ShaRa

This is how the Christians of the Middle East and North Africa went from majority to minority. Today they are less than 3%. In the 7th century, most people from Iraq to Egypt to Carthage were Christian. Our churches, languages, and monasteries shaped the region long before Islam arrived. 7th–10th centuries: After the Arab conquests, Christians kept their faith only by paying the jizya tax and accepting life as second-class subjects. They were barred from building new churches, from bearing arms, and from testifying against Muslims, and leaving Islam was punishable by death. Revolts were crushed: in Egypt, the Bashmurian Copts rose up in 831 and were defeated, and survivors were killed or deported. Under this mix of pressure and force, conversion spread over generations. In much of the region, Muslims became the majority sometime around the 9th or 10th century, and later in Egypt. 11th–15th centuries: Around 1009 in Egypt and the Levant, Caliph al-Hakim ordered churches destroyed, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and pressured Christians to convert. In the 12th century, the Almohads in North Africa gave Christians and Jews a choice of conversion, exile, or death, and Christianity there all but disappeared. In Egypt, mob attacks and waves of church burnings under the Mamluks in the 1300s drove more Copts to convert. In Mesopotamia, after the Mongol ruler Ghazan converted to Islam in 1295, churches were destroyed, and Timur’s massacres a century later shattered the Church of the East, which had once stretched all the way to China. Ottoman era (1500s–1800s): Communities survived under the millet system, organized and governed through their churches. Researchers estimate that from 1500 to 1900, Christians held fairly steady at roughly 15 percent of the Middle East’s population. 1914–1923: The Armenian genocide and the Seyfo, the massacres of Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Syriacs, wiped out whole villages across Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia. In Iraq, the Simele massacre followed in 1933. 20th century: War, discrimination, and lack of economic opportunity pushed families to emigrate, while birth rates fell. Across Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the Palestinian territories, the Christian share of the population fell from 10% in 1900 to 5% in 2010. 2003 to today: In Iraq, about 1.5 million Christians lived in the country before the 2003 invasion; as few as 150,000 remain. In 2014, ISIS gave the Christians of Mosul the same choice their ancestors had faced: convert, pay the jizya, leave, or be killed. Those who refused were driven out or killed, and for the first time in nearly 2,000 years, Mosul and the Nineveh Plain were emptied of Christians. We were the original people of this land, and our numbers fell over fourteen centuries due to violence and intolerance.