Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms

Introduction

As the British archaeologist Leonard Woolley was patiently excavating the ruined city of Ur in southern Iraq, he uncovered by chance a breathtakingly beautiful carved wooden panel. It had survived nearly five thousand years in the dry sand and was as fragile—as Woolley put it—as the plumage on the wings of a butterfly. Even as he looked at the panel, a rare thing happened: in the middle of the Iraqi desert, it began to rain. Before Woolley could even take a photograph of the carvings to record them for posterity, they had turned into featureless mud. They had survived for more than four millennia, and they dissolved in front of his eyes.

It was with a similar feeling that I wrote this book—a feeling that I was seeing survivors from the ancient world, as beautiful in their way as Woolley's carved panel, being destroyed even as I struggled to discover them. The Mandaeans, for example, lived until recently in southern Iraq, where they kept alive the Aramaic language of Babylon along with the ancient city's belief in the supernatural powers of the stars and planets. Mandaean magicians, as late as the 1940s, called upon the gods and goddesses of ancient Babylon in their conjuring. The Alawites of Syria believe in the possibility of God adopting human form, a teaching that was popular across the region before the spread of Islam. The Yazidis pray toward the sun three times a day, perpetuating a custom of the region's ancient sun worshipers. Some of Syria and Iraq's Christians, known as Assyrians, see themselves as the inheritors of the ancient Assyrian civilization, and are fiercely proud of this heritage. It is almost as though the worship of the goddess Aphrodite still continued on a remote Greek island, or the Druids still inhabited their ancient holy island of Anglesey off Wales.

I fell in love with the Middle East when I first went there more than twenty years ago, but it can be a hard place to love. News from there is often anguished; pessimism has been an invaluable tool for predicting its politics; its most beautiful aspects—love of language, of history, and of God—have been sullied by hatred and prejudice. The Middle Eastern mosaic of religions and peoples, a monument to the region's immense and glorious history, is being dismantled. Our generation may be among the last who can encounter the diverse faiths of the Middle East while they still remain in their homeland.

In 1987 Iraq's Christians numbered 1.4 million, which was 8 percent of the country's population. Now they are down to 1 percent. Sanctions impoverished their country and forced many to flee in the 1980s and 1990s. Then, beginning in 2004, more than sixty Christian churches were bombed. Christians were attacked—sometimes out of religious hostility, sometimes out of greed for their homes, which gangs would seize once the owners had left. No wonder the Christian Iraqi population of metropolitan Detroit has swelled by at least a hundred thousand.

The Syrian civil war is not a straightforward battle between different religious sects—there are people of all religions on both sides—and it has made Syria, one of the Middle East's most diverse countries, a far more dangerous place. Tens of thousands of Syrian Alawites, who are mostly loyal to the country's Alawite president, Bashar al-Assad, have died in the fighting; the community has also attracted much more attention and hostility from its neighbors. And it is the ongoing conflict in Syria that gave birth to the region's newest and nastiest manifestation of intolerance, the terrorist group ISIS.

ISIS seized control of Sinjar and the Nineveh plains, parts of northern Iraq that were still rich in religious diversity, in 2014. They then slaughtered and raped the area's Yazidi inhabitants and drove out its Christians. About a third of the Christians who remain in Iraq are homeless, because ISIS occupies the towns and villages where Christianity was traditionally strongest.

ISIS calls itself "Islamic State" because it claims to be imitating the original Muslim community, who spread their new religion through stunning successes on the battlefield. ISIS's followers want to re-create what they imagine that early community to have been—one united in rigid obedience to a caliph, absolutely intolerant of different opinions about religion, oppressing Christians and Jews and exterminating idol worshipers. They reject what they view as a later weakening of the faith, in which the tough penalties laid down by the Koran were diluted, Muslims were divided among different states and governments, and diversity of belief was tolerated.

