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Before he was exiled from the Soviet Union, the great writer and dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was outspokenly critical of Patriarch Pimen and the Russian Orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchy whenever he sensed they were cozying up to the Communist authorities. After going into forced exile, however, Solzhenitsyn fell silent on this issue. When reminded of his earlier criticisms and urged to continue in that vein, he replied firmly and without hesitation that he no longer felt he enjoyed the moral right to speak out against the perceived errant behavior of the Russian Orthodox Church because he was no longer sharing directly in the daily historical-existential trials and tribulations of his people and his church living under Soviet rule. In other words, criticizing from a distance can be a dangerous business and also risks becoming unethical.
I mention Solzhenitsyn's studied caution only to suggest that a similar prudence is required when evaluating the behavior of Christians native to the Middle East, especially those of Lebanon—an ancient and beleaguered Christian community that proudly traces its roots in an uninterrupted line all the way back to the time when Saint Paul set sail from Byblos on his first missionary voyage to the West.
Middle Eastern Christianity, which includes the Christian communities of Lebanon, has had to contend over the past 1,300 years with living in close proximity to, and often under, Islam, the religion that early on became dominant in the region. Over the centuries, Western interest in, and subsequent incursions into, the Middle East have taken on many forms—a lot of them proving disadvantageous to the Christians of the region. The eventual defeat of the Crusades, for example, precipitated a violent Islamic backlash against the indigenous Christians, particularly those like Lebanon's Maronites, who had cooperated with and supported the crusading hordes.1 Later Western commercial and imperial expansion into Ottoman domains seemed at first to resuscitate the sagging fortunes of local Christian communities, only to have them witness a return of persecutions once the inevitable Western retreats occurred. Rivalries among the European powers in the Levant and in Egypt often enlisted the native Christians on the side of one and against the other. This too had its deleterious effects, culminating in the 1861 massacres of Christians in Mount Lebanon and Damascus that left a lasting scar on intercommunal relations, and aggravating the repeated oppression of Egypt's Copts to this day.
I am not suggesting that all Western involvement in the affairs of the Near and Middle East over the centuries has been detrimental to the region's Christians. Far from it. However, the fact remains that the West's interaction with the Middle East was always designed to serve primarily the West's interests. This includes the Protestant missionary activities of the nineteenth century, which, after failing to make noticeable headway among Muslims, turned their energies to converting the local Christians to the creeds of Europe's great Reformers. Resulting tensions and mutual misunderstandings between the native churches and the newly transplanted Protestants linger to the present.
Meanwhile, the reputed tolerance of Islam, particularly for the "People of the Book," as Jews and Christians are designated, created in reality the dhimmi system of second-class servitude, which, under the guise of toleration, was actually a system of subtle repression and dehumanization leading to gradual liquidation.
Repeatedly the advice offered to Middle Eastern Christians by Westerners—the sincere among them as well as the self-serving—would counsel restraint, circumlocution, and a self-effacing posture vis-ˆ-vis the dominant Muslim majority; in other words, a resignation to the perpetuation of dhimmi status in the name of mere survival and not rocking the boat. The one community in the region that has persistently resisted traveling down this demeaning road is the Maronite Christian community of Lebanon, along with assorted portions of Lebanon's other Christian communities—the Orthodox, Greek Catholic, and even Protestant. This has earned them a number of by now familiar adjectives in the specialized as well as the popular literature, the most benign of which has been "obstinate."
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