UNDERSTANDING CHRISTIAN FAITH AND FREEDOM IN CENTRAL ASIA AND TRANSCAUCASIA
Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan
Transcaucasia (South Caucasus): Armenia, Azerbaijan (includes Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh), Georgia.
Most Westerners know something of the origins of Christianity from Bethlehem to Jerusalem. Most also know something – courtesy Hollywood – of how cruelly Christians were persecuted in the eastern Roman Empire during the first centuries of the Common Era (CE) when they were burned alive, fed to lions, and slain by gladiators to entertain the masses. Most, however, know very little about Christianity in Africa, presuming it to be a more recent addition, introduced by colonial powers; and absolutely nothing about Christianity in Central Asia, a region they presume to have been beyond the Church’s reach. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As Catholic theologian and history Adrian Hastings writes: “ There was no intrinsic reason why Christianity should be confined to the Roman Empire and it was was so confined. Its universalist momentum was bound to take it well beyond the Empire’s wide frontiers.’ [Adrian Hastings, “150-550”, in A World History of Christianity, ed. Adrian Hastings, (London: Cassell, 1999), p58.]
This fact is illustrated in an ancient symbolic map, dating from the Middle Ages, which depicts the spread of ancient Christianity during the first millennium of the Common Era. The map has the appearance of a three-petaled flower, the life-giving centre of which is “Jerusalem”. Each “petal” represents a region into which Christianity had spread and become established. Stretching west from Jerusalem is “Europa”. Stretching south from Jerusalem is “Africa”. And stretching east from Jerusalem is “Asia”, including placenames such as Arabia, Damascus, Antioch, Syria, Mesopotamia, Chaldea, Armenia, Babylon, Media, Persia, India . . .
The Assyrian Church of the East – also known (incorrectly) as the Nestorian, Persian or Syriac Church – was established in Edessa (modern-day Urfa, in Sanlıurfa Province, southern Turkey), in the first century of the Christian era. The Assyrians had great missionary vision and by the end of the second century the Church in Edessa had four Gospels in Aramaic and was already engaged in spreading Christianity east through the Persian Empire. “It may well have been from Edessa,” writes Hastings, “that the faith was taken north into the kingdom of Armenia and on into Georgia, just as it was carried through Persia and on into India and, somewhat later [6thC], China.”
Historian R.G. Tiedemann elaborates: “As Nestorian Christianity spread eastward from Persia among the Turkic nomads of Central Asia and along well-established trade routes, it eventually came into contact with Chinese civilization, probably sometime in the sixth century.” [R.G. Tiedemann, “China and its neighbours,” in A World History of Christianity, ed. Adrian Hastings, (London: Cassell, 1999), 369 – 70.]
“Just as the rivers flowed out of Eden,” writes historian Philip Jenkins, “so the other patriarchs flowed forth from Mesopotamia . . . The natural home of Christianity was in Mesopotamia and points east.”
Indeed, far from being beyond the Church’s reach, Central Asia was both open and receptive. Just as merchandise moved freely along the Silk Road, so too did the Christian Gospel (good news). Merv (Turkmen: Merw; Persian: Marv) in today’s Turkmenistan was once one of the world’s great Christian centres. The city had a bishop by the 420s, and in 544 it became a metropolitan see (religious jurisdiction) of the Eastern Church. It retained a seminary for training Tatar believers up until around 1340.
While Islam’s arrival brought suffering, hardship, persecution and subjugation, it was not until the 14th century that Christianity collapsed all across Asia.
Recommended:
The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia – and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins (Harper Collins Publishers, 2008)
Historian Philip Jenkins explains: “Within the [Byzantine] empire and beyond, Asian and African Christianity were still powerful forces in 1200, yet within at the most two centuries that presence had crumbled. In this brief time, some the most ancient Christian communities were all but annihilated.” (Jenkins, p115)
“The perpetrators,” he explains, “were Muslims, from the central Asian people of the Seljuk Turks . . . who subjugated the Armenian kingdom in 1064 . . .” and in the 1140s, captured Edessa, “killing or enslaving virtually its entire population, then estimated at forty-seven thousand.” (Jenkins, p116)
As if that were not enough, after the Turks came the Mongols, who invaded Central Asia in the early part of the 13th Century just as Byzantine power was collapsing. The Mongols’ subsequent conversion to Islam (late 13thC) resulted in a Christian crisis of monumental proportions.
