On Syriac Christian realities

Mar Gorgis Church, Bakhdida, Iraq

One thing was particularly troubling to me as I was writing my hagiographies of our Syriac saints this month: Saint ’Abu, Mâr Ya‘qûb, Mâr ’Ishâq, Mâr ’Afrâm and Saint Frahât. Their biographies attest to places that still exist, and places that are endangered by our government’s policies.

The ancestral home of Saint ’Abu, and home to some of the most beautiful and rich thousand-year-old (but now threatened) architecture in the world, including one of the greatest libraries in history: Baghdad? Obviously still a real city. The US military, under orders from the five-and-dime Antichrist in the White House, just straight up murdered two men there in the middle of a civilian airstrip. And now, as we speak, it’s the site of a huge protest against our government’s very presence there, after the lawful government of Iraq voted for our troops to leave and our government, arrogant occupiers that we are, refused to remove them.

The only reason we’re there, of course, is because of Bush’s brutal, gratuitously unnecessary and unjust war of choice that killed upwards of 600,000 people, destroyed much of this material heritage of humanity, and was based on and fuelled by wilful and deliberate lies. Lies which were, in no small part, propagated and perpetuated by a suppliant belligerati with a certain plausible façade of internationalism: Christopher Hitchens, Václav Havel, Liu Xiaobo, Garry Kasparov, André Glucksmann and Adam Michnik. These belligerati were and are willful, compulsive liars who have still not gotten over the delusion that they are somehow persecuted martyrs for truth.

Speaking of Iraq, the city of Mosul was once known as Nineveh – the biblical city where Jonah preached! Mosul was once the thriving centre and beating heart of Syriac Christendom – home to the monastery from which Mâr ’Ishâq wrote his Ascetical Homilies. That monastery was attacked repeatedly and destroyed, and the holy abbots and monks put brutally to the sword, by the Kurds multiple times throughout the 1700s and 1800s. The Kurds destroyed the monastery’s library, including the original writings of Mâr ’Ishâq, in 1828, committed a democide of the Assyrians in Mosul in 1843, killing over ten thousand people and destroying the Christian architecture and holy iconography. The site still exists, but the monastic community itself was moved to al-Qûš soon afterward. The Assyrians were one of the groups – along with the Armenians and the Pontic Greeks – who were targeted and killed in the Ottoman-perpetrated genocides of 1915-1917.

Arbela, the centre of the Assyrian diocæse of Adiabene where Mâr Ya‘qûb, Mâr ’Afrâm and Saint Frahât lived most of their lives, is also in northern Iraq – modern-day Erbil. Adiabene covers an area which covers the northern tip of Iraq and the southeastern tip of what is now Turkey, as well as a part of Western Iran. Erbil’s built culture is far more ancient even than Baghdad’s – the Citadel alone dates back 4,300 years – and it is one possible contender for being the oldest continuously inhabited human settlement on the face of the planet.

The Assyrian Christians of northern Iraq – including Mosul and Erbil – suffered perhaps more than any other group because of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. They were persecuted by vengeful Sunnî militias while the American military, acting under orders from Bush’s State Department, dismantled the Republican Guard that had been protecting them, and then deliberately and maliciously neglected them when they came for protection. American evangelicals, too, mostly ignored the plight of the country’s Christians, and their situation from 2003 to 2011 was left to be ‘reported’ in American media by Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist of Doonesbury. The Assyrians of Iraq were targeted again there by the forces of Dâ‘iš, which managed to capture Mosul and most of the Plains of Nineveh. (Dâ‘iš was technically ‘founded’ in by az-Zarqâwî in 1999. But it was incubated as a proto-state precisely in the vacuum of power that followed the invasion of 2003. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant was and remains a consequence of American foreign policy in Iraq under Bush and Obama, which allowed it to flourish.) The substantive displays of solidarity the Assyrian Christians got from within the country were largely from the Shî‘a majority in southern Iraq.

The Assyrians, and other groups of Arab Christians, also inhabit far western Iran, southeastern Turkey and northeastern Syria, a region which is coterminous with Kurdistan. The difficulty the Assyrians face – and this is a difficulty that is made clear if one reads even the sæcular literature, like William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain – is that the Assyrians are neither Turks nor Kurds. They thus face repression from three sides of an asymmetrical armed conflict that has only escalated since 2011. Under the Turks they were subject to genocide – and they are subject to Turkish brutality again, now that we’ve left a power vacuum in northeastern Syria. As mentioned above, the Assyrians face mass killings, rape and repression from Dâ‘iš. And the Kurds have not behaved particularly well toward the Christians of the region either, as can be witnessed from the history of places like Mosul. The ‘Rojava’ experiment in northeastern Syria, however rosily it is portrayed by certain anarchist groups in the West, resulted in a precipitous loss of the Assyrians’ cultural and religious rights as the Kurds have demanded their assimilation or expulsion.

These places all have ancient heritage. Diyarbakır (once Amida) and Urfa (once Edessa), both now in Turkey, were both home to significant populations of Assyrians and Armenians – who either fled or were killed or evicted between 1900 and 1925. In Nusaybin (once Nisibis), the Assyrians hung on longer, but the Kurdish-Turkish conflict and the Syrian Civil War caused them to flee. These communities are ancient and irreplaceable. They not only represent an invaluable golden thread of Christian religious heritage; they reflect a heritage of human history going back into the infancy of civilisation itself. Holy places are places; and holy history is history.

This is a truth for which I think American Christians in particular have an insufficient appreciation. I can’t say for sure how this comes to be the case, but I have a few surmises. In a handful of high-up cases among the power élite, I think there is an awareness of the Christian heritage of the Middle East, combined with an intentional malice against both the legacy and the people, that drives the war policies and the immigration policies that exclude and destroy Middle Eastern Christians. For most Americans, however, ignorance and fantasy seem to be the key culprits. I have to wonder if – excepting a handful of places now within the borders of the state of Israel – there isn’t a certain degree of mystification at work when American evangelicals in particular refer to places in the Scriptures. A mention of Damascus in the Book of Acts doesn’t register to American ears as a real place in real time, but is a mythologised setting, a backdrop against which a certain fable can unfold. There is a certain sense in which we Americans read the Scriptures as fundamentally about us, which precludes the sort of civilisational humility which characterised, for example, early English Christianity. And that leads us to ignore the reality of the places and people around Christ in the Gospels, in such a way that it distorts the personality of Christ Himself.

In addition, living at the core of the sole world superpower, based as it is on technological dominance of man and nature rather than on any religious qualms, has a hardening effect on hearts, and a deadening effect on our ability to show compassion for crucified peoples. That seems to be the case, whether they are in an Aramaic-speaking village in Mesopotamia, or in an old neighbourhood in Wuhan, or in a detention facility on the Texas border, or on a reservation just upriver. We are not becoming stronger or greater; we are merely becoming coarser, and that is not an improvement. For the love of God – I say this not as a vain exclamation, but as a genuine and impassioned entreaty – this needs to change.