Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East
by gerard russell
basic books, 354 pages, $28.99
We were on Saturday, and you are on Sunday. Now your Sunday has come.” So goes an oft-quoted warning from the Jews of Iraq about the fate of the country’s minorities. “Saturday,” of course, refers to the Jewish Sabbath, but also to the period in the mid-twentieth century when Iraq’s ancient Jewish community disappeared under the threat of mob violence, social discrimination, and the prospect of emigration to Israel. “Sunday” refers to the Christian Sabbath, but also to the bloodletting that has rocked Iraq since 2003, leading to the sudden shrinking of the country’s historic Christian population. The meaning of the maxim is clear: What happened to Jews in Iraq decades ago is finally and inevitably catching up to the country’s Christians. They, too, shall soon be gone.
Minorities face a grim future in the Middle East, and above all in Iraq, a place Winston Churchill once referred to as an “ungrateful volcano.” The rise of the Islamic State over the past year has only accelerated a long-term process of cultural and religious homogenization that has been going on for the better part of a century. Until recently, it was possible to find in the great landmass stretching from Morocco to Iraq a stunning variety of peoples, languages, and beliefs. Christians made up roughly 20 percent of the Arab world at the start of the twentieth century. Jews were a vital presence in metropolitan centers as varied as Tunis, Cairo, Sana‘a, and Aleppo. Sunnis and Shi’ites lived cheek-to-jowl in mixed cities such as Beirut and Baghdad. Sadly, at the start of the twenty-first century, the landscape of the Middle East looks very different.
