Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East

by Gerard Russell

  The Kalasha are famous for their homemade wine and brandy, which their religion does not prohibit. Here Wazir Ali (left), Azem Bek (third from left), and the author (between them) sample it during the Chaumos festival in January 2013.

  After our tea, Wazir and I went down to the floor below, and he knocked on the door of another house, to say hello. At the mention that there was a foreigner outside, two small girls popped their faces around the door for just a second and then were gone and could not be persuaded to emerge again. The village men, however, were very happy to be photographed, pointing out to me their own distinctive features and light-colored hair, and gesturing proudly to their village mosque, the only freestanding structure they had besides their village house.

  —————

  When the time came to leave the valley, Azem Beg rode with me in the car to Chitral, and asked if we might stop at a house at the foot of the Kalasha valley, where the people are all Muslim (it was in the same town, in fact, as Wazir’s school). He was paying a condolence call on the family who lived there and invited me to join him. I noticed what a good ambassador he was for his people, and that a part of this was how he played down his Kalasha identity. His name could be taken for a Muslim one (it was twenty years, one person told me, since any child had been given an old-style Kalasha name). He prayed with the family Muslim style, extending his hands and symbolically wiping his face with them. Earning Muslims’ respect in such ways could come in very handy when needed. Some Kalasha had once been taken as hostages in the course of a dispute over land, and Azem had worked with this family to set them free.

  The Kalasha needed diplomacy because they were vulnerable. A book written in 1982, by a passionate Pakistani Muslim defender of the Kalasha, presented a gloomy picture of Kalasha-Muslim relations: vandalism of Kalasha holy sites, money offered to Kalasha who converted, “missionary activity of the school teachers and a continuous denigration of the Kalasha culture by them.” The writer believed that, as he put it, “outsiders suffering from a feeling of superior culture” were destroying the old traditions. He was in part reflecting the efforts made in the 1950s, shortly after independence, to convert the Kalasha forcibly to Islam.

  Azem Beg and Wazir said that things had improved over the past few decades. The Pakistani police were controlling access to the valley and keeping out some of the most aggressive missionaries. Their own numbers, they told me, were increasing. Tourism—though it has decreased—has clearly benefited their villages, which now have a number of new, well-built houses. Even so, I was told by one Kalasha man that Muslim visitors would always nag him by asking, “Why have you not yet converted?”

  I feared that much worse might await them. Pakistan was a country of contradictions. It was founded by a liberal Shi’a Muslim, but in the past twenty years, four thousand Shi’a have been killed there, a blasphemy law has been deployed oppressively against the country’s minorities, and religious extremists have carved out areas of virtual self-rule in the Pashtun areas near Chitral, where they are challenged only by controversial, lethal US drones. Pakistani politicians who see a whole range of difficult constituencies that they must buy can see one that is cheap: religious fundamentalists will give their support for free if they are given influence over education and the morality of the people. All that is needed is to mortgage the future.

  However, a vein of tolerance can still be found in Pakistan wherever the fundamentalists have been kept out, and Chitral had long been largely cut off from the rest of Pakistan by its topography and by the British-drawn border, which put part of the valley in Afghanistan. In winter, the only land route for a long time had been a very tough climb over the Lowari Pass (at ten thousand feet) or else a trip through Afghan territory. But at the time of my visit a tunnel had been dug under the pass, which when it was fully opened would create an easy route between Chitral and the rest of Pakistan. It would boost the local economy but might also bring other, less desirable changes. “When that tunnel is open,” the Pakistani photographer Zulfikar gloomily said to me, “I wonder how long the Kalasha will last.”

  Epilogue

  Detroit

  In a supermarket in metropolitan Detroit, a conurbation that houses half a million people whose roots lie in the Middle East, I overheard a woman in a white smock take a break from stacking shelves to address a customer in a language that was half familiar to me; it was like Hebrew and Arabic, but different, its words unknown to me, smooth-flowing but laden with harsh consonants. It was Aramaic. Amid the Muzak and synthetic fruit drinks in a suburban American store, I was hearing the language of Christ.

