Difficult for Christians to Survive in the Middle East
Pastor Paul Ciniraj,
Salem Voice Ministries
Beirut (Lebanon), SVM News, 20 January, 2007: The Presbyterian Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon reported to the Presbyterian Church delegation of USA that being of Christians in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon is very difficult.
The Presbyterian Church delegation visiting the Middle East reported Friday, the 19th of January that Christians in Lebanon expressed difficulties surviving in an unstable and Muslim-dominated region.
"We are tired. Our young people are leaving. We want our children to live like any other children and pray that they may have time to dream", the Middle East Christian leaders shared to the delegation.
Top leaders of the Presbyterian Church of USA expressed concern in a letter for the indigenous Christian population that is dwindling not only in Lebanon but elsewhere in the Middle East.
Violence, terrorism and the Islamists’ growing influence pose a threat to Christianity in the Middle East. In some countries, members of an unpopular Christian minority are already fighting for their survival - or fleeing for their lives.
Instability, insecurity, persecution and economic hardships are only some of the many factors prompting Christians to flee the region.
Christians have lived in the Arab world for the past 2,000 years. They were there before the Muslims. Apostle Paul also had been to Arabia according the Bible (Galatians 1:17).
Saudi Arabia has no Christian of its own but employs Hundreds of thousands of Christian guest workers from the Indian subcontinent and Africa. Christian church services are banned and punishable with severe penalties. Bibles and crucifixes are routinely confiscated. Recently they decide to ban the english alphabetical letter "X" in Saudi Arabia, because that letter shows the symbal of a cross. The Wahhabite religious police, the Muttawah, have even been known to raid private religious services. Even though thousands of Saudi origins accepting Jesus as their personal saviour.
There are no reliable figures on the size of Christian minorities in the Middle East. This is partly attributable to an absence of statistics, and partly to the politically charged nature of producing such statistics in the first place. Lebanon’s last census was taken 74 years ago. Saddam Hussein, a Sunni who is himself part of a minority, was fundamentally opposed to compiling denominational statistics. In Egypt the number of Christians fluctuates between five and 12 million, depending on who is counting.
Given the lack of hard numbers, demographers must rely on estimates, whereby Christians make up about 40 percent of the population in Lebanon, less than 10 percent in Egypt and Syria, two to four percent in Jordan and Iraq and less than one percent in North Africa. But the major political changes that are currently affecting the Middle East have led to shrinking Christian minorities.
In East Jerusalem, where half of the population was Christian until 1948, the year of the first Arab-Israeli war, less than five percent of residents are Christian today. In neighboring Jordan, the number of Christians was reduced by half between the 1967 Six Day War and the 1990s. There were only 500,000 Christians still living in Iraq until recently, compared to 750,000 after the 1991 Gulf War. Wassim, one of the seminary students now fleeing to Kurdistan, estimates that half of those remaining Christians have emigrated since the 2003 US invasion, most of them in the last six months.
Actually nobody can imagine Lebanon without its Christian community. They played a major role in Lebanon after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Christians were the leaders in the Cedar revolution that drove the Syrians out after nearly 3 decades of occupation.
It was a Syrian Christian, Michel Aflaq, who founded the nationalist Baath movement in 1940, a career ladder for Iraqi Christians until 2003 and still a political safe haven for many Syrian Christians today. Former Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser had no qualms about paying homage to the Virgin Mary, who supposedly appeared on a church roof in a Cairo suburb after Egypt’s defeat in its 1967 war with Israel. And former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004, insisted on sitting in the first row in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity during the annual Christmas service.
But those days are gone. The last prominent Christians — Chaldean Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s foreign minister for many years, and Hanan Ashrawi, Arafat’s education minister — have vanished from the political stage in the Middle East. And since the election victories of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the bloody power struggles between Sunni and Shiite militias in Iraq, the illusion that Christian politicians could still play an important role in the Arab world is gone once and for all.
A Middle East scholar during visits to the nation’s capital last year warned that the lost of religious minorities in the region would adversely affect Islamic moderation.
Dr. Habib Malik, professor of history and cultural studies at the Presbyterian-founded Lebanese American University in Beirut, said that Christians provide a “dimension of universality – openness towards other culture” that help Muslims in the region become more accepting of others different from themselves.
For example, Christian beliefs such as respect for women’s rights, acceptance of religious pluralism, rejection of suicide bombings and religious domination can facilitate Islamic moderation when the two groups co-exist in the region.
“There is a new breed of Muslims that emerges after this interaction with a generally relax, secure, and stable non-Muslim, indigenous community,” said Malik in a conference last November.
Preserving a Middle East Christian population is also important for mediating western ideas into the region and maintaining a population that the international community can ask for reciprocal equal treatment as Muslims receive in their country.
Pastor Paul Ciniraj, Director of the Salem Voice Ministries request prayer supports as well as financial supports for the persecuted Christians in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. It is very very important to get support and helps for those who are converting to Christianity from Islam or other religions. Because sometimes the Christians can seek and get supports from their relatives, friends and the people of own community from other countries. But the converted Christians have nobody to show empathy when they are facing persecuted.
To see this news item at the original site, log-on to: http://salemvoice.org/news125.html
Beirut (Lebanon), SVM News, 20 January, 2007: The Presbyterian Evangelical Synod of Syria and Lebanon reported to the Presbyterian Church delegation of USA that being of Christians in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon is very difficult.
The Presbyterian Church delegation visiting the Middle East reported Friday, the 19th of January that Christians in Lebanon expressed difficulties surviving in an unstable and Muslim-dominated region.
