Pope Francis arrives in Cairo on Friday — the first
visit by a pontiff to the Middle East’s most populous country in 17
years — at a time when Christians across the region find themselves
under threat by political repression and violent attacks. In
Egypt, Coptic Christians have been chased from their homes, their
churches and a monastery attacked. In Iraq, Assyrians have been
displaced from villages, whole neighborhoods and business districts
gutted by Islamic State. In the West Bank, Iran and Lebanon, Christians
have grown accustomed to celebrating under guard.
“Some of the
oldest Christian communities in the world are disappearing in the very
lands where their faith was born and first took root,” concluded a Center for American Progress report on the plight of Christians in the Middle East.The
Middle East-North Africa area has the highest concentration of Muslims
of any region of the world: 93% of its more than 340 million
inhabitants. Christians in the region face not only the threat of
Islamist violence, but subtler challenges. Many wind up leaving because
they can’t find jobs and face social discrimination. Countries such as
Saudi Arabia make it difficult for Christians to practice their faiths
openly. We talked to Christians across the region, from Egypt to Iran, on the eve of the pope’s visit.
Facing Islamic State in Iraq
make the sign of the cross during Easter Mass at the Mar Youhanna
Church, also known as St. John Church, in Iraq. (Marcus Yam / Los
Angeles Times)
He
once owned a house, a hotel, a casino, a herd of cattle and a farm in
the Christian city of Qaraqosh east of Mosul, home to 50,000. Then
Islamic State arrived.
Militants forced Tawfiq Abosh Jabu Sakar
and most of his neighbors from their homes. They took his hundred head
of cattle, his chicken coops, even his irrigation pipes. Then they
burned his home and business.
“They want to make us all refugees,” said Sakar, 67, as he flipped through photos of his stolen cows.
Iraqi
forces freed the area last fall, but many displaced families refused to
return. The government had yet to restore running water and
electricity. A Christian militia was patrolling the streets, but they
feared militants still lurked nearby.
Two months ago, Sakar decided to move back.
“Christian people have a right to stay here,” he said. “Those who love the area will return and give their soul to protect it.”
He gets upset sometimes with the Iraqi government, and with international charities he thinks should help Christians resettle. Standing
in the charred remains of his three-story home this month, Sakar picked
up a piece of plaster and threw it at the cracked ceiling in
frustration.
“You can’t use this house anymore. What did I do to deserve this?” he said.
Sakar
has replaced his singed casino ceiling, and is repairing the hotel
above. He is building a new ranch house near his fields, which he
replanted with corn. So far, the crop appears healthy.
Islamic State “destroyed everything,” he said. “But I still have hope.”
Displaced in Iraq: ‘It’s getting worse’
Rahim makes klecha holiday cookies with her family at a Christian
refugee camp in the Ainkawa neighborhood of Irbil on April 12. (Marcus
Yam / Los Angeles Times)
The
three women chopped walnuts in the kitchenette of their two-room
trailer, then poured them into a bowl along with dried coconut. Now, as
children hovered, the bakers were rolling out and cutting sweet dough to
make an Easter Iraqi favorite: klecha cookies.
Islamic State
militants forced the trio of Assyrians from their Christian hometown of
Qaraqosh two years ago. Suad Rahim and daughters Iman, 30, and Fata, 27,
had expected to stay at the trailer park in the town of Irbil for a few
months. But they can’t imagine returning home.
Most of the houses
and storefronts sit empty. Militias police the area, and many citizens
fear the armed groups have been infiltrated by Islamic State.
“In the night, it’s very scary,” said Rahim, 50. “We don’t know who is who.”
So
her family of eight are still sharing a trailer, hoping to move to a
house elsewhere in the Kurdish region of Iraq, or overseas. Many of
their former neighbors are now in Australia, Canada and Britain. They
don’t feel safe in Qaraqosh.
“If they try to push us back there,
we’re going to Europe,” Rahim said of Kurdish officials. “It’s not
getting better, it’s getting worse. Nobody is going back.”
