EMQ » January–March 2018 » Vol. 54 Issue 1
Book Review
The Last Christians: Stories of Persecution, Flight, and Resilience in the Middle East
Andreas Knapp
Plough Publishing House, 2017, 233 pages, $17.98
Reviewed by Matthew Friedman, professor and program director for global ministry, Kingswood University, Sussex, New Brunswick, Canada, and Adjunct Professor at Asbury Theological Seminary.
On August 22, 1939, the eve of the invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler gave a speech to a group of German military leaders. He spoke forcefully of his plans of wanton death and destruction, justifying it with the chilling statement, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” (157). The Ottoman Empire’s devastation of the Anatolia’s Christian population had, for Hitler, served as a signal that similar actions would likewise be largely ignored.
In The Last Christians, Andreas Knapp takes us through a painful journey into a modern replay of the devastation of a hundred years ago. This time, the carnage is taking place mainly in Syria and Iraq, as entire ancient Christian communities, many in existence since before the advent of Islam, have been wiped out or sent fleeing into exile. Knapp, a Roman Catholic priest and member of the Little Brothers of the Gospel, takes us with him on encounters with suffering Christians in Kurdistan in northwest Iraq as well as among refugees in his native Germany. He gives voice to these Christians to tell their stories and those of their families, mainly from people whose primary languages are Aramaic as well as Armenian and Arabic.
The stories which he records are vivid and in places brutal. All of those he encounters, including small children, have seen the horrors of war, and have lost family members to the genocidal slaughter of the marauding soldiers of ISIS. Stories of torture, rape and death of Christians abound in this painful volume, but it is the resilience as well as the suffering which stand out in this account. One of the most important elements of this book involves the parallel drawn between the attacks on Christians as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing which have been taking place over the past several years in Iraq and Syria with earlier massacres, especially the aforementioned events in Anatolia in 1915 in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. In this latter narrative, one of the surprises encountered is the complicity which the German government had at the time with the events in Turkey. In both cases, though Knapp presents several modern accounts in which Muslim people stood with their suffering Christian neighbors, there are many other situations described in which even friends ignored or were complicit with ISIS in the horrors visited upon Christians.
The author notes in his introduction that the views expressed in some of these stories “may not be entirely politically correct, but they are correct in the sense that they are authentic: they bear the indisputable stamp of ‘victim authority’” (ix). This caveat provides the reader with an important bit of context, in that this is not meant to provide a definitive understanding of Islam, but of a perspective of those who have suffered under violence inspired by Islamic extremism. This enables us to encounter the views of these suffering members of our family in Christ with the empathy which includes a listening ear.
For further reading:
Balakian, Peter. 2003. The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response:
New York: HarperCollins.
Belz, Mindy. 2017. They Say We Are Infidels: On the Run from ISIS with Persecuted Christians
in the Middle East. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum.
Voice of the Martyrs. 2016. I Am N: Inspiring Stories of Christians Facing Islamic Extremists.
Colorado Springs: David C. Cook.
