Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms Read Free Page A

fight “for the universality of values” but also against “foolish conformism . . . against everything that makes for a monotonous and puerile world.” I agree with him—though I could never in my own mind decide whether cultural diversity should be treasured whatever the price. Should we be sad if a community grows rich and abandons its customs, or if a religious belief is defeated in argument? I don’t pretend to know the answer: I just believe that we happen to be fortunate that they have survived, and that today religions that have been sincerely observed for many generations are able to examine each other’s ideas and learn from them.
    How did they survive so long under Muslim rule? Very often Islam is presented as an intolerant religion, and some of its own followers regrettably want it to be so. The existence of the minority religions described in this book shows that image of intolerance to be untrue, for they survived under Islam, while no equivalent faith survived in Christian Europe. The reasons for this, though, are complex. For the remainder of this introduction, let me try to summarize them.
    One reason goes back well before Islam or Christianity. There were religions in the Middle East that were more sophisticated than the pre-Christian religions of Europe and which had common roots with Christianity and Islam. So whereas Christians had no hesitation about putting an end to the Norse or Celtic religions and relatively quick success in doing so, some Middle Eastern pagans—deeply learned in Greek philosophy and Babylonian astronomy, and possessing a complex theology—clung on much longer.
    Also, though the Prophet Mohammed certainly wanted to put an end to the traditional religious practices of the Arabs, which involved worshiping multiple deities, the Koran was by contrast relatively benign toward religions that were monotheistic and had religious texts, such as Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians. These groups were called “people of the book.” Several of the groups discussed here survived because they managed, somehow or other, to secure this label for themselves.
    The early Muslims were not systematic about suppressing even openly pagan practices in the first three or four centuries of Islam, when Muslims remained the minority in many parts of the Middle East. When Muslim preachers did seek converts more aggressively, some of them were prepared to tolerate a wide range of beliefs and practices that elided the difference between Islam and the old religions it was supplanting. A group of newly converted Muslims, for example, might say that their rites of reverence to the stars were legitimately Islamic because the stars were angels—and so they could preserve some parts of the older, pagan heritage that they were giving up by adopting Islam.
    None of this means that minority faiths were treated well. This was a time when to disagree with the ruler about theology was also potentially to challenge his right to rule. It was understood, in both the Byzantine and Arab empires, that those who rejected the ruler’s religion would be disadvantaged. The “people of the book” were legally inferior to Muslims and paid an extra tax. When they rebelled against the imposition of taxes, as the Copts did in the ninth century AD , the state might begin to regard their religion as a subversive force and take measures to undermine it.
    In the tenth and eleventh centuries, as Islam became the majority faith, communities that were not “people of the book” came under greater pressure. The tenth century saw the mass persecution and virtual extinction of the Manichees. In the eleventh century, the temple of the sun god Shamash at Harran, which had existed since Babylonian times, was demolished and the scholar al-Ghazali pressed for Muslims to abandon their fascination with pre-Islamic philosophers. Even then, though, scholars such as Biruni and Ibn Nadim were writing about non-Muslim religions with an objectivity