ISIS's supporters are in fact wrong about early Islamic history, which involved far more compromise with other religions than they imagine. When they chose to focus on the fact that early Muslims spread their religion through force of arms, they forget that it took a lot more than violence to build a state. Islam's golden era was in reality one in which Muslim rulers made liberal use of the talents of the other religious communities who lived under Islamic rule. By contrast, Islam's greatest period of intolerance toward those other faiths, during the late Middle Ages, was also its greatest period of poverty and backwardness.

In the modern era, a similar pattern has unfortunately recurred. In the first half of the twentieth century, Muslim-majority countries were progressive in their treatment of minority faiths. For many of those countries, this was also a time of hope, as they sought to liberate themselves from the dominance of their onetime Muslim imperial rulers while also fending off attempts at colonization by Christian governments. In the past few decades, religious narrow-mindedness, cultural decay, and other forms of backwardness have also gone hand in hand. ISIS is the culmination of that trend.

ISIS is equally attacking Islam's own past. It wants to erase the memory of the many Muslim caliphs who licensed and patronized non-Muslim communities under their rule, and Muslim clerics who tolerated those who held on to older faiths or half-merged them with Islam to form hybrid heterodoxies. It wants to erase, too, the great pride that modern Muslims often feel in the religious diversity of their homelands and their ancient pre-Islamic history. Such pride and open-mindedness were what enabled so many diverse religions to survive in the midst of Islam—and what has allowed more than ten million of their followers to remain there today. I hope that this book will remind people of the truths the terrorists want us to forget.

I hope, too, to show readers how the cultures of the Middle East and the modern West, ostensibly so different, are in fact closely linked through numerous historical ties. Twists of fate drew us apart, nothing more. Had it not been for the invasions of the Mongols and Tamerlane, which devastated the Middle East between 1240 and 1402, 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, and its Syriac script was adopted by Uighurs and Mongolians.

In the middle of the fourth century, 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 journeying to Bethlehem, European pilgrims might head instead to the Iraqi Marshes, where Mani first preached, and where the Manichees' close cousins the Mandaeans still live.

This did not happen; instead these religions retreated in the face of Christianity and Islam, finding havens in mountains and marshes and remote villages. That was where I found them when I traveled the Middle East as an Arabic- and Farsi-speaking diplomat. I was alternately intrigued and baffled: What were these religions? Where did they come from? How had they survived? These were mystery religions, whose followers might not even know what the religion taught. What was it like to belong to such a community? Why did the Yazidis refuse to eat lettuce or wear the color blue, and why was it taboo for them to trim their mustaches? Why did Mandaeans practice baptism, which I had always imagined to be a Christian ritual? Why did the Druze believe in reincarnation? What was the point of their secrecy? These riddles continued to puzzle me long after leaving diplomacy. Eventually they led me back to the Middle East, to research this book.

I found that though they might be little known today, these religions have had an influence on the history of Western society. We owe Western monasticism partly to the Manichees, who impressed St. Augustine with their ascetic and celibate lifestyle. The handshake was popularized in Europe by followers of Mithras, who were forerunners of the Yazidis (the Yazidis still practice the handshake in its original form, with a lump of sacred earth clasped between the two hands). The people of Harran, pagans who died out in the Middle Ages but bequeathed many of their customs to still-existing religions in the Middle East, played a major role in preserving the scientific knowledge of the ancient Greeks, which was eventually returned to Europe after the fall of Byzantium and helped inspire the Renaissance.

I found also that these communities, as minorities in the Muslim world, had endured fourteen centuries of legal discrimination, oppression, and danger. Some early Muslim rulers were prepared to condone the continued existence of non-Muslim and even pagan communities. But later ones were not. As military technology improved, governments slowly gained the ability to invade even the remotest places. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled the Arab world from the sixteenth century to the twentieth, put this technology to awful use when it massacred the Yazidis and infamously exterminated most of the Christian population of what is now Turkey. Yet these heterodox religious communities survived. They stubbornly refused every inducement to abandon their traditions. When need came they hid in the mountains or fled into the desert.

