Arabs arrived in Egypt, the Near East and in North Africa, all the countries were Christian. “Half of the
Persians were Christian ... Under the Byzantines, there was a man of religion who had power and very
frequently he was in charge of the collection of taxes,” Decobert said.
When the Arabs began to settle in their newly conquered lands, they decided to create an administration.
And of course – this is my own interpretation – they needed tax collectors. “Some monasteries
disappeared,” Decobert said. “Some survived. Some converted to Islam – this was nothing to do with faith,
it was about the cultural system. And the first people who converted to Islam were the monks. So the heads
of the monasteries became key people in the Islamic system. There was no distinction between religious
and economic life.”
Kamal Salibi, one of the finest of Lebanon’s modern historians – a Protestant and an old friend, he died
almost eight years ago – wrote a short but revealing book called A House of Many Mansions, which will still
be read a 100 years from now for its historical revelation and its wisdom. He insisted that the Maronites did
not come to Lebanon as a persecuted people from the Orontes valley, as they claimed, and that they had in
fact begun their life as heretics. As the years passed, Salibi, a professor at the American University of Beirut,
became even more sensitive to what he called the “Muslim predicament” in the Middle East.
And it is indeed strange that although they remain a profound minority in the region, the Christians of the
Arab world should have become not just a sounding board for Islam, but a minority fine tuner on the
instrument of coexistence between two great religions, more often than not in harmony but with a
distressing habit of producing discord – to the delight of religious extremists and, alas, of politicians and
journalists.
A Pakistani soldier stands guard on the
roof of a Methodist church during the
Easter service in Quetta (AFP/Getty)Writing my new book on the Middle East, scheduled to be published next year, I intended to devote my
chapter on religion to Muslims and Islam. But it was instructive for me to discover, as I worked on the
chapter, that it was turning out to be, primarily, about Christians. Perhaps I can give readers a hint as to
why this is the case by quoting directly from my text. Needless to say, blood and pain and betrayal crowd
the many pages before and after the chapter on religion.
Salibi complained about those who say there was never a “renaissance” in Islam to match the Renaissance
of 15th- and 16th-century Europe. There was a great deal of very original thinking within Islam, he
maintained, and “science and philosophy flourished, because [Muslims] drew a line between religion and
intellectual activity. They said the religion is ‘this’ – [but] it does not say we have no right to investigate the
relevance of science and medicine or how to study the stars or how to consider metaphysical questions or
ethical questions independently of the Quran.”