Christians in the Holy Land

By Charles M. Sennott, Globe Staff, 01/17/99

Above, the destruction of Jerusalem by Romans in AD 70. Below, Calvary chapel, constructed on the believed site of the crucifixion of Jesus in Jerusalem. Both prints were painted by artist David Roberts between 1839 and 1849.

ERUSALEM - In the land where Jesus Christ began his ministry 2,000 years ago, Christian life is vanishing.

In one Jerusalem parish, there were not enough young men left to carry a casket at a recent funeral. In the sanctuary of an upper-Egypt cathedral, Christians cowered in fear that they would be tortured by local authorities. The empty halls of Lebanon's once-grand monasteries echo a faded splendor.

This year, 4 million tourists are expected to flock to the Holy Land to mark the 2,000th anniversary of Jesus' birth. At the same time, the Middle East's native Christians continue to disappear from church pews. For those who stay, life is harder.

''We are talking about the Christian church in the Middle East becoming a museum church, a Disneyland of faith nearly void of the living community of believers,'' says the Rev. Jerome Murphy-O'Connor, a Dominican priest and biblical historian who has witnessed the exodus through three decades in Jerusalem.

The reasons for the departure of Christians are complex. The Globe has not found evidence of widespread persecution, as some would claim. Those who leave instead cite more nuanced realities - economic hardship, the turmoil of civil conflict, and the intolerance of rising Muslim and Jewish fundamentalism.

The Globe retraced the path of Jesus - from Bethlehem into Egypt and from Nazareth to what is now Lebanon - and found a dwindling Christian presence on the eve of the third millennium of Christianity.

**************************************

Part 1: Israel & Palestine

Christian numbers dwindle in Israeli, Palestinian areas

NAZARETH - Aissam and Rose Farji walk in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.

Their home is perched on the same hill where 2,000 years ago Jesus lived with his mother, Mary, and Joseph. Every morning, they fight traffic on the narrow, crowded streets of the Holy Family's hometown to reach the ancient well where Mary collected water.

As caretakers of the Orthodox Church of the Archangel Gabriel on the biblical site of ''Mary's well,'' they answer tourists' questions. They stock votive candles in the shrine. They clean up after the tour buses leave. And they watch as their own Christian community withers away.

''We are disappearing,'' says Aissam, 56. ''It breaks our hearts. We fear in our children's lifetime, the living Christian community here will be gone.''

The fear is not unfounded. The Christian community in the Holy Land has witnessed an exodus that began in earnest about 100 years ago and has steadily continued to the present. The Christian presence in what is now modern Israel and the disputed West Bank and Jerusalem has dropped from as much as 20 percent of the population in the early part of this century to no more than 2 percent today. Even in Nazareth and Bethlehem, where for centuries Christians were an overwhelming majority, they now comprise less than one-third the population.

The exodus of Christians poses grave political consequences. In an age of rising Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism, the Christians have provided a buffer against intolerance by demanding that the rights of their religious minority be protected. Their dwindling numbers in the Holy Land raise concerns that if they vanish, pluralism will too.

The effect is more devastating in small villages, many of which are among the world's oldest Christian communities. In the West Bank hamlet of Berkain, where according to biblical tradition Jesus healed a colony of lepers, there were 500 Christians in 1948. Today, there are fewer than 25.

In the shadow of Mount Tabor, in the village of Na'in where Jesus is believed to have raised a widow's son from the dead, there are no more Christians. A Muslim family opens the church for tourists.

In Jerusalem, the Christian population has declined from 45,000 in 1940 to under 10,000 today. Just steps from the Old City path on which Jesus carried the cross, a bishop tells of a recent sparsely attended funeral of an elderly parishioner.

''There were not enough young men left in the parish to carry his casket,'' says Anglican Bishop Joseph Ria. ''For the few among us who are still here, it was like witnessing the funeral not just of this one man, but the life of a parish, the near disappearance of the church in the land of Christ.''

A confluence of events - the war that forged a Jewish state in 1948 and the Arab-Israeli wars that followed in 1967 and 1973, the Palestinian intifadah of the late 1980s, and now the newly created Palestinian Authority - have caught Christians in the hinge of history.

They are a minority within a minority, squeezed between the Jewish state of Israel and the overwhelmingly Muslim Palestinian Authority.

Within the borders of Israel, Palestinian Christians live mostly in Nazareth and the small villages of the Galilee. They complain that they are viewed by Israelis as indistinguishable from Palestinian Muslims and have suffered under Israeli rule.

Within Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian Christians are concentrated in Bethlehem and scattered throughout the West Bank. They say they are viewed suspiciously as non-Muslim and treated as outcasts amid the creeping Islamic influence of Palestinian society.

Crushing political, economic, and social pressures have pushed tens of thousands of Palestinian Christian families to emigrate to the United States, Latin America, Australia, and Europe in the last half century. Bernard Sabella, a Bethlehem University professor and lead researcher for the Middle East Council of Churches, has found that more Christian Palestinians live abroad than in the Holy Land. Christians emigrate, he notes, at four times the rate of Muslims.

''In one more generation, we will barely exist. At the current rate of decline, the Christian population will be a fraction of one percent in the year 2020,'' says Sabella, who has pored through Israeli and Palestinian Authority census data and diocesesan records to document what he calls ''an historic exodus.''

According to a recent Palestinian census, 2.8 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem - territory captured by Israel from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War. There are only 45,000 Christians there today, according to Sabella's research, which means that Christians make up about 1.8 percent of the population.

Within the pre-1967 borders of Israel, there are 6 million people. Roughly 120,000 of them - approximately 2 percent - are Christians.

''If we don't stem the tide, we will have no living church in the land of Christ. There will only be empty religious monuments and museums,'' says the Rev. Peter Vasco, director of the Holy Land Fund and a Jerusalem liaison between the Roman Catholic archdiocese and the US Embassy. ''St. Peter called the first churches `living stones.' But what we have now are dying stones.''

It is a cruel irony that the indigenous church is withering just as hundreds of thousands of Christians from Europe and North America - from mainstream churches and fringe groups - descend on the Holy Land to mark the 2,000th anniversary of their faith.

Primarily, historians say, the Christians of the Holy Land are leaving a war-torn region to seek economic opportunity. The Christians' traditional economic strength, higher levels of education and links to Western churches have helped them emigrate to cities like Boston, Detroit, London, Toronto, and Melbourne.

