By Alexander Stafford, Catholic Herald. (image: Wikimedia Creative Commons)
The last few decades have been terrible for Christians in the Levant and wider Middle East. The Iraq war and the rise of Islamic State and a myriad of other jihadist groups, as well as the Syrian Civil War, have led to a huge exodus from the region. A report in 2019, commissioned by Jeremy Hunt, the then Foreign Secretary, described the situation as near a “genocide”.
Since then, and especially this year, the position of Christians has deteriorated further, with state-sponsored persecution even occurring in countries with large Christian minorities. We have seen even more signs of the persecution of Christians in Syria since the fall of the Assad regime, and in May the Egyptian state turned its gaze on one of the most famous Christian sites in Egypt: St Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai.
An Egyptian court declared St Catherine’s Monastery to be state property, sparking concerns of closure. St Catherine’s is one of the oldest continually functioning monasteries in the world. It was built on the order of the East Roman/Byzantine emperor Justinian the Great between 548 and 565, and has operated as a religious community ever since.
Yet the court ruling has provoked real concern that the monastery will be forcibly turned into a museum, with the 20 monks evicted and the ownership of the monastery’s land transferred to the Egyptian state. This flew in the face of a meeting a few weeks earlier, where Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt’s president, publicly reassured the Greek government that the monastery would continue as before.
Mount Sinai holds enormous theological significance for Christians. It is believed to be where God spoke to Moses through the burning bush in Exodus 3, tasking him with leading His chosen people out of Egypt, and is where the Ten Commandments were handed down to Moses. The monastery, designated a World Heritage Site in 2002, is itself of huge cultural value and St Catherine’s Basilica, with its intricate mosaics, is considered a treasure trove of Byzantine-era religious art, including the earliest known depiction of Christ Pantocrator.