From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium [Hardcover]

Dalrymple travels in Moschos's footsteps, from Mount Athos in Greece, to the Great Oasis at Kharga in Upper Egypt. The journey takes Dalrymple across Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and Israel before reaching his conclusion on the edge of the Sahara, surrounded by Egyptian army guards bristling with automatic weapons protecting him from Muslim fundamentalists.

The historical theme he brings to life is the way that Christianity began as a religion of the Middle East, centred on Alexandria and Constantinople, long before it became the established faith of Western Europe. But his travels take him through a series of conflicts: the Orthodox Church of Southern Turkey caught in the cross fire of civil war between Kurd nationalists and the Turkish state. In Lebanon, he walks through the remains of the Maronite Christian community who have propelled their country into a disastrous civil war. In Israel, the Orthodox monks and the Palestinian Christians are trying to cope with the growth of Jewish settlements across the Holy Land. And in Egypt, the Coptic Church is menaced by the growth of Muslim fundamentalism.

What makes the book special is the way Dalrymple can sink into Moschos's world. His eye for art and architecture brings the Byzantine world to life, and his ear captures conversations with monks who regard miracles and saints hovering above their monasteries as everyday events. The bizarre hallucinations and beliefs of the early Christian church become matter of fact occurrences as Dalrymple talks to Christians whose prayers, music and way of life have changed little over 1500 years. His outlook remains admirably compassionate. He brings off a journey through history that is intertwined with some of the nastiest conflicts of the 20th century. It's a lament to the disappearing world of Eastern Christianity, but it's also informative and spiritually very moving.

Dalrymple is a master of prose: he paints tragic portraits with his words. Following the path outlined in an old Greek book by the medieval Byzantine tourist and monk John Moschos, Mr. Dalrymple travels through the Aegean, the Levant, and the Nile Valley. From Greece's Mt. Athos to the necropolises of southern Egypt, his journey is a record of history in the making. For what he sees on the way is the end of an era, the end to what his medieval "tour-guide" saw the beginning of: the almost-complete collapse of Eastern Christianity in the Levant. His writing will haunt me forever: old Orthodox churches crumbling to dust; living human relics of the savage persecutions in Armenia at the beginning of the 20th century; abandoned monasteries perched solemnly in the desert. If apocalypse were but silence, I think Mr. Dalrymple has described it perfectly. His Borgesean treatment of this ghostly land is gripping and, at the same time, terrifying.

Various partisan ethnic and political groups have criticized the author of "From the Holy Mountain" for taking a supposedly "unbalanced" view of the decline of Christianity in the Middle East and the mistreatment of the Palestinians. This argument is misguided. Mr. Dalrymple's portrayal of various non-Christian groups is often unsympathetic indeed, and his book is perhaps somewhat "unbalanced" (depending on the reader's position) in that he has sympathies of his own, but what I admire especially about his account is that it clearly refuses to condone persecution of any sort, by anybody, of anyone, by giving the irresponsible excuse that the persecuted have also been the persecutors. The politics of ethnicity should not condone the desicration of the Middle East's beautiful human cultures, priceless treasures of art, and rich traditions of faith. Mr. Dalrymple expresses this sentiment ably.

I also found the author's account of his personal renewal of religious faith very touching. Who could not be moved by the grandeur of that landscape, the mystic hills, the face of God in every look of those people as they reminisced on the joys and horrors of the last century and the slow death of a 2,000 year-old faith? Dark churches in the early morning, dusty altars, the extremities of old Byzanitine hermits: deep, narrow canyons and tiny caves, tall pillars where stylites once chastised themselves. What a rich land! What a place to lose oneself in thinking about divinity and history!

Five stars for this beautiful book! A perfect investment of time and money.