There have also been dramatic shifts in the demographic landscape such as the influx to Israel of millions of Jewish immigrants from Europe, Russia, and North Africa and a soaring Muslim birth rate. These developments have made those Christians who stay in their native villages and cities an ever-shrinking minority. Statistics show that the remaining Christians tend to be elderly, poor, and female.

''The biggest issue for Christians is the brain drain,'' says Columbia professor and Palestinian Christian Edward Said. ''The ones left behind are increasingly the powerless and the poor.''

Government wrestles with an identity crisis

Elias Khoury, a Christian Arab, gazes at the church at Ikrit. Khoury was born in the village, where residents were forced out a half-century ago. On Christmas, they still attend services at the old stone church. (Globe Photo / Heidi Levine)

As a Jewish state, Israel still openly struggles to balance its secular democracy with its religious foundation. There is no constitution in Israel. A set of 1992 ''basic laws'' addresses ''human dignity and freedom'' for all citizens, but they do not address the rights of religious minorities.

The Palestinians and Israeli Arabs who live within the borders of pre-1967 Israel have citizenship and can vote. But in practice, say Christian and Muslim citizens, they face separate and unequal status in housing, education, and job opportunities. Thousands of Israeli Palestinian families were displaced by the 1948 war. A particularly poignant example has recently stirred debate in Israel.
A half century ago, residents of two Christian villages in Israel, Ikrit and Biram, were told by Israeli soldiers to leave their homes and return in two weeks. But they have never been allowed back. On Christmas, they still attend services in the stone church that sits atop a barren hill surrounded by the modern kibbutz housing built over the old villages.

The families have petitioned the Israeli High Court to be allowed to return. The Israeli Minister of Justice recommended last month that the families be given about 5 percent of the land. The minister stressed that his ruling should not set a legal precedent. There are an estimated 250,000 refugees from 60 other such villages whom Palestinian land rights' groups contend fall under the same category. The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly opposed to the offer.

Uri Mor, the director of Christian community relations in the Israeli Ministry of Religious Affairs, dismisses critics who charge that Israeli policies, such as land appropriation, have contributed to the flight of Christians.

''We have protected Christians. The fact is we have thousands of applications of [West Bank] Christians who want to become citizens of Israel,'' he says. ''That is because they don't want to live under Arafat's government. They know what will be the future.''

When asked if he believes that Christians within Israel and parts of the West Bank still under Israeli control are afforded equal rights, he said, ''I will not say there are no problems.''

Christian leaders have complained loudly about the unequal dispersement of government funding, in particular the Religious Affairs Ministry's budget. Arab Israeli citizens, who make up nearly 20 percent of Israel, pay the same taxes as other Israelis yet receive only 1.5 percent of the funding. With most of the money going to the Muslim majority, Christians end up with ''a pittance,'' says Ria.

Mor declined comment on the dispersement. But one ministry official conceded, ''Obviously, it is unfair, and has been unfair for too long.''

Meanwhile, the rising influence of the ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israeli politics has contributed to an atmosphere of intolerance. Their growing strength affects secular Israelis as well as Reform and Conservative Jews - whose marriages and conversions are not legally recognized under the current religious laws - far more than it affects Christian. But there are significant ways, church leaders and Israeli analysts say, that the increased political power of the ultra-Orthodox has heightened Israeli-Christian tensions as well.

The powerful religious party of Shas controls three key ministries - Religious Affairs, Labor, and the Interior. Netanyahu is careful to articulate the importance of religious tolerance and pluralism in Israeli society. But ultra-Orthodox elements within his coalition are less concerned with those issues.

One example is a proposed Knesset bill to make missionary activity, and the possession of ''missionary'' literature, a criminal offense. To many Christians, spreading the gospel is a tenet of their faith. Many Christian leaders, especially Jerusalem's American evangelicals, are offended by the proposal. Although the law has languished for over a year, Netanyahu has publicly indicated support.

There are other ways that religious intolerance in Israel is felt by Christians. The religious Shas party, for example, demanded last year that the military suspend soldiers' visits to churches as part of army-organized historical tours of Jerusalem because ultra-Orthodox Jews consider it sacrilege to enter a church. And this Christmas, the chief rabbinate in the Israeli city of Bat Yam forbade a Jaffa function hall from allowing ''Christian events'' and threatened to revoke its license as a kosher establishment if it failed to do so.

These ultra-Orthodox initiatives, seen by Christians as hostile, need to be viewed as the reaction of a religious fringe to centuries of anti-Semitism, says David Hartman, an Orthodox rabbi and founder of an institute that promotes dialogue between religious and secular Israelis.

Shmuel Evyatar, the Jerusalem mayor's liaison to the Christian community, says the level of intolerance toward Christians is exaggerated and often misunderstood by American Christian evangelists.

''The American Christian missionaries here want to think of this place as a suburb, like some place in New Jersey,'' says Evyatar. ''The religious Jews are playing the game of democracy. They are not harming it. They are not saying Christians should get out. But they are saying don't come into my yard and tell me what to do.''

'Discrimination from two sides' in Nazareth

BECAUSE HE SELLS ALCOHOL in his grocery store in K'far Qana, Zahi Zafuri has been threatened by members of the Islamist Movement. "Almost all of my family has left. And God willing, each of my sons - (from left) Tamer, Iyad, and Needol - will leave and go on to America." (Globe Photo / Miriam Sushman)

On the streets of Nazareth, which has by far the largest Christian concentration in Israel, few Christians say they feel under direct pressure to leave. Instead, they describe a sense that they no longer belong, even in the same city where Jesus lived. Sitting in a pew of the cavernous Orthodox Church of St. Gabriel, Aissam, 56, a father of four, explains how many Christians feel.

''We face discrimination from two sides,'' he says as the footsteps of tourists echo in the church. ''We are treated as second-class citizens by Israel, and the Muslim community does not accept us.''

How Aissam and Rose Farji ended up in Nazareth is a classic tale of a Christian family caught between the rising Israeli nation and the yearnings of Palestinians for their own independent state.

Aissam is from the predominantly-Muslim West Bank village of Ber Zeit, where he ran a grocery store. His family endured Israeli occupation and arbitrary arrest and detention.

When the frustrations of the occupation exploded into the intifadah in 1987, small businessmen like Aissam suffered. Violent clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli troops made it impossible for him to operate his store. The Israelis imposed steadily higher taxes. He did nothing to to support the intifadah. Soon he was labeled a collaborator. Life grew worse.

