As I met these different religious groups, I was inspired and amazed at their constancy in faith. They have held on to practices and traditions without change for more than a thousand years—sometimes preserving them for many millennia, under constant pressure to convert. Most of these groups, though, are now more vulnerable than ever, and this book aims to give them a voice. They are worth hearing for other reasons as well: they connect the present to the past, bringing us within touching distance of long-dead cultures. They link the Middle East with European culture by showing how the two emerged from shared roots. They follow their religions differently than Europeans and Americans do—the Copts, for example, take on a burden of prayer and fasting that exceeds even that of monks in the West; the Druze have a religion that makes no demands of them at all, save that they marry within it. Thus the groups featured in this book seem to me to address three things that troubled me during my time in the Middle East: humanity’s collective ignorance of its own past, the growing alienation between Christianity and Islam, and the way the debate about religion has become increasingly the preserve of narrow-minded atheists and literalists..
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We have intellectual cousins in unexpected places. Greek philosophy is not a European phenomenon, for example, but a Mediterranean one and it influenced the Middle East as much as it did Europe. To give another example, when Alexander the Great marched through what we now call Afghanistan and Pakistan, he felt that he could see echoes of his own culture—and he was right, because Europe and North India share a common Indo-European heritage. Such links exist with people who live even farther east. The Christians of Iraq a thousand years ago shared their church with Mongolians; they had a Chinese patriarch and a bishop of Tibet, and influenced the modern-day Mongolian and Tibetan alphabets. Everywhere in the Old World, at least, apparent differences can conceal unexpected connections and commonalities. As I wrote this book I was always delighted to find these: they disprove the theories and beliefs of those who want to corral people into separate cultures and civilizations and set them at war with each other.
At the same time I enjoyed finding differences, too: ideas that differed from my own and challenged me to reflect on what I myself believed and why. The Lebanese–French writer Amin Maalouf, in a book called On Identity, called for a fight “for the universality of values” but also against “foolish conformism . . . against everything that makes for a monotonous and puerile world.” I agree with him—though I could never in my own mind decide whether cultural diversity should be treasured whatever the price. Should we be sad if a community grows rich and abandons its customs, or if a religious belief is defeated in argument? I don’t pretend to know the answer: I just believe that we happen to be fortunate that they have survived, and that today religions that have been sincerely observed for many generations are able to examine each other’s ideas and learn from them.
How did they survive so long under Muslim rule? Very often Islam is presented as an intolerant religion, and some of its own followers regrettably want it to be so. The existence of the minority religions described in this book shows that image of intolerance to be untrue, for they survived under Islam, while no equivalent faith survived in Christian Europe. The reasons for this, though, are complex. For the remainder of this introduction, let me try to summarize them.
One reason goes back well before Islam or Christianity. There were religions in the Middle East that were more sophisticated than the pre-Christian religions of Europe and which had common roots with Christianity and Islam. So whereas Christians had no hesitation about putting an end to the Norse or Celtic religions and relatively quick success in doing so, some Middle Eastern pagans—deeply learned in Greek philosophy and Babylonian astronomy, and possessing a complex theology—clung on much longer.
Also, though the Prophet Mohammed certainly wanted to put an end to the traditional religious practices of the Arabs, which involved worshiping multiple deities, the Koran was by contrast relatively benign toward religions that were monotheistic and had religious texts, such as Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. These groups were called “people of the book.” Several of the groups discussed here survived because they managed, somehow or other, to secure this label for themselves.
The early Muslims were not systematic about suppressing even openly pagan practices in the first three or four centuries of Islam, when Muslims remained the minority in many parts of the Middle East. When Muslim preachers did seek converts more aggressively, 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. A group of newly converted Muslims, for example, might say that their rites of reverence to the stars were legitimately Islamic because the stars were angels—and so they could preserve some parts of the older, pagan heritage that they were giving up by adopting Islam.
None of this means that minority faiths were treated well. This was a time when to disagree with the ruler about theology was also potentially to challenge his right to rule. It was understood, in both the Byzantine and Arab empires, that those who rejected the ruler’s religion would be disadvantaged. The “people of the book” were legally inferior to Muslims and paid an extra tax. When they rebelled against the imposition of taxes, as the Copts did in the ninth century ad, the state might begin to regard their religion as a subversive force and take measures to undermine it.
In the tenth and eleventh centuries, as Islam became the majority faith, communities that were not “people of the book” came under greater pressure. The tenth century saw the mass persecution and virtual extinction of the Manichees. In the eleventh century, the temple of the sun god Shamash at Harran, which had existed since Babylonian times, was demolished and the scholar al-Ghazali pressed for Muslims to abandon their fascination with pre-Islamic philosophers. Even then, though, scholars such as Biruni and Ibn Nadim were writing about non-Muslim religions with an objectivity that still impresses modern readers.
