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The Archbishop of Canterbury had already touched upon this in Easter Monday’s controversial edition of Start the Week from Lambeth Palace, when he began by reminding us that many Christians in the world are experiencing a throwback to the perilous conditions of the first and second centuries AD. Locked doors, Jesus’s resurrection appearances in secret rooms…these are suddenly no longer abstract ideas, says the Archbishop, in places such as Baghdad where Christians are being persecuted for their faith just like the early disciples. In stressing their own Christian vocation, Bush and Blair have unwittingly led to a huge exodus of Christians from the ancient lands of Mesopotamia, home to Christian communities for 2,000 years. It’s no longer safe to be a Christian in the very parts of the Middle East where the faith was born.
This dusty and depressing discussion between the Archbishop, Andrew Marr and the other guests on Monday’s programme was brought vividly to life the next day by Ed and his producer (David Coomes) in Iraq’s Forgotten Conflict (Radio 4). Ed began by talking to Canon Andrew White, the larger-than-life vicar of the Anglican Church of St George, Baghdad. There’s hardly a person in his church, built as a memorial to the British soldiers who died in Iraq during the first world war, who has not lost a member of their family to the persecutions, which began after the invasion of 2003. In one month alone in 2005, all the lay leaders of his congregation were either kidnapped or killed. The possibility of martyrdom for your faith is ever present. The church looks more like a fortress and body armour is worn at communion. ‘Put on the armour of Christ’ never sounded more appropriate.
Christianity has been in Iraq since the apostles Thomas and Thaddaeus travelled to the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in the second century AD. But now the combined forces of neocon ideology and the wave of American evangelical missionaries, who flooded into Iraq after the fall of Saddam hoping for quick conversions, have decimated the Christian congregation, who have fled to neighbouring Syria and Lebanon or further afield to the UK and beyond. Centuries of co-existence between Jews, Christians and Muslims, born of necessity and habit, have been wiped out in less than a decade.
Ed also took us to Mosul in northern Iraq, on the site of biblical Nineveh. Here he met with a community of Mandaeans, who believe that John the Baptist was the last great prophet of the Church. The Mandaeans have also suffered persecution so that there are now fewer than 5,000 living in Iraq. There’s a real fear that the sect will die out; it’s too difficult to preserve their belief system, which requires a weekly baptism in running water. This is not difficult if you can bathe year-round in the warm waters of the Tigris but not advisable when in exile in Sweden in midwinter.
Back in Baghdad we heard the congregation at St George’s reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, the language in which it would first have been spoken. There was something very moving about it — a frisson, a moment of real connection not just with the past but also with a thread of human history now in danger of being broken.
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