Good Friday in Syria

En route to battle with the Persians in the 6th century AD, the Byzantine emperor Justinian went hunting in the desert hills outside Damascus. According to legend, he was about to kill a beautiful gazelle standing atop a rocky escarpment, when the animal became transformed by white light and spoke to him: I am the Virgin Mary. Do not slay me. Instead, build a church here in my honor.

The Orthodox convent of Saydnaya stands there to this day, a major stop for Holy Land pilgrims. I made my own little pilgrimage to the convent today, which held a special ceremony for Good Friday. Nuns carrying crucifixes and relics circled the sanctuary. A priest perpared communion with thick, sweet, Easter bread. Scattered amid the regular Christian worshipers, several Muslim women wearing the hijab prayed as well. The convent contains an icon of Mary attributed to Luke the Evangelist and reputedly bestowed with the power to heal women and help them bear children. "There has always been coexistence between Christians and Muslims in Syria," the abbess told me. "Every time we see people -- all people -- coming to the church, we feel God's mercy to earth."

There are almost two million Christians in Syria, about 10 percent of this overwhelmingly Muslim country. Some of them are descended from the earliest Christian communities and still speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus. However, most are members of the Orthodox church, which has maintained its traditions in Syria since the days of the Eastern Roman empire (which we in the West call the Byzantine empire.) Even through centuries of Muslim rule under Arab dynasties and then the Ottoman Turks, Christians (and Jews) had protected status in Syria, as as followers of God's laws as set forth in the Bible.

The protected status of Christians in Syria continues to this day. The Ba'ath regime of Hafez Al-Assad and now his son Bashar have included many high ranking Christian officials. As a secular party, the Ba'athists have been staunch opponents of radical Islamic movements, including the Muslim Brotherhood, with whom the government waged a civil war in the 1980's. While radical Islamic movements have persecuted Christians elsewhere in the Middle East -- especially in Egypt -- Christians enjoy security and prosperity to a greater degree in Syria than anywhere else in the region except perhaps Lebanon.

But that may be slowly changing. Syrian Christians have watched nervously as a Iraqi Christians fleeing Sunni and Shia Mulism militias in their own country have flooded into Syria. And Syria itself, which is 80 percent Sunni Muslim, is undergoing an Islamic reawakening, fueled in part by conservatives from Saudi Arabia, opposition to the secular government, and anger at the American occupation of Iraq. As of yet, this anger hasn't turned against Christians, but many are worried.

More threatening perhaps for Christian communities in Syria is the lure of emigration to the West. The wife of a senior Ba'ath party official with whom I ate a vegetarian Good Friday lunch at the convent (on the menu was soup with bread dumplings called "Ezra bullets") told me that she made sure her sons went to study in France rather than the United States for just such a reason. "In America, it would be very easy for them to get married and become citizens," she said. "It's a big country. There's freedom, technology, everything. They would never come back."

--Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus