BRITAIN’S ARCHBISHOP of Canterbury has warned that the Arab Spring could lead to increased hostility towards Christians in the Middle East, describing their position as “more vulnerable than it has been for centuries”.
In a debate in the House of Lords, Dr Rowan Williams said such communities faced a “painful dilemma” in the wake of revolutions across the region.
He told about 80 peers: “Under some of the discredited regimes of recent years, they have enjoyed a certain degree of freedom from aggression or discrimination.
“The first tremors of political change were felt by some Christians as a bit of a threat to a status quo that, while anything but ideal, was a bit more bearable than some alternatives. At the moment, most of these communities urgently want to know whether the Arab Spring will be good or bad news for them, and for other non-Muslim or non-majority presences.”
The region, home to millions of Christians, has seen its communities dwindle in number because of low birth rates, emigration, persecution and violence. Dr Williams said Christians must have a “guaranteed place” in their historic homelands and that emerging governments must commit to civic equality and the rule of law.
“The challenges to dictatorship have, just as in the Balkans, brought their own dangers and instabilities. What began as a distinctively non-sectarian set of movements has inevitably opened the door to some of those Islamic political activists who suffered repression under the old regimes.
“We wait to see exactly what agenda such groups will now want to advance as they win high levels of popular electoral support and whether this will mean new kinds of repression in which non-Muslim and, importantly, non-orthodox Muslim communities will become targets for discrimination or whether something more like the Turkish model will emerge: an openly and strongly Islamic government with, equally, a strong commitment to practical pluralism and political transparency.”
Dr Williams said that this seemed to be the direction in which Tunisia was moving, and “we hope and pray that this may still be possible in Egypt”.
The treatment of Christian communities would be a “litmus test” of the success of the Arab Spring, he added. – (Guardian service)