HEIRS TO FORGOTTEN KINGDOMS
Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East
Gerard Russell
Basic Books; 320 pages; $28.99
In early August, fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) advanced on the northern Iraqi city of Erbil, routing the local Kurdish forces, storming the surrounding villages and seizing control of the Mosul Dam, the largest in the country. The militants drove thousands of Iraqi Christians and Yazidis out of their homes, forcing them to take refuge in the barren heights of nearby Mount Sinjar in the intense summer heat.
As the ISIS approached the mountain, fears grew that a religiously motivated genocide was imminent. In response, United States President Barack Obama, who described the Yazidis as "a small and ancient religious sect", vowed to avert a massacre. Within weeks, the attack on Mount Sinjar had been repelled and the world's attention shifted elsewhere.
In his lively new book, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, Gerard Russell chronicles the emergence and survival of religious minorities like the Yazidis that have been overshadowed by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the dominant Abrahamic religions of West Asia. Alternating between personal travelogue and carefully researched history, Mr Russell introduces his readers to the Yazidis, Mandeans, Zoroastrians, Druze, Samaritans, Copts and Kalasha - groups that have been threatened by civil wars, growing intolerance, the rise of Islamic militancy, autocratic governments and the pull of emigration. Paradoxically, he argues that their survival is a testament to a long, and often overlooked, history of religious coexistence fostered by Islam. "They connect the present to the past, bringing us within touching distance of long-dead cultures," he adds. "They link the Middle East with European culture by showing how the two emerged from shared roots."
Mr Russell, a former British and United Nations diplomat, writes movingly of his encounters with the adherents of these faiths. Many of the groups he focuses on are secretive, and in the case of some, especially the Yazidis and the Druze, even many adherents of the religion aren't privy to all its rituals and sacred texts. There are clerical castes devoted to preserving these mysteries, but such practices often lead to fear, misconceptions and persecution on the part of outsiders. Consider, for example, the Yazidis, who believe in a monotheistic God and also revere the prophets of Islam and Christianity. Yet their central figure of worship is an angel known as Melek Taoos, who takes the form of a peacock. Because this angel is sometimes conflated with Satan, certain Muslims accuse Yazidis of being Devil worshippers.
At the heart of Mr Russell's exploration is the question of how these minority communities managed to coexist with Islam for such a long time. For centuries, they were able to reach an accommodation with Muslim rulers by fostering the notion that they too were ahl al-kitab, or "people of the book". The Quran singled out Jews, Christians and Sabians as possessors of books recognised as God's revelation. Thus, as the Islamic empire expanded, Jews and Christians were granted a legal status in Muslim communities as protected subjects. They were allowed to practice their faith, govern their own communities and defend themselves from aggressors in exchange for paying a special tax.
Mr Russell highlights the way other groups managed to secure this label for themselves, and, thus, were able to coexist with the dominant faith. "When Muslim preachers did seek converts more aggressively," he writes, "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." One central question, which Mr Russell doesn't explore fully, is how and why this tradition of tolerance changed, especially over the past half-century.
In his powerful polemic, In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong, first published in French in 1998, the Lebanese novelist Amin Maalouf describes how, in its early conquests, Islam developed a "protocol of tolerance" and contrasts that with the views of Christian societies at the same time. Mr Maalouf, himself a member of a religious minority - a Greek Catholic - wonders: "If my ancestors had been Muslims in a country conquered by Christian armies, instead of Christians in a country conquered by the forces of Islam, I don't think they would have been allowed to live in their towns and villages, retaining their own religion, for over a thousand years."
How did this "protocol of tolerance" collapse? Mr Russell hints at this in explaining the rise of Islamic militants like the ISIS, which view non-Muslims as people to be forcibly converted, driven into exile or put to the sword. Here Mr Russell's account could have been fleshed out more fully. Today's authoritarian regimes emerged in the 1950s and the 1960s, as the Arab world rid itself of the vestiges of colonial rule. Arab nationalists, eager to project an image of tolerance, embraced minorities in the region - except for Arab Jews, who were expelled from most Arab countries. But the Arab liberation movements ended in disappointment, yielding a politics of betrayal, exile and carnage.
Arab nationalism began to wane after the humiliating defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. By the 1980s, Islamist movements were gaining ground across the region, buoyed by the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Arab societies became more conservative, and the Islamic movements dislodged Pan-Arab and secular groups to exert greater influence over both public and personal life.
As religious identities become more pronounced, Mr Russell's work reminds us that West Asia was not always convulsed by sectarian bloodletting. For a long time, it was a place where minorities coexisted with the Muslim faith, inhabiting this world far more peacefully than they do today.
© The New York Times News Service 2014
