Fisk: Exodus

Robert Fisk's article in the last Independent on Sunday shows how Christian emigration from the Middle East, already an existential concern even ten or twenty years ago, has accelerated. American intervention in the region has of course been something of a catalyst. However, he relates it more generally to the simultaneous othering of Christians in the region by Muslim majorities, who may view them as part of Western imperial Christendom, and by Westerners for whom the 'Christian' designation means little in any case. This is most obviously the case in the Holy Land where Israel, arguably at the front-line of Western we-feeling, views Palestinians with indiscriminate hostility, while Palestinian Christians may experience the focussed suspicion of Muslim compatriots.

Western Christian culpability in this is nothing new. At least since Leo I, the counter-intuitive notion that the West is the legitimate guardian of Christianity, and then of civilisation, has often been aggressively asserted. Indeed, the success of this notion is evidenced not only in our general ignorance about the range and depth of early Christian activity east of Jerusalem as far as China, but also in the often reluctant identification Eastern Christians sometimes have with the West because of domestic hostility. Indeed, the Church of the East is now based in Chicago.

Latin Patriarch Fouad Twal is quoted by Fisk describing Arabic-speaking Christians as a bridge between East and West, but it seems that in representing Eastern Christianity the epistemological concessions have been made by Easterners. I hope it is not too ambitious to view my research as politically significant in this regard at least. Framing Eastern Christianity in Western categories, as representations of 'Palestinian' Christianity tend to, may do violence to particular ways of seeing the world that could, with a bit of work on our part, radically transform the engagement Westerners have with the Middle East, drawing us closer to a mutual comprehension based on intellectual hospitality. Better representing the perspectives of Christians at a further remove from a Western objectification of texts is just one way of doing this.