Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms
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Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms
“As the al-Qaeda splinter group, ISIS, storms across Syria and Iraq and attempts to destroy the Yazidi religious sect, now comes Gerard Russell, an erudite, polylingual former British diplomat, who documents the fates of the ancient religions of the Middle East, many of which are on the brink of extinction. Russell writes beautifully and reports deeply, and his account of these ‘disappearing religions’ will be an enduring anthropology of largely-hidden worlds that may disappear within our own lifetimes.”
—PETER BERGEN,
author of
Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad
“Oxford and Harvard, fluency in Arabic and Farsi, postings with the British Foreign Service in the Middle East and Afghanistan—as a scholar-diplomat Gerard Russell seems almost too good to be true. He brings these gifts to his beautifully written account of some of the most fascinating and little known communities facing the challenges of globalization. Read it to understand the complexity of—and hope in—our world.”
—
AMBASSADOR AKBAR AHMED
,
Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, DC, and the former Pakistani High Commissioner to the United Kingdom
“An eloquent and sensitive portrayal of the Middle East’s lesser known religions, whose existence is severely threatened by the strident nationalisms and proxy wars that are currently tearing apart a region once renowned for its tolerance. Gerard Russell gives a voice to those who cannot speak for themselves, those whose traditions—handed down through many centuries—are being disregarded and indeed obliterated in a blaze of violence and hatred. He lifts the ‘veil of ignorance’ and reveals just what is at stake—both in the Middle East and around the world. Through extensive and meticulous research, and encompassing years of travel to distant places to meet in person those whose lives have been turned upside down, Mr. Russell’s passionate message touches the heart and reminds us of the value and beauty of tolerance.”
—
ALI ASANI,
Professor of Indo-Muslim and Islamic Religion and Cultures, Director, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Islamic Studies Program, Harvard University
“At a time when minorities—and even majorities—are being persecuted across the Middle East, ancient faiths continue, just barely, to survive. Gerard Russell not only recalls a more tolerant past through his sketches of now exotic tribes and rituals, but also paints a deep and complex relief to help us understand this troubled region’s evolution. Russell is a true classical diplomat: explorer, linguist, scholar—and master storyteller.”
—
PARAG KHANNA
,
author of
The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order
“Gerard Russell’s beautifully written book provides wonderful insights into the Middle East and the beauty of the different cultures that have flourished there for centuries. It is a welcome respite from the usual portrayal of violence in the region, and at the same time a wakeup call of what will be lost if a perverse form of violent extremism is allowed to prevail. At a time when religion is so often seen as a cause of war, this book shows how lives can be enriched by maintaining rituals and beliefs through generations.”
—
EMMA SKY
,
Senior Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, Yale University
H
EIRS TO
F
ORGOTTEN
K
INGDOMS
H
EIRS TO
F
ORGOTTEN
K
INGDOMS
JOURNEYS INTO THE DISAPPEARING
RELIGIONS OF THE MIDDLE EAST
GERARD RUSSELL
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
New York
Copyright © 2014 by Gerard Russell
Published by Basic Books,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 250 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10107.
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Designed by Pauline Brown Typeset in Times New Roman
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
LCCN: 2014948120
ISBN: 978-0-465-03056-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-465-05685-9 (e-book)
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my parents
And to Linda Norgrove, Vadim Nazarov,
and others who shared my journeys
but are no longer here to read this book
Contents
Foreword by Rory Stewart
Timeline
Map of the Forgotten Kingdoms
Introduction
CHAPTER 1: Mandaeans
CHAPTER 2: Yazidis
CHAPTER 3: Zoroastrians
CHAPTER 4: Druze
CHAPTER 5: Samaritans
CHAPTER 6: Copts
CHAPTER 7: Kalasha
Epilogue: Detroit
Sources and Further Readings
Index
By the early eighth century, Muslim rulers controlled most of the land between Afghanistan and the edge of North Africa. But Islamic states—which developed in Europe a reputation as fierce and exclusive—proved ultimately more tolerant of other religions than Western Christianity. In Europe, “pagans” were eliminated so completely and so rapidly that the details of the pre-Christian religion of somewhere like Britain can barely be recovered. In the Muslim world, however, complete “pagan” religions were allowed to survive intact into the twenty-first century, and it is still possible to interview their believers.