Near Bethlehem: ‘We are a witness to the Lord in this city’
Buses
rumbled past Rafat Houary’s stone villa ferrying a stream of tourists
to the Shepherds Field Chapel, where Catholic tradition holds the birth
of Jesus was first announced.
Standing on his balcony, the
43-year-old carpenter and fledgling craft beer brew master pointed out
the hotels and restaurants on the horizon that had popped up around the
holy site in the last few years as tourism to Bethlehem has picked up.
Not long ago, the street was a war zone.
At the height of the
Palestinian uprising at the beginning of the 2000s, the road became a
battlefield for the Israeli army and Palestinian militants. Israeli
tanks patrolled to enforce a curfew as the military scoured the town for
gunmen and potential bombers. Many Christians from Bethlehem and the
suburban villages of Beit Sahour and Beit Jalla moved abroad.
“I
know 100 families that moved,’’ said Houary. “They were looking for a
better life. They were looking for freedom. Maybe if I had a family and
children at the time, I would have thought about moving.’’
But
Houary stayed and helped build a new Bethlehem congregation. When he
bows his head in prayer at the Immanuel Evangelical Church in Beit
Sahour, he faces a colonnade-adorned altar that he erected.
Israel
built fences behind his house separating him from his family-owned
property. Fellow congregants fret about Islamic militancy spreading to
the West Bank. But Houary remains optimistic. Christians, though a
diminished minority in the Holy Land, still have a mission to fulfill,
he said.
“We are a witness to the Lord in this city. So, we have
to be here,” he said. “If all of us move, the culture will die. We want
to find a light for them. We want to find a reason for them to stay in
this country.”
Praying for terrorists in Cairo
Mina Magdi, left, was at church the day of the bombing, along with
friend Yousef Mina, 11, right. (Molly Hennessy-Fiske / Los Angeles
Times)
Vivian Aziz Shehata Shenoudah always
covers her head when she goes out in Cairo. She calls it her
“precaution.” The Coptic woman said she has been harassed by men, women,
even children on the street for being Christian, for her gold crosses,
dyed blond hair and makeup.
She has not seen her brother in San
Diego in a decade. He no longer feels safe visiting her. Shenoudah’s
apartment is in the Abbasia neighborhood, steps from her church, St.
Mark’s. A suicide bomber attacked in December, killing 30 worshipers.
Despite
the risks, for 42 years the unemployed widow has attended services
every week. Last Sunday after church, she walked through the compound,
pointing out her haunts: On Tuesday, she prays in the St. Athanasius (of
Alexandria) chapel next to the tombs of two Coptic priests; on
Thursday, in the St. Rueiss chapel, with its 12th century crypt; on
Friday, the chapel of the Madonna and St. Rueiss (he’s a popular
Egyptian saint, appearing with a camel).
On Sunday, the chapels were packed not just with Egyptians, but also with Christian refugees from Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan.
Three
days a week, Shenoudah also attends services at Botroseya Chapel, in
the women’s area where the bomb detonated and marble columns are still
pitted from the explosion. In a nearby hall, tour guides display
remnants of the attack now considered relics and preserved under glass:
bloodied pews, victims’ bloodstained heels, handbags and hair clippings.
Shenoudah
comes to pray, but also for companionship. After her husband died, the
Egyptian economy tanked and her consulting business assisting foreigners
dried up.
She blames poverty and wealthy Gulf countries for stoking Muslim extremism.
“I always pray that they change their minds to peace and that they leave us alone,” she said.
‘This is the grave of the martyrs’
The bombing on Palm Sunday shook the Church of St. George in Tanta, Egypt.
“This
is the grave of the martyrs,” says the sign next to the church where 28
who came to worship on Palm Sunday were killed by an Islamic State
suicide bomber. They had their funerals there the same night.
Solemn
families paused to pay their respects as they filed past on their way
to services in the chapel just beyond. St. George, about an hour’s drive
north of Cairo, is still gutted. Broken pews are heaped outside.
Shattered windows reveal interior columns still pitted and bloodstained.
