Professor Rodney Stark has written about “the unique Christian conviction that progress was a God-given obligation”—which may strike some as odd, given that the Catholic Church condemned Galileo Galilei, the “father of science” himself, as a heretic for saying that the Earth moved around the sun. Galileo and the Scopes “monkey trial” generally form the Catholic and Protestant bookends of the case that Christianity is anti-science. However, historian Thomas Woods notes of the former: “The one-sided version of the Galileo affair with which most people are familiar is very largely to blame for the widespread belief that the church has obstructed the advance of scientific inquiry. But even if the Galileo incident had been every bit as bad as people think it was, John Henry Cardinal Newman, the celebrated nineteenth-century convert from Anglicanism, found it revealing that this is practically the only example that ever comes to mind.”

As the story goes, an obscurantist church, blinded by dogma, hounded and condemned Galileo because church officials could not square the idea that the Earth moved around the sun with such scriptural declarations as “Thou didst set the Earth on its foundations, so that it should never be shaken.” Reality was not quite so pat. In fact, Jesuit astronomers were among Galileo’s earliest and most enthusiastic supporters. When Galileo first published supporting evidence for the Copernican heliocentric theory, Cardinal Maffeo Barberini sent him a letter of congratulations. When Galileo visited Rome in 1624, Cardinal Barberini had become Pope Urban VIII. The pope welcomed the scientist, gave him gifts, and assured him that the church would never declare heliocentrism heretical. In fact, the pope and other churchmen, according to historian Jerome Langford, “believed that Galileo might be right, but they had to wait for more proof.”

Woods notes that Cardinal Robert Bellarmine explained, “If there were a real proof…that the sun does not go round the Earth but the Earth round the sun, then we should have to proceed with great circumspection in explaining passages of scripture which appear to teach the contrary, and rather admit that we did not understand them than declare an opinion to be false which is proved to be true. But as for myself, I shall not believe that there are such proofs until they are shown to me.” And that was the ultimate source of Galileo’s conflict with the church: he was teaching as fact what still at that time had only the status of theory. When church officials asked Galileo in 1616 to teach heliocentrism as theory rather than as fact, he agreed; however, in 1632 he published a new work, Dialogue on the Great World Systems, in which he presented heliocentrism as fact again.

That was why Galileo was put on trial for suspected heresy and placed under house arrest. Historian J. L. Heilbron notes that from the beginning the controversy was not understood the way it has been presented by many critics of the church since then. The condemnation of Galileo, says Heilbron, “had no general or theological significance. Gassendi, in 1642, observed that the decision of the cardinals [who condemned Galileo], though important for the faithful, did not amount to an article of faith; Riccioli, in 1651, that heliocentrism was not a heresy; Mengeli, in 1675, that interpretations of scripture can only bind Catholics if agreed to at a general council; and Baldigiani, in 1678, that everyone knew all that.”

Speaking about the Galileo case in 1992, Pope John Paul II remarked:

The Galileo case has been a sort of “myth,” in which the image fabricated out of the events was quite far removed from reality. In this perspective, the Galileo case was the symbol of the church’s supposed rejection of scientific progress, or of “dogmatic” obscurantism opposed to the free search for truth. This myth has played a considerable cultural role. It has helped to anchor a number of scientists of good faith in the idea that there was an incompatibility between the spirit of science and its rules of research on the one hand and the Christian faith on the other. A tragic mutual incomprehension has been interpreted as the reflection of a fundamental opposition between science and faith. The clarifications furnished by recent historical studies enable us to state that this sad misunderstanding now belongs to the past.