For Eastern Christianity, the 14th Century was catastrophic. A vulnerable minority within an Islamic Turco-Mongol super-Caliphate, the Christian communities of Central Asia were annihilated, their ecclesiastical institutions shredded beyond repair.
The killings peaked during the reign of Amir Timur, also known as Timur the Lame or Tamerlane. The genocidal Turco-Mongol warlord – who ruled from 1370 to 1405 – is believed to be responsible for the deaths of some 17 million people. Silk Road cities such as Bukhara or Khiva became centres of Islamic slave trading, where Russian and Armenian Orthodox Christian captives were routinely sold alongside Persian Shi’ite prisoners of war in Islamic slave markets.
During the eighteenth century, the insecurity caused by endless Islamic incursions and slave raiding in Christian lands evoked increasing Russian hostility toward the Central Asian khanates. Ultimately the situation compelled Russian expansion. By the late 19th century, Transcaucasia and much of Central Asia had been conquered and pacified by the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great and Tsars Nichols I and Alexander II.
Then, for much of the 20th Century, the republics of Transcaucasia and Central Asia were under the control of Soviet appointed, communist dictators.
During the Soviet era, the communists mercilessly crushed religion while advancing modernisation. Eventually, in the late 1980s, reforms ushered in by Soviet Communist Party chief Mikhail Gorbachev – in particular, glastnost (openness) – paved the way to religious revival.
When the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, Islam literally flooded into the Caucasus (North and South) and Central Asia. Funded mostly by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, mosques sprang up everywhere, missionaries poured in, and Qurans arrived by the tonne. It was not long before Azerbaijan, the North Caucasus and Central Asia were simmering with fundamentalist, pro-Sharia, pro-Caliphate, revolutionary and jihadist Islam. Throughout the region, conflicts erupted between nationalist Muslims (backed by Moscow) and trans-nationalist, pro-Caliphate Muslims (backed by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and al-Qaeda).
While Central Asia’s Soviet-era dictators have gradually given way to a new generation of leaders, authoritarianism and corruption remain deeply entrenched, and destabilising poverty is rife. Despite (and often due to) severe (and often indiscriminate) crackdowns, fundamentalist, revolutionary and jihadist Islam remain a very real and present danger.
Despite the significant risk posed by intolerant fundamentalist Islam, and despite the exodus of millions of ethnic Russians, Germans, Koreans and other foreign Christians, an authentically Central Asian Christianity – comprised mostly of Central Asian Muslim background believers – has emerged, grown, and taken root throughout the region. Central Asian Christianity is back!ut the region. Central Asian Christianity is back!
It is in this highly strategic region, the hub of Eurasia, that China’s Belt Road Initiative and Turkey’s pan-Turkic and neo-Ottoman ambitions converge in what has been dubbed “The Middle Corridor”.
See: Turkey’s Multilateral Transportation Policy,
Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
For Central Asian countries hoping to benefit from China’s Belt Road Initiative, the number one priority is maintenance of order.
Throughout Central Asia the greatest threats to a harmonious social order are: (1) pro-Caliphate Wahhabi Islam and the jihadist (i.e. al-Qaeda) and revolutionary (i.e. Hibz ut-Tahrir) movements that seek to overthrow the secular order; and local Muslim unrest or strife (fitna) that arises in response to Christianity.
One proven way maintain social order is to enact repressive legislation that will lock out, and render illegal, everything the state deems ‘non-traditional’ and ‘foreign’ – i.e. Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Islam and non-Russian Orthodox Christianity – and to crack down hard on anything that could be deemed “proselytism”.
Case study:
Uzbekistan’s Religion Law: Currently Under Review
By Elizabeth Kendal, 2 September 2020
What Central Asian Christians seek is nothing more than their fundamental human right to believe and worship as their conscience dictates, and to live peaceably and securely as followers of Jesus Christ.
