Out of the east

If the test of the Arab Spring was its treatment of minorities, it has failed. Hopes that the region was poised to make the transition to liberal democracy have proved to be premature, trampled under the boots of the ethno-religious cleansers. The old-style corrupt despots have metastasised into even older-style Islamist xenophobes. The Arab world, already judenrein, now seems determined to slough off its Christian minority.

A few weeks ago, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Amdullah, Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, responded to a question posed by a visiting Kuwaiti delegation. Would sharia permit churches to exist in their emirate? The sheikh’s response was categorical. Kuwait is part of the Arabian Peninsula, he said, and ‘therefore it is necessary to destroy all the churches of the region’.

The Sheikh based his ruling on a Hadith which recorded the Prophet’s deathbed declaration that, ‘There are not to be two religions in the Peninsula’, a command that has been interpreted to mean that only Islam may be practised in the region.

Now, the Grand Mufti is not just another swivel-eyed fanatic. He is the most senior Islamic authority in Saudi Arabia, president of the Supreme Council of Ulema [Islamic scholars] and chairman of the Standing Committee for Scientific Research and Issuing of Fatwas. His views do not make him an isolated extremist.

Just ask the dwindling Arab Christian minorities in the region who believed their arabness would trump their Christianity — the Copts and Chaldeans, the Maronites and Melkites, the Latin Rite Catholics and Protestants, the Armenians, Syriac Orthodox, the Assyrian Church of the East and others. They have paid a high price for hanging on. Christian Arabs constituted 20 per cent of the region’s population a century ago; today, they represent about 5 per cent, and falling.The remnant of the 2,000-year-old Christian population is being decanted from the Arab world.