Many Palestinian Christians fought alongside their Muslim compatriots in the intifadah, but the Christians were often suspected of being aligned with the West and therefore sympathizers with Israel. Aissam gave up in 1990 and closed the family store. Most of his extended family left for the United States. But he could not afford to and did not want to leave his homeland. He and his wife moved to Nazareth hoping that life might be better.

''We feel caught up in all these forces. It's easy to feel sometimes like you don't belong as a Christian,'' says Aissam.

Modern Nazareth, a congested city of 60,000, is located in the fertile north of Israel near the Sea of Galilee and falls within the borders of the pre-1967 Israeli state. Fifty years ago, Nazareth's population was 90 percent Christian. Today it is only 30 percent.

With the largest population of Palestinians living within Israel, Nazareth posed a challenge to the Jewish state: Would it afford the population, Christian and Muslim, the same infrastructure and opportunities as the rest of Israel?

The answer, the Nazarenes say, is no. The Israelis instead created a new Jewish community called ''Upper Nazareth,'' which has traditionally received most of the government funding and support.

Muslims and Christians have for years been united in their criticism of this bias. But recently tensions have flared between Nazareth's Christian minority and Muslim majority.

In municipal elections last month, the Islamic Movement took partial control of the city council for the first time. The Christian mayor barely survived reelection. The Muslim community resents an $80 million renovation of the city - widening streets and building 1,000 hotel rooms in preparation for the 4 million tourists expected for the anniversary of 2,000 years of Christianity.

The recent tensions between Muslims and Christians center around a vacant strip of land at the base of the Church of the Annunciation. The mayor, Ramez Jeraisi, last year tore down a school and a mosque within it that dated back to the Ottoman era. This infuriated Muslims who claim that the land holds a small shrine to Shahab el Din, a Muslim military leader who fought against the Christian crusaders in the 11th century.

The municipality had planned to build a parking garage and plaza there for tourists who come to visit Christian holy sites. But Muslim activists occupied the land and have erected a large canvas tent where they hold daily prayer services.

A crudely constructed minaret with loudspeakers blares the Muslim call to prayer. Green flags of the Islamic Movement flap in the wind. The Muslim activists have created an architectural rendering of an enormous mosque that they propose to build. The battle is now in the Israeli courts.

City politics are suddenly cast in religious terms.

''The mayor and his Christians do not fear God,'' says Mohammed Nim'r Mahajneh, 57, who performs the call to prayer in the makeshift mosque.

Dressed in a gray jilabi and clacking Muslim prayer beads, he thundered against the land taking and compared it to a ''modern Christian crusade.''

Just up the street is a string of tourist shops. A 26-year-old Muslim shop owner who gives his name only as Sari sells carved wooden crucifixes and religious artifacts.

''The dispute has polarized things,'' he says, speaking in perfect English but in very hushed tones, fearing that anyone who speaks out on the issue can be targeted. ''Things have gotten very tense.''

Hassam, 29, a Christian certified public accountant, adds, ''There is not open hostility, but there is a feeling of the society pulling apart.''

Christians tell of sporadic incidents. Muslim teenagers recently threw stones at a Franciscan priest in traditional brown robes leading a tour of pilgrims. A young woman driving with a crucifix hanging from the rear-view mirror was stopped by Muslim teenagers, who smashed the car's window and called her an ''infidel.''

''Christians here are living in fear,'' says the Rev. Quirico Calella, an Italian Catholic priest who for 23 years was the director of Terra Santa High School in Nazareth. ''So many, especially the young men, prefer to simply leave. The reasons for decades have been economic hardship caused by Israel. But I think increasingly there is a sense of fatigue. They are tired of being caught in the middle.''

These tensions have also surfaced outside Nazareth in the rolling hills of the Galilee, a patchwork of green and brown wheat fields where a young Jesus wandered. Set among these fields is the village of Turan.

Violence between Muslims and Christians exploded here last April 25, the Orthodox Good Friday, when a group of young Muslim men burst into the Roman Catholic Church and disrupted services. Clashes between Christians and Muslims ensued in the streets. Muslims firebombed five Christian houses and seven cars. A 23-year-old Christian art student, Sallah Sa'alme, was stabbed to death in a Muslim ambush. A local Muslim was charged with the killing.

The violence has continued to simmer over the last year. The home of the Rev. Basselius Houri of the Roman Catholic Church has been fired upon at least three times in recent months. Two bullet holes are visible in a kitchen window.

Community leaders have tried to downplay the incidents as a war between clans. But Houri says, ''This is religious hatred, and Israel does nothing to stop it. We live in fear.''

Christians anxious under Palestinian rule

Within the area on the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian Authority, the historic peace process begun in 1993 has given hope for Christian and Muslim Palestinians alike that they may soon have their own independent state. Gaza and less than one-third of the West Bank currently fall under full or partial control of the Palestinian Authority.

But for Christians who endured occupation and fought with Muslims in the intifadah, life under the Palestinian Authority has been marbled with anxiety.

Palestinian Christians cite fears of institutional discrimination in the Palestinian Authority, which has adopted Islam as its ''official religion.'' In shaping the ''basic law'' of the new authority, the legislators relied on ''sharia,'' or the laws codified in the Koran. Many Christian Palestinians feel isolated amid what they see as a creeping influence of Islam within the new government.

Specifically, Palestinian Christian leaders cite land laws that prescribe the death penalty for selling land to Jews. This law is often interpreted by Palestinians in the street as preventing Muslims from selling to any non-Muslims, including Christians. This misinterpretation has gained currency because of the preachings of radical Muslim sheikhs who refer to all non-Muslims as ''infidels.''

But most of the feelings of discrimination are subtle, Christians say. Ghada Mansour, 29, a former producer of a news show on the authority-conbtrolled Voice of Palestine radio, says a news director told her that Christian names should not be included in obituaries read on the air. And on another occasion, several colleagues acted shocked and demeaning toward her when she told them she was Christian.

The atmosphere, she says, contributed to her decision to leave her job. Another woman who is a nurse in a health clinic was told she should not wear a necklace with a crucifix because she might ''offend'' some Muslims.

Palestinian Authority President Arafat has actively condemned religious intolerance. He has long cultivated Christian support for the Palestinian cause and frequently invokes references to the church spires of the Old City along with the minarets when he speaks of reclaiming Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. His wife is Christian.

But Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi says that Arafat, like Netanyahu, faces religious extremist forces within his government.