  Aramaic was once the pre-Islamic lingua franca of the Middle East. Its different dialects all closely resemble both Hebrew and Arabic, to which Aramaic is essentially a linguistic cousin. (For example, “peace be with you” in Arabic is salaam aleikum, in Hebrew shalom aleichem, and in Iraqi Aramaic shlama lokhum.) It is still the language traditional rabbis in Jerusalem use when they curse. One of the most famous of Jewish rituals, the Kaddish prayer, has an Aramaic name, not a Hebrew one. (Kaddish is Aramaic for “holy.”) In the Middle East, Aramaic has now been all but displaced by Arabic, but in the distant northern villages where Iraq’s Christians endured over the centuries, it remains in use. When people from those villages watched Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, which was in the language that would have been used in Jesus’s time, they could understand it without subtitles.

  Originally these villagers’ ancestors belonged to the Baghdad-based Christian Church of the East. Hardly known in Europe, this was once one of the world’s great churches; it had the allegiance during the Middle Ages of 10 percent of all Christians in the world, and its Patriarch, based in Baghdad, had bishops and monasteries across a wider swath of the world than the Pope in Rome. Its missionaries brought Christianity to China in ad 635, a fact recorded on the so-called Nestorian Stele in Xi’an. In the thirteenth century it was the only Christian church to have at its head a man of East Asian origin (his name was Yahballaha, and he was Chinese or Mongolian; he came to Baghdad on an extraordinary four-thousand-mile pilgrimage from Beijing). Both Mongolia and Tibet have alphabets based on the Syriac script introduced by Iraqi Christian missionaries more than a millennium ago.

  The Church of the East evolved among Christians living under the Persian Empire, who found that their ideological differences with Western Christians usefully protected them from suspicion that they might be secretly in league with the rival Byzantines. Its members have sometimes been called Nestorians, a name that identifies them with Nestorius, who rejected the idea that a Christian could say on Good Friday that “God is dead.” He wanted to distinguish between Jesus as God and Jesus as man. The Church of the East never quite adopted the teachings of Nestorius, but it did reject the use of icons and play down the role of the Virgin Mary. British missionaries called them the “Protestants of the Middle East,” choosing to ignore their un-Protestant cult of saints and practice of monasticism.

  This church is today hardly even a shadow of what it once was. Much of this is due to Tamerlane, who sacked Baghdad in 1401 and left ninety thousand skulls on its ruins. He was particularly hostile to Christians, and from his time onward, it seems, the Church of the East clung on only in the mountains of northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, and southern Turkey. In the 1830s its members faced a similar threat when a militia sent from a nearby Kurdish chieftain, probably at the behest of the Ottoman government in Istanbul, killed twenty thousand Christian men, women, and children. The Church of the East—sometimes called also the Assyrian Church—had a number of splits over the centuries, some of them provoked by disputes over the church’s leadership which often historically went from father to son, leaving other potential claimants disappointed. Often the dissident group would pledge loyalty to the pope in Rome, who eventually created a Uniate “Chaldean” Church for them that was recognized by Rome but preserved its distinctive rite and customs. To
day, as a result, there are both “Assyrian” and “Chaldean” Christians, as well as a small number of Christians from other traditions.

  After the supermarket, I went to a nearby church—a prefabricated building set back from the road, surrounded by parked cars. Outside, it was suburban America (an area with no trace of the urban decay that has blighted the city of Detroit—Detroit’s metropolitan area is far larger than the city and more prosperous). Once inside, however, I was back in Iraq. There were stickers in Arabic on the collection boxes. A deep male voice was chanting the Chaldean liturgy, which dates back to the fifth century ad and is the oldest Christian service still in use, in Aramaic. “Kaddisha, kaddisha, kaddisha,” recited the priest: holy, holy, holy. Chaldean cookbooks were on sale at a little bookstore at the back, and the Catholic-style altar was decorated in gold leaf and bunches of artificial fruit. A black-and-white poster by the church door showed a picture of Mar Addai Scher, after whom the church was named. Mar is the Aramaic word for a holy man, and Addai Scher was a Chaldean bishop executed by Turkish soldiers in 1915. Alongside the more than one million Armenians who died in that terrible year, hundreds of thousands of Chaldeans and Assyrians were also killed, and still more fled to Iraq. In Mardin, which is now a beautiful holiday resort near the southern border of Turkey, there are houses bearing the names, carved above the door, of their onetime owners who were killed or driven out.