The Yazidis, for example, survived a succession of massacres—seventy-two, by their own count. Only a few among them understood what their religion's teachings were or the logic behind its arcane rules, but they preferred to die rather than abandon their ancestral faith. Similarly, many groups of Iraqi Christians have endured slaughter and exile numerous times in the past century, from death marches enforced by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 to the actions of ISIS today.

Despite their resilience, it will not be easy for these religions to keep their faith alive outside the Middle East. Ultra-secretive groups such as the Yazidis do not easily pass on their traditions. For the Yazidis, as also for the Druze and Mandaeans, priests are essential for the rites that keep the religion alive—and in their home villages are never far away. When Yazidis emigrate, though, they do not always get to choose where they end up; they may find themselves hundreds of miles from the nearest priest. Persecution in some ways preserved these ancient communities, giving them a strong sense of identity, limiting their contact with the outside world, and keeping them in villages where their customs were seamlessly integrated into their everyday lives. In a way they were fossilized. Now they are exposed to the elements.

What is more, when they move to the West, they find themselves living in a society that does not easily understand them. In the West, religion is a matter of public debate and secularism is the norm—so how to explain a religion that is heartfelt but secret? Sometimes these smaller Middle Eastern faiths seem similar to Christianity or Islam or (most of all, perhaps) Judaism, but they are from a wholly different tradition. They are the last heirs to once-vast kingdoms and civilizations whose history, beliefs, and ways of life have otherwise died out and been forgotten. Yet they deserve to be better understood, not least because of their valiant efforts to survive. The main purpose of this book is to give them a voice and a memorial.

It also highlights, I hope, the value of religious diversity. The Arab world declined when it rejected religious tolerance and began to enforce orthodoxy. Beginning in recent centuries, the West has flourished by doing the opposite. A country that values its minorities is one that can benefit from their talents and their connections with other communities around the world.

Finally, it says something about Islam. I hope to give a nuanced picture of Islam's interaction with other faiths. Some writers present Islamic history as one of irreproachable tolerance; others, as fourteen hundred years of uninterrupted persecution. In fact, rather like Christianity, Islam has sometimes been uncompromisingly oppressive but other times strikingly lenient and broad-minded. After all, these extraordinary and ancient faiths survived under many centuries of Muslim rule, while none did so in Christian Europe. Yet there are those who prefer to ignore the subtleties and say instead that the extremists speak for all of Islam. They want either to condemn all Muslims as extremists or to condone the extremists, suggesting that their ugly views must be tolerated since they speak for a billion Muslims. Both approaches miss the mark. I hope this book can give a truer picture.

1: Mandaeans

In the faded cafeteria of Baghdad's al-Rashid Hotel, the Mandaean high priest, his brother, and his cousin all looked at me, asking for my help. They did not know how honored I felt to meet them. Here, in front of me, were the representatives of one of the world's most mysterious religions. Because they worshiped one God, practiced baptism, took Sunday as their holy day, and revered a prophet called John, the Mandaeans had been mistaken by sixteenth-century European missionaries for yet another of the region's many and varied Christian sects. In fact, their religion is wholly separate from Christianity. They believe in a heaven, but it is called the Light-World; in an evil spirit, but one that, unlike Satan, is female, and called Ruha; and in baptism as a necessary condition for entering the Light-World, though for them it must be in running water, while babies who die unbaptized are comforted for eternity by trees bearing fruits shaped like their mothers' breasts. Their John is the Baptist, not the Evangelist, and although the Baptist is presented in Christian texts as a follower of Jesus, the Mandaeans see him as a greater prophet. After hearing the Christian gospel in which John the Baptist says he would be unfit to undo the strap of Jesus's sandals, one nineteenth-century Mandaean convert to Christianity became indignant. "Aren't Isa and Iahia"—the Arabic names for Jesus and John—"cousins, and therefore equal?" he demanded of the priest after the service. "Aren't they in the Light-World together?"