''There is a sense that this is the language of the day,'' she says. ''One political force has to prove it's more fundamentalist than the next. And then suddenly the parameters of political debate are drawn along religious lines.''

Ashrawi, one of the most powerful Christians in the new government, recently resigned from her post in Arafat's cabinet. She is tough and independent. But she adamantly denies that there is any persecution of Christians under the Palestinian Authority despite ''deliberate attempts by Israel to create this impression.''

She is, however, concerned about recent reports of perceived Christian discrimination. And as a Palestinian leader who believed in secular democracy, she is ''troubled'' about the rising influence of Hamas, the militant Islamic organization, on the shaping of the new Palestinian authority.

Bethlehem's shrinking Christian population

Bethlehem's steep hills lead up to the Bassilica of the Nativity on Manger Square, where Christ was believed to have been born. Today, the square is under massive reconstruction in preparation for ''Behtlehem 2000.''

But the mayor, Hanna Nasser, says the occasion is tinged with sadness for Christians like him, who've seen Bethlehem's Christians go from a 95 percent majority to a 35 percent minority over the last 50 years. Half of his family has emigrated.

''But we should not blame this on rising Muslim fundamentalism,'' he says. ''The historical fact that precipitated an exodus of Christians was the creation of the state of Israel.

''They have confiscated land around Bethlehem, most of it Christian, to build Jewish settlements,'' he continues. ''And when the Israeli military closed off our access to East Jerusalem, they cut off the lifeblood of our economy. We have 30 percent unemployment and a per capita annual income below $1,000. That is why Christians leave.''

Jack Giacaman, 28, agrees. From his high school class of 30 at the St. Lasalle's Brothers School, he is one of only two students who've not left for economic and educational opportunities in the West.

His family runs a small shop just off Manger Square.

Giacaman says Bethlehem's economic situation is dire. It is compounded by Israeli military checkpoints that sever connections to East Jerusalem and Ramallah.

''We live in a cage,'' he says. ''Those who can afford to, break out.''

Mary Taljia's family can't afford to.

She owns a small dry goods store with a portrait of the Holy Family framed on the wall. She is bitter about the realities of life for Christians under the new Palestinian Authority.

During the violent clashes of the intifadah her family paid a heavy price. In 1988, her husband, 57, suffered a blow from an Israeli police baton, and died two weeks after the injury. One of her sons spent three years in an Israeli prison for throwing rocks. She remembers that ''the mothers of the intifadah'' would visit their sons in prison and would yell support outside the prison windows. But by 1991 something began to change.

''Suddenly it was about religion,'' she says. ''They shouted that the boys... were Muslim soldiers fighting in the name of Allah. I would ask them, what about my sons, they are Christian? Didn't they fight just as bravely?''

As darkness descended in the Bethlehem neighborhood on a recent evening, the sound from the local minarets blared loudly. Annoyed, Taljia turned and flicked the switch on a six-foot neon cross that she erected atop her store one year ago.

''This is to say that we are Christians, that we are proud, and that we have been in Bethlehem for 2,000 years,'' she said.

Outside of Bethlehem, the tide of Christian emigration is stronger in the rural villages of the West Bank and Galilee, where Christian life has all but vanished.

Take the West Bank town of Berkain. ''We have more funerals than we do christenings,'' says Elias Sayegh, 65.

There is no longer a priest assigned to either the Greek Orthodox or Roman Catholic churches of Berkain. Occasionally, visiting priests offer Masses on Saturdays. No Sunday service has been held in a decade.

Sayegh holds the key to St. George's Roman Orthodox Church. It is built into an ancient cave where tradition holds that Christ healed a colony of 10 lepers. On a recent Sunday morning, Sayegh walked through the narrow streets of the town, making his way to pray alone in the church as he does most Sundays. He unlocked a large steel door, which creaked as it opened. Inside, it was dark and damp. Cobwebs hung from the altar.

He lit a thin white candle and knelt to pray. A draft whistled under the door. The candle flickered and for a moment the church went dark. But the flame rekindled and cast a small, warm glow on the ancient stone walls.

*******************************

Embattled Coptic Christians are fleeing Egypt

By Charles M. Sennot, Globe Staff, 01/18/99

AL KOSHEH, Egypt - On a sweltering night last summer, the bodies of two slain Christian men were dumped in the center of the Christian neighborhood of this remote village on the banks of the upper Nile River.

VILLAGERS SHOW what they say is evidence of torture on small children by Egyptian police to force statements from them to frame a Christian for a murder last summer in Al Kosheh. (Globe Photo / Thomas Hartwell)

What began as a local investigation into their murders has exploded into a national case that has reopened old and deep wounds for the Coptic Christian minority living in Egypt's Muslim society. And it has become a dramatic example of the religious intolerance that is pushing Egypt's Christians to steadily leave their homeland.

In the weeks after the Aug. 14 murder, the victims' families and local Christian leaders presented evidence that the killing was done by a gang of five Muslims. But local police ignored their claims and rounded up 1,000 Christians from the town for questioning. Christians charge that police subjected dozens of people, including women and small children, to beatings and torture to force statements from them to frame a Christian for the crime. He now faces the death penalty.

Egyptian officials have reacted predictably, critics say, by concerning themselves more with masking the perception of a Muslim-Christian divide in Egypt than in investigating the case. The government thus far has done nothing to reprimand the local police, all of whom are Muslim.

Instead, they arrested a prominent Coptic bishop for speaking out against the alleged injustices and a leading human rights worker for doing the same. Both face charges of fomenting sectarian strife. A five-count indictment against the bishop includes a charge of threatening national security, which carries the death penalty.

''What happened in Al Kosheh is a very sad chapter for our country,'' said Bishop Wissa, the frail, 60-year-old Coptic cleric, on the October night he was arrested. ''We have traditionally got along with our Muslim neighbors. But the situation is deteriorating from bad to worse. We have spoken out and now I may face the death penalty for doing so. How can I say nothing when this is happening to our people?''

Egypt's nearly six million Copts, by far the largest Christian population in the Middle East, have for centuries coexisted with Muslims. But it has never been easy. Today they are an embattled minority, and they are leaving in significant numbers. Their reason is primarily to pursue economic opportunity in the West amid Egypt's crushing poverty, but the rising influence of Islamic fundamentalism has forced an undercurrent of Christian-Muslim tension to surface. And it has accelerated the emigration.

The Christian flight has profound consequences for Egypt's secular society. The Coptic minority has served as a firewall against Islamic fundamentalism, a wall which journalists, artists, and academics - both Muslim and Christian - fear has crumbled as the Christian presence shrinks.

