Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms

This was a fascinating look at some lesser known religions of the Middle East. I had some passing knowledge of Zoroastrianism and the Samaritans but reading about other peoples like the Kalash and Mandaeans was engrossing. I also appreciated how neutral the author kept this book, particularly in the chapter about Samaritans, whose existence is now so adjacent to the Israeli - Palestinian conflict.

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This is an extremely interesting and extremely informative survey of the non-Islamic religions that have survived in the Islamic world, but which face extinction in their homelands in the face of resurgent fundamentalist Islam. The author, Gerard Russell, is an Arabic and Persian speaking British diplomat. His narrative features a kind of “diplomatic portfolio” of background, theology and history of these surviving communities plus his own interactions with members of the communities, which allows the reader to see how these communities are experienced outside the pages of a textbook. The writing is well-done. The author obviously shares an interest in the people who are the subjects of his book. The “travelogue” features of the book reminds an older reader of documentaries by Lowell Thomas about visits to exotic places where life is different and sometimes dangerous.

This book is important for obtaining an understanding of modern Islam. Most people have no idea of the religious diversity that has existed in the Islamic world up until quite recently. I remember reading the following exchange in the Hugo award winning science fiction novel “This Immortal” by Roger Zelazny between the characters Hassan and Conrad Nomikos:

““My father was a very good and land and religious man,” he said. “He worshipped Malak Tawûs, whom the benighted Shi'ites” (he spat here) “call Iblis— or Shaitan, or Satan— and he always paid his respects to Hallâj and the others of the Sandjaq. He was well-known for his piety, his many kindnesses.”

Hassan goes on to mention that his father worshiped the “Peacock Angel.”

That exchange has stuck with me for forty years, but I did not know that the people Zelazny was describing was a community of 500,000 in northern Iraq until ISIS began its extermination campaign and the world learned about the Yazidis.

Russell describes his encounters with the Mandaean of southern Iraq, who claim John the Baptist as a prophet, and the Yazidis, who revere the Peacock Angel as the closes approximation to the unknowable God, and the Zoroastrians, dualists who were the original religion of Iran, and the Druze, who may or may not be Islamic but have a substantial community in Lebanon, and the Copts, who were the original Christian community in Egypt, and the Samaritans, 800 or so survivors of a variant Judaism that worshiped on Mount Gerizim and not in Jerusalem, and the Kalasha, the last pagans of Afghanistan. There was even a interaction the Alawites of Syria, a Muslim sect that drinks wine and baptizes and is the religion of Syria's dictator. Russell offers the interesting thesis that Mandaeans are what Gnosticism could have, or did, evolve into and that the Druze retain much of the ancient Pythagorean religious system.

Most of these communities are substantial - numbering in the hundreds of thousands with heartlands geographically protected by marsh or desert or mountain. What they all have in common is that they have survived on the sufferance of Islam, a sufferance which has been sorely absent at various times in history, but they have all managed to persevere into modernity.

What was also interesting to me is that all of these religions - except the Kalasha and Zoroastrian - appear to be essentially monotheistic. Even the Yazidis recognize a distant, incomprehensible “one” that is represented by a lieutenant, Maelek Taoos, the Peacock Angel. The Zoroastrians recognize two divine principles, but they are called to serve the Good principle against the Evil principle, which seems fordained to lose in the end. This got me to wondering about the nature of monotheism. Did these religions survive because they were essentially monotheistic?, or did they bury the non-monotheism to survive?, or is it the case that monotheism is far more common than we are taught?

What the reader also gets is how these survivals swore off proselytization. Some religions - the Druze and the Yazidi - limit their religion to their own ethnic community. Others are keenly aware that aggressive proselytization can and will provoke a violent reaction by their dominant Muslim neighbors.

I also found it interesting that the lay adherents of many of these religions are institutionally unable to explain the doctrines of their faith. The author mentions that Druze and Yazidi lay people are not taught the doctrines of their religion, leaving such knowledge to their sheikhs. The lay people are therefore at a disadvantage in the emerging world when they emigrate and are challenged by the adherents of other religions.

The author also presents a picture of recent history where Islam was not what it is today. It seems that Islam was liberalizing under the nationalism of the early 20th century, as, for example, Egyptians began to stress their common nationality instead of their separate religious identity. This reduced religious bigotry and expanded opportunity for Copts. This process was undermined in Egypt by “the last Arab,” i.e., Gamel Nasser, who wanted to create a pan-Arab state, not an Egyptian one. Then, Sadat supported fundamentalist Muslims against sectarian Communists. The rest is history, that is still working itself out.Likewise, the murderous autocrat Saddam Hussein put the lid on sectarianism in Iraq in the interest of building an Iraqi nation, which had the effect of making his dictatorship more open to non-Islamic religious minorities. All of this was undone by the war and the rise of ISIS. Religious minority communities have to be careful in picking sides because they are so vulnerable. They usually find it expedient to support the government. When things become chaotic, however, their neutrality makes them a target for all sides. This fear also explains the tradition of “honor killings”; marriages between minority religions threaten the survival of the community as the wives are expected to raise their children in their husband's religion and the community can then lose fertile women, on the one hand, but, worse, such marriages force the minority religious community into the web of politics and feuds in the larger community.

Russell does present a history that suggests that Islamic states were more pluralistic and tolerant at some time. It would seem that this is not a constant state of affairs, Russell mentions numerous occasions in the memory of these communities when they were subjected to persecution, mass-murder or forced conversion. The most recent of such occurred in the last 100 years in the mountains of Afghanistan when the Kafiristan pagan peoples, who had defeated every invader since Alexander the Great, succumbed to an Islamic invasion in 1895. Kafiristan was renamed Nuristan and the people were forcibly converted to Islam, apart from a remnant who continued to worship the old gods in one or two scattered communities.

Russell does not feel optimistic about the fate of these communities in their homeland. The demographics support pessimism. Minority religious communities are dying in the Middle East. There are more Copts in Michigan than Cairo. Russell observes:

“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.”

Russell concludes with a narrative about the diverse Arab community of Michigan where Druze, Copts, and Mandeans have settled. But he points out that these communities are probably fighting a holding action against assimilation.

The book is well-written. I listened to it as an audiobook and it was absorbing. The book, however, has pictures and maps that add to to the experience.