Book review: From the Holy Mountain - A journey in the shadow of Byzantium Author: William Dalrymple
Publisher: Penguin Books
Price: Rs 399
Pages: 483
By Eisha Sarkar
Posted on Mumbai Mirror on Thursday, October 08, 2009 at 04:19:40 PM
In this hard-hitting book, British author-journalist William Dalrymple embarks on a journey through the Middle East following the footsteps of a sixth century Byzantine traveller-monk, only to find that Islamic Fundamentalism is not the only enemy Eastern Christians have to combat with everyday.
As he retraces the route of the journey John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist had set off on in 587 AD, Dalrymple finds that despite centuries of isolation, a surprising number of the monasteries and churches visited by the two monks still survive today, surrounded by often hostile populations. Dalrymple’s pilgrimage takes him through a bloody civil war in eastern Turkey, the ruins of Beirut, the vicious tensions of the West Bank and a fundamentalist uprising in southern Egypt.
More than a millenia back, Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist had stayed in caves, monasteries and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their world shattered under the great eruption of Islam.
Like in The Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos, Dalrymple starts his journey at the Monastery of Iviron, Mount Athos in Greece where he finds the original mauscript of Moschos's travelogue. He then moves eastwards to Constantinople (Istanbul) and Anatolia in Turkey, then through Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the West Bank southwards towards the Nile, Cairo and the Great Kharga Oasis in Egypt, which was once the southern frontier of the ancient Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire.
Through his journey Dalrymple exposes the plight of downtrodden Christians in the Middle East. In south-east Turkey, he finds Syrian Christians "trodden underfoot in the scrummage between two rival nationalisms , one Kurdish, the other Turkish". In Lebanon, the Maronite Christians' failure to compromise with the country's Muslim majority had led to a destructive civil war that ended in a mass emigration of Christians. In Israel, Palestinian Christians were Arabs in a Jewish state and hence regarded with a mixture of suspicion and contempt by their Israeli masters. The educated lot preferred to emigrate en masse and very few are now left in the land they've inhabited for thousands of years. In Egypt, Christians were threatened by a resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism. Only in Syria, did he find happy Christians but even their future looked decidedly uncertain.
"Christianity is an Eastern religion which grew firmly rooted in the intellectual ferment of the Middle East. John Moschos saw that plant begin to wither in the hot winds of change that scoured the Levant of his day. On my journey in his footsteps I have seen the very last stalks in the process of being uprooted. It has been a continuous process, lasting nearly one and a half millenia. Moschos saw the beginnings. I have seen the beginning of its end," the author writes.
From the Holy Mountain is more hard-hitting than Dalrymple's other books. But who would go church-hunting in the conflict-stricken Islamic Middle East and come up with a light-hearted travelogue? Like his other books, this too is very well-researched and has academic value. Dalrymple's done well to present a list of bibliographical sources at the end of the book along with a glossary.
This book speaks of the author's courage, his endurance, his passion for discovery and most importantly, his service to a long-forgotten people who may soon lose their history and their future.
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