Today Sanliurfa is a Muslim city, and its heart is an ornate mosque surrounded by a park where families and couples stroll in the relative cool of the evening. After reaching the city and installing myself in a local guesthouse, I joined them, thinking about the city’s past. There has been a settlement on the site for thousands of years—for instance, between 2000 and 600 bc in the time of the Assyrian Empire, whose legendary king Nimrod features in the Bible and whose capital, Nineveh, stood where Mosul is today. The modern city was founded by one of Alexander’s lieutenants and subsequently changed hands many times as Romans, Persians, and Byzantines—and, in a later era, Arabs, Crusaders, and Turks—fought over it. Above the mosque, on a ridge, a tall pillar still stands with an inscription in the extinct language Syriac, a reminder of this history.
There turned out to be another relic of the past in the park: Egeria’s tasty fish. A small stream ran through the park, and I noticed it was full of carp—thousands of carp, as thickly gathered together as if they had been caught in a net. They thrashed about, writhing past each other, three or four deep. A man came to stand next to me, his head draped in a black-and-white keffiyeh. Every so often one of the people walking in the park would come scurrying up to him, half kneel, press the man’s hand to lips and then forehead, and mutter briefly in Kurmanji. Each time this happened, the man would scowl with feigned annoyance and maybe move his hand out of the way in a condescending gesture. But he never turned the supplicants away.
Eventually the man addressed me. “Maybe you are wondering how there are so many fish here?” he asked. “Nobody here will kill or eat them. When the evil king Nimrod wanted to punish the prophet Ibrahim, he ordered him to be burned alive on a pyre of flaming coals. But God turned the fire into water and the coals into fish. This is why we regard these fish as holy.” Ibrahim was Abraham, who is claimed by Muslims as well as Jews as a prophet. But the tradition of Sanliurfa’s sacred fish was older than Islam, dating back at least to Egeria’s time and perhaps much further. The people standing around that pool once spoke Aramaic, then Greek, then Arabic, and now Kurmanji, and Christianity has come and gone, but the fish remain.
“My name is Mahmoud,” the man said. He was a Muslim, and a Kurd like many of the people of Sanliurfa. He explained that he was a man of some standing locally. And as we talked he told me about a ruined city to the south of Sanliurfa, called Harran. That evening I read about Harran and discovered that, though now abandoned, it had once played a major part in history. It was allegedly where Abraham lived before adopting Yahweh as his God. (This has now been called into question: the biblical account certainly places him in a town called Harran, but it may have been a town of the same name much further south.) It was definitely the place where the Romans experienced one of their most famous defeats. In 53 bc the Roman plutocrat Crassus launched what he hoped would be a lucrative military campaign against the Parthian Empire (the successor to Cyrus’s Persian Empire), coveting its gold and its monopoly on the traffic of Chinese goods to the west. Tricked by a local Arab who was a double agent for the Parthians, Crassus and his legions were annihilated by a numerically inferior Parthian army. It was the first encounter in history’s longest war. Hostilities between Rome and Persia continued, with intervals of truce, for nearly seven hundred years.
We have forgotten this longest war, for both protagonists are extinct, but it shaped their world and ours. In its last phase, when the Roman emperors had moved to Byzantium, the Persians found allies among the Byzantine Empire’s Jewish communities; the Byzantines, meanwhile, employed Arabs, some of them Christians, to fight against Persia. News of the war even reached remote Mecca, where the Prophet Mohammed was converting Arabs to the new religion of Islam. At one point, after a Persian victory at Antioch in ad 613, it seemed as though the Byzantine Empire was on the verge of utter defeat. The Persian emperor wrote to his Byzantine rival, “Even if you take refuge in the depths of the sea, I will stretch out my hand and take you,” while the Byzantines issued coins inscribed “God help the Romans.” The Prophet Mohammed and his followers were troubled, because Christian Rome was meant to have God on its side. A Koranic verse offered comfort. “The Byzantines have been defeated in a nearby land,” it acknowledged, “but after their defeat they will overcome . . . And that day the believers will rejoice.” The Byzantines did recover, dealing the Persian empire a mortal blow—and cutting payments to their Arab mercenaries, dismissing them as “dogs.” The Muslim Arabs changed their mind about Byzantium and marched north to seize its southern territories and ultimately conquer the Persian Empire, too. The seven-hundred-year war had exhausted both empires; without it, Islam might not be the world religion that it is today, and the Christian West, with its capital at Istanbul, might have a Zoroastrian-dominated culture as its Eastern rival.