Many
worshipers still wear black, out of respect for friends and family who
were killed. The victims’ names are listed on a golden plaque some touch
as they pass, hoping for a blessing. There’s a poem, too, and a picture
of St. George, the “great martyr,” slaying a dragon.
Mina Magdi, 12, was at church the day of the bombing, along with friend Yousef Mina, 11.
Pellets
from the bomb nearly struck Yousef’s mother. She survived. Her cousin
was struck in the head by a piece of metal, Mina said. Attached to it
was someone’s eye.
“I saw bodies split in two,” Yousef said as he stood before a grave.
The list of the dead includes their Sunday school teacher, the priest’s son.
Other
children begged their parents not to come to church, afraid of another
attack. But the boys were upbeat, despite the bloodshed they had seen
here. They said they were not scared.
“Pope Francis isn’t afraid to come to Egypt,” Mina said. “He is coming to support us. He is coming at a dangerous time.”
Lebanon an oasis of peace for Christians
On
the Saturday before Easter, residents of Beirut’s Mar Mikhael
neighborhood enjoying an evening drink began to shout over the
surrounding noise.
But it wasn’t because of the music piping out
of the neighborhood’s cafes and bars. Instead it was the cacophony of
hundreds of fireworks mixed with the peals of the many churches in the
area. “It’s almost like they were competing over which one is the
loudest,” complained one reveler when quiet finally returned.
It
was yet another sign, several Lebanese Christian leaders said, that when
it comes to their communities, Lebanon is the exception in the Middle
East.
“There,” said Sebouh Garabedian, the laid-back media
representative of the Armenian Catholic church, “you have explosions,
and then they blew up the church in Egypt, so there is more fear.”
The “there” he referred to was neighboring Syria, where the six-year civil war has decimated the country’s minorities.
A
33-year-old priest with stylish stubble and designer glasses,
Garabedian was preparing last week for a large Mass set to be held in
the large asphalt playground of a nearby school.
“Here it is the
opposite. The churches are even fuller than in past years … because it
is safe, and there is no fear regarding this sort of attack.”
Raffi Aywazian, a 25-year old Syrian Lebanese man, agreed.
Aywazian
recalled his time in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. In the years
before the war, Aywazian said, the city’s sizable Christian community
would have large street celebrations.
“It was even bigger than
here,” said Aywazian with a note of wistfulness. He had come to Lebanon
with his family five years ago, after the Syrian civil war finally
reached Aleppo.
Many minorities in Syria fear the opposition,
which is fighting to dislodge President Bashar Assad and is
overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim. They point to the dominance of Islamist
groups within its ranks.
In Beirut, however, Aywazian was happy to take part in the festivities all over Mar Mikhael.
Archpriest
Mesrob Kerkezian credited the reason for Lebanon’s relative tranquility
to its eighteen sects. The country’s politicians constantly jockey for
benefits for their communities — none really ever gaining the upper
hand.
In Iran, Armenian Christians commemorate the Turkish genocide
A
sign spanning St. Sarkis Armenian Church in Tehran this week
commemorated genocide of the Armenian people by the “Ottoman Turkish
state.”
At a nearby grocery store, owner Gregory Davoud Daavetian,
an Armenian Christian, said he looked forward to the pope’s visit to
the Middle East.
The Armenian community in Iran is one of the
oldest and largest in the world, and it enjoys official recognition in
the Islamic Republic. There has been a surge in emigration in recent
years, but much of it is due less to discrimination than a search for
better economic opportunities.
The Iranian government places
strict limits on proselytizing among evangelical Christians. But the
Armenians are generally free to practice their religion.
“Any
attempt to reduce violence in the region is appreciated, so I am happy
to see that the pope is coming to Cairo,” Daavetiansaid. “I was born in
Iran, I am Iranian Christian and Iran is my country.”
Hennessy-Fiske reported from Cairo and Mosul, Bulos from Beirut, Mostaghim from Tehran, Mitnick from the West Bank.
Copyright © 2017, Los Angeles Times