  After 2003 it was the turn of Iraq’s Christians to flee, this time to the West. As late as the 1990s there were still 1.4 million Christians in Iraq. Now the country is not stable enough for a survey to be carried out, but probably only a third of that number remain, or even fewer. This enormous wave of emigration is not just because of the dangers that Christians have been facing there, but also because of the possibilities of building a better life elsewhere—and perhaps most of all the feeling, as one Iraqi Christian put it to me, of no longer being wanted in Iraq.

  My own Arabic teacher in Baghdad, whose name was Nadia, was a Christian whose first language was Aramaic. She told me in 2006 that she dreaded every journey that took her out of her home. She never knew if kidnappers might see her as a viable target, or whether the family who lived across the street and who seemed to stand at their window all day long watching people come and go might perhaps be passing information to terrorists. (The family’s Muslim neighbors were otherwise friendly and supportive, she said.) And there was always the risk of being caught in a bomb blast meant for others. Going to church was especially dangerous. When she got home in the evening, she said, neither she nor her parents had the energy to say anything to one another. They ate in silence and went to bed dreading the next day. Nadia left in 2007. Her parents stuck it out for another year and then moved north to Kurdistan. They didn’t know Kurdish and had to accept lower salaries and living standards, but at least there they were safe. Nadia, reaching Detroit, had a better experience. She found Rafi at the church she had begun attending. They had known each other when they were children in Iraq, but they had not seen each other for years, because he had emigrated before the war. At their wedding, the priest was the same one who had officiated at their local church in Baghdad. He had moved to Detroit, too. It was as if an entire community had been transplanted halfway across the world.

  The head of the Assyrian Christians, Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV, lives in Chicago. There are more speakers of Aramaic in metropolitan Detroit than there are in Baghdad: over a hundred thousand Iraqi Chaldeans live in the city and surrounding areas, and they have established nine churches, restaurants, a newspaper called the Chaldean News, a radio station, an annual festival, and (for the richest among them, which generally means the longest-established) a multimillion-dollar club. Sadly, they have not brought the Iraqi aesthetic with them, the beautiful houses and shrines of the hill villages where the Chaldeans have traditionally lived. When I traveled by bus around northern Iraq in 2012, each village seemed to have a monastery or saint’s tomb, or else a ruined citadel that related in some way to the community’s long history. This is something that emigrants cannot re-create in their adopted country. In greater Detroit there is little that distinguishes one home from the next in the rows of neat, all-American suburban houses. The Egyptian Copts, Iraqi Chaldeans, Lebanese Shi’a, and Syrian Sunnis who live here and in the nearby towns keep their national cultures strictly within the home.

  Other Middle Easterners agree that the Chaldeans are among the most conservative of immigrant groups. Church attendance is high and two new priests were lately ordained. Certainly the community newspaper, the Chaldean News, gives little sign of the stirrings of rebellious youth. I thought it might when I started to read a review of a play at a community cultural center—a play whose hero is a man who tries to resist his parents’ pressure to marry. An edgy examination of changing values and a community coming to grips with secularism and modernity, perhaps? But no, the play had a happy ending, the paper reported: the hero finds a nice Chaldean woman and marries her.

  The play was true to life. In America as a whole, according to a 2013 book by Naomi Schaefer Riley, the interfaith marriage rate is 42 percent, and parents care more about the political views of their possible sons- and daughters-in-law more than they do about their religious identity. That is not true of its Middle Eastern communities, among whom exogamous marriages remain very rare. The Assyrians of Chicago claim that only 10 percent of their community marry out. Some families will go far to control their children’s marriage choices: I met an Iraqi Christian woman at a dinner party in Ann Arbor, near Detroit, who told me that she had run away from home, where she had no freedom to meet men. “As a teenager?” I asked. “No, I was twenty-six,” she told me.