The Coptic church estimates that more than 1 million Christians have left for the United States, Europe, and Canada over the last three decades. Every week at the American embassy in Cairo, dozens of Coptic Christians wait in line with visa applications to Europe and America. There are 250,000 Copts registered with the North American Archdiocese of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

As Egypt's Muslim population expands with one of the world's highest birth rates, the Copts have become a smaller minority. In 1975, according to church statistics, the Copts represented close to 20 percent of the total population. Today they are between 6 and 9 percent of Egypt's 60 million population.

Discrimination against Copts is rarely as dramatic as the incident at Al Kosheh. What they claim to face in their daily lives is far more subtle.

For example, Copts in recent years have heard their faith denounced by fiery Islamic clerics on government-run television. Copts from Egypt's professional classes are frightened of Islamists who have imposed ''Sharia,'' or Koranic law, on Egypt's legal system, undermining the country's self-image as a secular, and tolerant, republic.

Copts feel the discrimination in schools, especially in the poorer neighborhoods of Cairo and small villages of upper Egypt, where Islamist teachers sometimes distort and insult the Christian faith. Only the Muslim faith, not Christianity, is taught in mandatory religion classes in public schools.

As their presence dwindles, Copts are being marginalized politically and economically. Of the 26 governors appointed by President Hosni Mubarak, none is a Copt. None of the presidents or deans at Egypt's universities is a Copt. And with the powerful professional syndicates increasingly under the control of the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, Copts complain that they are disenfranchised.

''Those who can afford to have left the country,'' says Moris Sadik, a lawyer and director of a Coptic advocacy group called Egyptian Human Rights for National Unity. ''For those of us who stay, life is made very difficult. Opportunities are limited. Discrimination is rampant.''

Church's identity dates to 7th century

The word ''Copt'' is derived from 7th-century Arab invaders who used the term to refer to everyone in the country, the vast majority of whom at the time were Christian. As Islam rapidly took hold in Egypt over the following centuries, the Coptic Christians held tightly to their identity.

The Coptic church is one of the oldest in Christendom. It was founded by St. Mark the Evangelist, who is said to have arrived in Egypt in AD 60. The vast majority of Copts are of the Eastern Orthodox rite, though there are smaller communities of Roman Catholics and Anglicans in Egypt. The Copts of the Eastern Orthodox Church adhere closely to ancient traditions. Most discreetly profess their faith with a small blue tattoo of a cross on one wrist. The clerics wear long beards, black vestments, skull caps, and large leather crosses hanging from their necks.

Copts are fiercely proud of their Egyptian identity and generally reluctant to criticize the Egyptian government. This makes the recent voices of protest all the more resonant.

Yet they have suffered petty discrimination for centuries. One lingering example is the 19th-century Ottoman empire restriction against the construction and even repair of Christian churches without approval from the highest levels of the government.

A 19TH-CENTURY restriction against the construciton and repair of Christian churches without approval from the highest levels of the Egyptian government has left many churches in Al Kosheh in crumbling condition. (Glboe Photo / Thomas Hartwell)

Today, this law infuriates the church hierarchy that oversees once-grand cathedrals and small parish churches that are crumbling. Bishop Thomas, who oversees a diocese of 21 churches and monasteries, says many of the properties have cracked foundations, broken steeples, and lack plumbing.

''I don't know what kind of danger to the state repairing a toilet poses, but apparently there are security reasons for this,'' said Thomas.

During the rise of pan-Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s, the economically prosperous Copts, who then represented 20 percent of the population but held more than 50 percent of the nations's wealth, saw their businesses and factories nationalized under the socialist government of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Many of them left as a result.

Through the 1970s, sectarian tensions in Egypt simmered. Sporadic violence occurred, amid bitter complaints by Copts of discrimination. The violence intensified in 1980 as then-president Anwar Sadat courted Islamic fundamentalists to consolidate power against socialist rivals. This further embittered the Coptic hierarchy, especially the church leader, Pope Shenouda III, who charged that Sadat had replaced nationalism with religion.

In 1981, Sadat outraged Copts by putting Shenouda under house arrest, where he stayed for four years.

The Islamic militant group Gama Islamiya began targeting Copts in 1991, when it launched a terrorist campaign to overthrow the secular government of Hosni Mubarak, which responded with a relentless crackdown that imprisoned 20,000 militants. Still, occasionally spectacular atrocities continue to occur, such as the massacre of 58 foreign tourists in Luxor in November 1997.

Throughout the Muslim extremists' 8-year battle against the government, militants have chosen Copts as easy and repeated targets. Militants firebombed churches and gunned down Copts working in the wheat and sugar cane fields along the Nile. Perhaps the most dramatic case occurred on Feb. 12, 1997, in Abu Qurqas, a small town on a wide bend in the Nile River in upper Egypt near Minya. While a Coptic student prayer group was gathering in St. George's Church, gunmen whom police believe to have been Gama Islamiya militants opened fire, killing nine people.

The church now has armed guards stationed at a steel gate that leads to its courtyard. On a recent visit, a reporter was permitted to enter the town only with an armored troop carrier flanked by six soldiers carrying automatic rifles.

Inside, Emad, 28, an accountant and youth leader of the church, suspiciously eyes the security officials who appeared in the church. The plaster walls of the church are pockmarked with bullet holes. Framed photographs of the nine young faces of the victims adorn the walls with the faces of ancient martyrs.

Coptic churches are always filled with images of persecution and martyrdom, first at the hands of the Romans, then by the Byzantines, and later Arab Muslims. Copts define their history in epochs of suffering, such as the 3rd century ''Age of Martyrdom'' and the 7th century ''Era of Great Tribulations.''

''The killers came in here, right here, and opened fire,'' said Emad. ''Our brothers and sisters were killed while they prayed. They are martyrs.''

When asked about the relationship between Muslims and Christians in Egypt, Emad retreated into an uncomfortable silence.

The militants have also targeted wealthy Copts. A recent spate of robberies of Coptic jewelry stores is believed to have been a key source of financing for the Gama Islamiya. And Copts complain they must pay ''gezia,'' a kind of protection tax, which Islamists say is grounded in Koranic law. Copts who have resisted have been threatened with death. Some have been killed.

The story of one Christian family from Abu Qurqas in upper Egypt is a dramatic example. Rif'at, who asked that his last name not be used, said that for eight years his family faced threats and ultimately murder by Islamic militants. They burned the family's general store when they refused to pay.

