Title: From the Holy Mountain –
A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium
Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Flamingo, 1998 (First published 1997)
ISBN: 978-0-00-654774-7
Pages: 463
Ever the incessant travel writer
and story teller familiar to us as one who stays here in India, taking in its
eccentricities, beliefs and mannerisms, William Dalrymple needs no
introduction. With his chaste diction in which he radically differs from Justin
Marozzi, another equally great writer and the superb narrative escalate him to
one of the great writers of the genre. He is one of my favourite authors, with
his titles The Last Mughal, White Mughals, Nine Lives and City of Djinns reviewed earlier in this blog. Once you start reading one of his
works, you just can’t put him down until it is finished – as simple as that! In
this book, Dalrymple travels around the Mediterranean littoral, retracing the
foot steps of an ancient monk through Greece, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel
and Egypt over a period of five months in 1994. The itinerary is comparable to
Justin Marozzi’s, as detailed in his book The Man Who Invented History,
(reviewed earlier) journeying on the route taken by Herodotus, the father of
history to Greece, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt. With these two books side by side,
you get a good glimpse of how life goes on in the present Middle East.
Traveling on the path of ancient
travel writers is an exhilarating experience as you get the lucky chance to
tread the paths, stay in the same cities and take in all scenes that came along
the way, exactly like your forebear did in his less technically advanced modes
of travel. The author follows John Moschos, an ancient Christian monk in
Galilee who wrote The Spiritual Meadow, cataloging his travel and
religious experiences gathered during his travel with a fellow monk Sophronius,
who later went on to become the Patriarch of Jerusalem. The conditions which
obtained in the Middle East in 578 CE when he began his travel which ended in
early 7th century was radically different from that which exist
today. The region was overwhelmingly Christian, bickering among themselves for
minute ecclesiastical details along the lines of Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Monophysite, Nestorian,
Armenian and a lot of minor fringe groups. The kings and commoners were oblivious
to the dark clouds forming over the Arabian desert in the form of Islam. Hardly
a century later, the Christian kingdoms were swept off the face of the earth in
the torrent that was to unleash from the followers of the Prophet. The
Byzantine emperor clung on to a titular throne until 1453 when the city of
Constantinople itself fell to the Ottoman Muslims.
In stark contrast to the
conditions prevailed when Moschos made his journey in late 6th
century, when Christianity dominated the region, the author finds it
overwhelmingly Muslim and the number of Christians dwindling year by year by
means of emigration, deportation and alienation by the Muslim regimes. This is
nowhere more apparent than Turkey where Christians and their religious
institutions are systematically erased off the landscape. The Turks might have
some justification for dispelling the Greek Christians, citing a narrow
interpretation of nationalism. Turkey and Greece continue to foster enmity
going back to several centuries. In response to Turkish actions, Greeks had
razed mosques in Athens and other places. But no such excuse hold water for the
Turks’ ghastly treatment of its Armenian Christian minority. Dalrymple saw with
his own eyes the conversion of an ancient Armenian church to a mosque – in the
year 1994! And you thought Turkey was aspiring to join the European Union!
Though vying for a place in the European community, archeological values don’t
find merit in Turkish eyes if it is on the wrong side of the religious divide.
Even now, the oppression Syrian Christians feel is immense. The author himself
was stopped and harassed by Turkish police many times, the army even arresting
him. On one occasion, we see the security personnel behaving like hooligans at
a monastery, just because they provided accommodation to the author.
