What Is Happening in Syria Is Not a Surprise
A Response to “The Vanishing Crosses of Syria” <idicenter.org>
By A. C. Rosenthal
A response to Sally Obeid’s “The Vanishing Crosses of Syria”
In a town called Maaloula, carved into the cliffs an hour northeast of Damascus, there is a church where the liturgy is still sung in Aramaic. Not Aramaic studied, not Aramaic reconstructed. Aramaic spoken, the actual language Jesus used, carried mouth to mouth for two thousand years in an unbroken line by people who never stopped saying the Lord’s Prayer the way it was first said. There are only a handful of places left on earth where you can hear it. Maaloula is the most famous of them.
One morning early last year, a priest in Maaloula woke to a loud sound, ran outside, and found streams of red liquid running through his town. The families are leaving now. The bells still ring on Sunday mornings across the rock, but fewer and fewer people are left to hear them. The town that kept the voice of Jesus alive for twenty centuries is going quiet, and it is going quiet on a schedule.
Sally Obeid has documented that schedule, and she has done it precisely. Her account of what is being done to Syria’s Christians names the mechanisms without flinching: symbolic dominance, institutional marginalization, managed disorder. She traces the line from nearly two million Christians before the Arab Spring, to roughly three hundred thousand by the time Assad fell, to a number falling faster still under the new authorities. She refuses the comfortable words. Not chaos. Not collateral damage. A methodical campaign with a direction.
She is right about all of it. What I want to add is one thing, and it is the thing that changes how you read every elegy like hers: it is not a surprise. And until we are willing to say plainly why it is not a surprise, we will keep writing beautiful obituaries for communities like Maaloula’s without ever understanding why the same funeral keeps being held, in country after country, century after century.
Before I make that argument, I have to be careful about what kind of argument it is, because the careless version of it is a slander and I want no part of that one.
A word I have to say first, and mean
I am not talking about Muslims as people. I want to plant that before I go a step further, and I want to plant it with something specific rather than a disclaimer, because disclaimers are cheap and specifics are not.
Maaloula itself is the specific. That town was, for centuries, genuinely shared. Roughly half Muslim, half Christian, the same Aramaic on both sets of lips, the same mountain, neighbors in the real sense and not the postcard sense. The Muslims of Maaloula are not the villains of this essay, and many of them are grieving the emptying of their town as much as anyone, because it is their home and their heritage too. When I argue that a system produces a result, I am not arguing that the man next door wills that result. Most of them don’t. Some of them are the ones bringing food to the families who are afraid to go out.
So hold those two things at once, because the entire essay lives in the space between them. The people are not the problem. The structure is. And keeping those separate is not a rhetorical softening I add to avoid trouble. It is the actual claim, and if I blur it I have gotten my own argument wrong.
The structure explains the fruit
Here is the question I spent much of The Two Muhammads on, the one polite analysis tends to walk around: what does a system reliably produce when it is followed seriously, at scale, without apology? Not what its most sincere believers intend. Not what its gentlest interpreters prefer. What does the system itself, enacted faithfully, consistently generate?
Trace that through the architecture of Islamic governance rather than through the hearts of individual Muslims, and you arrive at exactly the pattern Obeid is documenting. The institutions that arise under serious enactment are oriented toward enforcement, preservation, and boundary maintenance. Religious courts adjudicate not just disputes but belief itself. Status is formalized along religious lines. Law is not a procedural tool that serves whatever ends a society chooses; it is a sacred inheritance, and authority justifies itself not by its outcomes but by its continuity with revelation. That last point is the hinge of everything, so hold onto it: a system that grounds its legitimacy in fidelity to revelation cannot later be talked out of the parts of that revelation we find intolerable, because the fidelity is the whole source of the authority.
That is not a verdict on a people. It is an observation about a machine, and the machine has a traceable logic. Watch it run.
Pluralism as hierarchy, not coexistence
Western observers watching Syria reach instinctively for the word pluralism, and then for the word failure. The new authorities promised inclusion and delivered persecution; the gap gets filed as hypocrisy, or as a moderate movement contaminated by its extremists.
That framing misses the structural point entirely.
