Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms Read Free

the austere vegetarian preacher called Mani almost became emperor of Rome. Had he done so, the Roman Empire might have spread Mani’s teachings, not Christianity, across Europe; instead of going to Bethlehem, European pilgrims might head instead to the Iraqi Marshes, where Mani first preached. Instead, the Manichees became extinct, but their closest cousins, the Mandaeans, are still living in Iraq. Had it not been for the invasions of the Mongols and Tamerlane, Baghdad might still be a world center of Christianity, for there was a time when the Iraq-based Church of the East had bishops and monasteries as far east as Beijing.
    In the course of fourteen years as an Arabic- and Farsi-speaking diplomat, working and traveling in Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, I encountered religious beliefs that I had never known of before: a taboo against wearing the color blue, obligatory mustaches, and a reverence for peacocks. I met people who believed in supernatural beings that take human form, in the power of the planets and stars to steer human affairs, and in reincarnation. These religions were vestiges of the pre-Christian culture of Mesopotamia but drew as well from Indian traditions that had been transmitted to the Middle East through the Persian Empire, and from Greek philosophy. They preserved, too, the customs of ancient civilizations of which they were the last, frail descendants. These are some—and only some—of the groups described in this book.
    As I met these different religious groups, I was inspired and amazed at their constancy in faith. They have held on to practices and traditions without change for more than a thousand years—sometimes preserving them for many millennia, under constant pressure to convert. Most of these groups, though, are now more vulnerable than ever, and this book aims to give them a voice. They are worth hearing for other reasons as well: they connect the present to the past, bringing us within touching distance of long-dead cultures. They link the Middle East with European culture by showing how the two emerged from shared roots. They follow their religions differently than Europeans and Americans do—the Copts, for example, take on a burden of prayer and fasting that exceeds even that of monks in the West; the Druze have a religion that makes no demands of them at all, save that they marry within it. Thus the groups featured in this book seem to me to address three things that troubled me during my time in the Middle East: humanity’s collective ignorance of its own past, the growing alienation between Christianity and Islam, and the way the debate about religion has become increasingly the preserve of narrow-minded atheists and literalists..
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    WE HAVE INTELLECTUAL COUSINS in unexpected places. Greek philosophy is not a European phenomenon, for example, but a Mediterranean one and it influenced the Middle East as much as it did Europe. To give another example, when Alexander the Great marched through what we now call Afghanistan and Pakistan, he felt that he could see echoes of his own culture—and he was right, because Europe and North India share a common Indo-European heritage. Such links exist with people who live even farther east. The Christians of Iraq a thousand years ago shared their church with Mongolians; they had a Chinese patriarch and a bishop of Tibet, and influenced the modern-day Mongolian and Tibetan alphabets. Everywhere in the Old World, at least, apparent differences can conceal unexpected connections and commonalities. As I wrote this book I was always delighted to find these: they disprove the theories and beliefs of those who want to corral people into separate cultures and civilizations and set them at war with each other.
    At the same time I enjoyed finding differences, too: ideas that differed from my own and challenged me to reflect on what I myself believed and why. The Lebanese–French writer Amin Maalouf, in a book called On Identity, called for a