In 1996, Rif'at's brother was shot to death by militants. Most of the family has fled to Cairo, and parents are trying to send their children to America.

''We fear for our lives every day. Only because we are Christians,'' wrote Rif'at in a letter documenting the case.

Egyptian officials point out that Christians are not the only targets of Islamic militants. Tourists, police officers, prominent secular journalists, and politicians have also been slaughtered by militants.

But in Al Kosheh, the problem was the government, not the militants. This is why the case there resonates so powerfully among Copts.

Based on dozens of interviews with victims, police ran roughshot over the Christian part of town from the morning the bodies were found last Aug. 15 through to the end of September.

Victims claim that police threatened to rape several women. They described in chilling detail being subjected to electric prods, of being hung from window grates and in some cases a ceiling fan for hours during questioning. Evidence of rope burns, bruises, and small red scars from the prods were visible on the bodies of more than a dozen victims interviewed by the Globe.

Boctur Abu Yameen, 60, was the first arrested as a suspect. He said the police also detained members of his family, including his 11-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter, who were threatened and beaten while police tried to force them to confess that their father was the killer. Yameen was held for 34 days without any formal charges before he was eventually released.

''They began shocking my ears first, and then I was stripped and the prods were placed on my genitals,'' he said. ''They said things I cannot repeat about the Lord Jesus.''

A Copt, William Artori, has been convicted of the murder and is sentenced to death. The church and human rights activists say Artori was wrongly accused and that the only two witnesses against him were tortured into making statements that they have since recanted. The five Muslim men whom the Christians suspect of carrying out the murder - one of whom is reportedly a relative of a high-ranking officer in Egypt's intelligence agency - were briefly questioned and remain free.

The Egyptian government has found no wrongdoing by police, according to press reports. Officials say claims of torture were exaggerated and that they have convicted the right man.

Osama El Baz, a senior adviser to president Mubarak, adamantly denies that Christians face discrimination. In an interview in his elegant Cairo office, El Baz cited Egypt's ''proud history of religious tolerance.''

''I confess that the Copts are claiming they are treated unfairly as a minority, but they are wrong,'' said El Baz.

El Baz typifies to many Copts the Cairene elite whom they consider dismissive and largely ignorant of the difficulties they face as a religious minority, especially in the more lawless reaches of upper Egypt.

El Baz believes the case has attracted interest because of an orchestrated effort by conservative American Christian groups and Washington lobbyists for the Israeli government to draw attention to the ''persecution'' of Christians in many Muslim countries and China.

Leading the crusade has been Michael Horowitz, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former Reagan administration official. He, along with conservative Christians, successfully lobbied for passage last year of the US Freedom From Religious Persecution Act, which can carry economic sanctions for any country that violates it.

As an American ally receiving $2 billion a year in aid, Egypt has been targeted by Washington activists as a potential violator of this law because of its treatment of Copts. This has infuriated the Egyptian government. Even prominent Copt leaders, such as Yusef Boutros-Ghali, Egypt's finance minister and the son of the former United Nations chief Boutros Boutros-Ghali, have been critical of the new American law. The younger Boutros-Ghali has said it could in fact intensify discrimination against Copts.

Critics say law being used as wedge

Secular Muslim critics, such as the director of Cairo's Al Ahram Strategic Center, Abdel Monem Said Ally, see the new American law as a shameless attempt to foster divisions between Christians and Muslims.

''These are American forces tied to Israel who are intent on demonizing Islam and hurting the interests of the Arab world,'' said El Baz.

Nevertheless, a report by the respected Egyptian Organization for Human Rights found that the Al Kosheh case ''constituted grave violations of the rights, freedoms, and human dignity of the people.''

In an October interview, the group's secretary general, Hafez Abu Seda, qualified his findings: '' Police brutality is widespread against Muslims and Christians, even if this is an exceptionally dramatic case. Systematic police brutality...has been an issue for all of Egypt.''

Still Seda, who is Muslim, sharply criticized the government for doing too little to respond to the events in Al Kosheh. His criticisms of the government landed him in one of Egypt's worst prisons in the weeks after the Globe interviewed him. The government charged that his report was an ''act harmful to Egypt.'' The International Commission of Jurists has come to his defense, calling his detention ''an attempt to silence the voice of a major and internationally recognized human rights group.''

If the Egyptian government is in fact trying to silence those who speak out against police brutality, it is not working in Al Kosheh. On a Sunday afternoon last fall at the Church of the Angel, the Christian families of Al Kosheh gathered in the courtyard behind a huge steel gate. Some 400 angry parishioners clamored to tell a reporter their stories of torture, arbitrary arrest, and vicious attacks on their faith by police.

''The police want us to be afraid. They don't want anyone to know what is happening here,'' said Shawki Shenouda, 59, who added that he spent 10 days detained and tortured by police.

As he warily eyed police officers stationed in front of the church, he whispered, ''But we're not afraid.''

**********************************

Christians are a dwindling force in war-ravaged Lebanon

By Charles M. Sennot, Globe Staff, 01/19/98

IN THE 7TH CENTURY, as Islam spread through the region, the Maronites retreated to fortress-like monasteries auch as this in the Kadish Valley. Today it is home to two nuns. (Globe Photo / Pascal Beaudenon)

DAMOUR, Lebanon - There is not much left here.

Once an elegant Christian town of hand-hewn stone homes and citrus groves overlooking the Mediterranean, Damour is now a hollow ruin. Weeds sprout from bombed-out foundations. Apartment buildings stagger from mortar fire. One has imploded at an angle like a broken accordion.

Damour suffered more than most Christian towns in Lebanon's bloody 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. It was just one of many datelines of horror that transformed the country into a television-age Armageddon. The conflict claimed 150,000 lives.

Both Muslims and Christians fled Lebanon, but far more Christians left. From a prewar Lebanese population of roughly 4 million, 500,000 of the 700,000 who emigrated were Christian. In the eight years since, another 100,000 Christians have left.

Damour's desolate streets were blanketed in fog on a recent morning. The dull tapping of hammers broke a strange silence that falls on the town 15 miles south of Beirut. A work crew was fitting new stones into the walls of St. Elia's Eastern Orthodox Church, which was demolished in the fighting.