  Although Chaldeans and Assyrians do not see themselves as Arab, their history parallels closely that of other communities from the Middle East, both Muslim and Christian. Large-scale emigration from the Middle East began in the late nineteenth century, driven by growing poverty and land shortages in Lebanon and Palestine, as well as Ottoman oppression and conflict. Most of the migrants were Christian, and Latin America was a favored destination because it both encouraged immigration and offered plenty of economic opportunities. As a consequence, it attracted the lion’s share of Arab Christian migrants, with some startling results: today, for example, 5 percent of Latin America’s population is ethnically Arab; there are more Christians of Palestinian descent in Chile than in Palestine; eight presidents of South and Central American countries have been of Middle Eastern descent; and the world’s richest man (Carlos Slim Helú, a businessman), one of its best-known singers (Shakira), and the actress Salma Hayek all have Lebanese ancestry. The 2004 presidential election in El Salvador was contested by two politicians, one from the radical left and the other from the right—and both of their families were Christian Palestinians from the same small town near Bethlehem.

  In the United States it is Michigan that has a higher proportion of Arab Americans than any other state. Their history is explained by the Arab American Museum in Dearborn, a city where 20 percent of the population are Arab. When I reached the museum, I found a small knot of people outside. They were staring at a man on the other side of the road, who was standing on the steps of Dearborn’s city hall. He had set up a lectern with the words “Kafir! Infidel!” written on it against a backdrop of black cloth. The man at the lectern was managing to make himself heard over a hubbub of voices from supporters and opponents. “An end to Muslim immigration!” he demanded. “No Muslims in senior government posts!” Pastor Terry Jones, author of the book Islam Is of the Devil, whose well-publicized plans to burn a copy of the Koran had caused riots in Afghanistan, was aiming to provoke the people of Dearborn.

  Many of the Arabs he was haranguing, I saw, were wearing crucifixes. A majority of Arab Americans are Christian, although the demographic is changing fast thanks to new waves of immigration from the Middle East. A sign in the museum’s blue-mosaic-tiled lobby reflected this change, declaring that it was “
an institution that makes a 4th-generation Arab American Christian whose great-grandparents came from Syria and a newly arrived Muslim immigrant from Iraq feel that the museum tells both of their stories.” Until recently, Arabs who came to America tended to arrive with very little and achieved success only through hard work and luck. They were peddlers in the 1850s, $5-a-day manual laborers at Ford in the 1920s, and shopkeepers in the 1960s. Henry Ford’s auto factory at Dearborn, Michigan, which was completed in 1928, was a particular magnet for Middle Eastern migrants (mostly at that stage Iraqi and Lebanese Christians) because it offered work to people who spoke poor English. They formed the nucleus that subsequently attracted others, both Muslim and Christian, who could see better opportunities for themselves in a place where their culture and communities were already established. There are now nearly 3.5 million Americans with roots in the Arab world, according to the Arab American Institute. The big success stories were all featured in the museum: politicians such as Donna Shalala; businessmen such as the founder of Kinko’s, Paul Orfalea; and poets such as Kahlil Gibran.

  I was browsing in the museum’s shop when Yusif turned up. A friend of a friend, he was to be my guide to local Arab landmarks. He arrived dressed in a wooly hat, cowboy boots, and a jacket decorated with antiwar badges, one of which declared, “I’m already against the next war.” We went to a boot shop so he could look for a new pair. He was every inch a Palestinian and yet somehow had managed also to fit into a particularly American category: the rebellious hippie. Though he was in his seventies, he was in better shape than me, due to a routine of swimming in an ice-cold lake every day.

  Yusif Barakat shows a younger member of the Arab American community how to perform a traditional Arab dance, the dabkeh, in Dearborn, Michigan, in summer 2012. Photo by the author