Winds of Change

There was a time when I used to be furious about religious restrictions (and there are many in the religion of my birth). For me, all debates over whether this or that injunction by bearded clergymen (there are many in the religion of my birth and they are powerful) complies with modernity are over. I have managed to come out of the herd I was born in and am utterly convinced that religion is an obstacle to individual freedom. It is naïve to believe that there are good things in religion.
Although religion is no longer my concern, I still feel deeply disturbed whenever I witness some sadist moulavi or priest shoves his dangerous retrograde, male chauvinist and gender-discriminatory views down the throats of his oddly hapless and sheepish flock. I am disturbed not so much by what the bearded or gowned guy was farting about as by the amazing level of acceptance often shown even by supposedly intelligent people in the herd.
A few days ago, I was a witness to an outrageous restriction imposed by a moulavi at a nikah ceremony held in a hall in my town. Men and women invited to the marriage solemnising ceremony was clearly segregated by a partition that sliced the hall into two mutually irreconcilable zones. But the mulla did not come on stage to officiate the nikah till the women zone was completely enveloped inside their portion of the hall so that they could not see the ceremony. Barring a few private murmurings, there was hardly any voice of protest from either of the zones. An `outsider’ in the herd, I showed my protest by not entering the hall when the ceremony was going on. My daughter just walked out of the hall in protest and strolled outside till the male-dominated ritual was over.
Such depressing experiences are enough to ward off any hopes about possible winds of change in religion. An incorrigible optimist I am not, but a news item that was carried by most of the newspapers on August 13 has at least soothes me out of my depression and pessimistic feelings. Dr. Sayeda Hamid, a member of the Planning Commission and an Islamic scholar flew down from New Delhi to Lucknow on August 12 to perform what had been a monopoly of male priests. Dr. Hamid solemnised the marriage of Naeesh Hasan, an activist fighting for women’s rights, and Imran Ali, a PhD scholar from Aligarh Muslim University. The bride (not her father as is the practice) and the bridegroom were present as Dr. Hamid played the role of a `qazi’ and performed their wedding. All the four witnesses were also women.
That is refreshing news. Now I am not sure whether I should remain serene when all kinds of idiotic things are happening in the name of religion. It is time we brought Dr. Hamids, Hasans and Alis on the centre stage of our debates. They revive hopes of reforming religion.

Dalrymple's Journey in the shadow of Byzantium

The journey that starts from the Monastery of Iviron, Mount Athos in Greece, on June 29, 1994 ends in the Great Kharga Oasis in Egypt on December 20 that year. It traces the twilight of Eastern Christianity in a vast expanse of land that was once Byzantine Empire, eastern part of the Roman Empire, that broke away from the western empire in the fifth century common era (CE) with Constantinople as its capital.
William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain (Penguin, 1997) is not a just a travelogue that narrates his experiences during his journey from one end of the eastern empire to its other end. It rather encapsulates the divisions, disturbances and growing tension that define contemporary life of people in areas that once formed part of the eastern Christendom, which has ceased to exist since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, an event that culminated the expansion of Islam started in the seventh century.
Dalrymple starts his journey in the footsteps of the great Byzantine traveller-monk John Moschos who narrated his journey in The Spiritual Meadows that he compiled at the end of his life in Constantinople in the sixth century. It is a collection of memories, events and anecdotes the monk had witnessed during his journey with his young friend Sophronius from one end of the Byzantine Empire to the other. Dalrymple’s journey, however, is essentially from the classical Christian past of the Levant to its Islamic present.

