Book Review: Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East – Gerard Russell

Ford, G. (2015). Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East by Gerard Russell, Asian Review of Books, 10 January.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is generally seen to encompass the half of the globe that stretches from the America’s Pacific Coast in the West to the environs of the Khyber pass in the East. Gerard Russell shows in his new book Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms that this tradition can in fact be driven back much further to early roots in Babylonian, Persian and Egyptian society and in doing so, he exposes some rare and strange religious highways and byways that are still—albeit barely in a number of cases—functioning.

Some, like the Zoroastrians and the Manicheans, were contenders for greatness—a Manichee named Sebastianus almost became the emperor of Rome in the middle of the fourth century—while others like the Samaritans and the Kalasha were lost deep in the religious undergrowth even at their greatest flowering. The second-century Christian sect the Marcionites in Northern Turkey shared with North West England’s eighteenth-century “Shakers” a belief in strict celibacy. Unsurprisingly, they were doomed to an early extinction.

Gerard Russell, a former UN and British diplomat, performed this splendidly-reported peregrination around the shrines and temples of these endangered species talking to “priests”, “sheiks” and elders to explore their past, present and future. The story he tells is riveting, but at the same time woeful and doleful. Before the twentieth century, these remnants of the thousand religious flowers that bloomed two, three millennia ago were sheltered in the geographical interstices of inaccessible mountains, valleys and deserts. More recently they were sheltered by the secularism of communism and nationalism. If you are trying to build a nation or a global ideology everyone is—more or less—welcome. You could be, after all, a Muslim or Christian, Mandaean or Yazidi Iraqi.

In the decades since the end of the Cold War, the battle lines have been redrawn to be no longer between left and right but instead of race, ethnicity and religion. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 carving up the Middle East into British and French controlled nation-sized chunks that would, post-WW2, vie for nationhood from their neo-colonial masters is no more: in June 2014, this was replaced by the Islamic State video of a Chilean Muslim proclaiming the Agreement’s end in front of the newly demolished border post between Syria and Iraq.

The consequences have been desperate. In Iraq, the choice was for most flee, die or convert. In 2003, there were 1.4 million Assyrian and Chaldean Christians living in Iraq, mainly on the Nineveh plain. Now barely 400,000 remain. Most fled as refugees, others as economic migrants with even the most secure reading the writing on the wall. Where are they now? Until the outbreak of Syria’s interlocking civil wars hundreds of thousands were in camps there. Now they have been decanted to Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and the United States. We have seen the subsequent plight of the Yazidis in August last year on Mount Sinjar as they were ethnically cleansed by ISIS.

The Assyrians are not alone. Dearborn, Michigan—Henry Ford’s old stamping ground—has the highest percentage of Arab-Americans in the US. But even here the minorities keep to themselves and discourage cross-religious sexual relationships. The suburb of Sterling Heights has the Chaldaeans, Dearborn itself the Muslims, Troy the Copts and Grosse Pointe, previously made famous by John Cusack and Minnie Driver’s eponymous film, the Maronites.

Will they survive? It depends. The ones that can shelter under the umbrella of established churches like the Chaldeans and the Maronites will change, but not die. The Copts with their millions of adherents are too big to fail. But for others the future is bleak. The Druze who have no holy day, no prayers and a set of beliefs kept secret from the large majority of adherents by the elect will struggle in the US, although there may be help elsewhere. They believe in reincarnation with those not reborn in Lebanon apparently reborn in China.

The Yazidi’s have a similar secret faith, but alongside a fearsome set of taboos that include not wearing the color blue or eating lettuce. More importantly a Yazidi woman can only marry someone from the right caste and clan. One Yazidi man told Russell that in his home city there were 15,000 Yazidis but not one eligible for marriage. The Mandaeans, who are closest to the Babylonians, favor astrology, a mythology of multiple gods and John the Baptist over Jesus. Their plight is the same. They have a demon Dinanukht who is half man, half book and sits reading himself. His end will be a loss to literature.

The Middle East and the World will be a lesser place when the fanatics and fundamentalists have finally wiped history clean in their attempt to overprint their black and white world on life’s colorful past. Hopefully Gerard Russell’s fascinating travelogue will be a point of departure for those who see in technicolor.