"We are tired. Our young people are leaving. We want our children to live like any other children and pray that they may have time to dream", the Middle East Christian leaders shared to the delegation.
Top leaders of the Presbyterian Church of USA expressed concern in a letter for the indigenous Christian population that is dwindling not only in Lebanon but elsewhere in the Middle East.
Violence, terrorism and the Islamists’ growing influence pose a threat to Christianity in the Middle East. In some countries, members of an unpopular Christian minority are already fighting for their survival - or fleeing for their lives.
Instability, insecurity, persecution and economic hardships are only some of the many factors prompting Christians to flee the region.
Christians have lived in the Arab world for the past 2,000 years. They were there before the Muslims. Apostle Paul also had been to Arabia according the Bible (Galatians 1:17).
Saudi Arabia has no Christian of its own but employs Hundreds of thousands of Christian guest workers from the Indian subcontinent and Africa. Christian church services are banned and punishable with severe penalties. Bibles and crucifixes are routinely confiscated. Recently they decide to ban the english alphabetical letter "X" in Saudi Arabia, because that letter shows the symbal of a cross. The Wahhabite religious police, the Muttawah, have even been known to raid private religious services. Even though thousands of Saudi origins accepting Jesus as their personal saviour.
There are no reliable figures on the size of Christian minorities in the Middle East. This is partly attributable to an absence of statistics, and partly to the politically charged nature of producing such statistics in the first place. Lebanon’s last census was taken 74 years ago. Saddam Hussein, a Sunni who is himself part of a minority, was fundamentally opposed to compiling denominational statistics. In Egypt the number of Christians fluctuates between five and 12 million, depending on who is counting.
Given the lack of hard numbers, demographers must rely on estimates, whereby Christians make up about 40 percent of the population in Lebanon, less than 10 percent in Egypt and Syria, two to four percent in Jordan and Iraq and less than one percent in North Africa. But the major political changes that are currently affecting the Middle East have led to shrinking Christian minorities.
In East Jerusalem, where half of the population was Christian until 1948, the year of the first Arab-Israeli war, less than five percent of residents are Christian today. In neighboring Jordan, the number of Christians was reduced by half between the 1967 Six Day War and the 1990s. There were only 500,000 Christians still living in Iraq until recently, compared to 750,000 after the 1991 Gulf War. Wassim, one of the seminary students now fleeing to Kurdistan, estimates that half of those remaining Christians have emigrated since the 2003 US invasion, most of them in the last six months.
Actually nobody can imagine Lebanon without its Christian community. They played a major role in Lebanon after the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Christians were the leaders in the Cedar revolution that drove the Syrians out after nearly 3 decades of occupation.
It was a Syrian Christian, Michel Aflaq, who founded the nationalist Baath movement in 1940, a career ladder for Iraqi Christians until 2003 and still a political safe haven for many Syrian Christians today. Former Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser had no qualms about paying homage to the Virgin Mary, who supposedly appeared on a church roof in a Cairo suburb after Egypt’s defeat in its 1967 war with Israel. And former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004, insisted on sitting in the first row in Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity during the annual Christmas service.
But those days are gone. The last prominent Christians — Chaldean Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s foreign minister for many years, and Hanan Ashrawi, Arafat’s education minister — have vanished from the political stage in the Middle East. And since the election victories of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Hamas in the Palestinian Authority, the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the bloody power struggles between Sunni and Shiite militias in Iraq, the illusion that Christian politicians could still play an important role in the Arab world is gone once and for all.
A Middle East scholar during visits to the nation’s capital last year warned that the lost of religious minorities in the region would adversely affect Islamic moderation.
Dr. Habib Malik, professor of history and cultural studies at the Presbyterian-founded Lebanese American University in Beirut, said that Christians provide a “dimension of universality – openness towards other culture” that help Muslims in the region become more accepting of others different from themselves.
For example, Christian beliefs such as respect for women’s rights, acceptance of religious pluralism, rejection of suicide bombings and religious domination can facilitate Islamic moderation when the two groups co-exist in the region.
“There is a new breed of Muslims that emerges after this interaction with a generally relax, secure, and stable non-Muslim, indigenous community,” said Malik in a conference last November.
Preserving a Middle East Christian population is also important for mediating western ideas into the region and maintaining a population that the international community can ask for reciprocal equal treatment as Muslims receive in their country.
Pastor Paul Ciniraj, Director of the Salem Voice Ministries request prayer supports as well as financial supports for the persecuted Christians in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. It is very very important to get support and helps for those who are converting to Christianity from Islam or other religions. Because sometimes the Christians can seek and get supports from their relatives, friends and the people of own community from other countries. But the converted Christians have nobody to show empathy when they are facing persecuted.
To see this news item at the original site, log-on to: http://salemvoice.org/news125.html
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Pastor Paul Ciniraj is the founder-director of the Salem Voice Ministries and the Chairman of the SVM News Service. He was a muslim by birth, accepted Lord Jesus Christ as his Personal Saviour and called for His ministry about 32 years ago. He is a well known Gospel Preacher in India and the author of many Christian books, literature and Gospel tracts. Several times he and his family were attempted to death and still facing persecutions.
Salem Voice Ministries,
Devalokam (P.O), Kottayam,
Kerala-686038, INDIA.
http://salemvoice.org/
Salem Voice Ministries,
Devalokam (P.O), Kottayam,
Kerala-686038, INDIA.
http://salemvoice.org/
posted by Salem Voice @ 5:26 PM
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