WHEN the Moroccan Quarter in Jerusalem was torn down to create the plaza in front of the Western Wall in 1967, after the Six-Day War, Jeremy Bowen was at De La Salle Primary School, in Cardiff. The BBC’s Middle East Editor describes the De La Salle Brothers as “somewhat sadistic with long black habits and white things coming out of the top. It was a fairly odd place.”
His father, the BBC Wales journalist Gareth Bowen, was not a Roman Catholic. But his mother, Jennifer, took him to mass on Sunday, and he appreciated the exposure to faith, even if it did not stay with him into adulthood. “I’m not personally religious, but I see the resonances of it all.”
Johnny RingJeremy Bowen
Thirty years reporting on the Middle East, five of them spent living in Jerusalem, have underscored for him the importance of faith in the region. “It’s possible we can live in this country, in North-West Europe, in an entirely secular world. But if you live in the Middle East, or spend time there, you see the centrality of religion to people’s lives.”
Mr Bowen continues: “I’ve seen many horrible things in the world, and would very much like to have a religious faith. I feel quite envious at times of the certainties people who are believers have, of whatever branch of religion; but I don’t have it. To quote Salman Rushdie: ‘I don’t have a God, but I have a God-shaped hole inside of me.’ I see the power of religion.”
Mr Bowen’s new book, The Making of the Modern Middle East, combines his personal recollections and analysis of the region with an outline of its history. When General Uzi Narkiss captured the Western Wall on day three of the Six-Day War, it was the 37th time that Jerusalem had changed hands.
Jerusalem’s struggles and conflicts inevitably ripple out to the wider Middle East, and then the world. “Jerusalem has been at the centre of more than a century of festering conflict between Jews and Arabs. The tectonic plates of religion and culture come together in the city and when they move, Christians, Jews, or Muslims all over the world can feel it. . . In Jerusalem, it always starts with God, with power, possession, and loss following close behind.”
HAVING lived in the former Palestinian village of Ein Karem, now an Israeli suburb, between 1995 and 2000, Mr Bowen observes: “You need a thick skin in Jerusalem.” The first two years in the city were professionally satisfying, but difficult on a daily level. “I was a busy journalist doing lots of big stories: the assassination of Rabin and all its consequences; the peace process — and then the breakdown and peace process. But, as a human being, I found it very trying because people were, in the first few years, very aggressive. There was an awful lot of hatred. Everything is politicised.”
Unlike pilgrims and tourists to the Holy Land, Mr Bowen was able to enter the Palestinian territory of Gaza, an area the size of the Isle of Wight but with a population of two million rather than the 150,000 who live by the Solent. “Palestinians in Gaza call it the world’s biggest open-air prison. I’ve worked with a guy in his forties with three kids, a university degree, and he’d never left the Gaza Strip.”
As there is only one crossing point into Israel, and one into Egypt, getting permission to travel is challenging, but the internet and social media enable the Strip’s inhabitants to be fully engaged with events outside the territory. “Of all the different people in the Arab world, the Palestinians are the most politicised.”
Gaza’s geographical confinement has psychological and practical consequences. “It’s incredibly difficult for people. Thank God most of the year the weather’s good; so people spend the day outside. You go into a typical multi-generation house in a refugee camp with two or three rooms, but there could be 15 people living there.”
The erosion of Christian communities in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East is not a process that Mr Bowen sees reversing. “There’s already a large diaspora outside the region, a lot of people have family already settled in Europe and North America, and the possibility of emulating their overseas families’ lives, living somewhere a bit easier, is attractive. Western countries are quite open to Christian Arabs in a way that, sadly, some people might not be towards Muslims.”
CHRISTIANS’ historically siding with, or at least not actively opposing, the Middle East’s strongmen dictators, such as Egypt’s President Mubarak and Syria’s President Assad, has placed them in a difficult position after the volatility and violence of the Arab Spring movements.
“Middle Eastern Christians have a very strong sense of their own identity and pride in it, but also of being part of a beleaguered minority,” Mr Bowen says. “The Christians, in the main, in Syria sided with President Assad, because he said, ‘The Muslim extremists are out to get you, and I am the man who will support minorities.’
