Buried Monasteries, Buried Truths - How Islam Strangled Christianity in the Middle East By Raymond Ibrahim

Raymond Ibrahim : One of many ancient Coptic monasteries predating Islam. This one was unearthed in Wadi El-Natrun, Egypt. A series of recent archaeological discoveries is shedding fresh if inconvenient light on a largely forgotten reality: Christianity once flourished in regions where it has all but vanished.

In Egypt, archaeologists have just unearthed a 1,600-year-old Christian monastic site, complete with wall paintings and a Greek inscription. A few weeks before it, another, equally as old, monastic complex was also discovered in Egypt.

These are not isolated finds. They are part of a growing pattern: the steady unearthing of monasteries, churches, and Christian inscriptions across the Middle East—silent witnesses to a time when Christianity was not marginal, but dominant. And yet, as these discoveries accumulate, so too do efforts to reinterpret them—not as evidence of a dramatic civilizational rupture, but as proof of something more palatable.

Take, for example, yet another recent find—in the Arabian Peninsula, no less, the birthplace and home of Islam: in 2022, archaeologists in the United Arab Emirates unearthed the ruins of yet another Christian monastery. Radiocarbon dating suggested that its Christian community may have thrived there around the year AD 534 — meaning nearly a century before the rise of Islam in 622 (Year One of the Muslim calendar).

“It is an extremely rare discovery,” said Prof. Tim Power of the UAE University, who was part of the team that unearthed the monastery. “It is an important reminder of a lost chapter of Arab history.”

To be sure, historians have long known that both Christians and Jews lived throughout the Arabian Peninsula prior to the advent of Islam, though having archaeological backing is obviously substantial. This is, moreover, the second such monastery to be unearthed in the UAE. All in all, six ancient monasteries have thus far been discovered along the shores of the Arabian Gulf.

Ultimately, all of these findings confirm that what happened to the Arabian Peninsula is what happened to the broader Middle East and North Africa. In the seventh century, the entire region was overwhelmingly Christian majority. Once the jihad against the People of the Book (Christians and Jews) was proclaimed, c. 630, all of these formerly Christian regions were swallowed up and Islamized. In the words of Bernard Lewis:

We tend nowadays to forget that for approximately a thousand years, from the advent of Islam in the seventh century until the second siege of Vienna in 1683, Christian Europe was under constant threat from Islam, the double threat of conquest and conversion. Most of the new Muslim domains were wrested from Christendom. Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa were all Christian countries, no less, indeed rather more, than Spain and Sicily. All this left a deep sense of loss and a deep fear [emphasis added].

Another Coptic monastery predating the Islamic conquest, Beheira Governorate. 

Another Coptic monastery predating the Islamic conquest, Beheira Governorate.

The finding of all these monasteries is further unsurprising when one considers how utterly Christian the Middle East was. According to John Cassian, a Christian monk from modern-day Romania who visited Egypt about two-and-a-half centuries before the Arab invasion, “the traveler from Alexandria in the north to Luxor in the south would have in his ears along the whole journey [about 600 miles], the sounds of prayers and hymns of the monks, scattered in the desert, from the monasteries and from the caves, from monks, hermits, and anchorites.”

Today, Egypt—which, prior to its invasion and subsequent conquest by Islam, was one of the most thoroughly Christian nations in the world—has only a very few monasteries, and even these are not beyond threat. In 2025, a controversial court ruling placed the land of Saint Catherine’s Monastery—the oldest continuously operating Christian monastery in the world—under Egyptian state ownership, raising fears that monks could ultimately be dispossessed of property they had held centuries before Muhammad was born. The dispute escalated to the point of international diplomatic intervention, even as development projects began transforming the surrounding sacred landscape.

Speaking of Muhammad, much of what befell Christianity in general and monasteries in particular throughout the Middle East can be traced to him. The prophet’s deathbed wish was that “There are not to be two religions in the [Arabian] Peninsula.” Muslims have always interpreted this to mean that only Islam can be practiced on the Peninsula (hence why modern-day fatwas continue to call for the destruction of any church found in Arabia).

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