If Christians in the Middle East are going to be “honest” with their Muslim dialogue partners, said Chaldean Arch-bishop Bashar Warda of Irbil, Iraq, Muslims will have to acknowledge that the persecution of Christians in the region did not start with the Islamic State’s rise to power in 2014.
“We experienced this not for the last four years, but 1,400 years,” Archbishop Warda said during a speech at Georgetown University in Washington, sponsored by the Religious Freedom Research Project of the university’s Berkley Centre for Religion, Peace & World Affairs. Christians are partly to blame, too, in the dialogue, according to Archbishop Warda. “We did not push back against the recurring periods of terrorism that inflicted cruel pain upon our ancestors,” he said. He added that Christianity also needs to return to a “pre-Constantine vision” of the church, recalling Jesus’s words shortly before his crucifixion: “My kingdom is not of this world.”
Archbishop Warda added, “We object that one faith has now the right to kill another. There needs to be a change and a correction within Islam.”
