Objective history?

 

”De kristna i Mellersta Östern” (The Christians in the Middle East) is a book by Ingmar Karlsson, published this year. The author is a Swedish diplomat who used to work in Syria. He published a classical book on religious minority groups in the Middle East already in 1991, “Korset och halvmånen” (The Cross and the Crescent), which is available in many Swedish public libraries. In his new book, Karlsson tries – the best he can – to retell the history of Christianity in the Middle East (here also including Egypt) as objectively as possible. I think he succeeds remarkably well, except in the last chapter, where he retells his mostly negative experiences from Syria. He also touches upon the more general history of the region.

Thus, Karlsson points out that Monophysite Christians played a leading intellectual role in the medieval Muslim world, collecting ancient Greek or Roman manuscripts, and then translating them into Semitic languages. In the “multi-culturalist” pro-Muslim propaganda, this is often credited to the Muslims themselves.  The Catholic crusader states were multi-ethnic and multi-religious (except for the city of Jerusalem, where only Christians were allowed to live). Medieval Muslim historians considered the crusades to be a minor nuisance, instead viewing the Mongols as the larger threat. When a German emperor during the 19^th century wanted to pay homage to Saladin, it took considerable time to locate the tomb of the legendary Muslim leader, since it had been almost forgotten! Muslim obsession with the crusades is mostly a 20^th century phenomenon, a kind of counterpoint to the *modern* Western encroachments on the Middle East (and, of course, Israel). It works in tandem with Western obsessions about the same thing, positive or negative. The roots of the present situation in the Middle East are in any case to be found in the aftermath of World War I, and has nothing to do with the Middle Ages.

Karlsson does consider the Turkish/Kurdish massacres of the Armenians to have been a genocide, but also points out that the Armenians supported Russia during World War I (which technically made them traitors, since the Ottoman Empire was allied with Germany), that Armenian terrorist groups existed long before the genocide, and that they often targeted Kurdish civilians. One Armenian group even massacred Kurds in the hope that they would retaliate and the ensuing chaos provoke a British intervention (which never materialized). The Turks are often cast as evil oppressors by liberals and leftists in the West, but were just as often on the receiving end of violence and ethnic cleansing, for instance in Greece and Bulgaria during the 19^th century Balkan wars. The Greeks began their liberation struggle against the Ottoman Empire by large scale massacres of Turks in the Peloponnese. I get the impression that Karlsson has a (perhaps involuntary) admiration for Kemal Atatürk, the authoritarian Turkish nationalist who managed to stop the dismemberment of Turkey in the aftermath of World War I.

More recent alliances in the region are often extremely confusing. Thus, the pro-Israeli South Lebanese Army (SLA) during the Lebanese civil war was led by an Eastern Catholic and mostly consisted of Shia Muslims?! The Armenian Churches outside Armenia are part-Arab, since affiliating with these Churches gives you a higher social standing. In Iraq, about half of the Christians belong to a Shia-dominated pro-Iranian coalition. The Iraqi gentleman who spent most of last year burning Qurans in Sweden have a background in this milieu. One thing not mentioned in the book are the weird alliances of the Druze, a peculiar minority religion found in both Israel, Syria and Lebanon. Maybe the next edition can fill us in?

The most controversial chapter is probably the last one, in which Karlsson makes negative comments about the “Assyrian” immigration to Sweden from Syria during the 1970´s and 1980´s. He wonders why nobody was surprised about the fact that a people who disappeared from history 2,600 years ago suddenly re-appeared…in the Swedish town of Södertälje! Most of the “Assyrians” were members of the Syriac Orthodox Church and hence didn´t identify as Assyrian. Mass immigration of Syriac Orthodox from Syria to Sweden mainly took place from the Qamishly district, where no Syriac were persecuted by the Assad regime, many of the regional officials and officers were Syriac, and a Syriac church stood next to the building of the secret police. One of the first persons from Qamishly to get political asylum in Sweden as a refugee was a local boss of the ruling Baath party! Many of the “refugees” regularly returned to Qamishly (even greeting the Swedish “refugee coordinator”), forged and strangely uniform documents proving “persecution” were legion, one of the “banned Assyrian organizations” was actually legal and complained about the exodus, and so on. Delegations of “refugees” often visited Syria in order to construct new “native languages” which were then taught in Swedish schools (at the tax-payers expense) to Syriac children. The Syriac Christians referred to Sweden as “Ammo Djebbo”, a naïve and stupid character who tries to become popular by giving everyone money, while people laugh behind his back…

Karlsson claims that the political parties in Sweden each had their own favorite refugee/immigrant group during the 1970´s and 1980´s. The Social Democrats promoted Latin Americans, the Left Party the Kurds, the Center Party the West Saharans (!), the Conservatives anti-Communists from the Soviet bloc, and the Liberal Party “Christians from the Middle East” – actually, mostly the Syriac Orthodox. However, at the end of the book, it becomes obvious that Karlsson doesn´t really oppose immigration. *Today* the Christians in the Middle East are more persecuted than ever (he blames one George W Bush for this), and presumably wants the Western world to give them asylum. Instead, Ammo Djebbo has suddenly become jaded and cynical, and now doesn´t want to let anyone inside.

With that, I end this little review.