Stonecutter Michael Abu Abdella, 58, wiped the plaster dust off his hands and remembered the attacks that devastated the Christian community and forced hundreds to flee. The worst memory of that time was the night in January 1976 when Palestinian Fatah guerrillas returned to savage the 300 Christians who remained. They dynamited homes and massacred entire families. They exhumed the dead from the Christian cemetery and scattered skeletons throughout the rubble.

''Christian families still don't feel safe coming back,'' said Abdella.

He now lives in Beirut but comes to Damour to help with the church. He said most of his relatives and neighbors from Damour have left the country over the years.

''I'm not sure this town can ever come alive again,'' he said.

Once a clear majority fully in charge of a wealthy country, the Christians of Lebanon have become an embattled minority fearful of the future.

Lebanon's Maronites, by far the largest Christian denomination here, have been affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church since the 12th century. The Maronites's close ties to Europe's Catholic missionaries opened doors to Western education and ideas. Through the centuries, this connection set them apart from Lebanon's Arab Muslims.

The Christians became doctors and lawyers and financiers. They enjoyed complete political and economic dominance for decades after their independence in 1943 from French colonial rule. This hegemony fostered Maronite arrogance and elitism, which embittered the Muslims. Even as the Muslim population grew, Christians refused to share power.

Then the war erupted in 1975. The Muslim-Christian cycle of recrimination eventually spiraled into nihilistic carnage among various militias. Christian militias also fought viciously among themselves in the final throes of the war. Atrocities were committed by all sides. Amid the violence, the Christians left in droves.

They fled to Latin America, the United States, and Europe. They left in larger numbers than Muslims because they could afford to and because of their ties to the West.

Their exodus, and a concerted policy by a Muslim-dominated government to naturalize hundreds of thousands of Muslim immigrants, dramatically altered Lebanon's demographic landscape. In the years before the civil war began, the creation of the state of Israel had pushed some 300,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are Muslim, into squalid refugee camps inside Lebanon. Through the decades, the Muslim birth rates also have been much higher than those of Christians.

These factors diminished the Christian presence in the country. They also threaten the fragile balance that so tenuously holds together Lebanon's denominations of Christians, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and Druze, a secretive sect that seceded from Islam.

Christians worry that Lebanon's once-robust free market economy will never be resurrected with the newly-emerged Muslim power base. They fear that Beirut's legendary prewar character as a Paris of the Middle East has been ruined by the intolerance of the Iranian-backed, Islamist movement Hezbollah, or ''Party of God.''

When Christians leave, they take their money with them - $5 billion since the end of the war, by some estimates. Many Lebanese leaders, Muslim and Christian alike, believe the country will have to regain its largely Christian commercial base to rebuild.

In a November interview, Mohammad Sammak, head of the government's Christian-Muslim Committee for Dialogue and a senior aide to outgoing Muslim Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, said, ''Christians are more financially versed and richer than Muslims. They have more experience in banking and they have better connections to and understanding of the free market. When they leave and turn their back on Lebanon, they do great damage to this country.

''We will need each other to survive,'' he said.

Just how many Christians remain in Lebanon is in dispute. There are no official population figures in Lebanon. The last census was taken in 1932. The reluctance to complete a new one illustrates how explosive an issue population figures become when so many sects vie for power. As Farid Khazen, a political science professor at the American University of Beirut, puts it: ''Every group needs its own lies.''

Nevertheless, Khazen estimates, and church officials privately concur, that 1 million residents, or 25 percent of the country, are Christian. This figure is less than half of the nearly 60 percent majority of the early 1970s.

Among Christians, Maronites represent roughly 65 percent of the total. They take their name from a 4th-century Syrian monk named St. Maron. The next two largest denominations are Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic.

Carved into a steep cliffside outside of Beirut is the seat of the Maronite patriarchate. Beyond an elegant courtyard, through a long gallery, sits the Maronite patriarch, Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, in a red satin chair.

The gilded European decor speaks to the historical links between the Maronites and the West. The French in particular have had a missionary presence here for centuries and ruled the country between this century's two world wars. Most Maronites consider themselves Phoenicians, whose civilization dominated the eastern Mediterranean for centuries, not Arabs.

''The Christian church has been here from the dawn of Christianity,'' says Cardinal Sfeir. ''But what we see today is very sad for us. We see the Christian majority shrink to a minority. We fear it will shrink even more.''

The Vatican acknowledges the Maronite flight as a profound threat to the future of the Catholic Church in the Mideast. Rome convened a synod on Lebanon prior to a visit by Pope John Paul II there in May of 1997. The council created a mechanism for reconciliation between Christians and Muslims, which church officials consider the first step to rebuilding the country and staunching the outflow of Christians.

''The Christians have no confidence, no trust in the future,'' adds Sfeir. ''Many Lebanese would come back if they trusted the situation. These are very wealthy and very important people for the strength of this country.

''We have to find a way,'' he says, ''to bring people back.''

Displaced residents slow to return

In Damour, such efforts have failed. The government allocated $800 million for the return of those displaced by the war. But the funding has dried up. Christians claim that most of it went to Muslims. In Damour, most of the construction sites consist of concrete foundations and nothing more. Some 700 people live in a town that boasted a prewar population of 30,000.

Antoine Ghafari, the Christian mayor, was elected last May in the first municipal elections in 35 years. But even he doesn't live here anymore.

Ghafari lives most of the year in New York, where he is a corporate lawyer. Like many Christian professionals, Ghafari, 43, lives abroad but keeps a hand in Lebanese political affairs. He says he wants to return eventually, but his career keeps him straddling the two worlds.

He was 20 when the town was invaded. He fought in a small militia that tried to defend it. He fled and later watched as his home was destroyed. In 1983, the day after the bombing of the US Marines barracks in Beirut, he left Lebanon.

The product of a wealthy family, Ghafari had the means to attend the University of Pennsylvania law school. He later clerked for a federal judge and then built his own law practice.

''I want to help my people, the Christians, to come back here,'' he says. ''I am a true believer of the human and cultural wealth that Christianity brings to the Middle East. My belief is that it must be preserved. There is no civilization in the Mideast without Christianity.''

Not all Maronites are as dogmatic about their plight. They are people like Said Akil, 33, who owns a small lunch counter in Damour. Wearing a shirt with ''USA'' emblazoned on the front and a crucifix dangling from his neck, Akil works over a hot grill.

''Everyone is leaving. All of my relatives, all of my friends, any one who can get out, is doing it,'' he says. ''It's got nothing to do with Muslims. Most of my friends are Muslim. It's that there is nothing here for us.''