Courtesy of Jeremy BowenMorning coffee in Douma in December 2012
“I went to the fight in Syria for the town of Maaloula, where they speak Aramaic and which al-Qaeda, or al-Nusra, as they were there, was trying to capture.
“There was a big fight going on there. As well as the regular Syrian army, there were a lot of Christian militias, men with enormous crucifixes around their necks or with their guns, and one man said to me, ‘Two thousand years ago, we sent you St Paul, and you sent us al-Qaeda and Islamic State.’ He was pretty angry.”
Riding the tiger is the metaphor that Mr Bowen uses to describe the relationship between Christian leaders and the Middle East’s authoritarian regimes. “While the tiger might give you a privileged position, you’re lucky; but, if the tiger turns on you, you’re in big trouble.”
He points to the Christians in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. “In the run-up to the first Gulf War in 1990, I was in Baghdad, and Saddam Hussein’s regime organised one or two great conclaves of the different Christian communities.
“At that time, there was a very large Christian community, an extremely diverse range of churches and beliefs: Chaldeans, Syrian Orthodox, all sorts. And their patriarchs, prelates, and clergy arrived for this thing wearing the most exotic costumes, headgear, and regalia that you can imagine. Now, since the invasion in 2003, and the rise of jihadists, the Christian community in Iraq has been absolutely smashed.”
One of the book’s most vivid stories is an interview with Bassam Wahbh, a Damascene shopkeeper who had been kidnapped in 2013, during the Syrian conflict’s lawlessness. Offering Mr Bowen an ice cream, the host asked, would he also like to see his severed finger kept in the freezer? Then the shopkeeper showed the ransom video. “We filmed him looking at the video his family had been sent, of these people hacking off his finger. They strapped his hand to a block, took out this hatchet which you use for chopping firewood. It must have been blunt. They didn’t do it in one go, it took about four chops. And then you see the finger. It was a strange moment.”
Mr Bowen summarises the effect of witnessing such scenes as profound. “You couldn’t spend your working life as I have, in places which can be dangerous or deadly for some people, if not for you, without it having an impact. And colleagues and friends have been killed. It’s had a mental-health impact on me at times, which I think is under control, but it’s been a struggle. You’re dealing with some of the worst reality in the world. You would have to be made of stone for it not to have an impact.”
READERS of The Making of the Modern Middle East should not feel completely downcast about the region. “There’s always hope: wonderful people, a very young population — sadly, many of them unemployed. Incredible culture and diversity, incredible history, which people are proud of, and proud of the way humans have been living there at a civilised level for millennia.
“But, equally, there’s still authoritarian rule in many states, dysfunctional government, governance that is unfair and unjust, and people don’t have any redress. Add to that religious extremism, the toxic effects of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and foreign interference, which has made life much harder, not easier. Put it all together, and it is not a very helpful situation, sadly, because of a lot of pressures.”
Courtesy of Jeremy BowenChristian militias in Maaloula, in 2013, fighting the Nusra Front, a splinter group of al-Qaeda
Regular visitors to the Middle East will have noticed a much more conservative style of dress, especially among women. Mr Bowen says that when he was in Israel in the 1990s, Muslim women tended to be more covered up in Hebron and Gaza than in East Jerusalem and Ramallah. But now, hajibs and neck-to-toe coverings are predominant everywhere.
But Mr Bowen says that the position of women in the region is not necessarily going backwards: the picture is more mixed. In Afghanistan, the lot of women has deteriorated, but in the Gulf states there are signs of progress.
“In a lot of countries, women clearly don’t have the kind of equality Western women would expect. But, in the Gulf, women are in a lot of important jobs now. Men are running the place, but it’s more nuanced than you think. In Saudi Arabia, they tried to open up in terms of the petty things like women being able to drive. But then, if you protest against the state, you get thrown into jail, including if you were one of the driving protesters.”
In terms of travel, Syria remains off-limits, and, while there are scheduled flights to Baghdad, Mr Bowen advises going to Iraq only if you have local knowledge. And there is always the golden city: “I absolutely love going to Jerusalem. When I go back, there’s something to look at everywhere, and everything means something.”
The Making of the Modern Middle East: A personal history by Jeremy Bowen is published by Picador at £20 (Church Times Bookshop £18); 978-1-50989-089-7.