John Paul also reaffirmed the fundamentally Christian foundations of modern science: “Those who engage in scientific and technological research admit as the premise of its progress, that the world is not a chaos but a ‘cosmos’—that is to say, that there exist order and natural laws which can be grasped and examined, and which, for this reason, have a certain affinity with the spirit.” In a 2000 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, he observed that “the man of science…feels a special responsibility in relation to the advancement of mankind, not understood in generic or ideal terms, but as the advancement of the whole man and of everything that is authentically human. Science conceived in this way can encounter the church without difficulty and engage in a fruitful dialogue with her, because it is precisely man who is ‘the primary and fundamental way for the church’ (Redemptor hominis, n. 14).”

When modern science was in its infancy, openness to such exploration was common only in Christian Europe, and was conspicuously lacking from the Islamic world.

Adapted from Religion of Peace: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t, by Robert Spencer, with the permission of the author.

Many of these 1,001 inventions involve things on the order of “the world’s first soft drink,” and the perspective of this enterprise’s organizers becomes clear from a section detailing astronomical revelations found in the Qur’an. In a manner reminiscent of Khruschev-era Soviet propaganda about how Russia invented everything from baseball to zoology, 1001 Inventions frequently asserts that innovations and discoveries usually attributed to Westerners actually originated in the Islamic world. “Abbas ibn Firnas,” we’re told, “was the first person to make a real attempt to construct a flying machine and fly. His first flight took place in 852 in Cordoba when he wrapped himself in a loose cloak stiffened with wooden struts and jumped from the minaret of the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Though this attempt was unsuccessful, he continued working on improving his design.” And a bit more seriously, “The Polish scholar and inventor Copernicus is credited as the founder of modern astronomy. Historians have recently established that most of his theories were based on those of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and Ibn al-Shatir. Ibn al-Shatir’s planetary theory and models are exactly mathematically identical to those prepared by Copernicus over a century after him, which raised the issue of how Copernicus acquired such elements of information. The line of transmission lies in Italy where Greek and Latin materials that made use of al-Tusi’s device were circulating in Italy at about the time Copernicus studied there.”

Such assertions only highlight the discomfiture of those who make them. For if Muslims really did make innovations in aerodynamics, astronomy, and other fields long before Europeans did, what happened then? Why were the Europeans the ones who made use of these discoveries for technological advancement? Even if Copernicus (who came from a devout Catholic family and may have been a priest himself) was influenced by Ibn al-Shatir, which is not universally accepted, why didn’t Muslims make use of his insights the way Copernicus did? (For more on this, see Thomas Woods.) Al-Shatir died in 1375, just under a hundred years before Copernicus was born in 1473. Yet in that century, and in the centuries thereafter, Islamic astronomers did nothing significant with their coreligionist’s discoveries. If Islam contained the seeds of the high level of cultural attainment that the Islamic world enjoyed at its apex, why has it been unable to reverse its precipitous decline from those heights? Many Muslim and non-Muslim writers today answer this by blaming the West, but this just once again avoids the problem—for if Islam contains the means by which civilization can advance beyond anything the non-Muslim world has to offer, one would think that Muslims would be able to devise ways to circumvent the West’s deleterious influence.

Directly opposed to Islam’s repression of invention and innovations is Christianity’s—especially Catholicism’s—cultivation of learning and exploration. Few European or American students recognize, for example, the Catholic Church’s pivotal role in the development of the university, science, free market economics, charitable institutions, and even secular legal codes. Rodney Stark writes that medieval Europe’s advances in production methods, navigation, and war technology “can be traced to the unique Christian conviction that progress was a God-given obligation, entailed in the gift of reason. That new technologies and techniques would always be forthcoming was a fundamental article of Christian faith. Hence, no bishops or theologians denounced clocks or sailing ships—although both were condemned on religious grounds in various non-Western societies.” As Bernard Lewis reports, while medieval Catholic Europe invented and made use of clocks, in 1560, Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the Austrian ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, wrote that his hosts had “never been able to bring themselves to print books and set up public clocks. They hold that their scriptures, that is, their sacred books, would no longer be scriptures if they were printed; and if they established public clocks, they think that the authority of their muezzins and their ancient rites would suffer diminution.” It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, when Islamic norms were in retreat, that the first public clock was installed in Constantinople. This may have been the first public clock erected in any Islamic country.