It is highly unlikely that aspiring hegemons – China and neo-Ottoman Turkey – will support that right. Indeed, both have appalling records when it comes to religious liberty and their treatment of religious minorities.
TRANSCAUCASIA (the South Caucasus)
In his ground-breaking work, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination, (Harvard University Press, 2014), Historian Stefan Ihrig writes, “Turanism – the vision of a union of all Turkic peoples between from the Aegean to north-western China under Turkish leadership – had once motivated Enver Pasha [the Ottoman Minister of War] and had led to the catastrophe at Sarıkamış.” [In January 1915, during WWI, Ottoman forces were routed by the Soviet Red Army in the Battle of Sarıkamış (55km south-west of Kars, in eastern Anatolia). Enver Pasha blamed the Ottoman defeat on the Armenians and routinely sighted this “stab in the back” as justification for the Armenian Genocide (launched 24 April 2015)].
Researcher Yeghia Tashjian further explains how in 1918, Enver Pasha ordered the formation of an “Islamic Army of the Caucasus” with the aim of driving out the Armenians once and for all and establishing a pan-Turkic empire extending from Anatolia to the oil fields of Baku.
Erdogan’s Enver Pasha Dream: The Revival of the “Army of Islam”
By Yeghia Tashjian, Armenian Weekly, 16 October 2020
Today, the Turkish neo-Ottoman and Turanist dream is being revived by Turkey’s neo-Ottoman President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
In March 2021, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), published a report entitled: The Erdoğan Revolution in the Turkish Curriculum Textbooks.
After analysing twenty-eight textbooks, IMPACT-se assessed that the curriculum’s stance overall is anti-American and anti-Armenian, while sympathising with the motivations of Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and glorifying Islamic jihad and martyrdom.
In his ground-breaking work, Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination, (Harvard University Press, 2014), Historian Stefan Ihrig writes, “Turanism – the vision of a union of all Turkic peoples between from the Aegean to north-western China under Turkish leadership – had once motivated Enver Pasha [the Ottoman Minister of War] and had led to the catastrophe at Sarıkamış.” [In January 1915, during WWI, Ottoman forces were routed by the Soviet Red Army in the Battle of Sarıkamış (55km south-west of Kars, in eastern Anatolia). Enver Pasha blamed the Ottoman defeat on the Armenians and routinely sighted this “stab in the back” as justification for the Armenian Genocide (launched 24 April 2015)].
Researcher Yeghia Tashjian further explains how in 1918, Enver Pasha ordered the formation of an “Islamic Army of the Caucasus” with the aim of driving out the Armenians once and for all and establishing a pan-Turkic empire extending from Anatolia to the oil fields of Baku.
Erdogan’s Enver Pasha Dream: The Revival of the “Army of Islam”
By Yeghia Tashjian, Armenian Weekly, 16 October 2020
Today, the Turkish neo-Ottoman and Turanist dream is being revived by Turkey’s neo-Ottoman President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
In March 2021, the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se), published a report entitled: The Erdoğan Revolution in the Turkish Curriculum Textbooks.
After analysing twenty-eight textbooks, IMPACT-se assessed that the curriculum’s stance overall is anti-American and anti-Armenian, while sympathising with the motivations of Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and glorifying Islamic jihad and martyrdom.
An excerpt from page 32 reads: “As part of Turkey’s political vision, pan-Turkism is taught to students in various fundamental modules: “Turkish World Domination”; “Ideal of the World Order”; and the “Red Apple” [Kızıl Elma i.e., the desired goal, which is for Turkey, as a recognised world power, to exercise hegemony over a restored Ottoman Empire]. There is an emphasis on the unity of the Central Asian Turkic nations; the descriptions of Turkey’s special bond with Azerbaijan includes very anti-Armenian narratives.”
Recommended:
Turkey’s Chase for the ‘Red Apple’
Over the last five years, Turkish President Erdoğan and his allies have repeatedly used the image of the Red Apple (Kızıl Elma) as a symbol of their ambitions for Turkey.
By Stuart Williams (a Paris-based international correspondent with Agence France-Presse), 13 January 2021.