He pulled from a drawer a folder stuffed with documents supporting a visa application to the United States. His father, who owns a machine shop next door, looked on sadly as his oldest son spread out on the formica counter the government forms that he hopes will become his ticket out of Lebanon.

'The process feeds on itself'

In a posh office building in Beirut, Nehmatalla Abi Nasr, 60, an influential lawyer, lashed out at his Christian bretheren who leave.

''The Christians leave for opportunity in the West or to get away from the war,'' he says. ''Then they lose more and more influence here, and then they are increasingly afraid to return. The process feeds on itself.''

Nasr sits behind a polished oak desk, fidgeting with his Pierre Cardin glasses and constantly checking his gold Omega watch. He retains many powerful clients, including the Maronite patriarchate. He filed a suit on its behalf against the Hariri government's 1995 program that naturalized some 300,000 Muslims from Syria, Iraq, and other Arab countries. The move, he says, was coldly calculated to further marginalize Christians.

''We are barely holding on here,'' he says.

Under the agreement that ended the war, Christians are allocated half the seats in parliament and maintain a permanent claim to the presidency. The rest of the legislative body and the office of prime minister are assigned to Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Political science professor Khazen says Muslims have diluted this formula. First they shifted executive power to the prime minister. Then they carved out electoral districts to prevent the rise of any powerful Christian politicians.

As a result, Christian seats fall into the hands of weak candidates loyal to Syria. The neighboring country effectively controls Lebanon with some 35,000 troops stationed here with the compliance of the government. Christians have compounded their problems by boycotting the elections. The net result is that Hezbollah made a strong showing in the May municipal elections, securing a power base in Beirut's southern suburbs.

''The Christians have clung to their role in business, academic institutions, and medicine. But in politics, they are losing. And they are losing dramatically,'' says Khazen.

''Will this political marginalization erode Lebanon's uniquely pluralistic society? My sense is it will,'' he adds.

The November funeral of George Saade, 67, leader of Lebanon's Phalange Party, the largest Maronite political entity, symbolized the end of the dominant role Christians have played in government. Maronites had been critical of Saade for surrendering too much power to Muslims during the peace talks that ended the war.

Many of the aging men gathered at the funeral at the party's headquarters in Beirut were involved in some of the war's more brutal attacks on Muslims. The most famous of the Phalangist massacres occurred in 1982 in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Israeli-occupied West Beirut. More than 400 Palestinians were killed.

Jad Nehmeh, a member of the party's political bureau and a former Phalange fighter, said, ''Christians feel they are governed by Muslims now. This funeral gives us all the feeling of the end of things.''

Nehmeh was asked about claims that the Christians are responsible for their own fate. He was asked if Phalange atrocities such as those at Sabra and Shatilla did not contribute to the Christian disenfranchisement.

''That's not true. That's Palestinian propaganda,'' he angrily replied, referring to the Palestinian forces that fought alongside Muslim forces in the civil war. ''The Christians were the governors of this country. They had no interest in causing a war. The Palestinians were radicals who wanted to destabilize the country. We are the ones who tried to save it.''

While the history of the war is debatable, the outcome is not.

''We see fundamentalist groups from Iran and Libya with open access to power here,'' says Nasr. ''It threatens democracy in Lebanon. I don't fear that this could happen. It is happening.''

In the poor neighborhood of Haret H'reik in the south of Beirut, Hezbollah flags depicting a fist holding a machine gun high over the city are everywhere. Militant Islamists with beards and prayer caps and women in Islamic robes and black veils crowd the streets.

There are no movie theaters here. No bars. Instead, billboard-sized murals of the late Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini's disapproving face loom on street corners. What was once a Christian neighborhood is now firmly in the grip of Hezbollah.

Sheikh Atta, an intense and articulate Hezbollah leader, runs the Shiite Muslim group's press office here. He is quick to point out that Hezbollah is the only major political party that did not fight other Lebanese. Founded in 1982, its goal is to resist Israeli occupation.

When asked about Christian fears of Hezbollah's surging puritanical influence, Atta replies, ''Yes, we would like to make an Islamic state. But only as long as 90 percent of the Lebanese people agree, and not by force but by conviction.''

He questions the Christian perspective that Hezbollah's rise threatens Lebanon's unique character.

''There's never been a chance for Islam to bring its accomplishments, its civilization, its culture and tolerance here. Now we are doing that,'' he says.

One of Lebanon's premiere historians and authors, Kamal Salibi, a Christian, says that Hezbollah's attractive mix of social justice and resistance has strong appeal to young Muslims. This is why it is feared by both Christians and secular Muslims. Despite the influence of the fundamentalists, the vast majority of Lebanese Muslims are secular.

''They are terrified by the emergence of Islamic clericalism, so they have an umbilical attachment to the Christians as the preservers of secular government and more importantly a secular way of life,'' says Salibi. ''The secular Muslims say, `Don't leave us alone against this monster that threatens our lives, our ability to have a drink at a bar, to watch movies, to have a culture we want.'''

This threat to Lebanon's modern secular identity is evident on Christian college campuses, where the current generation knows only conflict between the two faiths.

Ralph Nahme, 22, who is completing a business degree, says, ''There is little economic opportunity here, so I would like to go to America.''

His friend, Eler Sadek, 22, stamps out a Marlboro and adds, ''Yeah, and there are too many Muslims.''

He adds, ''They are rearranging the country. I feel like a stranger here. This is not even Lebanon anymore. They [Muslims] are killing this country. If I could get a visa to America, I'd be gone.''

The road north out of Beirut winds through a landscape of bombed-out ruins mixed with shiny new American fast-food restaurants and European clothing boutiques. One hundred and twenty-five miles north of Beirut is the Kadisha Valley, home of the ancient Maronites and the rugged terrain that yielded their modern warlords. At the end of the 7th century, as Islam spread through the region, the Maronites retreated here to fortress-like monasteries carved into the cliffs. They remained isolated from the rest of the world until the Crusades, when the Maronites joined the Roman Catholic Church.

On a recent afternoon, the cavernous Virgin of the Qanubbin Gorge Church and living quarters here seem abandoned. But inside, a faint sound of coughing could be heard down a long hallway. Sister Mary Agnes, who would not give her age except to say she had been a nun for 60 years, tended a frail, bedridden sister. The two nuns were the only people living in the huge, unheated building where 100 clerics once resided.

Sister Mary was blithely uninterested in the exodus of Christians. Her serene face broke into a smile as she said, ''Wherever there is life, there is Christ. There is no need for us to worry.''