Sceptics will reply that the problems of Christians in the region are intertwined with history. That, of course, is correct. (It was also true of the Jews in Central and Eastern Europe — but that is another story.) Numbers of Christians in the Middle East have fallen over the centuries, and faster still since the end of colonialism. Today perhaps 10 to 12 million Christians remain in the Middle East. Nor is it just numbers that tell the tale. So does declining status.

This history of decline is precisely why it is so easy, and can seem so normal to Westerners (and useful to Islamic apologists), for Christians to be regarded as relics doomed to inevitable extinction. If cultural isolation, declining birth rates and economic migration push in the same direction, why not add a nudge and a squeeze from persecution, particularly if blame can be diffused? 

There was never a time when Christian minorities living under Islam enjoyed equality. Dhimmi status (and its post-Ottoman equivalent) is essentially precarious. But, between the massacres, large Christian communities were useful, wily and pliable enough to survive and often prosper. The case of Iraq is especially instructive, both about the past and the present.

You might not imagine it from Islamic paranoia and Western apologitis, but Christians brought something very positive to the Muslim world. In Baghdad, serving the Abbasid caliphs, in the eighth and ninth centuries, was a team of over 50 Christians (plus a Jew and a Sabian) employed to translate Greek philosophical works into Arabic. Alongside the translators, Christian doctors, scientists, philosophers and even theologians were indispensable to the transition of Arabic Islam from a primitive warlike culture to an advanced civilisation. Gratitude was limited: envy and destruction intervened. Assyrian Christians suffered their own Armenian-style genocide at the hands of the Ottomans and their successors. They were also foolish enough to be loyal to the British, who, of course, abandoned them. But Iraqi Christians clung on after independence; they recouped their fortunes, made their compromises, survived and even rose.