When Beshara al-Rai, patriarch of Lebanon’s Maronite church, this year described Syria as “the closest thing to democracy” in the Arab world, and Ignatius IV Hazim, patriarch of Antioch and the Greek Orthodox Christians in Syria, commended the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad for “reforms undertaken”, this was not some otherworldly clerical eccentricity. However inaccurately, they were conveying the unease among Arab Christians about Syria’s year-long revolt against tyranny.
Of all the revolutions that have upended the old order, none worries leaders of the plethora of religious minorities in the Middle East more than Syria’s, the most blood-drenched chapter in the Arab awakening. Their fear is that the overthrow of one minority – the Alawites through whom the Assad family has ruled Syria for more than four decades – will uncage sectarian demons that threaten all minorities.
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