Anthony Shadid: There’s a Slim Hope in History for Arab Christians

Anthony Shadid is the Beirut bureau chief of The New York Times.

...Worries about the fate of Christians in the Middle East are often thrust uncomfortably into the conflict between the West and the Muslim world; in the American presidential campaign, Newt Gingrich regularly warns of an “anti-Christian Spring,” as he did in a Republican debate last weekend.

But focusing on that conflict, and the bigotries that beset it, misses the nuances of what Christians represent to the region, and the lessons that their history in other times of tumult might offer the future. In the 19th century, they ushered in a renaissance of Arab culture. Just generations ago, they helped articulate the ideologies that seized the Arab world’s imagination. The fate of Arab Christians today will help define the unresolved struggle within the Arab world about its own identity — how universal, fair, just and equal its societies turn out to be.

“There is a part of Islam in every Arab Christian,” Ghassan Tueni, a journalist, diplomat and intellectual, once told me in Beirut. His suggestion for Christians’ survival was simple, that both they and Muslims imagine an identity that they could somehow share.

The idea is not new. It was debated more than a century ago by Christians and Muslims, during another upheaval. But it remains relevant to a contest as important as any other in the Arab revolts — whether the region can move beyond fear and forge an inclusive community, in which rights are individual, before grimmer impulses make co-existence impossible. In the exodus of Jews from the Arab world, in civil wars in Lebanon and Iraq, in upheavals today in Egypt and Syria, an axiom has proved true time and again. No community, it goes, has a guarantee of its survival.

The question is, on what basis can the Arab world forge that guarantee?...