In the course of that war, a curious cultural encounter took place. In the first century ad southern Turkey fell into Roman hands for the first time. Legionaries posted to this area encountered a religion that was wholly alien to them. It seems they found it attractive: when they went back to Rome, they took a version of it with them. It was the worship of the god Mithras. And it had some similarities to the religion of the Yazidis, the nearest of whom now live 120 miles east of Harran. Underground chapels dedicated to Mithras—built around a spring or stream, like the underground chamber at Lalish where Mirza was baptized—were constructed in great numbers across the Roman Empire. Initiation into the cult was intentionally difficult, and only initiates were allowed to learn the cult’s unwritten teachings (which were kept so secret, in fact, that we know very little about them today). This was not the only point of similarity between the Yazidis and the Mithras worshipers. Both religions involved praying three times a day, revering the sun, wearing girdles, and sacrificing bulls. Finally, the Mithras worshipers called themselves “those united by the handshake.” To the modern ear that sounds unremarkable: what was so special about a gesture that was so ordinary? But it was not then the standard gesture of greeting that it has since become in the West. It appears that it became so thanks to the Mithraists—for whom it was a ritual of bonding, as it is for the Yazidis. Mithras’s cult eventually disappeared when Christianity became popular in the Roman Empire, but the gesture has survived. Completely shorn of all its mystical associations, it is now the universal gesture of friendship.
The god Mithras, depicted in the act of killing a bull; a snake, dog, and scorpion are also shown, which all feature in different ways in some contemporary Middle Eastern religions. From a subterranean chapel at Santa Maria Capua Vetere, Italy, dating to the second or third century ad. Digital image courtesy of the Getty Museum’s Open Content program
No scholar knows the full history of the Yazidis. The remoteness and secrecy that kept them safe from outside interference also kept them out of most history books. Unlike the Mandaeans, who lived in relative isolation in the Iraqi Marshes, the Yazidis have been exposed to and influenced by many different religions and cultures over the past two thousand years. It would be a mistake to think that they are “the same as” this or that ancient religion just because they have cultural characteristics in common. There are differences between Yazidis and Mithraists: the Yazidis have three main castes and the Mithraists had seven, for example; Sanliurfa in Roman times did not speak Kurmanji; and ethnically, the modern Yazidis may not be linear descendants of the people of Sanliurfa. But our experience of religion is so conditioned by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (the Abrahamic faiths) that we forget that in the Middle East there has been, and remains, a wholly separate family of religions to which, loosely speaking, the Yazidis belong. Although the Roman soldiers who popularized the handshake had not met the Yazidis themselves, clearly they had encountered a religion from the same family.
—————
All the way to Harran, along a road with desert on either side, Mahmoud puffed incessantly at one cigarette after another. When we reached the ruined city, it proved
to be a peculiar place. The modern-day settlement, built by Arab migrants who came from Iraq a few centuries ago, is made up of a group of beehive-shaped huts, their conical roofs smudged with smoke, grouped around a ruined stone fortress. Pale stones scattered across the hillside nearby were the remnants of a medieval mosque. Thousands of years ago, however, when Harran was one of the region’s largest and best-known settlements, the same pale stones were part of a temple dedicated to the moon god Sin. The Babylonian king Nabonidus, who rebuilt the temple in the sixth century bc, was especially proud of the stones’ color and declared that he had made Harran “as brilliant as moonlight.” His 2,500-year-old inscription was uncovered in the 1950s, when an archaeologist turned over one of the steps of the ruined mosque and found that the mosque’s builders had recycled Nabonidus’s stones instead of quarrying new ones.
Long after the Roman Empire had become Christian, and even after their city had become part of the Muslim Arab empire, the Harranians stubbornly continued to worship the seven planets (true to Babylonian tradition, they regarded the sun and moon as planets, and were aware of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) and to allocate each one of them a holy day. Their ancient customs were coupled with sophisticated philosophy and scientific knowledge. The temples to the planets, for example, were arranged in order of the planets’ distance from the earth. And the worship of those planets was justified by an elaborate theology. The Harranians agreed with the Greek philosophers who had concluded that there was a supreme God who was the ultimate explanation for why the universe exists but who was far beyond the grasp of the human intellect. Since God was literally indescribable, mere human beings could hope only to see and revere the projections of God in the material universe.
As the eleventh-century Muslim theologian Shahristani put it, trying to explain the Harranians’ beliefs, God “multiplies himself in persons before the eyes of men. These bodies or persons are the seven planets which govern the world.” Thus Babylonian and Assyrian religious practices could survive with a new ideology to underpin them: the planets could legitimately be worshiped as projections of God. So could some people, as the writer goes on to explain: there could be “a descent of God’s essence” into a human being, “or a descent of a portion of his essence, which takes place according to the degree of the preparedness of the person.” When this essence descends in its fullest form, it might make a person into a sort of projection of God on earth. Shahristani recorded that the Harranians believed in reincarnation, which meant that these projections of God might die and then be reborn, returning to earth in successive eras.
The Muslim armies that seized the city from the Byzantines in ad 638 were unsure what to do with the Harranians. According to the Koran, “people of the book”—including Christians, Jews, and the so-called “Sabians”—deserved special tolerance. Polytheists, on the other hand, were generally thought to deserve death if they did not convert. It was not clear to which of these categories the Harranians belonged. So when the Arabs were confronted with a temple to the moon god, some among them—especially those who had been Jewish or Christian before adopting Islam—wanted to destroy it immediately. Another group of Arabs, though, had relatives who practiced something similar to the Harranian religion. This group defended the right of the Harranians to worship as they had before. Their view prevailed, and the temple survived for two hundred more years.