Excerpt: “Above all, the Red Apple is a symbol of a vision and quest for modern Turkey — to wield influence and hegemony well beyond its borders into Muslim-majority lands formerly ruled by the Ottomans in the Balkans, Middle East, and the Caucasus.”
Turkey’s partner in its new Caucasus campaign is the increasingly Islamist and equally as Armenophobic, President of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev.
The pair’s Islamic and anti-Armenian credentials were on clearly on display in the September-November 2020 war over Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh when Turkey facilitated the delivery into Azerbaijan of thousands of Syrian jihadis whose orders often were as simple as, “all Armenians should be slaughtered and killed” and “each person who beheads an Armenian [will] receive $US100 for each beheading”.
See: Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin, Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh): Genocide Postponed?
By Elizabeth Kendal, 11 Nov 2020
more: Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin / Artsakh
Also: Continuing Impunity: Azerbaijani-Turkish offensives against Armenians in Nagorno Karabakh
By Baroness Cox. Published by Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART) UK. 24 April 2021
Note: Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust (HART), founded by Baroness Caroline Cox, has a long history of engagement in Nagorno-Karabakh and provides regular news and analysis on the region.
https://www.hart-uk.org/locations/nagorno-karabakh/
To legitimise its claims to Armenian homelands, Azerbaijan is in the process of erasing all Armenian heritage in what many are calling cultural genocide.
See:
Why Armenian Cultural Heritage Threatens Azerbaijan’s Claims to Nagorno-Karabakh
by Yelena Ambartsumian, published in Hypoallergic (a New York based journal specialising in art and culture), 28 February 2021
Most critically, the toxic Armenophobic rhetoric emanating from Baku is seriously dangerous. Between them, Baku and Ankara are turning the South Caucasus into a tinderbox . . . a Christian crisis in the making.
See:
Armenophobia in Azerbaijan: Organized Hate Speech & Animosity Towards Armenians
The Office of Ombudsman of the Republic of Artsakh, September 2018
In April 2021, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom added Turkey and Azerbaijan to its Special Watch List (SWL) for “engaging in or tolerating severe violations of religious freedom”.
Recommended news sources reporting Christian persecution in Central Asia and Transcaucasia:
Forum 18 https://www.forum18.org
(Based in Oslo, Norway, Forum 18 monitors and analysis religious freedom in Central Asia, Russia, the South Caucasus, Belarus, and occasionally Turkey.)ALSO
Morning Star News, https://morningstarnews.org
Christian Solidarity Worldwide https://www.csw.org.uk
Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin http://rlprayerbulletin.blogspot.com/
ARTSAKH (NAGORNO-KARABAKH)
Mountainous and forested, Nagorno-Karabakh (N-K) is an Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan. Thousands of churches adorn N-K’s peaks, many dating back to the 10th Century. DNA samples from excavated bones indicate that Armenians have been settled in the region for at least 4,000 years.
When Russia annexed the region from the Persian Empire in 1805, the population of N-K was 94 percent ethnic Armenian, as it was in 1923 when the Soviet Union’s Communist dictator Joseph Stalin mischievously and fatefully made Orthodox Armenian N-K an autonomous region (or oblast) of the Turkic Muslim Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic, thereby setting the stage for future conflict.
In December 1991, following the break-up of the Soviet Union, the residents of N-K held a referendum on independence in which 99.98 percent voted to secede from Azerbaijan. N-K’s Azeri minority boycotted the vote and Azerbaijan responded with war. Ultimately the Armenians prevailed. Since then, the region has existed as a democratic self-ruled Armenian province inside Azerbaijan.
In February 2017, N-K’s residents voted to change the region’s name from Nagorno-Karabakh (a Russian-Azerbaijani hybrid) to Artsakh, the name by which it was known from the early 11th Century when it was a province of Armenia.
See:
All About Nagorno-Karabakh's 2017 Name Change
Political Geography Now, 30 January 2018
Inexplicably, the United Nations dismisses as irrelevant the expressed will of the residents – as determined by referendum – to their right to self-determination, while accepting as inviolable Joseph Stalin’s mischievous dictate.
Today, N-K’s remnant Armenians would be amongst the most existentially imperilled people on earth.
See: Understanding Christian Faith and Freedom in Transcaucasia (main page).