The effects of Christianity’s openness to innovation and Islam’s resistance to it reverberate through many fields. Even in medicine, while the Islamic world points proudly to many early physicians and medical theorists, it was not a Muslim, but Belgian physician and researcher Andreas Vesalius who paved the way for modern medical advances when he published the first accurate description of human internal organs, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) in 1543. Why wasn’t a Muslim able to do this? Because Vesalius was able to dissect human bodies, a practice forbidden by Islam. What’s more, Vesalius’s book is filled with detailed anatomical drawings—but also forbidden in Islam are artistic representations of the human body. Muslims, however, did allow themselves to benefit from Western creativity. Lewis notes that in the late fifteenth century, Persian mystical poet Nur ad-Din Abd ar-Rahman Jami noted that his vision, which had become extremely poor, was saved “with the aid of Frankish glasses.”

Adapted from Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t, by Robert Spencer, with permission of the author.

Friedrich Nietzsche once noted that “there is no such thing as science ‘without any presuppositions.’…A philosophy, a ‘faith,’ must always be there first, so that science can acquire from it a direction, a meaning, a limit, a method, a right to exist.” (Thomas Woods made much of this assertion in his excellent book.) It may be jarring to those who believe that faith and reason are at odds, and that religions are all the same, but it is nevertheless a historical fact that modern science took its presuppositions from Christianity, and that Islam gave modern science no impetus at all.

At Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI observed that “for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.” The one hundred Muslim authorities who wrote an open letter to the pope replied that this was an oversimplification, and that it is wrong “to conclude that Muslims believe in a capricious God who might…command us to evil.” (See the pope’s reply here.)

The pope was not saying that Allah would command his people to do evil, but that Allah might change the concepts of good and evil. In other words, Allah might always enjoin justice and kindness, but justice and kindness might have very different meanings.

The reason why this is so important for science is that Muslims believe that Allah’s hand is unfettered—he can do anything. The Qur’an explicitly refutes the Judeo-Christian view of God as a God of reason when it says: “The Jews say: Allah’s hand is fettered. Their hands are fettered and they are accursed for saying so.” (5:64) In other words, it is heresy to say that God operates by certain natural laws that we can understand through reason. This argument was played out throughout Islamic history.

Muslim theologians argued during the long controversy with the Mu‘tazilite sect, which exalted human reason, that Allah was not bound to govern the universe according to consistent and observable laws. “He cannot be questioned concerning what He does.” (Qur’an 21:23).

Accordingly, there was no point to observing the workings of the physical world; there was no reason to expect that any pattern to its workings would be consistent, or even discernable. If Allah could not be counted on to be consistent, why waste time observing the order of things? It could change tomorrow. Stanley Jaki, a Catholic priest and physicist, explains that it was al-Ghazali, the philosopher who the authors of the open letter recommended to the pope, who “denounced natural laws, the very objective of science, as a blasphemous constraint upon the free will of Allah.” Jaki adds elsewhere that “Muslim mystics decried the notion of scientific law (as formulated by Aristotle) as blasphemous and irrational, depriving as it does the Creator of his freedom.” Social scientist Rodney Stark notes that Islam does not have “a conception of God appropriate to underwrite the rise of science….Allah is not presented as a lawful creator but is conceived of as an extremely active God who intrudes in the world as he deems it appropriate. This prompted the formation of a major theological bloc within Islam that condemns all efforts to formulate natural laws as blasphemy in that they deny Allah’s freedom to act.”

The great twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides explained orthodox Islamic cosmology in these terms:

Human intellect does not perceive any reason why a body should be in a certain place instead of being in another. In the same manner they say that reason admits the possibility that an existing being should be larger or smaller than it really is, or that it should be different in form and position from what it really is; e.g., a man might have the height of a mountain, might have several heads, and fly in the air; or an elephant might be as small as an insect, or an insect as huge as an elephant.