Conflict between Muslims and the followers of other faiths—Crusaders in the west, Mongol invaders in the east—further undermined tolerance, as Arabs looked for the enemy within. By the thirteenth century the fundamentalist cleric Ibn Taymiyyah was issuing every execration and encouragement to violence that he could against sects such as the Druze and Alawites. By this time, though, some of the Middle East’s minority religions had taken refuge in places where the authorities could not reach them, such as mountains and marshes. Central government did not become as strong in the Middle East as it did in Europe, and military force was usually deployed against rebels or outside conquests, not in suppressing religious divisions at home. It was not until the nineteenth century, for the most part, that these remote religious communities faced widespread interference from the state, and by the middle of that century the governments of the Middle East had begun to change their approach toward minorities and (sometimes under Western pressure, sometimes just inspired by progressive ideals) to offer them something like equality. The Ottoman Empire gradually granted its non-Muslim subjects near-equality in the nineteenth century. The fifty years from 1860 to 1910 revolutionized the status of the Copts in Egypt. The Iranian revolution of 1906 gave Zoroastrians a seat in the country’s parliament. All this proves that Muslims in the Middle East were perfectly capable of valuing diversity. In fact, it was sometimes the Europeans who did not. When asked by Lebanese Christians what his country might do to help them, the German kaiser replied: “You are three hundred thousand Christians among three hundred million Muslims. Why not turn Muslim?”
So why today are the Middle East’s minorities on the retreat? Why are attacks on Christian churches in Egypt or Baghdad, or on Yazidis in northern Iraq, more common now than they have been for 150 years? (Not forgetting minorities within Islam—even the largest Islamic group, the Sunnis, can find themselves a minority under pressure in Iran and Iraq, while massacres of Shi’a Muslims are common in Pakist
an.) There are several factors at play here.
For one, the diversity of the Middle East is partly because its governments were too weak to impose their religion. Today governments have more power, and when they choose to evict a religious minority or impose orthodoxy they can do it more effectively than ever before. The Ottoman Empire was able to organize, between 1915 and 1917, the killing of more than a million of its Armenian subjects when it perceived that the Armenians were siding with Russia—“giving the death warrant,” as the American ambassador to the empire later wrote, “to an entire race.” Civil wars, too, can reach deep into the territory of a religious group that might only want to be neutral—as the Yazidis of northern Iraq found in 2007, when they became the victims of one of the world’s deadliest terrorist attacks. There are no safe places anymore.
Religious groups in the Middle East have a high degree of internal cohesion. Marriage to an outsider is generally frowned on; people within the group may prefer to employ other members from the same group; converting to another religion is not an intellectual choice but a much more profound change, because it usually means leaving behind one’s community and joining a new one. Some religious groups (such as the Yazidis and Assyrians, for example) enjoyed a high degree of autonomy for many centuries, outside the reach of governments; a few still speak their own language. This internal cohesion means there is a tendency to hold such groups collectively liable for the actions of anyone who has their religion. Hence the past attacks on the Armenians and Jews, and the present ones on Shi’a and Christians. In itself, this is not new. In the complex and ever-shifting political landscape of the modern Middle East, though, it is easy to end up being loyal to the wrong people. The Samaritans, living on a mountain in the West Bank, try hard to avoid alienating either the Israelis or the Palestinians; the Yazidis of northern Iraq are being pressed to choose between Arabs and Kurds; the Egyptian Coptic Church has had to decide whether to back military or Islamic rule. Each choice makes enemies for the whole community, not just its leaders.
Although governments have become strong enough to crush troublesome minorities, some of them are hesitant to expend political capital and risk wider confrontation by protecting smaller communities from attack. In southern Egypt, if a Coptic family comes up against a Muslim tribe, it will lose the fight—whether that be over money, land, or “honor” (love affairs, as described in Chapter 6, are a particularly frequent cause of conflict). Some Coptic communities are big and tough enough to turn the tables. Those that are not rely on the police and courts to protect them—but even those institutions, which often lack moral authority, may be afraid of the belligerent tribe and prefer not to punish them. This is not only a religious issue. Racial minorities often have the same problem. Religious minorities in the twentieth-century Middle East, however, became detribalized, urbanized, and middle-class, meaning that they are now well placed to benefit from stability and economic growth, but also that they are usually not well enough organized to defend themselves, and so they become especially vulnerable in times of conflict.
Finally, the past few decades have brought a change in the behavior of some Muslims in the Middle East toward other religions, and toward rival interpretations of Islam itself. In Egypt, the past fifty years have seen much more violence against Copts than the previous fifty years had. In Pakistan, a country founded by a Shi’a Muslim, violence against the Shi’a has become common. Iraq, a country ruled in the 1950s by a man of mixed Shi’a-Sunni parentage, is now a maelstrom of communal violence. Weakness and vulnerability make for closed-mindedness and, in turn, closed-mindedness holds back societies. Anger and hatred toward outsiders strengthen the communal identity of a group, perhaps satisfy some atavistic human urge for companionship in the face of an external threat, and may be cultivated by the group’s leaders as a way to strengthen the group’s sense of identity and mutual loyalty. There is no quicker way to build a sense of group identity than to point to a common enemy who is wicked and powerful yet can be defeated—to be David defeating Goliath. In the Middle East, such anger and hatred—which sometimes boil over into violence and at other times simmer unnoticed, perpetuating themselves through virulent propaganda—are also the product of specific circumstances. Islamism’s secular competitors from the twentieth century, Communism and nationalism, have declined. In their time, all these ideologies appeared to offer opportunities for peoples in the Middle East to regain the dignity and power to which they felt entitled, and of which they felt European colonialism, American dominance, Israeli military strength, and Arab governments’ weakness and corruption were depriving them. Communism’s appeal and its external funding ceased when the Soviet Union collapsed; nationalism’s popularity has declined since the end of the anticolonial struggle of the early twentieth century. Both movements offered minorities a cause in which they could stand side by side with Muslims. With the decay of postcolonial nationalist movements, religious divisions became easier to exploit. The idea that Iraq, or Egypt, was a country for all of its citizens has given way, for some Muslims, to the older idea that the natural community is one based on religion. As Suha Rassam wrote in Christianity in Iraq, “All minorities . . . have become vulnerable in the absence of a unifying Iraqi identity.”
