Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms (2 page)
Instead, he achieves something perhaps ultimately more valuable and more lasting—a careful chronicle. He truthfully and exactly records encounters with these religions in the twenty-first century. He introduces us in detail to his informants, gives us their context, and hints at their prejudices. He is never afraid to admit ignorance, uncertainty, or contradiction. He hints at a deep problem that the theologies of some of these religions no longer exist, if indeed they ever did. Some worshipers appear to continue their rituals without clear doctrines of sin or redemption; without clarity about the meaning of the words, or the objects and symbols in their temples; without any remaining memory of the stories of their gods. He links all his discoveries to contemporary landscapes.
This combination of linguistic skill, deep cultural understanding, courage, classical scholarship, and profound love of foreign cultures was once more common. Russell is in the direct tradition of British scholars/imperial officers such as Mountstuart Elphinstone, Macaulay, or even T. E. Lawrence. But it is now very rare. It is not an accident that Russell has now moved on from the British diplomatic service and Harvard University. Academics seem to be absorbed in ever more intricate internal arguments, which leave little space or possibility for a project of this ambition and scope. Foreign services and policy makers now want “management competency”—slick and articulate plans, not nuance, deep knowledge, and complexity.
Russell instead, brings older, less institutionalized virtues to bear. This book is a patient and nuanced challenge to grand theories and abstract ambitions. He is rigorous in his focus on the details of culture and history. He uncovers and helps to preserve the diversity and bewildering identities and commitments under the surface of a “global world.” He demonstrates how the autonomy, dignity, and ability of alien cultures can challenge Western vanities and preconceptions. And above all, he manages to link his love and his learning to living landscapes and living people. There is much to learn from this book.
c. 2560
BC
Great Pyramid built in Egypt
c. 1900 Indo-Europeans arrive in India, perhaps including ancestors of Kalasha
1842 Babylon emerges as an independent city-state
c. 1000 Date of composition of the Zoroastrian scriptures, the Avesta
740/722 Assyrians attack Israel, take the Ten Tribes into captivity
597 Nebuchadnezzar sacks Jerusalem, deports leading Jews to Babylon
331 Alexander the Great conquers Persia; shortly after, he passes the Hindu Kush
AD
70 Sack of Jerusalem by the Romans and destruction of the Second Temple
274 Death of Mani, founder of Manichaeism; Mandaeans already exist in Iraqi Marshes
313 Constantine issues Edict of Milan, granting recognition to Christianity
529 The Byzantine emperor Justinian closes Plato’s Academy
634–654 Arab Muslims conquer all lands from Morocco to Iran
635 The first Christian missionary arrives in China from the Middle East
1017 The Druze faith is first taught openly in Cairo
1095 Pope Urban II preaches the First Crusade
1160 Death of Sheikh Adi, a key figure in the Yazidi religion of northern Iraq
1258 Sack of Baghdad by Genghis Khan
1263 Birth of Ibn Taymiyyah, conservative critic of Druze and other heterodox Muslims
1501 Beginning of the reign of Shah Ismail I of Iran, who converted the country to Shi’a Islam
Imagine that the worship of the goddess Aphrodite was still continuing on a remote Greek island, that worshipers of Wotan and Thor had only just given up building longboats on the coasts of Scandinavia, or that followers of the god Mithras were still exchanging ceremonial handshakes in subterranean Roman chapels. In the Middle East, in contrast to Europe, equally ancient religions survived—often in marshes, wildernesses, mountains, and other remote or impenetrable places, and sometimes under the veil of a strict code of secrecy.
These religions might have dominated the modern world if history had taken different turns. A follower of the austere vegetarian preacher called Mani almost became emperor of Rome. Had he done so, the Roman Empire might have spread Mani’s teachings, not Christianity, across Europe; instead of going to Bethlehem, European pilgrims might head instead to the Iraqi Marshes, where Mani first preached. Instead, the Manichees became extinct, but their closest cousins, the Mandaeans, are still living in Iraq. Had it not been for the invasions of the Mongols and Tamerlane, Baghdad might still be a world center of Christianity, for there was a time when the Iraq-based Church of the East had bishops and monasteries as far east as Beijing.
In the course of fourteen years as an Arabic- and Farsi-speaking diplomat, working and traveling in Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, I encountered religious beliefs that I had never known of before: a taboo against wearing the color blue, obligatory mustaches, and a reverence for peacocks. I met people who believed in supernatural beings that take human form, in the power of the planets and stars to steer human affairs, and in reincarnation. These religions were vestiges of the pre-Christian culture of Mesopotamia but drew as well from Indian traditions that had been transmitted to the Middle East through the Persian Empire, and from Greek philosophy. They preserved, too, the customs of ancient civilizations of which they were the last, frail descendants. These are some—and only some—of the groups described in this book.
As I met these different religious groups, I was inspired and amazed at their constancy in faith. They have held on to practices and traditions without change for more than a thousand years—sometimes preserving them for many millennia, under constant pressure to convert. Most of these groups, though, are now more vulnerable than ever, and this book aims to give them a voice. They are worth hearing for other reasons as well: they connect the present to the past, bringing us within touching distance of long-dead cultures. They link the Middle East with European culture by showing how the two emerged from shared roots. They follow their religions differently than Europeans and Americans do—the Copts, for example, take on a burden of prayer and fasting that exceeds even that of monks in the West; the Druze have a religion that makes no demands of them at all, save that they marry within it. Thus the groups featured in this book seem to me to address three things that troubled me during my time in the Middle East: humanity’s collective ignorance of its own past, the growing alienation between Christianity and Islam, and the way the debate about religion has become increasingly the preserve of narrow-minded atheists and literalists..