This method of admitting possibilities is applied to the whole Universe. Whenever they affirm that a thing belongs to this class of admitted possibilities, they say that it can have this form and that it is also possible that it be found differently, and that the one form is not more possible than the other; but they do not ask whether the reality confirms their assumption….

[They say] fire causes heat, water causes cold, in accordance with a certain habit; but it is logically not impossible that a deviation from this habit should occur, namely, that fire should cause cold, move downward, and still be fire; that the water should cause heat, move upward, and still be water. On this foundation their whole [intellectual] fabric is constructed.

This fantastical cosmology comes from the Islamic conviction of the absolute sovereignty of Allah. Relatively early in its history, therefore, science in the Islamic world was deprived of the philosophical foundation it needed in order to flourish. Consequently, Professor Jaki observes, “the improvements brought by Muslim scientists to the Greek scientific corpus were never substantial.” The consequences of this have been far-reaching. Jaki details some of them:

More than two hundred years after the construction of the famed Blue Mosque, W. Eton, for many years a resident in Turkey and Russia, found that Turkish architects still could not calculate the lateral pressures of curves. Nor could they understand why the catenary curve, so useful in building ships, could also be useful in drawing blueprints for cupolas. The reign of Suleiman the Magnificent may be memorable for its wealth of gorgeously illustrated manuscripts and princely paraphernalia, but for no items worth mentioning from the viewpoint of science and technology. At the Battle of Lepanto the Turkish navy lacked improvements long in use on French and Italian vessels. Two hundred years later, Turkish artillery was primitive by Western standards. Worse, while in Western Europe the dangers of the use of lead had for some time been clearly realized, lead was still a heavy ingredient in kitchenware used in Turkish lands.

These technological differences abetted the Catholic victory at the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571. The Holy League, comprised of the Papal States, the Republic of Venice, Spain, Genoa, and others, defeated the Ottoman Turks in a decisive sea battle that the jihadists hoped would bring Europe within their grasp. Stark explains, “The European galleys not only had far more and far better cannons than did the Turks, but they no longer had their forward fire zone blocked by a high ramming beak—since they meant to blow the Turks out of the water, not ram into them. Firing powerful forward volleys, the Europeans annihilated Ottoman galleys while still rowing toward them; the Turks had to stop and turn sideways to fire, presenting much larger targets.”

In contrast to the dogmatic stagnation of the Islamic world, science was able to flourish in Christian Europe during the same period because Christian scientists were working from assumptions derived from the Bible, which were very different from those of the Qur’an. The Bible assumes that God’s laws of creation are natural laws, a stable and unchanging reality—a sine qua non of scientific investigation.

Christian mathematicians and astronomers believed they could establish mathematical and scientific truths because they believed that God had established the universe according to certain laws—laws that could be discovered through observation and study. St. Thomas Aquinas even goes so far as to assert that “since the principles of certain sciences—of logic, geometry, and arithmetic, for instance—are derived exclusively from the formal principals of things, upon which their essence depends, it follows that God cannot make the contraries of these principles; He cannot make the genus not to be predictable of the species, nor lines drawn from a circle’s center to its circumference not to be equal, nor the three angles of a rectilinear triangle not to be equal to two right angles.” (Summa Contra Gentiles, 25, section 14, emphasis added.)

This is a far cry from Maimonides’ depiction of Muslim philosophers envisioning elephants becoming snakes and fire turning cool. And to be sure, to a pious Muslim of Aquinas’s day, such Christian ideas of an inviolable ordered universe was blasphemy, implying that “Allah’s hand was fettered.” But Christians did not consider it blasphemous in the least. “The rise of science,” Stark explains, “was not an extension of classical learning. It was the natural outgrowth of Christian doctrine: nature exists because it was created by God. In order to love and honor God, it necessary to fully appreciate the wonders of his handiwork. Because God is perfect, that handiwork functions in accord with immutable principles. By the full use of our God-given powers of reason and observation, it ought to be possible to discover those principles….These were the crucial ideas that explain why science arose in Christian Europe and nowhere else.”

