The Church of Holy Sepulchre is in the Christian quarter of Jerusalem and is one of the holiest sites in Christianity. Dating from the 4th century it predates the Islamic opening of Jerusalem under Umar ibn Al-Khattab.

Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury claimed in 2018 in the Middle East ‘Christians face daily the threat of violence, murder, intimidation, prejudice and poverty…Across the region Christian communities that were the foundation of the universal Church now face the threat of imminent extinction.’[1]

While some try to frame this as Muslims oppressing Christians, or blame the rise of Islamic sentiments in the region, nothing could be further from the truth.

Muslims even more than Christians face the ‘daily the threat of violence, murder, intimidation, prejudice and poverty’ in the Middle East due to tyrannical rulers who do not implement Islam. This is also the case outside the Middle East in places such as Burma, Palestine and China.

The only reason Christians and Churches still exist in the Middle East is due to Islamic rule – the Khilafah – which protected Christians for over a millennia. However, since the Khilafah’s abolition in 1924 and the rise of nationalistic, secular, non-Islamic states, all peoples both Muslim and non-Muslim are suffering.

Thomas Arnold, who was a lecturer at Aligarh Muslim University in British India says: “But of any organised attempt to force the acceptance of Islam on the non-Muslim population, or of any systematic persecution intended to stamp out the Christian religion, we hear nothing.

Had the Caliphs chosen to adopt either course of action, they might have swept away Christianity as easily as Ferdinand and Isabella drove Islam out of Spain, or Louis XIV made Protestantism penal in France, or the Jews were kept out of England for 350 years.

The Eastern Churches in Asia were entirely cut off from communion with the rest of Christendom, throughout which no one would have been found to lift a finger on their behalf, as heretical communions. So that the very survival of these churches to the present day is a strong proof of the generally tolerant attitude of the Muhammadan governments towards them.”[2]

Hani Shukrallah, a Coptic Christian and a former editor of the newspaper Al-Ahram writes: ‘It is not easy to empty Egypt of its Christians; they’ve been here for as long as there has been Christianity in the world. Close to a millennium and half of Muslim rule did not eradicate the nation’s Christian community, rather it maintained it sufficiently strong and sufficiently vigorous so as to play a crucial role in shaping the national, political and cultural identity of modern Egypt.

Yet now, two centuries after the birth of the modern Egyptian nation state, and as we embark on the second decade of the 21st century, the previously unheard of seems no longer beyond imagining: a Christian-free Egypt, one where the cross will have slipped out of the crescent’s embrace, and off the flag symbolizing our modern national identity…’[3]

In fact the keys to the Church of Holy Sepulchre are still held by members of the Nusaybah Muslim family in Jerusalem who can trace their lineage back to the great sahabi Ubadah ibn Al-Samit, governor of Jerusalem under Umar ibn Al-Khattab who was first entrusted with the keys.[4]

It is true that the Fatimid Emir (who claimed himself Caliph) Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah ordered the destruction of the Church of Holy Sepulchre in 1009 but this was a mazlama (oppression) against the Christians and prohibited in Islam. Al-Hakim’s son Ali az-Zahir redressed this mazlama when he came to power after his father died and the church was restored.

We cannot judge 1400 years of Islam’s treatment of Christians by this one event. We need to look to the entire period and as mentioned the existence of churches across the Middle East disprove any claim that there was a ‘genocide’ against the Christians similar to what happened to Muslims and Jews in Spain.