From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East.

William Dalrymple Henry Holt, $30, 483 pp.

Paul Kaldjian

In A.D. 587, the Byzantine traveler-monk, John Moschos, began a thirty-year journey across Egypt, Palestine, the Levant, and Anatolia, to collect the memorable sayings, anecdotes, and holy stories known throughout the region's monasteries and Christian communities. His travel memoir, The Spiritual Meadow, became widely known and translated across the Byzantine world. With the inspiration of the monk and a translation of Meadow as spiritual and tour guides, the Scottish journalist William Dalrymple set out to learn what remains of the people and places that John Moschos visited a millennium-and-a-half ago. From the Holy Mountain is the log of Dalrymple's observations and reflections on his journey from Mount Athos - the Holy Mountain, where the original manuscripts of The Spiritual Meadow are kept - in Northern Greece, to the ruins of the Lavra of the Great Oasis in Kharga, Upper Egypt.

For three hundred years, Christianity, in its early, multiple, and frequently bizarre interpretations, was the primary religion of much of the Middle East. In From the Holy Mountain, we read about Byzantine saints, sophists, and ascetics. We meet monks who perched on pillars and lived in trees, other monks who waged violent battle against immorality, and hermits who, having bathed once in Christ, believed that bathing was no longer a necessity: "and believe me, my brothers, I, Pambo, this least one, smelt the good odor of that brother from a mile away." There is also the repentant bandit, filled with the desire to become a monk. However, the local abbot was reluctant to admit the repentant thief, who in turn replied, "Know then that I am David the robber chief; and the reason I came here was that I might weep for my sins. If you do not accept me, I swear to you and before him who dwells in heaven, that I will return to my former way of life. I will bring those who were with me, kill you all, and even destroy your monastery." It is reported that David went on to "exceed all the other members of the monastery in self-control, obedience, and humility."

John Moschos's sixth-century account marked the beginnings of the disappearance of Christianity from the Middle East. Consequently, Dalrymple is compelled to document Christianity's final stages in the region. He talks with monks, priests, lay Christians, and others about their pasts and presents. In contrast to the difficulties faced by today's Middle Eastern Christians, he learns that the spaces and theologies of Christianity and Islam have been intertwined historically far more closely than current conflicts suggest. There are numerous similarities between the practices of Muslims and Christians, and among the holy places where each prays, petitions, and gives thanks. In fact, many in the past believed, like the seventh-century theologian Saint John Damascene, that Islam, rather than being a separate religion, was another new and heretical form of Christianity. Such associations from the early stages of each religion may help explain Islam's traditional tolerance of religious minorities and how Islam was able to convert much of the Middle Eastern population so quickly.

From the Holy Mountain portrays a Middle East very different from stereotypes. There are Muslims and Christians that still visit each other's shrines. Persecuted Palestinian Christians in Lebanon find refuge not among local Christians but declare, "The Muslims treated us very well. ... The Muslims I know are better Christians than most Christians." The Syrian Orthodox Metropolitan asserts, "Christians in Syria are better off in Syria than anywhere else in the Middle East." This is in stark contrast to the level of daily difficulty and fear faced by today's Christians in Israel, Turkey, and Egypt, ironically the United States' closest friends in the region. Even the Ottoman Empire, until the emergence of nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century, was built on a system that encouraged religious tolerance and ethnic diversity. These are not impressions generally gathered from the nightly news.

Dalrymple does not hide his opinion of aggressive West Bank settlement; of politicized archeology in Israel; of the role Maronite Christians played in the destruction of Lebanon; of the official versions of Israeli and Turkish history regarding Palestinian, Greek, and Armenian Christians; or of the oppression of Coptic Christians by Muslim fundamentalists in Egypt.

The disappearance of Christians from throughout the Middle East has drastically accelerated in the twentieth century and, within a generation, what Dalrymple has documented will in all likelihood no longer exist. The loss has its cost. One Lebanese academic says that, "It is the Christian Arabs who keep the Arab world 'Arab' rather than 'Muslim.' It is the Christian Arabs who show that Arabs and Muslims are two different things. . . . Many Muslims [and, certainly, Christians in North America] regard Arab history as having little meaning by itself, outside the context of Islam." Similarly, the difficulties of Christians under Israeli rule and their subsequent mass migration from Jerusalem and the surrounding regions mean that the "most important shrines in the Christian world will be left as museum pieces. . . . Christianity will no longer exist in the Holy Land as a living faith."

As fine a job as Dalrymple does of weaving the accounts and anecdotes of John Moschos into his travels, of distilling a vast amount of secondary sources into a presentation very accessible to the lay reader (without boring the academic), and of compassionately capturing the origins, perspectives, and plight of Middle East Christians, his portrayal of other Middle Easterners at times teeters between elitist and rude. On taking an overnight bus in Turkey, Dalrymple writes, "The rutted roads, the bracing crash of the long-defunct suspension, the snoring Anatolian peasants: these one expects and can bear. What is intolerable is the deliberate regime of sleep deprivation imposed on all passengers by this driver and his henchman, the moustachioed Neanderthal of a conductor." As anyone who has traveled by bus in Anatolia knows, you get what you pay for. More to the point, the sarcasm used to portray the rural places and peasants of Turkey and Syria suggests stereotypes one would expect his book to avoid. The insulting descriptions distract from his critical analyses, and can easily sabotage good intentions and constructive dialogue.

Certainly, five months of traveling overland in the Middle East will test one's endurance; fortunately, this ascetic experience seems to have taken the cynical edge off Dalrymple. By the end of his journey, he seems more serene and is able to describe harmonious relationships between Muslims and Christians not as oddities or with surprise, but as eminently reasonable and right. Like the sisters at the Convent of Seidnaya in Syria who gracefully accept the petitions and prayers of Muslims, Dalrymple drops the language of difference. It is as if his five months of living with John Moschos, the wisdom of the desert fathers, and the faithfulness of today's monks has had a tonsuring effect on him.

From the Holy Mountain is at once a window into the early years of Christianity - a Christianity quite dissociated from the institutions with which we are most familiar in North America - and a contemporary picture of a community of Christians equally remote from North Americans. John Moschos and his earlier contemporaries lived closer in time, space, and culture to Jesus of Nazareth than we do to Columbus or the Pilgrims. And yet, consensus on interpreting and living the message of Christ appears to have been as unattainable then as it is today. As it is now, Christianity in its early years was full of spiritual searching, conflict, and uncertainty. Recognizing this encourages a less categorical and more constructive understanding of the peoples and religions of the contemporary Middle East.

Paul Kaldjian is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Arizona.