By Salah Ali

In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), discussions about religious freedom often center on legal protections, acts of persecution, and the politics of state-religion relations. While these dimensions are urgent and often life-threatening, they capture only part of the reality. There is a more gradual and insidious threat that religious communities face, one that draws less international attention but has long-term consequences for identity, belonging, and survival. That threat is the erosion of cultural heritage.

The disputes unfolding around St. Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, which, as Paul Marshall has written, may be the Christian world’s most important monastery, housing ancient historical and religious artifacts and manuscripts. Founded by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the 6^th century, near the base of Mount Sinai, the traditional site where Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments, the monastery has survived centuries of war and conflict. It reportedly received a covenant of protection from the Prophet Muhammad in 623 and from the Ottoman Sultan Selim I in the 16^th century. Now, as a legal and political battle over ownership of the land and properties unfolds, this controversy encapsulates the intersection between cultural heritage and religious freedom.   

Religious freedom is not simply the right to hold personal beliefs or to worship privately. In societies where religion is deeply embedded in communal life, cultural heritage becomes a primary vehicle through which faith is expressed, transmitted, and remembered. This is especially true in the MENA region, where minority communities, such as the Yazidis, Christians, Mandaeans, and Kaka’i, have maintained their distinct religious identities through sacred sites, oral traditions, seasonal festivals, language, music, clothing, food, and ceremonies. These cultural forms are not decorative additions to belief, they are belief, made visible and lived.

The destruction or disappearance of these forms, whether through violence, forced displacement, neglect, or policies of cultural homogenization, does not merely weaken a community’s outward expression of faith. It disrupts the entire ecosystem in which faith is sustained. When a shrine is demolished, when traditional songs are forgotten, when children are no longer taught the stories of their ancestors, a vital connection is lost. Once lost, it is rarely restored in its entirety. Generations raised without access to their cultural foundations often inherit fractured identities, uncertain of their roots, their place in society, or how to preserve and carry their heritage into the future.

In Iraq, religious places of worship are vital symbols of cultural heritage and identity, representing the histories, beliefs, and traditions of diverse communities. Yet these sites remain under serious threat, particularly in the disputed areas, where government jurisdiction is contested and the enforcement of property rights is inconsistent. Religious minorities often find their sacred sites lacking formal legal recognition. This absence of registration has left communities vulnerable to both targeted destruction and opportunistic land seizures. During ISIS’s occupation, many sites of worship were destroyed or desecrated in what was clearly a calculated attempt to erase Iraq’s religious and cultural diversity. But the threat did not end when ISIS left. In the aftermath, numerous unregistered sites were seized by individuals or local actors seeking to exploit the political vacuum, often occupying or building over lands belonging to minority communities or neglecting them entirely due to the absence of basic services and official recognition.

The situation is particularly stark for the Yazidi community. To date, over 200 Yazidi religious sites remain unregistered in official government records. This legal ambiguity has enabled surrounding landholders and other actors to encroach upon or claim ownership of these sacred spaces. The absence of documentation makes it difficult for Yazidis to contest such claims, and each case of occupation further weakens the community’s cultural and spiritual connection to its ancestral land. These acts represent more than property disputes, they constitute an existential threat. They undermine not only physical security but the long-term presence and legitimacy of minority groups in the places they have inhabited for centuries.

In periods of crisis, conflict, persecution, or authoritarian rule, religious minorities often retreat from visibility as a means of self-preservation. They stop gathering in public. They remove religious symbols from homes. They avoid speaking their language or wearing traditional clothing. These acts of concealment are often necessary to stay alive. But they carry consequences. Over time, such silence can lead to forgetting. What begins as a temporary strategy for survival risks becoming a permanent condition of erasure. Communities may survive physically, but spiritually and culturally, they begin to disappear.

This tension between short-term safety and long-term preservation is not theoretical. It is a dilemma that many communities across Iraq and the wider MENA region face. The urgency of securing legal protections for sacred sites is now being recognized more widely, but the process is complex. The registration of religious shrines in disputed areas is often obstructed by political sensitivities, bureaucratic inertia, and the lack of legal awareness within affected communities. Without official documentation, these places are not only left unprotected, they are treated as if they never existed. For many Iraqis, the campaign to legally safeguard religious minorities’ shrines is emerging as a critical first step, with the potential to expand protections to other communities whose heritage remains in jeopardy.

To protect religious freedom meaningfully, cultural heritage must be upheld in law, education, and the norms of the wider society. This means more than safeguarding sites of worship. It requires policies that preserve minority languages, support the teaching of minority histories, recognize traditional festivals, and protect access to sacred spaces. It also demands sensitivity in post-conflict reconstruction efforts, where rebuilding must be informed by local memory and religious significance, not imposed through generic or politically motivated design.

Cultural heritage also plays a powerful role in peacebuilding. In deeply fragmented societies, where mistrust runs deep and narratives compete, culture can provide a common ground. Sacred sites often carry shared or overlapping meanings across religious lines. Oral histories, if told in inclusive ways, can highlight periods of coexistence rather than just conflict. Music, cuisine, and art can serve as bridges when political discourse fails. When a community sees its cultural presence valued, not merely tolerated, it sends a signal that it is part of the national story. This recognition is crucial for social cohesion. It fosters dignity, belonging, and trust, all of which are essential for rebuilding societies torn by violence and division.

Legal rights, in this context, are necessary but insufficient. A community that is free to exist in principle, but is denied access to its language, history, or sacred spaces, is not free in practice. Laws that do not account for cultural survival fall short of protecting the full human experience of religion. Conversely, the preservation of cultural heritage can reinforce legal protections by rooting them in the lived reality of religious communities.

Cultural protection is not about nostalgia. It is about resilience. It is about equipping communities with the tools they need to survive not only the immediate threats to their existence, but the long-term pressures of assimilation, marginalization, and neglect. It is about giving younger generations a sense of pride in their identity and a sense of responsibility to carry it forward. Without cultural visibility, identity becomes fragile, and without identity, freedom loses its substance.

Religious freedom in the MENA region must be rethought. It cannot be confined to the right to believe silently or to worship behind closed doors. It must encompass the right to live one’s faith in public, to pass on traditions, to inhabit sacred places, and to be recognized as a full and equal part of the social fabric. This broader vision of religious freedom demands that cultural heritage be seen not as a secondary concern, but as its very foundation.

As we consider the future of pluralism and coexistence in this region, the question is not only whether religious minorities are protected from violence. The deeper question is whether they are supported in sustaining the cultural ecosystems that enable them to express their faith in communal ways. Without that support, the region may one day be free of persecution, but it will also be free of the diverse communities that once gave it life.

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Salah Ali is the General Director of the MENA Platform for Religious Freedom and Peacebuilding and the General Coordinator of the Iraq Religious Freedom and Anti-discrimination Roundtable. He is a Fellow of the Religious Freedom Institute and holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations (Leeds Beckett University).