This is an excerpt from John McHugo’s ‘Syria: A Recent History’ where he describes his experiences with the Christian community of Syria in 1974. The fact that Christians made up 10% of the Syrian population prior to the civil war, is a testament to their protection and fair treatment under 1300 years of Islamic rule. The social norms John McHugo observed among the Christian communities in the 1970s show the remnants of this rule.
John McHugo is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Syrian Studies at St Andrews University. A board member of the Council for Arab British Understanding and the British Egyptian Society, he is also chair of the Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine. He writes:
I first went to Syria in November 1974 when I was twenty-three years old and studying Islamic history at postgraduate level at the American University in Cairo. I had planned a week walking in the mountains which run parallel to the coast. Armed with a sleeping bag and ground sheet, I got off the bus at the crossroads below the famous Crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers. The dark, green hills rising before me had more in common with the Brecon Beacons in Wales than what I had been expecting: the stark rocks of the Arabian desert which I had seen in the film Lawrence of Arabia. Rain threatened, and I was only too happy to accept a lift from a taxi driver taking the local vet to visit a sick cow. Ibrahim, the farmer who had summoned the vet, insisted I stay the night as soon as he had greeted us. He was a stocky man in his sixties who wore a white cloth wrapped round his head and the sherwal, the traditional black pants of a farmer, tight round the ankles but baggy from the knees upwards.
Western visitors were rare in the mountains then, although that was not so in the years before 2011 – and plenty of hotels have been built since my visit. We communicated that night in a mixture of Arabic, French and English, for Ibrahim had served in the army during the French Mandate and was proud of his French, whilst Karim, his eldest son, was studying English at Aleppo University and was painstakingly ploughing through Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge with the same difficulties I was experiencing with classical Arabic works. Towards the end of the evening, when we had got to know each other as well as two people can in such a short time, Ibrahim asked me, “In the West, are there still people who live like us?” I told him there were hill farmers in Wales and in remote parts of England and Scotland, but I wondered how long they could survive in a modern economy. We could detect a sadness in each other’s eyes which betrayed our shared regret for the passing of old ways and disquiet at the uncertainties and brutalities of the modern world.
Much earlier, when questioned about myself, I had said I was doing a Master’s degree in medieval Islamic studies, which I hoped would lead to a career as a university lecturer. This met with approval, but when I mentioned I was working on a book by the eleventh-century Muslim thinker Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, my hosts did not seem interested and had hardly heard of him. The oval nostrils on Ibrahim’s Semitic nose flared ever so slightly and he interjected, “Yes, they have built a mosque here. There has to be one, of course”.
A silence followed. Eventually, Ibrahim broke it himself. “It goes back to Nasser. When he ruled Syria as well as Egypt, he thought he would become the great leader of the Arabs. He wanted everyone to think of themselves as the same – as Arabs, not Christians or Muslims. Here you are in the Wadi al-Nasara, which means the Valley of the Christians. He wanted it to be called ‘Wadi al-Nadara’, ‘the valley of the beautiful view’. He could do this by adding just one dot above an Arabic letter in the name on the map. But it did not work. It is still known as Wadi al-Nasara.”
Before I met Ibrahim I assumed everyone who wore clothes like his was a Muslim, but I could not have been more wrong. In the morning before I left, two other farmers dressed in the same way called by. They had heard that there was a visitor who lived in Egypt and they wanted to hear about the millions of Egyptian Coptic Christians about whom I knew shamefully little. Ibrahim’s family would normally read a story from the Bible together before they went to bed, and I have no doubt his religion, and the identity which flowed from it, were important to him. I had stumbled across a part of the mountains where most people were Christian. Over the following two days as I headed north, I would stop to talk to boys and girls walking home from school who confirmed this, since their first question was about my nationality, but they then immediately asked me my religion and proudly told me theirs. I couldn’t help noticing the little Orthodox Church in almost every village.
Ibrahim and his two sons honoured me as a guest in a traditional Arab way. They slept on mattresses on the floor beside me, because they were concerned I might feel lonely so far from home. They even lent me a white nightgown for the occasion. I experienced their hospitality, their generosity and their courtesy – three great Arab virtues. However, I did not meet Ibrahim’s wife or daughter, except when they brought in breakfast in the morning and arrived to sweep the floor. Their heads were wrapped in scarves and their arms covered to the wrist: the traditional dress of the mountains for Christian and Muslim women alike. This was a peasant society in which the sexes were segregated to a greater extent than would generally have been the case with peasants in Western Europe. It was a cultural norm that was not a badge of religious identity.
Ibrahim’s eyes were moist as I left. Karim accompanied me on the first leg of my journey when I left in the morning. We walked up the green hillside through a mist, spotting the carcass of the cow which the vet had been unable to save lying in a ravine with its stiff legs stretched up to the sky. Quite suddenly, we found ourselves under the walls of the castle where we said goodbye. Karim talked to me about fasq, which was a new Arabic word for me and which he did not know how to translate into English. He eventually settled for “moral degeneration”. Moral degeneration was the great threat to the modern world, this young Christian Syrian said, then told me it came from the West. I thought guiltily of the trickle of Westerners who came to Egypt as discreet sex tourists: something Muslim friends in Cairo had not hesitated to point out to me. The West, I was beginning to realise, lacked moral authority in the eyes of many Arabs. It might have great power, but it did not necessarily command respect.[1]
The featured image is of Saint George’s Monastery, Homs, established in the 5th century CE.
Rashid Rida (d.1935) summarises the treatment of non-Muslim citizens (dhimmi) and those entering the state on a visa (mu’ahideen) in an Islamic State. He says:
“The shari‘ah lacks any unfairness toward the nonMuslim that would justify hatred of it. It makes the weakest nonMuslim—a dhimmi or ally [mu‘ahad]—equal to the strongest caliph when standing before the qadi, as well as in terms of established legal rights. Testimonies to this from the era of the rightly guided caliphate and the period following are abundant. We declare in the strongest terms possible that absolute and universal justice does not exist except in Islam.
What occurred with some of the Muslims’ rulers deviating from the correct path by treating some dhimmis unjustly occurred only at the hands of those who were the least knowledgeable and the least guided by the religion.
Furthermore, such deviations did not affect non-Muslims exclusively. There is nothing that merits criticism of the just imams and the rightful caliphs, except for criticism of those who ignored the fact that certain exceptional actions taken during the era of the Islamic conquests were temporary, military expedients, and sought to render them permanent.
However, in this connection Islam was more just and more merciful than [the religions of] all other peoples, such that one of the fair and wise Europeans said: history knows of no conquest more just and merciful than that of the Arabs.” [2]
Notes
[1] John McHugo, ‘Syria: A Recent History,’ Saqi Books, 2014, p.29
[2] Muhammad Rashid Rida, ‘The Caliphate or Supreme Imamate,’ first published 1922-1923, translation of Al-Khilafa aw al-Imama al-‘Uzma, translated by Simon A Wood, Yale University Press, 2024, p.177; original Arabic https://shamela.ws/book/9682
Islamic Civilization 