There are the Yazidis of northern Iraq, whose temples include a statue of a peacock, somehow associated with the devil. There are the Kalasha of the Afghan-Pakistan border, whose faith incorporates wooden statues of ancestor-heroes. From Lebanon to Iran religions survive—some with a special relationship to fire, others that center on immersion in water, others with focus on the sun and the moon. Some of these faiths long predate the birth of Christ.
The subject is wonderful. These groups are not just symbols of religious sensibilities and possibilities now faded. They suggest a great deal about the origins and evolution of the major world religions. And they are challenging components of a modern world: intricate compressed identities, rooted in history and landscape, but also systems of belief that have changed dramatically over time, incorporated rival religions, and been exported to new lands.
But the subject is almost impossible. These religions are formidably difficult to access, understand, or describe. They survived partly because they are located in some of the most remote, mountainous, and dangerous regions of the Middle East. The believers sometimes speak obscure, archaic languages. The archives and scholarly accounts of the faiths are intimidating. In some cases the religions are esoteric: it is forbidden to record, discuss, or reveal their beliefs. In other cases, the religions are persecuted, and believers have had to learn to conceal the details of their faith, to avoid being murdered. They rarely can or will speak to outsiders. It is, therefore, very difficult to imagine someone qualified to address the subject.
Gerard Russell is one of the few people able to write a book of this kind. Born in 1973 in America to British parents, Gerard Russell studied classical languages and philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford. He then joined the British Foreign Service, which sent him to Cairo to learn Arabic. His Arabic became sufficiently fluent for him to become the UK public spokesman on Arabic news channels. He was posted to Iraq after the US invasion, became consul general in Jeddah, and then was political counselor in the embassy in Kabul. In those posts, when many diplomats remained isolated from the local populations, he developed strong friendships with Arabs and Afghans outside the compound, aided by his linguistic skills, and became an ever greater expert on the countries and people with whom he lived. In 2009, he joined a group of Afghan specialists at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
He is so modest that it can be tough to remember just how difficult it must have been to produce this book. He presents himself again and again as simply a bemused tourist, clattering around on rural buses. But he is an erudite scholar with patience and a very nimble mind. He has an extraordinary capacity for synthesizing and presenting complex information. He has a great knack for winning the trust of interviewees. When he interviews people in Iran or Lebanon, he is doing so in fluent Arabic or Farsi. When he traces the influences on the Yazidis or the Mandaeans, he does so with a deep knowledge of Islamic history and Christian doctrine. When he writes about the bombs and attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, he writes as someone who has worked and lived through the politics and violence of those insurgencies. The network of friends on which he relies to move through dangerous areas or gain access to religious leaders has been developed over years. This—his first book—is the fruit of two decades of experience and reflection.
Each of these religions has been shaped by a dozen other religions, living, evolving, and vanished. Theology is a subtle and tough discipline, where apparently “trivial” disagreements prove to have vast and often fatal consequences, frequently provoking sectarian killings. Many of the most basic facts about these faiths are still subjects of fierce debate, some driven by new data, some simply by new politics and fashions in anthropology or world religion. Thousands of books and articles demand to be read. Unpublished manuscripts in archaic languages need to be consulted. Some of the best accounts are a century old but need to be filleted for the prejudices of their authors. Much of this information is—inconveniently—relevant and good.
And “modernity,” conflict, and “the West” overshadow everything. Many of the religious homelands of these faiths are today in active conflict zones—Iraq, Afghanistan, the edge of Syria—that have been swept up in the fortunes of regimes supported or toppled by the United States, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Qatar. “Pagan” families have experienced occupation, proxy wars, honor killings, kidnappings, and giant truck bombs. The “pagans” are now clean-shaven men in suits or young professional women. In the last three decades, unparalleled numbers have left their rural homes, lost their links to their original landscape and extended family, and begun to marry out and forget their old religion. And perhaps the majority of believers have now fled as refugees to the West. So an honest portrait of a contemporary faith requires a description not only of a three-thousand-year-old temple and its ancient priest but also of a converted cinema in London or a community center in Detroit, all surrounded by the juddering fantasies and pressures of contemporary Western culture.
Russell navigates all of this, creating an almost effortless narrative, so that twenty years of dedication, study, imagination, and care are left very much in the background. It is tempting at times to hope for a more romantic account, more focus on his own emotional responses, a clearer glimpse of his own faith or views on God. There could have been space for Wordsworth’s fascination with paganism as another energy or possibility:
—Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
But Russell resists this, just as he resists the temptation of boasting about his discoveries or of turning the story of the decline, persecution, and scattering of these religions into a prolonged lament.