The Spiritual Meadow Could Be Read Less As a Dead History Book Than As the Prologue To

William Dalrymple

From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East

New York, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997

Pp. 483.

“The Spiritual Meadow could be read less as a dead history book than as the prologue to an unfolding tragedy whose final chapter is still being written” (19). In his book From the Holy Mountain, travel writer William Dalrymple attempts to expose and explain this final chapter of the tragedy that is the decline of Eastern Christianity. Retracing the route of a sixth-century monk at the end of the ancient world, Dalrymple’s remarkable account is a both a journey into the past and a tour of the complex political and religious world of the modern Middle East.

John Moschos and a companion set off from the monastery of St. Theodosius outside Jerusalem in the spring of 578. They would travel throughout the Byzantine Empire stopping at monasteries along the way to form a picture of Byzantine life at its height that Moschos would later describe in The Spiritual Meadow.

This extraordinary travelogue would become one of the most well-known works in all of Byzantine literature and the basis for Dalrymple’s own journey in 1994. Not only does Dalrymple follow in the footsteps of Moschos by visiting many of the same sites, he also uses many of the same techniques to understand many similar issues. Dalrymple’s goal is to expose the declining world of Eastern Christianity through a look at politics, history, and everyday life, and to compare and contrast that world with the world Moschos traveled through fourteen hundred years ago.

Dalrymple’s journey spans from Greece to Egypt, but he focuses on specific geographical regions within five countries: Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt. Each of these locations gives the reader a different look at the decline of Eastern Christianity. Traveling throughout the Middle East, Dalrymple shows the tight connection between Christianity and the politics of the nation in which it is being practiced. Starting in eastern Turkey, Dalrymple shares stories from older Armenian Christians who still remember the massacres that occurred early in the twentieth century. This is a crucial region in which to begin because it best shows the attempt of the ruling government not only to get rid of the present Christian presence but also to erase its memory from the history of the country. In the city of Beirut, Dalrymple focuses on the struggle of Arab-Christians to be accepted by Arab-Muslims who seem to want Arab to be synonymous with the title Muslim. In Syria, the author argues, the Christian situation is more optimistic, but only because the current president is sympathetic to their situation. If a new leader takes power, all the freedoms that make Syria an oasis for Christianity could be lost. Dalrymple then discusses the constant emigration of younger Christians from Israel which makes the future of the religion in that country seem hopeless. Egypt, Dalrymple maintains, is the country with the most obvious Islamic fundamentalist attempt to exorcize Christians. However, he makes clear that the large Christian population will certainly safeguard survival for some time.

Beyond giving a political synopsis of the current situation, Dalrymple uses personal anecdotes from a variety of sources along the way to give the reader a better understanding of how these intense political realities affect everyday life. For example, in Lebanon the author interviews Professor Salibi of the American University of Beirut. The university had been under siege the previous year, with many signs of war surrounding the students and faculty, yet the mood seemed light and the situation seemed somewhat commonplace. In response to a question concerning how one could deal with such a situation, the professor said, “Thankfully we are a very forgetful culture” (211). This and numerous other stories throughout the book energize the explanation of the political situation.

In addition to the political and personal viewpoints of the Middle East that Dalrymple presents, he also explains the historical significance of the present happenings by comparing and contrasting them with the situation John Moschos would have encountered in the sixth century. Speaking of Christianity in the Middle East, the author says, “Moschos saw its beginnings, I have seen the beginning of its end” (454). Dalrymple points to the increasing involvement of the government in expelling the Christians as the main difference between Moschos’s time and the 1990s. However, he also argues that there are many similarities. Throughout the book he points to situations he encountered that certainly would not have been foreign to Moschos. Many of the monasteries remain, and Dalrymple even encountered a monastery in Syria which was making plans to place a monk on a pillar for an extended period of time, an old ascetic practice dating to before Moschos’s time. Most interestingly, Dalrymple contends that Moschos would probably find more in common with the Muslim practice of religion than with that of Western Christians.

The journey that William Dalrymple took across the Middle East was certainly a long and arduous one, but my guess is that it was nothing compared to the difficulties he must have had trying to compress all of his experiences into 500 pages of literature. Dalrymple’s work is a combination of a travelogue, a history book, a political commentary, and a study of everyday life in the Middle East. With a topic so broad and an aim so all-encompassing one must expect from this work to grasp little more than a taste of what underlies each occurrence. Yet this points to the most wonderful element of Dalrymple’s writing. He is able to include aspects from all these different areas without getting lost in the details. He is able to discuss centuries of history and thousands of miles of geography in a fresh and comprehensive way. What he lacks in historical details, he makes up for in personal accounts.

The significance of this work is found equally in the importance of the topic and the way in which the author is able to make it interesting to a wide range of readers. Certainly anyone concerned about Muslim-Christian relations, intrigued by the history of the Middle East, or interested in the decline of Eastern Christianity would find this book both deeply thought-provoking and enjoyable. These three topics are particularly important at this point in history. The significance of the first two themes revolve around the increasing threat of hostility emanating from the Middle East and the immense ignorance in the West of what is causing that danger. The third is important because it will not be long before Eastern Christianity is a thing of the past, and the chance to study its active history, as done so well in this book, will be lost.

Cameron Kynes