Outside attempts by a secularized Christian West to interfere in the Middle East have strengthened this religious tension—particularly when that interference has all too obviously not served the interests of the people of the Middle East. “We do not even propose to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country,” wrote Arthur Balfour in 1919 about the British scheme to establish a Jewish national homeland in what was then Palestine. That attitude has not greatly changed, as the ill-considered Coalition plans for postwar Iraq (including a failure to safeguard the country’s precious archaeological heritage) demonstrated in 2003.
Nor do state institutions often enjoy the moral authority that might help them face down extremists without resorting to the use of force. State-backed religious institutions and clerics are discredited in the eyes of some Muslims by the presumption that they have been given preferment and money in return for toeing the government line. Radicals can exploit this by presenting themselves as bolder, less corrupt alternatives. Confronted with religious radicals who are more popular than they are, governments often prefer to buy off the radicals rather than confront them.
The currency with which religious extremists have usually been bought off is the opportunity to radicalize future generations through the education system. Islamists did this successfully in the 1970s, when they were seen (including by Israel and the West) as a valuable antidote to Communism and radical nationalism; they have since benefited from the fact that oil and gas wealth has enriched the Middle East’s most conservative societies. In Egypt, they have used their influence over the past forty years to make the country’s laws more explicitly Islamic. This has created an environment where minorities feel unwanted; as one Egyptian Christian told me, “If the constitution makes Islamic law the source of legislation, then I feel marginalized.” Some Islamist groups use violence, too—usually for political motives, rather than just for the sake of encouraging conversions. Christians were targeted by Egyptian Islamists in the 1980s not just as a way to force conversions and remove an obstacle to religious homogeneity but also as a means to put pressure on the government. After the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt in 2013, and in revenge for it, radicalized gangs of young men burned dozens of churches.
At the same time, it is important not to exaggerate. There are plenty of cases of Muslims protecting Christians in Egypt, and in Lebanon—where a terrible civil war ended only about twenty years ago—polling suggests that religious tolerance is higher than it is in many European countries. The progress the twentieth century brought toward religious equality in the Middle East has not been wholly undone: not even Ayatollah Khomeini went so far as to restore the old penal laws that oppressed non-Musl
ims in nineteenth-century Iran. But minorities feel increasingly unloved. And it is easier for minorities to emigrate from the Middle East than ever before, since they have used the last century or so to educate and enrich themselves, and generally find it easy to emigrate to Australia, Canada, the United States, or Europe. So the prospect that some of these religions will diminish or even disappear from their homelands is a serious one. Nobody would lose from this more than the Muslims of the Middle East, who I hope therefore will welcome this book, which attempts to memorialize the diverse faiths their ancestors brought to the world.
One thing remains to be said, about belief. The communities in this book have refused every inducement to abandon their religious beliefs and customs, and have often endured insult or violence in order to stand by them. In some cases those religious customs are in themselves very demanding, as they are for the Copts who fast most of the year round, or indeed for Muslims during Ramadan. If people in the Middle East fight about their beliefs more than Europeans and Americans do, it is partly because those beliefs are so precious to them. While the fighting is something that should be stopped, the religious spirit that motivates it may have something more attractive to offer. So the chapters that follow may perhaps prompt a reflection: as well as all the lessons that the West wants to teach to the people of the Middle East, have we something to learn from them?
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I have chosen in the book to use modern names of countries in the Middle East, even when referring to the distant past. So when I say that something happened in “Lebanon” a thousand years ago—a time when there was no such country—I just mean that it happened in a place within what is now Lebanon. This is simply for convenience’s sake. I have also used ad and bc instead of ce and bce because, in a region where every community has its own calendar, there is not yet such a thing as a “Common Era.” To give an example, this year is ad 2014. In the Samaritan calendar the year is 3652, measured from the day when the people of Israel entered the Promised Land; in the Muslim calendar it is 1435, measured from Mohammed’s migration to Medinah; in the Zoroastrian calendar it is 1383, measured since the last Zoroastrian king was crowned. Given this plethora of different dating systems, it seems more honest to say that 2014 is a year reckoned on the European Christian system.
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East Page 2