Wait a minute: Didn’t modern science originate in the Islamic world?

Readers who received a modern education in a Western country may find Stark’s statement implausible. After all, didn’t modern science begin in the Islamic world? Didn’t Muslims invent algebra, the astrolabe, and the zero? Didn’t Muslims preserve the classics of ancient Greek philosophy while Europe was blinded by a narrow Christian dogmatism? Weren’t the great Islamic empires of the past the bright lights of civilization, while Christian Europe was comparatively barbaric and primitive? “For while [the caliphs] al-Rashid and al-Mamun were delving into Greek and Persian philosophy,” according to historian Philip K. Hitti, “their contemporaries in the West, Charlemagne and his lords, were reportedly dabbling in the art of writing their names….No people in the early Middle Ages contributed to human progress as much as did the Arabs.” (Philip K. Hitti, The Arabs: A Short History.)

In fact, much of this alleged history about Europe’s ignorance and Islam’s civilization is actually myth—and interestingly, a myth fostered by jihad, by Muslim conquests. The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. The zero, which is often attributed to Muslims, and what we know today as “Arabic numerals” did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India. Aristotle’s work was preserved in Arabic not initially by Muslims, but by Christians like the fifth-century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. (Caesar E. Farah, Islam, sixth edition.) Another Christian, Huneyn ibn-Ishaq, translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato, and Hippocrates into Syriac. His son then translated them into Arabic. (Elias B. Skaff, The Place of the Patriarchs of Antioch in Church History, Manchester, NH: Sophia Press, 1993). Syrian Christian Yahya ibn ‘Adi also translated works of philosophy into Arabic, and wrote one of his own, The Reformation of Morals. His student, another Christian named Abu ‘Ali ‘Isa ibn Zur’a, also translated Aristotle and others from Syriac into Arabic. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital was founded in Baghdad during the Abbasid caliphate—not by a Muslim, but by a Nestorian Christian.( Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, p. 78) A pioneering medical school was founded at Gundeshapur in Persia by Assyrian Christians.

In sum, there was a time when it was indeed true that Islamic culture was more advanced than that of Europeans, but that superiority corresponds exactly to the period when Muslims were able to take the achievements of the Byzantines and others that they conquered. But after the Muslim overlords had stripped Jewish and Christian communities of their material and intellectual wealth, Islam went into a period of intellectual decline from which it has not yet recovered.

Certainly Muslims have innovated at high levels. Civilized people owe a debt to Muslim believers like Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, whose pioneering seventh-century treatise on algebra, Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, gave algebra its name and enjoyed wide influence in Europe. (Al-Khwarizmi, of course, was following in the pioneering footsteps of Diophantus of Alexandria, who died late in the third Christian century.) Abu Raihan al-Biruni did groundbreaking work on calculating longitude and latitude. The caliph Harun al-Rashid’s son Abu Jafar al-Ma‘mun, who became caliph in 813, established professional standards for physicians and pharmacists. Abu Bakr al-Razi, or Rhazes, wrote lengthy treatises on medicine and alchemy that influenced the development of medical science and chemistry in medieval Europe. The famous Muslim philosopher Avicenna (Ibn Sina) wrote a medical textbook that was preeminent among European doctors for five centuries—until the 1600s. Prolific scholar Abu ‘Uthman ‘Amr ibn Bahr al-Jahiz wrote more than two hundred books on a multitude of subjects: from politics (The Institution of the Caliphate) and zoology (the seven-volume Book of Animals) to cuisine (Arab Food) and day-to-day living (Sobriety and Mirth; The Art of Keeping One’s Mouth Shut.) (Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History, p. 147.) Mathematician Abu Ali al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham did early and influential work in optics.