But Syria offered a picture
diametrically opposite to the situation in Turkey. Christians enjoy equal
rights and it fact occupy some of the very top posts in the military. Freedom
of religion is guaranteed and at many places, both Muslims and Christians pray
together. Dalrymple however sounds a warning this oasis in the desert of
Islamic fanaticism may not outlast the reign of Asad family who holds Syria in
a Soviet-style dictatorship of its Baath party. Himself belonging to a fringe
Muslim sect, the Asads encouraged the minorities who are now fearing a backlash
when the Islamic fundamentalists oust Asad. The battle is raging on now in
Syria, at this writing. Astonishingly, when the author travels to Lebanon, the
situation is completely turned on its head. We learn about the atrocities
perpetrated by Christian extremists when they had absolute power in the 1970s
and 80s. The gruesome violence and massacre executed in the name of religion
don’t look different if the culprits are Muslims or Christians. The Maronite
Christians had gone on the rampage when it remotely looked like they’d be able
to claim the whole of Lebanon for themselves. They exhibited arrogantly
superior attitude against their brethren of different faiths, speaking only in
French and shunning Arabic, which is the lingua franca of the region. The rise
of Hezbollah put paid to the hopes of Maronites.
A short visit to Israel clearly
illustrate the moral lessons we saw earlier in Turkey and Lebanon – that the
majority religion persecutes the minor ones. Jews, discriminated against
everywhere settles the scores on the hapless Muslims and Christians still
staying in the holy land. Dalrymple narrates merciless tales of forcible
evictions and takeovers the regime regularly unleash on the minorities to make
way for townships and kibbutz to house the settlers immigrating from
various parts of the world. We may deduce from the scale of highhandedness and
resistance to it that peace in Israel is still a long way away. In the last leg
of the journey, we move on Egypt – Alexandria and Kharga oasis, to be precise.
There too, the ethnic Coptic Christians are beginning to feel the heat of
Islamic fundamentalism. Their plight was sinking more and more into despair
when Dalrymple visited there in 1994 when Hosni Mubarak still presided over a
secular administration. The rampant Islamicization was choking the life out of
innocent Copts. Though a secular regime ruled over the land, religious affairs
were still administered by the draconian Hamayonic laws which stipulated that
Christians need permission from the President of the country himself, to build
new churches or repair old ones. Technically, they have to seek permission even
to patch up a dysfunctional lavatory in the monastery while mosques were
mushrooming all over the country without any legal hassle to slow down the
growth rate.
In the characteristic Dalrymple
style, the author sketches a faithful and vibrant picture of how life is being
lived out by the minorities in the Middle East. We can’t accuse him of siding
with the Christians or looking only through the eyes of priests even though he
was retracing the footsteps of a monk and accepting the hospitality of the same
monasteries depicted in The Spiritual Meadow. Whether in Turkey,
Lebanon, Israel or Egypt, the author’s sympathies lay with the oppressed. The
narrative goads us to realize the dangerous and fatal prominence enjoyed by
religion in shaping the outlook of whole societies. Whatever be the religion,
the dominating one in a country persecutes the others and make life difficult
for its practitioners. The minorities in India may also take a potent lesson
from the harsh realities their coreligionists undergo in the Middle East and
compare their paradise-like life in this country under a very liberal religious
tolerance extended to them. The book also describes in a nutshell the origins
of Christian iconography from Egyptian religions. The images we see portrayed,
like St.George slaying the dragon, Christ child in the virgin’s bosom are too
often adaptations of similar pictorial myths from ancient Egypt and nothing
whatsoever to do with the tenets of Christianity.
The book contain a good number of
monochrome and colour plates portraying the places of interest. It also graced
by a comprehensive glossary and an index. The only thing we can arraign against
the work is the sometimes uncanny interest shown by the author in eliciting an
accusation from a victim against the oppressors. It is definitely the natural
course for the truth to come out, but the interviewees are often terrified of
the consequences when the material is published and they themselves are
destined to face the music. Sometimes, the author is simply asked to leave them
in peace in a rough way. Still, clinging on to the journalistic passion hidden
beneath the layer of travel writing, Dalrymple follows up each lead turning up
to its logical conclusion. Sometimes he travels to dangerous localities, just
to obtain the testimony of a harassed person so that the world can see and
judge for themselves the scale of tyranny heaped on the less fortunate ones.
The book is highly recommended.
Rating: 4 Star
No comments:
Post a Comment