Syrian author Dr. Nabeel T. Jabbour has written a very interesting and recommendable book on the challenges of talking about your faith with Muslims called The Crescent Through the Eyes of the Cross that I would recommend to anybody, particularly to Western Christians (Dr. Nabeel is himself a Protestant). It goes through many of the mistakes Christians often make when preparing to talk to Muslims, and how the Western worldview and Middle Eastern worldview are very different, particularly with regard to religion. I don't think it's really needed by Oriental Orthodox Christians, since I think this is one area where we have an advantage over others. We speak the same languages as the Muslim majority in the home countries (e.g., Syriac Orthodox in Iraq and Syria speak Arabic as a second or sometimes first language; Armenians in Iran speak Farsi; Syriacs and Armenians in Turkey speak Turkish, etc.), share at least some of the overarching culture, and we can say with no hyperbole that more often than not we are of the same blood and origins as the Muslim, Arab-identifying majority (this is only not true in Iran, where of course the people aren't Arabs anyway, unless you're talking about some parts of coastal Iran in the south). It was quite rare for large populations of ethnic Arabs to move into the places that the Arab-Muslim armies conquered, and generally if there were Arabs there they predated Islam by centuries, as in the case of Al-Hira (the first Arab settlement in what is now Iraq, which became the capital of the Christian Arab Lakhmid kingdom beginning in the 5th century). Usually instead the Arab-Muslim rulers would do everything they could to Arabize the non-Arab natives, like the Copts in Egypt or the Imazighen ('Berber' is pejorative) in the rest of North Africa. For that reason, when people in those countries want to "go back to their roots", it can involve encounters with Christianity. I have been to Coptic monasteries here in the USA where the priests and deacons very proudly told me that they have had Muslim Egyptians -- very serious ones like mullahs with long beards and women with full face covering -- come to them to learn the Coptic language. When I asked the deacons about that, they said very matter-of-factly "They are Egyptians; they know they are not Arabs". And so it is in most of the Middle East: the native people of Iraq and Syria are the Syriac/Assyrian people, not the Arabs (and not the Greeks). The native people of Egypt are the Copts, not the Arabs. The native people of Sudan and Upper Egypt are Nubians and various other black Africans like the Beja, not the Arabs. The native people of the rest of North Africa (excluding Egypt) are various Imazighen people, not the Arabs. This is something that everyone who is not politically motivated by so-called Pan-Arabism (which was the invention of Arab Christians, by the way, not Muslims) recognizes, and has been at least part of the driving force behind conversions to Christianity in some unlikely places, like Algeria (where in some Kabylie strongholds Christianity is approaching two-digit figures and is the fastest-growing religion; I have been told this by Algerian Catholics who were native converts). For a lot of these people, Christianity is to them similar to what I'm guessing your religion is to you now, Red Fox: A return to their ancestral religion/turning away from a religion that was imposed on them by cruel outsiders who exterminated or attempted to exterminate their culture, language, and religion in the process of stealing their land and making them an impoverished and brutalized minority in their own native land. (This is why I don't go in too much for calling every criticism of Islam "Islamophobic" or inherently bad; criticism of it from those who have lost everything to the people who forced it on them and on their land like the kind of criticism you may hear from Copts, Imazighen who are either non-religious or Christian, Armenians, Syriacs, various native Africans in Sudan like the Nuer or the non-Muslim members of the Dinka, etc. is worlds away from ranting white people who are mad or feel threatened that there's a girl in front of them in Starbucks in a hijab. One is rooted in 1400 years of oppression and murder at the hands of Muslims suffered by the native people of the Middle East and North Africa, and the other is "Eww, stinky brown people and their yucky brown God" or whatever. I have no patience for the latter, but the former is pretty much exactly the same as any person would react anywhere. If it is right for the native peoples of the Americas to reclaim their languages, lands, and religions -- and I believe it is -- then native people elsewhere should be doing the same thing. We should be allies, even if that means that some of us are Christians because we were from the beginning of that religion and no one ever forced it on us, while some of us might not be Christians precisely because it was forced by other people and is resented on that account. What can I say? Actions have consequences, and I'm not going to bow down to the Muslim out of a fear of seeming "racist" or whatever; Islam is not a race, and as I wrote above, often times Christians and Muslims are of the same ethnic origins anyway. So Islam really is the problem, when it comes to Muslim-Christian relations in a Middle Eastern context, and what the rest of the world assumes only the USA or other Western powers do can very much be said about Muslims, not matter what color they happen to be. To paraphrase the words of the very Muslim director Hassan Ibrahim of Al-Jazeera in the film Control Room: "You are the most powerful -- I agree; you can defeat everybody -- I agree; you can crush everybody, I agree...but don't ask us to love it as well!")
Anyway, so that's what I would say to Muslims: You are free to be Muslim all you want, but at least know the history of it and how you came to be one. The point is not that Christianity's history is all good and Christians never did anything bad (though there is a world of difference between what Oriental Christians did versus what Western Christians did, because it sure as heck wasn't the Copts or the Syriacs who carved up Africa or the Americas in the scramble for territory, resources, and souls; we would have been more like the beleaguered natives in those same eras, and even today I have known people who came to our church specifically because they were not comfortable as native people belonging to a church that cooperated in the calamities that Westerners brought upon their people), but that in becoming Muslims, many peoples' true identities have been erased, and they have been made to live in the image of a 7th century Arabian warlord, and it is not right that this great ahistorical deception should continue unabated in a time when people have more access to information and history than ever. So it is that Christianity has grown lately to many thousands of people in Kabyle (an Imazighen people) areas of Algeria, where the people have had an uneasy time with centuries of oppression not remedied by native (Algerian, but Arabizing) governments, who continue to treat the consciously-not-Arab-and-usually-religiously-secular population poorly.
I don't know what I would say to someone like you, Red Fox, who is simply practicing her native religion as she feels comfortable and true being. I think you've shown that your problem is with the effect of Christianization on your community and how you have personally felt it in your own life, not with all Christians everywhere and always by virtue of their being Christians. And that's an important distinction to make. Like I wrote, we should be allies. Native people in the Middle East and native people in the Americas and native people everywhere. And that's what my church is about: the real, lived history and theology and hymnody and iconography and Orthodoxy of the non-Hellenized (or at best semi-Hellenized) native people of the Near East, because before the Muslim Arabs were around, it was the Greeks who were the elite in the East (so the Arab Muslims came and it was "meet the new boss, same as the old boss"). Anyway, you're smart; I'm sure you can draw whatever parallel you might wish to out of all this. This is what I personally see, though.