But in almost every case, the Islamic scholars were building on what had established by Jews, Christians, or others. And, as Rodney Stark points out, “Islamic scholars achieved significant progress only in terms of specific knowledge, such as certain aspects of astronomy and medicine, which did not require any general theoretical basis. And as time passed, even this sort of progress ceased.”

Adapted from Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t, by Robert Spencer, with permission of the author.

That is true of Christians all over the Middle East, where safe havens for Christians are dwindling rapidly. Even in Lebanon, traditionally the Middle East’s sole Christian land, Christians suffer persecution, which leads to declining numbers and declining influence – and that in turn encourages more persecution. Christian communities that date back to the dawn of Christianity have been steadily decreasing in numbers; now the faith is on the verge of disappearing from the area altogether. In Iraq, half of the nation’s prewar 700,000 Christians have now fled the country since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Iraqi Christians today are streaming into Syria or, if they can, out of the Middle East altogether. Much of this migration can be attributed to the resurgence of Islamic militarism in recent decades. Indeed, the career trajectories of two twentieth-century regional titans, Yasir Arafat as well as Saddam, are particularly illuminating: Arafat began as a secular nationalist in the Soviet camp and ended up trying to fend off and co-opt a challenge from the Islamic jihadists of Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) and Islamic Jihad. Saddam was never a Muslim hardliner, and was indeed notorious for his personal divergences from Islamic orthodoxy; nevertheless, in the last days of his regime he did not hesitate to cast himself as a mujahid par excellence, a defender of Islam who deserved the support of all pious believers.

The fact that both Arafat and Saddam began, broadly speaking, as secularists and ended as mujahedin, however insincere and incomplete their poses may have been, is emblematic of developments all over the Middle East. After a long period of relative quiescence that stretched through the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent colonial period, the Islamic jihad ideology that mandates warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers is back with a vengeance. Archbishop Cyril Salim Bustros, the Melkite Greek Catholic Eparch of Newton, Massachusetts, and former Archbishop of the Hizballah stronghold Baalbeck, Lebanon, explained in a March 2006 address: “The doctrines of Islam,” he said, “dictate war against unbelievers.” Peaceful Muslims do not find strong support for their views within Islamic tradition: “the concept of nonviolence is absent from Muslim doctrine and practice.” The ultimate goal of Islamic theology, as preached by imams all over the Islamic world, is “the surrender of all people to Islam and to God’s power based on Islamic law [Sharia]. [Muslims] have to defend this peace of God even by force.”

Such ideas have come aggressively to the fore in Iraq since the people of Baghdad pulled down the giant statue of Saddam. And not only in Iraq. Around the Islamic world, Islam is newly energized; this resurgence stems from a variety of factors – most notably, Saudi oil billions made available for the spread of the global jihad, and the stimulating example of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, which showed that it could be done: Islamic jihadists could capture and rule a state. Within Iraq, Saddam brutally suppressed Islamic supremacists, but now they are the most powerful forces in the country.

Christians have been the principal victims of this. Besides dictating war against unbelievers, Islamic law mandates that Christians be subjected to a second-class status that exacts from them a special tax (jizya; cf. Qur’an 9:29) from which Muslims are exempt, not hold authority over Muslims, not build new churches or repair old ones, and submit to various other humiliating and discriminatory regulations. However, these laws have not been in force in Iraq since it was an Ottoman province – and under Western pressure, the Ottoman Empire abolished this discriminatory system, the dhimma, in the 1850s. In Saddam’s Iraq, as well as Hafez Assad’s Syria, lawmakers took their cue more from Western law than Islamic law, and Christians enjoyed relative equality with Muslims. But those days are over, at least in Iraq.

