May/June 2002 Religion & Theology Features

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You'd think that Christians would have a head start in America's belated effort to get a handle on the geography and history of the Middle East and Asia Minor, the cradle of their faith. It's true that many have made the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and even the stay-at-homes are likely to retain a vague familiarity with the pastel maps in the backs of their Bibles where the missionary journeys of Paul are marked with dotted lines. But for all that, most American Christians—excepting the Orthodox—are woefully ignorant of the history and present conditions of their fellow believers in the Eastern tradition.

Help is close at hand in William Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East, a book that's partly travelogue, partly cultural history, partly eulogy, and totally absorbing. In 1994, Dalrymple, a Scots journalist and travel writer, made a pilgrimage to Mount Athos in order to find the original manuscript of "The Spiritual Meadow" by John Moschos, an Orthodox monk. With his sidekick Sophronius, John circumambulated the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century, visiting monasteries and hermitages, recording sermons, spiritual counsel, and miracle stories. The manuscript inspired Dalrymple to retrace the monk's route in order to observe how Christianity is faring in the lands where it first took root.

He begins the journey in the city known to John and his contemporaries as Constantinople, built by and named for the emperor who made Christianity the empire's official religion. Today we know it as Istanbul, a city in Turkey, our newest nato partner, 99 percent of whose people are Muslim although the state is emphatically secular.

Dalrymple finds Turkey alternately charming and terrifying. ...