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WE HAVE INTELLECTUAL COUSINS
in unexpected places. Greek philosophy is not a European phenomenon, for example, but a Mediterranean one and it influenced the Middle East as much as it did Europe. To give another example, when Alexander the Great marched through what we now call Afghanistan and Pakistan, he felt that he could see echoes of his own culture—and he was right, because Europe and North India share a common Indo-European heritage. Such links exist with people who live even farther east. The Christians of Iraq a thousand years ago shared their church with Mongolians; they had a Chinese patriarch and a bishop of Tibet, and influenced the modern-day Mongolian and Tibetan alphabets. Everywhere in the Old World, at least, apparent differences can conceal unexpected connections and commonalities. As I wrote this book I was always delighted to find these: they disprove the theories and beliefs of those who want to corral people into separate cultures and civilizations and set them at war with each other.
At the same time I enjoyed finding differences, too: ideas that differed from my own and challenged me to reflect on what I myself believed and why. The Lebanese–French writer Amin Maalouf, in a book called
On Identity,
called for a fight “for the universality of values” but also against “foolish conformism . . . against everything that makes for a monotonous and puerile world.” I agree with him—though I could never in my own mind decide whether cultural diversity should be treasured whatever the price. Should we be sad if a community grows rich and abandons its customs, or if a religious belief is defeated in argument? I don’t pretend to know the answer: I just believe that we happen to be fortunate that they have survived, and that today religions that have been sincerely observed for many generations are able to examine each other’s ideas and learn from them.
How did they survive so long under Muslim rule? Very often Islam is presented as an intolerant religion, and some of its own followers regrettably want it to be so. The existence of the minority religions described in this book shows that image of intolerance to be untrue, for they survived under Islam, while no equivalent faith survived in Christian Europe. The reasons for this, though, are complex. For the remainder of this introduction, let me try to summarize them.
One reason goes back well before Islam or Christianity. There were religions in the Middle East that were more sophisticated than the pre-Christian religions of Europe and which had common roots with Christianity and Islam. So whereas Christians had no hesitation about putting an end to the Norse or Celtic religions and relatively quick success in doing so, some Middle Eastern pagans—deeply learned in Greek philosophy and Babylonian astronomy, and possessing a complex theology—clung on much longer.
Also, though the Prophet Mohammed certainly wanted to put an end to the traditional religious practices of the Arabs, which involved worshiping multiple deities, the Koran was by contrast relatively benign toward religions that were monotheistic and had religious texts, such as Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. These groups were called “people of the book.” Several of the groups discussed here survived because they managed, somehow or other, to secure this label for themselves.
The early Muslims were not systematic about suppressing even openly pagan practices in the first three or four centuries of Islam, when Muslims remained the minority in many parts of the Middle East. When Muslim preachers did seek converts more aggressively, some of them were prepared to tolerate a wide range of beliefs and practices that elided the difference between Islam and the old religions it was supplanting. A group of newly converted Muslims, for example, might say that their rites of reverence to the stars were legitimately Islamic because the stars were angels—and so they could preserve some parts of the older, pagan heritage that they were giving up by adopting Islam.
None of this means that minority faiths were treated well. This was a time when to disagree with the ruler about theology was also potentially to challenge his right to rule. It was understood, in both the Byzantine and Arab empires, that those who rejected the ruler’s religion would be disadvantaged. The “people of the book” were legally inferior to Muslims and paid an extra tax. When they rebelled against the imposition of taxes, as the Copts did in the ninth century
AD
, the state might begin to regard their religion as a subversive force and take measures to undermine it.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries, as Islam became the majority faith, communities that were not “people of the book” came under greater pressure. The tenth century saw the mass persecution and virtual extinction of the Manichees. In the eleventh century, the temple of the sun god Shamash at Harran, which had existed since Babylonian times, was demolished and the scholar al-Ghazali pressed for Muslims to abandon their fascination with pre-Islamic philosophers. Even then, though, scholars such as Biruni and Ibn Nadim were writing about non-Muslim religions with an objectivity that still impresses modern readers.
Conflict between Muslims and the followers of other faiths—Crusaders in the west, Mongol invaders in the east—further undermined tolerance, as Arabs looked for the enemy within. By the thirteenth century the fundamentalist cleric Ibn Taymiyyah was issuing every execration and encouragement to violence that he could against sects such as the Druze and Alawites. By this time, though, some of the Middle East’s minority religions had taken refuge in places where the authorities could not reach them, such as mountains and marshes. Central government did not become as strong in the Middle East as it did in Europe, and military force was usually deployed against rebels or outside conquests, not in suppressing religious divisions at home. It was not until the nineteenth century, for the most part, that these remote religious communities faced widespread interference from the state, and by the middle of that century the governments of the Middle East had begun to change their approach toward minorities and (sometimes under Western pressure, sometimes just inspired by progressive ideals) to offer them something like equality. The Ottoman Empire gradually granted its non-Muslim subjects near-equality in the nineteenth century. The fifty years from 1860 to 1910 revolutionized the status of the Copts in Egypt. The Iranian revolution of 1906 gave Zoroastrians a seat in the country’s parliament. All this proves that Muslims in the Middle East were perfectly capable of valuing diversity. In fact, it was sometimes the Europeans who did not. When asked by Lebanese Christians what his country might do to help them, the German kaiser replied: “You are three hundred thousand Christians among three hundred million Muslims. Why not turn Muslim?”