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 Pakistan.) 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-Muslims 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?
—————
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.
On the same note, I want to make it clear that this book is a series of informal and personal investigations. They are necessarily subjective and selective, colored by my own interests and by the encounters and scenes that I have chosen to depict. My own perspective is that of a British-American Roman Catholic speaker of Arabic and Farsi. Like the members of the other religions portrayed here, I also come from a culture in the process of transformation, whose older customs and traditions are being abandoned. There are other ways of looking at these communities, other stories that might cast a different light on them, and other interpretations of their histories. Anyone who wants to take a more thorough look at any of these communities should read certain books listed in the Sources and Further Readings section. Attempting to write this book based on only four years of research and ten years of traveling in the Middle East, I was awed by the dedication of someone such as E. S. Drower, who spent her whole life studying the Mandaeans. I could never compete with her knowledge or that of the many experts who have been kind enough to help me with this book. I have named and thanked them in the Sources and Further Readings.
In respect to Drower, and still more with Biruni and his medieval contemporaries, I am reminded of the praise given to Sir William Jones, the proponent of the idea that European and Indian languages had one common source. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” commented political economist James Anderson, “who by painful researches, tend to remove those destructive veils which have so long concealed mankind from each other.” I cannot claim any credit for doing anything so significant—but at least this book can remind people of the work of those who have.
—————
TO RETURN TO THE SPECULATION
with which I began the introduction: how might the world have been different if (let’s say) the emperor Constantine had not become a Christian in 312, the event that led to the empire adopting Christianity as an official religion? There would still be many Christians, of course, though their numbers might have been diminished by persecution. Judaism would be a major world religion, based in Iraq, squaring off from time to time against the Samaritans (who would number millions, dominating what is now Israel, and maybe southern Syria, too). Greek philosophers would not just be read; they would be worshiped by some. As for the rest of us, we might be following a mystery religion, one that vouchsafes its truths only to selected elders. What such a religion offers is not so much a personal relationship with God as the opportunity to benefit from the powers enjoyed by those few austere and pious elders who do have such a relationship. Several of these religions were among Christianity’s early competitors, including the Manichees. The following chapter gives an idea of what having such a religion might be like.
I
N THE FADED CAFETERIA
of Baghdad’s al-Rashid Hotel, the Mandaean high priest, his brother, and his cousin all looked at me, asking for my help. They did not know how honored I felt to meet them. Here, in front of me, were the representatives of one of the world’s most mysterious religions. Because they worshiped one God, practiced baptism, took Sunday as their holy day, and revered a prophet called John, the Mandaeans had been mistaken by sixteenth-century European missionaries for yet another of the region’s many and varied Christian sects. In fact, their religion is wholly separate from Christianity. They believe in a heaven, but it is called the Light-World; in an evil spirit, but one that, unlike Satan, is female, and called Ruha; and in baptism as a necessary condition for entering the Light-World, though for them it must be in running water, while babies who die unbaptized are comforted for eternity by trees bearing fruits shaped like their mothers’ breasts. Their John is the Baptist, not the Evangelist, and although the Baptist is presented in Christian texts as a follower of Jesus, the Mandaeans see him as a greater prophet. After hearing the Christian gospel in which John the Baptist says he would be unfit to undo the strap of Jesus’s sandals, one nineteenth-century Mandaean convert to Christianity became indignant. “Aren’t Isa and Iahia”—the Arabic names for Jesus and John—“cousins, and therefore equal?” he demanded of the priest after the service. “Aren’t they in the Light-World together?”