Classical Islamic jurisprudence does not imagine pluralism as mutual recognition between equals. It imagines it as managed hierarchy. The Quran frames legitimate judgment as belonging to divine revelation alone: whoever does not judge by what God has revealed, it says, those are the disbelievers (5:44). Read that as what it is in the legal tradition, not a mood but a jurisdiction. Once judgment itself is moralized that way, competing legal orders cannot be permitted to govern shared space as equals indefinitely. They can be tolerated, as a weakness, a necessity, a temporary strategy. They cannot be affirmed.
The category of dhimmi exists precisely to manage that tension. It lets diversity exist without letting equality exist. Christians and Jews may keep their rituals, their communities, their internal customs, but they may not contest the supremacy of Islamic law over the shared public square. Their presence is conditional. Their rights are negotiated rather than inherent. The system tolerates difference exactly up to the point where difference stops challenging jurisdiction, and not one inch past it.
What Obeid is documenting is not a deviation from that structure. It is the structure becoming visible. The crosses torn from the churches are not the work of a fringe that hijacked a moderate transition. They are the signal flare of which authority now governs and which must yield. The jizya was never merely a tax; it was always a legal sign reading subordination, a marker of who rules and who submits. Coexistence of this kind is not coexistence in the modern sense at all. It is stratification, and it holds only as long as the bottom of the stratum stays quiet.
Managed disorder is not an accident
Obeid names a third mechanism, managed disorder: radical networks left to operate with impunity in Christian neighborhoods, kidnappings and robberies and harassment manufacturing a climate of fear, while the authorities keep their own hands formally clean. Emigration becomes the rational choice, and no one in an office ever has to sign the order.
This too has a structural explanation, and it is almost elegant in its economy. A system claiming comprehensive jurisdiction does not need mass expulsion or public spectacle to transform a population. It needs only to raise the cost of staying and lower the cost of leaving, and then wait. A comprehensive religious order governs not just the dramatic moments but the ordinary ones: speech, family, inheritance, testimony, the boundaries of belief, the price of dissent. The costs of that governance are rarely theatrical. They are cumulative. The slow narrowing of what may be thought and said and done produces a steady ambient pressure that no amount of personal virtue on either side can relieve, because it is not coming from persons. It is coming from the structure the persons live inside.
Obeid notes that Syria’s Christians are walking the road Iraq’s Christians walked after 2003: near-total disappearance achieved not by one decisive massacre but by sustained pressure that makes staying feel impossible. The mechanism is identical because the system is identical.
The appeal to the golden age
Someone will answer a piece like Obeid’s, or like this one, by pointing to the long centuries when Syria held Christians, Jews, and Muslims in real proximity. They will cite the golden age of Islamic scholarship, the relative safety of dhimmi communities under various dynasties, the genuine beauty of a cosmopolitan Levant now being dismantled. Those things are historically real and worth honoring, and I will not wave them away.
But they do not answer the structural question; they restate it. Coexistence under hierarchy is not pluralism in the modern sense. It is management, and it functions precisely as long as subordination is accepted. The moment equality is asserted, the conflict appears, not because Muslims are intolerant as people but because the system cannot grant what it never authorized. The cosmopolitan Syria now being erased was always conditional. While the governing framework held, the condition stayed invisible, and it was easy to mistake the management for harmony. When the framework collapsed and a more assertive expression of the same underlying system moved into the vacuum, the conditionality became visible all at once. What had looked like pluralism revealed itself as management the instant the managers changed, and the managed discovered how thin their security had always been.
The direction of flight is the tell
Obeid frames the collapse from two million toward three hundred thousand as a tragedy of displacement, and it is. But the direction of the displacement is also a diagnosis.
There is a pattern across centuries and continents: populations living under comprehensive Islamic law move outward, toward pluralist orders, toward societies that separate ultimate authority from religious command. The flow is remarkably consistent, and it persists even when leaving means cultural loss, moral anguish, and real danger. People do not flee toward what they are fleeing from. Syria’s Christians are not leaving because this particular transitional government is unusually cruel or this particular moment unusually chaotic. They are leaving because when a system that does not authorize equality moves into full governance, those who cannot be governed as equals have three options: submit, vanish quietly, or go. The same movement hollowed out Iraq’s Christians, thinned Egypt’s Copts, emptied the oldest Christian communities in what is now Turkey. The direction never changes because the pressure never changes.
The objection I have to answer honestly
Now I have to turn the knife on my own argument, because everything I have said so far has a shape that a sharp critic will recognize and distrust, and they will be right to press on it.
