Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East
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More Advance Praise for
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
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms
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
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LCCN: 2014948120
ISBN: 978-0-465-03056-9 (hardcover)
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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
Foreword by Rory Stewart
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 diffic
ult 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.
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.
Timeline
c. 2560 bcGreat Pyramid built in Egypt
c. 1900Indo-Europeans arrive in India, perhaps including ancestors of Kalasha
1842Babylon emerges as an independent city-state
c. 1000Date of composition of the Zoroastrian scriptures, the Avesta
740/722Assyrians attack Israel, take the Ten Tribes into captivity
597Nebuchadnezzar sacks Jerusalem, deports leading Jews to Babylon
331Alexander the Great conquers Persia; shortly after, he passes the Hindu Kush
ad 70Sack of Jerusalem by the Romans and destruction of the Second Temple
274Death of Mani, founder of Manichaeism; Mandaeans already exist in Iraqi Marshes
313Constantine issues Edict of Milan, granting recognition to Christianity
529The Byzantine emperor Justinian closes Plato’s Academy
634–654Arab Muslims conquer all lands from Morocco to Iran
635The first Christian missionary arrives in China from the Middle East
1017The Druze faith is first taught openly in Cairo
1095Pope Urban II preaches the First Crusade
1160Death of Sheikh Adi, a key figure in the Yazidi religion of northern Iraq
1258Sack of Baghdad by Genghis Khan
1263Birth of Ibn Taymiyyah, conservative critic of Druze and other heterodox Muslims
1501Beginning of the reign of Shah Ismail I of Iran, who converted the country to Shi’a Islam
Introduction
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.