by Raymond Ibrahim
How Islam Strangled Christianity in the Middle East
A series of recent archaeological discoveries is shedding fresh if inconvenient light on a largely forgotten reality: Christianity once flourished in regions where it has all but vanished.
In Egypt, archaeologists have just unearthed a 1,600-year-old Christian monastic site, complete with wall paintings and a Greek inscription. A few weeks before it, another, equally as old, monastic complex was also discovered in Egypt.
These are not isolated finds. They are part of a growing pattern: the steady unearthing of monasteries, churches, and Christian inscriptions across the Middle East—silent witnesses to a time when Christianity was not marginal, but dominant.
And yet, as these discoveries accumulate, so too do efforts to reinterpret them—not as evidence of a dramatic civilizational rupture, but as proof of something more palatable.
Take, for example, yet another recent find—in the Arabian Peninsula, no less, the birthplace and home of Islam: in 2022, archaeologists in the United Arab Emirates unearthed the ruins of yet another Christian monastery. Radiocarbon dating suggested that its Christian community may have thrived there around the year AD 534 — meaning nearly a century before the rise of Islam in 622 (Year One of the Muslim calendar).
“It is an extremely rare discovery,” said Prof. Tim Power of the UAE University, who was part of the team that unearthed the monastery. “It is an important reminder of a lost chapter of Arab history.”