The objection is this. An argument that says the system produces this can be made unfalsifiable, and unfalsifiable arguments are worthless. If every atrocity counts as the system expressing itself, and every peaceful century counts as merely the system biding its time, then I have built a machine that converts all evidence into confirmation and can never be proven wrong. That is not analysis. That is a horoscope. And the uncomfortable thing is that I make exactly this charge against the other side inside this very essay: I say that if every failure of Islamic governance is excused as misuse, then no outcome can ever count as evidence and the system stays magically untouched. A fair reader will notice that my own thesis is vulnerable to the mirror image of that complaint. If I am allowed to claim every good period as fake and every bad period as real, I have done the same trick in reverse.
I take that seriously, and here is my answer, because the argument only earns its keep if it can survive its own strongest critic.
The thesis is falsifiable, and I will tell you exactly what would falsify it. It would be falsified by a society that enacted comprehensive Islamic law seriously, at scale, with full jurisdiction, and over generations affirmed the genuine legal equality of its religious minorities, not their tolerated presence but their equal standing to contest the public square. Not a golden age of gentle management, which is what the tradition’s defenders keep offering, but a structure that authorized equality and held. If that society exists or has existed, my argument fails, and I will retract it. The reason I make the claim with confidence is not that I have rigged the game. It is that the cases keep coming back the same way, and the defenders keep answering not by producing the counterexample but by re-describing management as harmony. The distinction between coexistence and managed subordination is not a dodge I invented to protect my thesis. It is the precise place where the thesis could be killed, and the fact that it survives contact with the actual history is why I still hold it.
That is the difference between my version and the misuse defense I criticize. Mine names the condition under which it would be wrong. The misuse defense never does. It treats every peaceful stretch as the real Islam and every atrocity as an aberration, with no rule for telling which is which except the conclusion it wanted in advance. I am trying not to do that. You should hold me to it.
The misdiagnosis and what it costs
The real danger in responses to pieces like Obeid’s is not the description. The description is usually right: this is erasure, not turbulence. The danger is the explanation that gets reached for next, which almost always grabs at contingency. It is HTS specifically. It is the power vacuum. It is the failure of the international community to guarantee enough. Each of those is real. None of them is sufficient. And the move they all share is to keep the system itself untouched, so that the violence is always excessive, the repression always accidental, the flight always circumstantial, and the architecture never once enters the analysis.
But the architecture is producing exactly what it has produced everywhere it has been enacted seriously. Until that observation is allowed into the room, the elegies will keep arriving on schedule and the communities will keep disappearing on schedule, and we will keep mistaking a pattern for a series of accidents.
The stakes
Obeid ends by reminding us that Syria was not just another Arab state but a cradle, the ground where Christianity first took root and spread. To lose its Christian presence is to lose a living bridge to the ancient world, to erase not only people but the memory of coexistence itself.
She is right about the stakes. Two thousand years of unbroken presence, from the Damascus road where Paul was struck blind to the Aramaic still sung in Maaloula in the voice Jesus used, is not a footnote to a civilization. It is one of the threads the civilization is made of. Pulling it is a civilizational act, not an administrative one.
But the memory of coexistence now being erased was always more fragile than it looked, because it always depended on the system’s willingness to manage rather than to eliminate. When management gives way to something more ambitious, the fragility turns catastrophic overnight, and the people who trusted the management are the ones left standing in the street.
The crosses are coming down in Syria. They will not go back up until someone builds a structure of governance that authorizes equality rather than merely tolerating subordination. That is a political task of enormous difficulty, and it cannot even begin until the diagnosis is honest. The priest in Maaloula who woke to red running through his streets is not the victim of an unlucky decade. He is standing at the end of a pattern that has a name, and the first act of respect we can offer him is to call it by that name instead of writing him one more beautiful elegy.
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Thanks for reading. This post is public, so feel free to share it. A. C. Rosenthal writes on comparative religion, Islamic theology, and the relationship between Christianity and modern Western culture. This work is entirely reader-supported. By choosing a paid subscription, you allow me to continue this long-form research to bring these vital stories to light. Thank you for helping this Lion roar for truth. A.C. Rosenthal is the author of The Two Muhammads: What History and Manuscripts Reveal About the Islamic Dilemma, The God They Rejected Isn’t Real: Exposing the False Gods of Modern Doubt, and The Carpenter’s Son and the Imam’s Son. Further analysis at:
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