'People of the Book' because it was they who taught Muslims the meaning of education and intellect which, according to the very words of the Quran, are gifts from God.
In the words of Ephraim the Syrian, in his Lenten prayer, we experience how the spirit of guidance is sought during the time of fasting and forgiving. We all can learn something from this simple and humble prayer from a simple and humble man who dwelled in the deserts and caves of Syria centuries ago. His example and prayer was good enough for Muhammad. It's more than good enough for me. May we all be guided to enlightenment.
"Oh Lord and Master of life, do not give me love of curiosity, idleness, love of power and vain talk, but grant to me thy servant, the spirit of humility, prudence, patience and love. Yes Lord and King, grant that I may see my own faults, and to not judge my brother. For you are blessed of ages to ages."
Amen.
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