“Christianity is an Eastern religion which grew firmly rooted in the intellectual ferment of the Middle East. John Moschos saw that plant begin to wither in the hot winds of change that scoured the Levant of his day. On my journey in his footsteps I have seen the very last stalks in the process of being uprooted. It has been a continuous process, lasting nearly one and a half millennia. Moschos saw its beginnings. I have seen the beginning of its end.” (pp 453-454)

When he reaches Istanbul, which was “once home to an inspirational ferment of different ethnicities”, he finds that the city is now mono-ethnic with Turks forming 99 per cent of its population. Half of the population of what was once the capital of Eastern Christendom was Christian at the end of the 19 th century. What sealed the fate of Christians (Greek Orthodox and Armenians) was the victory of the Turks in the 1922 Greeco-Turkish war following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Turks expelled the Greeks from Anatolia (Asian part of Turkey) in retaliation for the mass eviction of the Turks from northern Greece. There were still Greeks in Istanbul as the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 allowed 400,00 Greeks to remain there.

“All this changed in 1955 when Istanbul played host to the worst race riot in Europe since Kristallnacht. In a single night…thousands of hired thugs descended on the city’s Hellenic ghettos. Almost every Greek shop in the city had its window broken; cemeteries were desecrated; the Tombs of the Patriarchs were destroyed; seventy-three Orthodox churches were gutted.” (P 30).

Today this ancient Byzantine capital is said to have only five thousand Greeks and the rise of Islamic Right has made things worse for them. Dalrymple says that the city, which once had 500 churches and monasteries, now has hardly 30, most of them rebuilt and converted into mosques, including Hagia Sophia, the supreme masterpiece of Byzantine architecture, built in 530 CE. Perhaps the history of the region would have been different had the embattled Byzantine Emperor Manuel II secured the support of the Catholic Church to defend Constantinople under threat from the Ottomans. He went to the West and acceded to many of the religious demands of the Catholic Church. But the latter still refused to come to the rescue of the Christian empire. Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks 50 years later in 1453.
The story of Antioch and Edessa (now Antakya and Urfa) is no different. While Byzantine Antioch is “now just a city of memory”, Edessa has no Christian communities since the First World War. The Byzantine university town of Edessa, located at the “philosophical faultline that ran between the Eastern and Western worlds”, was once the breeding ground of heretic sects such as Carpocratians who thought that true freedom can be achieved by believers by ignoring the distinction between what is good and what is evil. Armenians in the city were marched out and murdered by the Turks after the end of the First World War.
The author visits Saffron Monastery (Deir el-Zaferan) in Mardin in Turkey. The monastery was the headquarters of Syrian Orthodox church, the ancient Church of Antioch. The Syrian Orthodox Church, also known as Suriani church, broke away from the mainstream Greek Orthodox Church of Byzantium in 451. The Surianis were also deported and massacred by the Turks at the height of the post-First World War Turkish nationalism. From 200,000 in the 19 th century, the size of the community came down to 70,000 in 1920 and barely 4000 in 1990s.
Dalrymple finds Christians comfortable in Syria after he crossed the Turkish-Syrian border and reaches the ancient Byzantine city of Aleppo.

“I have always loved the fact that in Syria you can still walk on Roman roads that have not been resurfaced since the time of Diocletian, or stand on castle walls that have not been restored since Saladin stormed them. In the Same way, perhaps I should be pleased that in the [Hotel] Baron you can sleep in sheets that have not been washed since T.E. Lawrence slept there, and even be bitten by the same colonies of bedbugs that once nibbled the great Ataturk.” (p. 135)

Aleppo has been a place of refuge for the Armenians, Surianis and Greeks driven out of Anatolia. After the First World War, Syria was under the French Mandate. The author witnesses religious harmony still existing in Syria. In the convent of Seidnaya, the most important of the three Byzantine monasteries still functioning in Syria, he watches Muslim women praying there for babies.
There are occasions when Dalrymple witnesses fluidity of religions during his travels. He tells the story of the fish ponds of Abraham in a remote part of Turkey. They are a relic of one of the most ancient fertility cults in the Middle East. They later became a Christian shrine and now they are sacred to Muslims. Throughout his narrative, there is an underlying feeling that this fluidity of faiths is now extremely vulnerable to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.
The conflicts among faiths are nowhere clearer than in Lebanon. Dalrymple meets Robert Fisk, reputed British journalist settled in Beirut for nearly three decades. According to Fisk, Maronite Christians of Lebanon are themselves to blame for the Lebanese civil war. The francophone Maronites always wanted to dominate Lebanon. Dalrymple visits the Maronite town of Bsharre in Lebanon which was the birth place of Maronite poet Khalil Gibran. On his death bed, Gibran left Bsharre all the royalities from The Prophet running $ 1 million annually. “The town was plunged into its own miniature civil war” between two Maronite clans over the division of the money.”
The author’s next destination is Jerusalem where he visits the Armenian quarter of the city.

