The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Another Review...

Another Review...
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Saturday, April 11 2009, 19:58:25 (CEST)
from *** - *** Non-Profit Organizations - Linux - Mozilla
Website:
Website title:

Note: This one comes from the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago. No doubt another Zionist front! So long as this "nation" prefers the fantasies and ravings of the Jumblats and Aprims and scorns the actual scholarship of people such as Dr Joseph...well, just so long will they stay where they are.


B O O K R E V I E W


JOHN JOSEPH. The Nestorians and Their Muslim Neighbors: A Study of Western Influence on Their Relations. Princeton University Press, 1961.


Hopes ran high, around the turn of the century, that modern nationalism would solve the age-long problems of all sorts of minorities. Nowhere were such hopes higher than in the minority ridden Near and Middle East. Generally, however, nationalism came to mean one thing to a minority and quite another thing to the majority involved. To the extremists among the minority groups, who finally put their faith in the fourteen points of Woodrow Wilson, nationalism meant complete independence. To the extremists among the ruling majority, nationalism meant another degree of assimilation, after the fashion of the “Young Turks,” or elimination and expulsion of the minorities after the fashion of Kamalist Turkey. Both groups meant to put an end to the long established millah system or semi-autonomous religious community within the Islamic body politic.

The larger and more politically experienced minorities such as the Greeks, Armenians, and Jews sought a solution in large scale migration to Greece, and in the creation of the Soviet Republic of Armenia and the Jewish national state of Israel respectively. The weaker and less experienced Nestorian minority, though it pursued the dream of national independence, had to settle ultimately for a degree of civil and cultural assimilation. Local factions and religious divisions among the Nestorians themselves contributed to this end. For natural and political geography raised barriers between the Nestorians in Turkey and their fellow sectarians in Persia. Western proselytizing by Roman Catholic, Russian Orthodox, Anglican, and American Protestant missions confused these insulated groups and aggravated their disunity (pp. 158, 160, 184).

The most decisive factor, however, in the fate of the Nestorians was the international power politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when rival Western imperialisms looked upon the Nestorians, as on several other minorities, as pawns in the high-stake game. Nor were the Nestorians themselves above taking a hand in a game in which they were far outclassed (pp. 105-107, 165f., 199f.). As their hopes of support from this or that Western power mounted, their claims against the home or host Muslim governments increased to the point where they became an embarrassment to their patrons and allies and a threat to their Muslim rulers and neighbors. The Western powers, adjusting their policies to serve their own interests as situations changed, procrastinated and at times defaulted on the aid promised to or expected by the Nestorians (pp. 137f., 143f., 156f., 205-209). The Persian and Turkish governments and later Iraq also, themselves resentful victims of Western imperialisms, seized any opportunity to rid themselves of these “Christian traitors” and at times used the Nestorians’ restless and disgruntled neighbors, the Kurds, as their tools (pp. 107f., 116-119, 195ff.). In the end, the decimated and disillusioned Nestorians faced a choice of mass emigration and refugeeism or a simple minority status in their homelands as against their traditional status as a millah.
Dr. Joseph has detailed with great care and marked subjectivity1 the emergence of the Nestorian or so called “Assyrian” problem subsequent to the French and British excavation of Ninevah. The excavators confusing ethnic with geographic factors led themselves and the Nestorians into believing that these latter” were as much the remains of Ninevah and Assyria as were the rude heaps and ruined places” (pp.94ff.). The introductory chapter of the study is devoted to a much needed clarification of geographic, ethnic, and religious terms associated at one time or another with the long history of the Nestorians. Chapter two touches, in passing, on the cultural role of this ancient Christian community first in Sassanian Persia and later under the early Abbāsids and still later under the Mongols. For the rest, the study concentrates on Western influences, governmental and missionary, on the political and religious ups and downs of the Nestorians in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Special attention is paid to the interaction of political agencies and rival foreign missions to the “Assyrians,” which on several occasions proved to be detrimental to the cause of their protégés (e.g., pp84-87, 105-107, 222f.). While not any of the Big Powers nor yet of the foreign missions is spared, Dr. Joseph’s evidence points to Russia and to Rome as the most persistent and aggressive in their approaches to the Nestorian question (pp. 78-81, 98-101, 120-122, and 235f.). The elimination of the millah status in favor of the ideal of the human rights of minorities is bringing a greater degree of cultural inter-communication between minority and majority. One result of this, the author notes, is an increase in the rate of conversions to Islam, a situation which he believes presents the ancient Middle East Church with the danger of possible extinction (p.234). To this reviewer the more probable danger seems to be one of emasculation of the Nestorian and other Christian minorities of the area.

Much of the literature on the Nestorians of this period and on their neighboring Kurdish minorities is if comparatively recent origin. Dr. Joseph has explored this literature, along with some documentary source, to good advantage. The full biography (pp.239-269) along with the index render his study a useful reference work. Chronological lists of the rival patriarchial dynasties would be a welcome addition.

The problem of multiple minorities, long endemic to the Middle East, still has in our times the common denominator of Western influence in that region. The history and attempted solution of any one minority has meaning for and bearing on all the others. This book could be read with profit alike by those who are interested in the particular fate of the Nestorians and by those concerned about the general problem of Near Eastern minorities.

Nabia Abbott
Oriental Institute
University of Chicago

Reviewed in JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES, 22 (January, 1963), 71-72.



---------------------


The full topic:



***



Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9