A Christian's meditation on Syria's suffering

I was asked to give a talk on Syria at St Olave's Church York. I wrote two, and this is the one I didn't use. We can say different things about Syria and how I as a Christian respond. The Gospel for the day is the story of Bartimaeus, to whom Jesus gives sight.

 St Mark wrote his gospel in a period of catastrophic warfare during a Judean uprising against the Roman thugs who were robbing the country of its wealth, an empire led by soldiers who were happy to use torture, and who would use local clients like the Herod family to ensure that the rich and powerful were kept rich and powerful. Jesus was offering an alternative regime, which would challenge the narrative of torture and military force with a new vision of service and humility. Blind Bartimaeus could see that, when the sighted powerful couldn’t.

The uprising in Syria against a brutal, torturing kleptoctracy began in outrage at children being imprisoned and beaten. Remember how St Mark talks about Jesus’ treatment of the children? ‘Let them come to me.’

The response to a massive popular rejection of the system was violence. Syria is being crucified by a bunch of Mafiosi because that is what they know. The reaction to peaceful demonstrations by the Syrian government was the same result as the Romans and their Judean clients, the Jerusalem clerical elite. Be brutal.

My first visit to Hasakeh in the Kurdish north-east, was to meet the young and dynamic Bishop, Matta. He had studied with Anglicans in New York and was busy building a monastery. He drove around in a very nice Mercedes, and was most hospitable. When I was leaving he gave me a little lapel badge. What would a Syrian Bishop give? It was the head of the president. For Bishop Matta had been coerced by the government. You Christians, whose families fled Turkey in 1922 after the genocide, you will be protected by us, but you must be totally subservient. Nice car, political protection, VIP lounge at the airport, meetings with important politicians, and the protection of your Christian Syriac minority in the sea of Islam and Kurds. So every big feast would see the governor visiting the church and the Bishop, and the Christian minority feeling connected and safe. Unlike the Kurdish majority who could easily find themselves tortured, and thousands of whom were stateless and impoverished. You don’t want to be like them do you?

But not all Christians flourished and some, especially the better educated felt frustrated. If they made life difficult for Bishop Matta, they might find themselves taken away and roughed up by the Security police. But if I took a party from my parish, the same security would ensure that we were safe and sound and have a great visit.

The Christians often felt isolated or aware that they could be in some horrendous place like Saudi Arabia where owning a Bible is illegal. They might not like the government, but the government frequently warned them that if there was opposition it would be a radical violent Islamic state. Not like the local Kurds whose Islam was moderate and who encouraged their women to be equal. But the government said: After us Al Qaida, and they believed it. So when the first demonstrations took place, the government opened the prisons and liberated many. But the ones they liberated were the violent Jihadists who flocked to Iraq to join the Islamic State, a brutal regime like Saudi Arabia, but one which did permit Bibles.

What can we as Christians say? I look at the Patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox and his closeness to the regime, and think, ‘If I were based in Damascus what would I do? My little community is scared enough and at least the regime claims to protect us.’ He can close his eyes to torture, as we have done too, because he is between the devil and the deep blue sea.

My friend, Bishop Yohanna Ibrahim spoke clearly at the beginning of the rebellion about the need for people to talk. He was kidnapped and is still missing, and I assume he is now one of the martyrs. So we need to read the gospel, especially St Mark, carefully. It does not offer easy solutions in a time of trial. It has God feeling abandoned in his torture.

I was watching some footage of a hospital, taken from the government by Kurdish and Christians rebels. It contained the torture cells, with blood, still red on the white tiles; the blood of a tortured man. In the Eucharist we receive the cup of life, we receive the blood of a tortured man. Christ our God knows what it is like to be the victim, he knows what it is to be betrayed to the powerful. When we think of Syrians who have had enough of this barbarous rule, they share something with God. Our Gospel is not wishful thinking, it is about having a God who is where we are when things really at their worst.

Russia in Syria

What is Russia doing in Syria?

Like the Syrian Civil War, Russia's latest intervention has many causes. One of them is internal Russian politics, something about which I am ignorant, but I suppose that Preident Putin thinks that he will be politically strengthened by his country's significant intervention in Syria.

Russia, like the USSR before it, has been a consistent supporter of the Baathist government in Syria for many decades. Syria has benefitted by receiving both military support and a shield in international diplomacy when Russia would veto any significant attack on it at the UN. It has meant for Russia that it has an ally in the middle of a frequently anti-Russian Arab world, It has allowed Russia to have a small naval base on the Mediterranean, although this has not been a much used asset over the decades.

With the eruption of the Syrian revolution in 2011, the two states which backed the government were Russia and Iran. Russia supplied the weapons, and Iran was significant in sending in military personnel, with reports of Iranian, Afghan and Pakistanis fighting as Syrian forces. Alongside them were Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, heavilly supported by Iran. In many ways Iran was taking much of the load of the actual fight.

Spiegel's Christoph Reuter recently wrote an important article about why Russia has intervened so dramatically.( http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/syria-leader-assad-seeks-russian-protection-from-ally-iran-a-1056263.html ) The essence is that Iran was treating Syria as an Iranian colony or even a province, as it has been doing with central Iraq. The difference between Iraq and Syria is that Syria's population is not significantly mainstream Shia. There is a significant Ismaili presence, and of course many of the ruling elite are Alawite, but there are far from being Iranian style Shia. Alawites have no mosques and their cult is scarcely Muslim, with their women avoiding headwear and a normal (and often religious) consumption of alcohol.

From Iran's point of view we need to remember the theological battle going on in the region between Shia Iran and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia.

Saudi's aggressive planting of Wahhabi preachers throughout the Sunni world, including the take-over of mosques from Kenya to London, is well known. Its radically extreme form of Islam is alien to that found anywhere outside of central Arabia, but it is aggressive and well-funded. Its brand of Islam is to be seen as a basis for much of the violence racking the Muslim world. Certainly, if you had walked down the streets of Aleppo or Damascus a decade ago there was real contempt among serious Muslims for this extreme version which was seen as barbaric and inauthentic. But Wahhabism has been preached widely in mosques, on the streets and on the internet and has gained support.

Iran has been doing similar things on a smaller scale, but its preachers have been trying hard to turn the ordinary Shia, Alawites and other non-Sunni Muslims in Syria and Lebanon into Iranian style Shia, and also to convert Sunni Muslims in the same direction. There are reports of Iran bringing in Shia migrants from other countries into Syria to change the demography.

In terms of the war, the government of Syria is clearly losing. Most of its young men try to avoid the army, or are not trusted to fight. Bashar has been under pressure from the Iranians, and so he turned to Russia who have no serious theological interest in Syria, but plenty of reasons to value it as a client. (Some Russians see this partly as a war to protect the Orthodox Christians, but this has not been said by the Patriarch himself, and the Russian Church is not in Putin's pocket, despite the western view to the contrary) By making Russia the main fighter in Syria, Iran has been reminded that Damascus is not one of its provinces, and that it has other friends, and the public and aggressive Russian intervention is a clear statement of this.

European commentators have forgotten that religion is really important in most of the world. The basis of Russia's intervention in Syria is the struggle between the conservative Iranian Shia preachers and the radical Wahhabi Saudi Arabian preachers. Assad's relatives value their relaxed pragmatic Alawite religion and most Syrian Muslims, whether Sufi or not have an understanding of Islam, with its art and high culture and urban sophistication which is centuries away from the radical extremity which Saudi wealth promotes.