At the end of that time the caliph himself happened to pass through Harran. The people were terrified. The caliph might condemn them as pagans, and strip them of legal rights or even condemn them to death. Then they spotted the reference to “Sabians” in the Koran and latched on to it: they declared that they were the Sabians, and in doing so won another three hundred years of peace. (Only the perceptive Biruni pointed out that there were Mandaeans in the southern Iraqi Marshes who were the real Sabians.) The Harranians were also protected by their knowledge of Greek science, which made them useful to their Muslim rulers. A Harranian called Thabit ibn Qurra was employed by the illustrious “House of Wisdom” in Baghdad, an institution founded by the Muslim caliphs as a repository of the world’s scientific knowledge. He calculated the length of the year to within two seconds and proved that Pythagoras’s theorem of triangles had a wider application than had previously been demonstrated. He made an eloquent defense of his culture: “Who was it that settled the inhabited world and propagated cities, if not the outstanding men and kings of paganism? Without the gifts of paganism, the earth would have been empty and impoverished, enveloped in a great shroud of destitution.”
So it was not until the eleventh century that Harran’s luck ran out and a mob tore down the shrine, scattering its stones, “brilliant as moonlight,” on the hillside. A hundred years later the Mongols destroyed the city and its people, wiping out two thousand years of history. But the Harranians’ ideas can still be found in a belt of land south of the ruined city, stretching from the mountainous Iranian province of Azerbaijan westward to the Mediterranean Sea. On the Syrian coast, for example, a community of Alawites have practiced for many centuries a very unusual form of Islam permeated with customs and ideas that the Harranians would have recognized. Though technically they are Shi’a, Alawites have as little in common with orthodox Shi’a as Unitarians do with evangelical Protestants. The Alawites followed eleven of the twelve imams who led the Shi’a in the first two centuries of Islam. Then their ideas developed in a very radical direction.
In 2012 I set out to interview an Alawite sheikh in northern Lebanon, in the hope that he might talk to me about his religion. My expectations were low. Not even his own flock were entitled to know the secrets that he held, and I was an outsider who represented two undesirable nationalities (British and American) at once. At the time of my visit the Alawites were especially controversial because the Syrian government and its Alawite president, Bashar al-Assad, were involved in brutal repression and mass killings. So I was unsure how easy it would be to reach them, let alone get them to talk. But, armed with a cheap mobile phone, some phone numbers, a grizzled taxi driver from Beirut’s southern suburbs, and a car that had seen better days, I was going to try.
The Sunni Muslim city of Tripoli is located right up in the north of Lebanon, and it is in one of its suburbs (originally a hill village, which the city has now swallowed up) that the Alawites live. It was obvious when I had entered this suburb: there were huge portraits of Bashar al-Assad hanging from every lamp-post. I had arranged the meeting through a local strongman who was accused of organizing the militia that led the local Alawites in battles against their Sunni Muslim neighbors. Men standing in the street quizzed the taxi driver who brought me and were satisfied only when they found that he was Shi’a. That made him an ally, in their eyes—a rare thing.
After a full-body search to make sure I had no concealed weapons, I was ushered into the study of an Alawite sheikh whose head was encased in a red-and-white turban. “None of our beliefs are hidden,” he assured me. “There are a few things that are private, that is all—ancestral customs and suchlike.” These included a ban on eating camel or rabbit meat, and on eating meat from any animal of a different sex from oneself: women ate the meat of female animals and men the meat of male animals. Did they attach a sacred significance to groves of trees, as the British ambassador had suggested to me? No. Did they regard Ali as divine? No, just as a lawgiver and successor to the Prophet. As for Syria, he claimed, what was going on there was the work of terrorists acting in the service of Israel. As I left, the sheikh was willing to share with me one last observation about his religion. “There are no Alawites in hell,” he said with a smirk. “Only the terrorists are in hell, suffering torment.”
The sheikh was being less than frank according to an Alawite who asked to remain strictly anonymous. The Alawites’ most secret ritual involves the drinking of consecrated wine and shows very clear Christian influences—they call it the Mass, and their books make references to Jesus—but also draws on traditions
that come from Iran: the core of the ritual is inherited from Zoroastrianism, in which wine is regarded as a means to achieve communion with God. People can be reincarnated as plants or animals; perhaps this is why certain types of tree have a sacred significance, though the sheikh denied this. The Alawite holy books (which, though no non-initiate may see them, have been published by Western scholars) teach ideas that were justified by early Muslim philosophers but which also continued the traditions of Harran. The books list many figures from history as having been the human equivalents of God’s celestial servants: not just ones familiar from Islam and Christianity, such as Mohammed and Jesus, but also others drawn from classical traditions, such as Plato and Alexander the Great. The greatest of them, in their tradition, is Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed. He was a glimpse or image of God, and the closest thing to God on earth that the limited human mind could conceivably grasp. It would be right to exalt Ali by saying that he was God, but wrong to limit God by saying God was Ali. (The Alawites actually say “the image is God but God is not the image,” a phrase that resembles that used by Nestorian Christians in a text dated to ad 550: “The Messiah is God but God is not the Messiah.”)
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East Page 8