Although the laws of the dhimma are not fully enforced anywhere in the Islamic world today, both Sunni and Shi’ite Islamic jihad groups are reasserting them. Women have been threatened with kidnapping or death if they do not wear a headscarf; in accord with traditional Islamic legal restrictions on Christians “openly displaying wine or pork” (in the words of a legal manual endorsed by Cairo’s venerable Al-Azhar University), liquor store owners in Iraq have likewise been threatened. Many of their businesses have been destroyed, and the owners have fled. A onetime Iraqi liquor store owner now living in Syria lamented that “before the war there was no separation between Christian and Muslim. Under Saddam no one asked you your religion, and we used to attend each other’s religious services and weddings. After the invasion we hoped democracy would come; but instead all that came was bombs, kidnapping and killing. Now at least 75% of my Christian friends have fled. There is no future for us in Iraq.”

And there may not be in Syria either. Bashar Al-Assad, like his father, is an Alawite – an enigmatic offshoot of Shi’ite Islam that blends elements of Christianity with Islam and is generally considered only marginally orthodox by the Sunnis. The Alawites comprise roughly twelve percent of Syria’s population. The Assad regime, aware that the majority Sunnis regards Alawites with suspicion and contempt, have long fostered an alliance of convenience of sorts with another group that Sunnis generally despise: Christians. Christians face various forms of petty discrimination in Syria – including, most notably, job discrimination, but they nevertheless enjoy a better situation there than virtually anywhere else in the Islamic world. However, the post-Saddam era in Iraq indicates just how precarious this position really is. While Bashar Assad keeps himself in power by giving jihadists a more or less free hand to use Syria as a base of operations, this has so far not extended to imposing Sharia restrictions on Christians. Were “regime change” to come to Syria, Christians would almost certainly face what they now suffer in Iraq: the rapid erosion of the rights and liberties they have enjoyed under a relatively secular government, and the brutal imposition of second-class status upon them. Christians in the West who are aware of the plight of their brethren in the Middle East are therefore in the uncomfortable position of supporting Bashar Assad as the lesser of two evils – at least in regard to his treatment of Christians.

Some suspect that even darker motives are in play as Christians stream out of the Middle East. Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregory III, who lives in Damascus, declared in April 2006 that “after 11 September, there is a plot to eliminate all the Christian minorities from the Arabic world….Our simple existence ruins the equations whereby Arabs can’t be other than Moslems, and Christians but be westerners….If the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Orthodox, the Latin Catholics leave, if the Middle East is cleansed of all the Arabic Christians, the Moslem Arab world and a so-called Christian Western world will be left face to face. It will be easier to provoke a clash and justify it with religion. That is why I wrote a letter in July to all the Arab rulers, to explain how important it is that this small presence, 15 million Arab Christian scattered among 260 million Moslems, not be swept away.”

So far his words have gone unheeded. Christians in the West are generally surprised just to discover that there are ancient communities of Christians in the Middle East at all. Extending a helping hand to them necessarily involves difficult issues of American relationships with Islamic countries, which is enough to make the task too daunting for most. Evangelical groups that focus on the persecution of Christians around the world have tended to ignore the plight of Middle Eastern Christians, since most of the latter belong to the Orthodox and Catholic Churches, which some Evangelicals do not even regard as Christian at all. There are, however, some notable exceptions to this: the Christian news service Compass Direct, for instance, provides solid news about the persecution of all Christians, without practicing sectarian exclusion. Meanwhile, the anti-Christian rhetoric (see Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Chris Hedges, etc.) that has become increasingly fashionable in the popular culture makes it difficult for many to see Christians as victims at all. Like the jihadists, some in the West regard Middle Eastern Christians as effectively the agents of a sinister foreign power: the United States.

And so their numbers continue to dwindle. It may be that, when the dust finally settles in the Middle East, the only clear result of the great American democracy project in Iraq will have been to allow for Sharia supremacists in Iraq to assert themselves with new confidence (and brutality) – and the concomitant destruction of the ancient and storied Church of Babylon of the Chaldeans.

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the author of two New York Times bestsellers: The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.