“The Jerusalem Armenians became adept at living under foreign rule. In the eighth century, when Jerusalem was ruled by the Arab Abbasid dynasty, the Armenians managed to arrange it so that two of the Caliphs had Armenian mothers; in 1099, when the Crusaders captured the town, the first two queens of Jerusalem were also Aremenain. Later, when Saladin reconquered the city for Islam, the Armenians played their cards with such skill that they were the only Christians who avoided being expelled or carried off into slavery.” (p. 310)

Jewish colonisation of Jerusalem has changed the character of the Holy City. Non-Jews have been excluded from the Jewish quarter of the city. The book gives details about the colonisation of the city by Jews. As many as 134 buildings in the Muslim quarter of the city have been bulldozed and 650 Palestinian who lived there have been expelled from their home after the 1967 war. While all the 2000 Jews who had lost property there in 1948 had their land restored, 30,000 Palestinians evicted from the Christian suburbs of West Jerusalem in 1948 were not allowed to return to their old homes.
In 1948, following withdrawal of the British troops, some 55,000 Palestinian Christians fled or were driven out from their homes along with 650,000 Muslim Palestinians. Between the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in 1967 and 1992, around 40 per cent of Christians living in the Occupied Territories (19,000) left their homes to live elsewhere.

“Within ten years of the Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem, 37,065 acres of Arab land had been confiscated and settled; today only 13.5 per cent of East Jerusalem remains in Palestinian hands.” (p 318).

He is surprised to see that there is hardly anything of Byzantine architecture left in Jerusalem, which was a Byzantine city.

“Ironically, the great Byzantine building left in the city is a mosque – the Dome of the rock – decorated by Byzantine craftsmen for the new Muslim conquerors in the late seventh century, shortly after the fall of the eastern half of the Empire.” (327-328).

The Byzantine city of Alexandria in Egypt has also undergone changes as it is no longer a Greek-dominated city founded by a Greek. It was deserted by the Greeks as well as by Jews and Armenians after Egyptian President Nasser nationalised banks and businesses owned by the Greeks in the 1950s.

“Under the city’s cheap hotels and bare-shelved shops, its brothels and seedy restaurants, lie many of the greatest buildings of antiquity; the Caesarium, where Cleopatra committed suicide; the Pharos lighthouse (one of the Seven Wonders of the World); the Great Alexandrian library with its seven hundred thousand scrolls; the Mouseion; the Seraphium; the tomb of Alexander. All have disappeared, utterly and completely…" (p. 383).

Alexandria used to be the target of attack by fanatical Coptic monks in the past. The author finally visits the Great Oasis, modern Kharg in Upper Egypt, the very last outpost of Christendom visited by Moschos and Sophronius.
The Eastern Mediterranean region had been almost a Christian world for over three centuries since the era of Constantine in the early fourth century till the advent of Islam in the early seventh century. Dalrymple travels across this erstwhile heartland of Christianity, starting from Athos, circling the Levant and finally visiting Coptic monasteries of Upper Egypt. As he says, his purpose of the travel is “to witness what was in effect the last ebbing twilight of Byzantium.”
What is most striking about the book is absence of any trace of what can be construed as a display of victimhood even when Dalrymple, who is a Christian, narrates his experiences in places where Christians are living under the shadow of an imminent `withering' of their communities in lands which were once theirs.